The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (5 page)

The mangroves did it for nothing. So 200 million dollars is their replacement value.

And you got rid of 200 million dollars’ worth of mangroves for 2 million dollars’ worth of shrimp farms?

That sort of calculation has made people stop and think. It’s the kind of arithmetic which can stay the chainsaws when
Please don’t do it!
falls on resolutely deaf ears.

Environmental economists and many conservationists have been seized by it, and echoing in their minds is the biggest calculation of all, the sum worked out by a team led by Robert Costanza, then at the University of Maryland, which sought to put a financial value on all the principal natural systems of the planet which support human life. Published in the journal
Nature
on 15 May 1997, and attracting startled attention from all around the world, the paper by Costanza et al. estimated the central worth of seventeen of the earth’s major ecosystem services at 33 trillion dollars annually – that’s 33,000 billion, remember, 33 followed by twelve noughts – at a time when global GDP (all the goods and services produced by everybody in the world together) had an estimated annual value of 18 trillion dollars only. There it was. The value of nature to human society. Worth more than everything else put together. Nearly twice as much, in fact.

You can understand why many of those seeking to defend the natural world from destruction in the century to come, now see the economics as the answer; not least, it is far more aligned, than is sustainable development, with the hard-faced reality of
the human condition as Adam Smith unforgettably expressed it: ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ While sustainable development, alas, principally appeals to people’s better natures, the concept of ecosystem services appeals to their self-interest directly. Follow the money, as Deep Throat told Bob Woodward.

Governments in the rich world have proceeded to do just this. As a sequel to the Millennium Ecosystems Assessment, they have been enthusiastic in setting up the TEEB project, a major global study of the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity, which reported convincingly in 2010 that saving the earth’s wildlife from the crisis engulfing it would cost far less than letting it disappear (because replacing the services it provides would be unthinkably expensive) – the sort of statement which makes finance ministers, the people holding the real levers of power in many governments, everywhere sit up.

Yet just as I cannot be the only person who thought that something was lost to us when Neil Armstrong plonked his great fat boot down upon the moon, despite being in awe of the daring and the technological triumph (why? Because the mystery was no more), so I cannot be the only one who views these developments, powerful aids to saving the planet though they may be, with deep unease.

It is partly that the commodification of nature may strike many people as intensely unpleasant, not to say sinister: putting cash prices on rivers and mountains and forests is not a noble undertaking. To treat the elements of the natural world as commodities paves the way for them to be traded, speculated on, and ultimately owned and controlled by multinational corporations. The jargon of the financial world has begun to attach itself, and they cease to be places to delight in and become instead Natural Capital and Green Infrastructure.

But it isn’t just that. It’s even more, that the value which is
accorded by the commodification of nature is highly selective. Worth is attributed only to services whose usefulness to us can be directly measured. For example, a recent innovative study suggested annual values for four ecosystem services in the USA: dung removal ($380m annually), crop pollination ($3.07bn), pest control ($4.49bn), and wildlife nutrition ($49.96bn). These values are based on human society trying to supply artificial replacements. But if it hasn’t got a measurable, utilitarian value to us, it’s nowhere, and by implication, not worth protecting.

For what value, in all this exciting new endeavour, do we give to butterflies, the creatures which, when I was seven, captured my soul? What value do we give, for that matter, to birdsong, which has captured countless spirits more? Are they just to be written off, as the great ruination of nature gathers pace? And the appearance of spring flowers or autumn mushrooms, and the unfolding of ferns, and the rising of trout, they have no value either do they, and is there now to be only one worth for wildlife, the one recognised by accountants?

Here we are at a peculiar moment in history, when the natural world is mortally threatened as never before, and those who love it are crying out for a defence. Yet while a new defence is being offered – one which is far more realistic and hard-headed than previous defences, one which must stand a better chance of succeeding – as we examine it, we realise that it too is deeply, crucially, fatally flawed.

What are we to do?

•

In a famous preface to one of his short novels, Joseph Conrad pointed out that the enterprise of the scientist or the intellectual may have more immediate impact, but that of the artist is more enduring because it goes far deeper; the statement of fact,
however powerful, does not take hold like the image does. I believe that in defending the natural world, the time has come to offer up the images.

What I mean is, it is time for a different, formal defence of nature. We should offer up not just the notion of being sensible and responsible about it, which is sustainable development, nor the notion of its mammoth utilitarian and financial value, which is ecosystem services, but a third way, something different entirely: we should offer up what it means to our spirits; the love of it. We should offer up its joy.

This has been celebrated, of course, for centuries. But it has never been put forward as a formalised defence of the natural world, for two reasons. Firstly, because the mortal threat itself is not centuries old, but has arisen merely in the space of my own lifetime; and secondly, because the joy nature gives us cannot be quantified in a generalised way. We can generalise or, indeed, monetise the value of nature’s services in satisfying our corporeal needs, since we all have broadly the same continuous requirement for food and shelter; but we have infinitely different longings for solace and understanding and delight. Their value is modulated, not through economic assessment, but through the personal experiences of individuals. So we cannot say – alas that we cannot – that birdsong, like coral reefs, is worth 375 billion dollars a year in economic terms, but we can say, each of us, that at this moment and at this place it was worth everything to me. Shelley did so with his skylark, and Keats with his nightingale, and Thomas Hardy with the skylark of Shelley, and Edward Thomas with his unknown bird, and Philip Larkin with his song thrush in a chilly spring garden, but we need to remake, remake, remake, not just rely on the poems of the past, we need to do it ourselves – proclaim these worths through our own experiences in the coming century of destruction, and proclaim them loudly, as the reason why nature must not go down.

It is only through specific personal experience that the case
can be made, which is why I will offer mine. I will explore why, remarkably, we as humans may love the natural world from which we have emerged, when the otter does not love its river, as far as we know, and I will explore how it can offer us joy, through my own encounters with it over many years, touching on the ways it has touched me, just as it may have touched you; and I will do so, not just as a celebration of it, but as a conscious, engaged, act of defence. Defence through joy, if you like. For nature, as human society takes its wrecking ball to the planet, has never needed more defending.

2
Stumbling Upon Wilderness

The range of emotions which the natural world can excite in us is extensive, and we should not forget that it includes fears and even hatreds. Nature is not always benign. It can be dangerous. It can kill you. Some of the feelings it induces in us can be negative in the extreme (for example, wolves in the wild can arouse violent detestation in some – although reverence in others). But if we leave aside the blank-faced indifference which is also a major response to nature today, especially amongst young people seduced by screens and living electronic lives, then many if not most of the feelings it sparks in us are positive ones. Some we might characterise as satisfactions, such as the cherishing of familiar landscapes; others are sharper pleasures of novelty and beauty, such as encounters with rare and charismatic wildlife. A particularly powerful feeling is the sensation of wonder, which can whisper of immanence even to intensely practical personalities. But I am concerned with something which has preoccupied me more and more over the years, the most powerful feeling of all.

It is unusual. But it is not as uncommon as its exceptional character might suggest, and I have known not a few people
who have encountered it. It is this: there can be occasions when we suddenly and involuntarily find ourselves loving the natural world with a startling intensity, in a burst of emotion which we may not fully understand, and the only word that seems to me to be appropriate for this feeling is
joy
, and when I talk of the joy we can find in nature, this is what I mean.

It seems to be an abrupt apprehension that there is something exceptional and extraordinary, beyond our everyday experience, about nature as a whole, something much more than the sum of its parts, glorious even though some of those parts may be, from birds of paradise to coral reefs, from Siberian tigers to bluebell woods. It is a sentiment that might be described as having a spiritual aspect, although it seems able to penetrate the most otherwise-secularised of minds. It can come to us anywhere, in the presence of a whole landscape or of a single organism; it can be met with in a number of nature’s diverse aspects, such as its abundance or the peace it can bring; it can especially be encountered in the shifting calendar, in the discerning of a great change coming in the rhythms of the life of the earth, above all in the sensing of rebirth, in the springtime. A particular point: the wilder the part of the natural world you are in contact with, the more likely you are to experience it. I do not think it can be met with at second hand, through television wildlife documentaries, for example, however inspiring some of these may be.

It seems to be rarely talked about, perhaps because it is dimly perceived for what it is, perhaps because it is hardly ever articulated; and let us accept also that referring to it as joy may not facilitate its immediate comprehension either, not least because joy is not a concept, nor indeed a word, that we are entirely comfortable with, in the present age. The idea seems out of step with a time whose characteristic notes are mordant and mocking, and whose preferred emotion is irony. Joy hints at an unrestrained enthusiasm which may be thought uncool; to not a few in my
country, it may seem merely old-fashioned and a bit lame, like patriotism. It reeks of the Romantic movement. Yet it is there. Being unfashionable has no effect on its existence.

If we examine what we traditionally mean by it, we realise that joy refers to an intense happiness, but one that is somehow set apart. It is in no wise the same as
fun
, or even
delight
, or, for that matter, terms describing extremes of gratification such as
bliss
or
rapture
, which in our sardonic age can no longer really be employed at all unless archly, in cookery writing, say (
new potatoes crushed with first cold pressing extra virgin olive oil – bliss!
). Joy, however, even if slightly uncomfortably, still lives in our lexicon with its original meaning, and what it denotes is a happiness with an overtone of something more, which we might term an elevated or, indeed, a spiritual quality.

We do not commonly employ it to define our pleasure, even if extreme, in eating a particularly well-made pork pie; but we might well think it appropriate to describe the feeling of a parent finding safe and well a missing child, or the feeling of a lover whose love for another person has long been unrequited, but who finds it at last being returned. It is not a word, I would say, that we use to describe self-centred gratification (and so we would tend not to use it for euphoria, even of the most potent kind, induced by drugs); it looks outwards, to another person, another purpose, another power. Joy has a component, if not of morality, then at least of seriousness. It signifies a happiness which is a serious business. And it seems to me the wholly appropriate name for the sudden passionate happiness which the natural world can occasionally trigger in us, which may well be the most serious business of all.

It is not exclusive, this emotion; it is not the property of the illuminati, of an enlightened or privileged few. It is open to every one of us, and I encountered it, purely by accident, when I was fifteen.

•

The memory is resonant still. The accident was one of geography, of having an unfamiliar and very different environment close enough to my home to be discovered, and what led me there was the pursuit of birds; for though it was indeed butterflies which first held sway over me – and they have continued to do so in a particular way, throughout my life – it was birds, once my enthusiasm had widened to all of nature, which led me out of childhood and into adolescence. In that, I was like a million other small boys in England in the 1950s (and judging by the membership figures of the RSPB, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, in subsequent decades, a million is probably not an exaggeration).

In fact, I think that in many ways I had a very typical fifties childhood, although this was strictly by dint of turning my back on the abnormality all around me, for after her breakdown of 1954 and her shaky and troubled return, Norah my mother, who clearly was only partially recovered, suffered two more collapses of her psyche, in 1956 and 1958. Both times were preceded by great distress within the family – I can remember cups of hot tea being thrown at the wall – and both required periods of recuperation in hospital for her lasting weeks, during which, with my father as ever away at sea, Mary and Gordon again looked after John and me, temporarily moving in to the new house my parents had bought, which was in another Bebington cul-de-sac called Norbury Close, about a mile from Sunny Bank.