No easy answers

I do so love these birds - the avian emergency services... according to my rather convoluted theorising.

On that theorising, I have started reading Sophie Yeo's Nature's Ghosts. She is making me think again. Not so much about the emergency services, but of the nature taking its course side of it. Look, I still think that were we all to bugger off, or at least 90% of us (I volunteer - so long as it's painless and the cats don't suffer), then nature taking its course would be the best thing. But, as I said, that demands so much space and time. The Oh-wow-we've-forgotten-about-the-humans-at-last-ocene.

In the meantime, I think this Ms Yeo has the right ideas. She's researched it thoroughly, is (so far - 37% according to the old Kindle) arguing it persuasively and writes well to boot. She's introduced me to a Finnish guy who sounds pretty hardcore (he has no truck with environmentalists who won't kill a burbot [What is a burbot? - Ed.] [It's a fish. - Crone]) who claims that nature "needs" humans. And he makes a good case. You can find out about his Snowchange Co-operative here.

She writes:

Tero was sure-footed in his relationship with the natural world, and I felt myself stumbling mentally as I tried to keep up. He had little patience for the visitors who came seeking quick fixes and cheap sentiment: for the volunteers who hoped to heal themselves without also building connection with nature; for the London tourists who refused to kill a burbot; for environmentalists who condemned the ethics of the hunt. Nature, he stressed often, is not about pretty scenery and simple cures: it is about death and the surrender of self. About putting the collective before the individual. I gave up trying to find the words that might secure his esteem, and instead resigned myself to sitting with the flimsiness of my own connection with the earth. The truth was, I didn’t have the words. His world was deep, frozen, bloody, earthy. Mine seemed gossamer by comparison.

This reminded me of what I had heard from the trees about indistinct morality, uncomfortable stories and the way that "love" is different from our understanding.

The book covers the "myth" of the wildwood - particularly across Scotland - making the case, with which I know my mentors at the Wildlife Trust are familiar, that the dense "climax" woodland was the effect of lost megafauna, i.e. a result of damage caused by humans, and that coppicing and subsistence farming "returned" the landscape to a state amenable to the local fauna.

It's an important book and a good read - I'm ranking it up there with Ben Rawlence and David George Haskell.

Like me, Sophie Yeo read English at Oxford. Unlike me, she is not an old Crone and has already achieved two wonderful things - this book and the Inkcap Journal, which publishes long-form stories about the environment. She is the editor. She's really young.

Maybe I like her a bit less now.

Still, I'm kind of happy to note that I am willing to be persuaded by someone, rather than doggedly sticking to my guns... or perhaps I am always too willing to be persuaded? I mean, she's going against the trees! But... I mean... trees??? Who am I kidding?

Need to think about that.