Irreplaceable: The Fight to Save Our Wild Places

by Julian Hoffman

Between 1980 and 2012, it’s believed that 40 million starlings vanished from the landscapes of the European Union, a loss of roughly 140 birds per hour.

By 1915 Rothschild had compiled a list of 284 potential nature reserves; included in that list, which would eventually be known as Rothschild’s Reserves, were chalk downland, ancient woodland, shingle beach, raised bog, mountain, sand dune and salting.

Our instinctive desire to forge attachments to landscapes that impart personal meaning, value and identity as they intertwine with our lives and communities is known as topophilia, or the love of place.

landscapes of Fermanagh, when he said, ‘My roots are shaped by place and the freedom to explore. My mind is expanded by the sparks and connections which follow.’

I’ve never met anyone who combines the qualities of compassion and consideration with such dogged persistence as her. She spent a significant

‘What kind of world are we going to leave to our children and grandchildren in the future?’ asked Gill. ‘We can’t destroy absolutely everything.’

Professor Ian Rotherham, ancient woods are best understood as semi-natural, eco-cultural landscapes, enduring fusions of the natural world and human activity that have enabled a remarkable diversity of wildlife to flourish within them over an extraordinarily long period of time. They are the venerable offspring of joint parenting.

Coppice was systematically cut for basketry, fencing, fodder, pegs, pails, bowls, heating and charcoal, which was itself the primary fuel for the iron forges and smithies of the land. Timber trees were felled for hogshead barrels, houses, barns, pit-props, railway ties and ships.

surnames that are in some way connected to trees, woods or historic woodland occupations, including, amongst many others, Hirst, Greenwood, Shaw, Forester, Greaves, Oakes, Ash, Underwood, Maples, Wainwright, Tanner, Woodman, Barker and Warren.

He called this ‘the loss of meaning’, the gradual stripping away of all that has made us and our societies what they are today. ‘The landscape is a record of our roots and the growth of civilization,’ he writes. ‘Each individual historic wood, heath etc. is uniquely different from every other, and each has something to tell us.’

‘Accept the principle of biodiversity offsetting and you accept the idea that place means nothing. That nowhere is to be valued in its own right any more, that everything is exchangeable for everything else.’

Especially at a time when to do so is criticized by some as sentimental and out of touch with ‘the real world’, as though there is another world lurking invisibly beside this one

This is the only world we have, the one whose water and air we need, and from whose substance we shape our lives.

And a 1905 account by the writer Herbert Job of a London auction lot of heron and egret feathers for the millinery trade revealed that some 193,000 birds had been killed on their nests

Ornithology (BTO) estimates that since the late 1960s the range of the nightingale has shrunk by 43 per cent, while its population numbers over that same period, gauged by spring surveys of singing males, has plunged by 90 per cent. Which means that in only half a century – roughly my lifetime – nine out of every ten nightingales in Britain have vanished.

‘This is as important as a nightingale, because they need large amounts of the right flowers from spring until autumn across vast areas, so bumblebees effectively act as barometers of environmental quality.

Considering the dead body to be nasu, meaning ‘unclean’ or ‘polluted’, the Zoroastrians practised excarnation, leaving corpses openly exposed to these birds after death.

India’s vulture population, comprising 40 million birds spread across nine different species, was suddenly and inexplicably almost entirely wiped out.

deaths from rabies for every 100,000 bites in India, and so the scientists asserted that the disappearance of the vultures was directly responsible for 47,300 fatalities in that fourteen-year period.

diclofenac in 2006, the Indian vulture crisis remains one of the most comprehensive environmental, medical and cultural catastrophes ever to have hit the subcontinent, its effects both long-lived and wide-reaching, reminding us how seemingly innocuous human interactions with the natural world can upset the scales of balance, resulting in consequences that are profoundly life-altering in the starkest possible sense. *

Dimitris was one of an increasing number of young Greeks I’ve met who are confronting the bleak prospects of their country with a reflective and uncompromising honesty. Noting that external factors have unquestionably played a role in the nation’s precarious situation, he talked openly and easily about the chronic corruption and nepotism that had historically held his society back.

American writer Guy Davenport sums up with just three words, a phrase that could be applied to nearly all of our environmental crises: ‘distance negates responsibility’.

‘I discovered that grief is not the same as sadness and despair,’ he said about his work with dying and dead albatrosses. ‘Grief is the same as love. Grief is a felt experience of love for something that we’re losing, or that we’ve lost.’

According to JATAM, an organization that advocates on behalf of Indonesian communities threatened by mining, 1,890 of the country’s 9,721 mining licences are in violation of the Small Islands Law, meaning that the stories I’d been hearing on Bangka were just fragments of a far larger narrative of loss.

To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. ∽ Patrick Kavanagh, ‘The Parish and the Universe’

Oliver Rackham recorded four kinds of loss in the landscape: the loss of beauty, freedom, wildlife and meaning.

‘What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never known a wren?’

grace notes is from a score. The constant, unrelenting pressure of development, delisting, deregulation and destruction leaves a simpler, leaner and less refined land than before.

In Wisdom Sits in Places, his thoughtful study of Western Apache connections to the land through place names and narrative, Keith H. Basso describes places in their culture as being ‘portable possessions’

community has little to do with like minds. It has to do with very differently minded people finding a way to get along because we all live in, are connected to, and share a sense of place.’

Not only do the Gwent Levels retain one of the largest surviving tracts of grazing marsh and ditch system in all of Britain, but they’re also profoundly old in character and shape. Reclaimed from tidal salt marsh in Roman times,

As George Orwell wrote in his essay ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’, ‘I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and – to return to my first instance – toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.’

‘Building more roads to prevent congestion is like a fat man loosening his belt to prevent obesity.’

Each and every child, spoken to individually, gave the same two reasons, as if drawing on a communal well of common sense. Firstly, they adored the wildlife, the very things that accord the levels their technical designations, and which underscore the attachment that so many have for this celebrated area. But secondly, and of far greater surprise to me, they all said they loved the calming peace of the place. What the children articulated was that they still urgently require nothing more simple and restorative than silence in nature – a fact easily overlooked in our busy digital world.

If children do not attach to the land, they will not reap the psychological and spiritual benefits they can glean from nature, nor will they feel a long-term commitment to the environment.’

With the invention, in 1873, of John Deere’s steel-mouldboard plough, designed specifically to contend with compacted prairie sod and the tendency of its soils to cling to the blades of its cast-iron predecessors, the work of obliteration was swift, economical and thorough.

The nineteenth century was a graveyard for the American bison. At its beginning, an estimated 30 to 60 million of the animals roamed their territory on the continent,

‘If you take a 25,000-square-foot house that was once all prairie, all you now have left of it is a four-inch by four-inch tile in the kitchen. But to be truly accurate,’ he said, ‘you’d have to take that tile and smash it into little pieces which you threw to the winds.’

Asking the nest protectors about the relationship between their people and the hornbill, I learned that while hornbills were traditionally hunted for their casques and for food it was also considered taboo to kill a male during the breeding season, especially if the female was sealed inside the tree cavity. Even amongst the more circumspect young, a strong belief existed that bad luck, or even death, would be the consequence of such a crime.

While the global sum of land given protected status for the preservation of wildlife has doubled since 1992, a study published in Science in 2018 revealed that one-third of all those areas are under intense threat of destruction.

Despite the precedent of the Indian vulture crisis, diclofenac was approved for veterinary use by Spain and Italy in the 2010s,