Irreplaceable: The Fight to Save Our Wild Places

by Julian Hoffman

A testament of minor voices can clear away any ignorance of a place, can inform us of its special qualities.

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. ∽ Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

While they insist that their proposal is a way to ‘safeguard future generations’, the obvious question in reply is, What will be safeguarded for them?

But what is a map, any map, however subtle its scale, to the song of the skylark? What is a map to the arc of the avocet, that slow flight back from extinction to survival? What is a smooth sheet of paper to the centuries of evensong sung in peninsular churches, to the thousands of cockle shells embedded in their walls? What is a map to the murmur of the rising tide, to those three white egrets, aglow in the pewter sky?

I peered closely at one of the photos on my computer screen; none of its monochrome, infrared graininess could dim the beauty of the scene. At an earthen pool in a dell of winter-bare beech trees, a mother lynx and her cub flatten themselves against the ground to drink. Their pointed ears are distinctive in the gloom, like pinched candle wicks. The cub’s white, reflecting eyes are fastened onto its mother, watching closely for guidance and signs in this tremulous new world that it’s emerged into. It’s a tender snapshot of secretive forest lives lived largely out of range of human eyes. Despite all that they faced, this mother and cub were still precisely where they should be, rightful parts of this world we all share.

While not, strictly speaking, a religious man, it’s the natural world that brings me closest to expressions of the spiritual. Something as simple as standing in a vast prairie landscape, squeezed small between endless seas of grass and sky while meadowlarks sing from the wind-murmuring bluestem, can be numinous in its overwhelming effects.

‘We have lost species, almost all species, because of human ego,’ he said. ‘Human ego and stupidity have killed the Egyptian vulture. But this is why I love conservation: it’s about politics and changing minds and attitudes. And my dream is to see Egyptian vultures again at Meteora, to stand by a monastery and see them flying by.’