Why conservationists should thank God for the motor car
ROD LIDDLE
It is the almost unchallenged assumption of our time that we are destroying the environment and, as a result, every day rendering extinct thousand upon thousand of species of blameless crawling, hopping, flying or swimming things.
Conservationists have the statistics ready to hand. Every 20 seconds or so 150 species of bird, animal or insect go the way of all flesh, never to reappear. Or something. One day we will wake up and there'll be nothing left at all. Just a couple of feral pigeons gazing around with reproach at the vast, desolate, denuded, human wilderness, And by then, you feckless, acquisitive, materialistic people, it will be too late to do anything but mumble a sort of aghast, regretful 'Sony'.
I've bought into this apocalyptic vision more than most, to tell you the truth. I lie awake at nights wondering what creatures are for the cosh next. Perhaps tomorrow morning there will be no stoats. I toss and turn. I don't want a world without stoats. There is something engaging and graceful about the tilt of a stoat's neck, as it prepares to rip open a rabbit's throat, that should be uplifting to all of us. I've been so worried, in the past, that I've even voted for the Green party, despite the fact that, apart from preserving stoats, they want to make lesbianism compulsory and ban refrigerators. (Yes, I know, this is a misrepresentation of the Green party manifesto. Exactly how much of one I shall leave for you to decide. Check out the party's website. . . . )
Anyway, the notion, then, is that things are always getting worse and worse through our reckless despoiling of the planet and our cavalier disregard for those of its inhabitants that are, in general, through no fault of their own, smaller and more stupid than us. And thus, by extension, that things were better in the past. When, exactly, in the past is never made clear. But there is a certain admiration for the bucolic haze of Edwardian England; the England of Hardy, Housman, Belloc, Chesterton and a happier Rupert Brooke. A place achingly reconstructed in Orwell's Coming Up for Air — before the ravages of the internal combustion engine, consumerism, mass population explosion, modern warfare and totalitarianism. Perhaps, then, it was here that man and beast lived in a sort of loving, mutually supportive symbiosis, with harvest mice allowed to nibble the ears of the corn before sturdy, illiterate peasants, wielding scythes, brought it home?
A friend in my home village of Heytesbury, in west Wiltshire's Wylye Valley, loaned me a musty old book that was published at the high-water mark of Edwardian England — 1909. It was written by an extraordinarily self-satisfied, pompous man called W.H. Hudson and entitled A Shepherd's Life. Mr Hudson was not himself a shepherd, I should add. His attempts to construct a picture of life on Salisbury Plain and in the various nearby river valleys — stretching as far back as the early 1830s — is effected through a series of occasionally charming but more usually brutally condescending interviews. These are interspersed with rants about the futility of providing education for the peasant class and the general, ineluctable ingratitude of proletarians. I'm slightly surprised he wasn't a regular columnist here.
It is Hudson's perorations about Wiltshire wildlife which interested me. In his introduction he announces: 'Of the losses of wild bird life, they relate chiefly to the extermination of the finest species, the big bird, especially the soaring bird which is now gone out of all this Wiltshire sky. By this, we later discover, he means particularly the buzzard, and he dates its extinction to the late 18th century. Nowhere in the county is there a hawk bigger than a kestrel, he laments, despite the vast, unpopulated spaces. When the 'big birds' do turn up, this is what happens: 'A few years ago a buzzard made its appearance there lin the Savernake Forest] . . . and the entire surrounding population went mad with excitement about it and every man who possessed a gun flew to the forest to join in the hunt until the wretched bird, after being blazed at for two or three days, was brought down.' And then again. at Foothill Bishop, nearer my neck of the woods: 'Nobody could say what this wandering hawk was — it was very big, blue above with a white breast barred with black, a "tarrable" fierce-looking bird with fierce yellow eyes. All the gamekeepers and several other men with guns were in hot pursuit of it for several days, until someone fatally wounded it.' Sounds like the peasants had found themselves — and killed — a goshawk.
But that's not all. Hudson also bemoans the extinction of the stone curlew and the bustard and all manner of smaller, less obviously impressive birds.
Now, believe me, there are more buzzards today on Salisbury Plain — and in the river valleys — than you could shake a stick at. There are at least four nests within a 1,000-yard radius of where I'm sat, with the usual bottle of Soave, writing this article. Of all creatures, buzzards adore motor cars and, more particularly, their tendency to squash flat small bewildered mammals whose corpses they can later strip bare. You might confuse them, the buzzards, when they're at rest, on the telegraph poles overlooking the A36, with the beautiful red kites, which these days abound.
In the last year or two I've also seen a hen harrier and — yes — a goshawk (not that far from Fonthill Bishop, as it happens). I've even chanced upon an osprey sitting in a tail beech tree by a wide stretch of the River Wylye. It was a strange, disconcerting event, suddenly sighting this huge, thuggish, embittered-looking bird of prey in the lush and gentle environs of the Wyiye Valley. Like bumping into John Prescott at Glyndeboume. The bird had stopped off on its way from Rutland Water to the coast, I later discovered. The stone curlew has made a comeback, too, up on the plain. A breeding programme to reintroduce the great bustard has met with reasonable success. All around, the wildlife teems in fecundity and diversity. Mr Hudson would have exulted.
The reasons are many and varied. Undoubtedly the conservationists should take a lot of credit for the revival of the red kite and the stone curlew. The buzzard has made a comeback because we use far fewer pesticides than before and, by and large, the peasantry have such exciting interactive games on DVD as Grand Theft Auto with which to quench their insatiable blood-lust. They don't need to chase buzzards any more, Gamekeepers have largely been re-educated
although more work is required here.
But there are two other important considerations, both seemingly at odds with the usual environmentalist mantra. The first is that 100 years of rapacious capitalism and consumerism, together with a hugely increased population, the industrialisation of agriculture and the triumphant accession of the motor car has in fact resulted in a greater diversity of wildlife — in this area, at least.
The second is that the military control of Salisbury Plain to the north, with its prohibition upon ramblers as well as farmers, has preserved rather than eradicated (as Hudson thought it might) the diverse wildlife in which we can take so much pleasure. So, as an alternative environmental shibboleth, one which may not be adopted by the Green party at the next general election, how about this? Save a buzzard today. Buy more cars and tanks.
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