The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (7 page)

Bird fervour led me there. The estuary of the Dee is Elysium for the birdwatcher, a sprawling watery plain ten miles long and six miles wide at its mouth, holding, in winter especially, enormous numbers of waterbirds, both waders and wildfowl. As I
walked and cycled around the Wirral, spurred on by C. F. Tunnicliffe and his tea cards, and my knowledge grew, and I began to spot the tree-creepers and siskins of Storeton Woods, and the yellowhammers and linnets of the fields beyond them, and the pheasants and partridges that ran in the fields, and the spotted flycatchers of various Wirral village gardens, I began to realise, talking to similar-minded boys, that the Dee had birds which were bigger and wilder and more exciting still, and that it was there that I needed to be. This was ultimately dependent, however, on a rite of passage common to all the birdwatching boys of my generation: the purchase of a pair of binoculars. They seemed to be very dear in those days, did bins. At Christmas 1960, therefore, when I was thirteen and a half, I asked for money for a binoculars fund instead of traditional presents: £2 was forthcoming, and duly put aside. It was complemented by another £2 for my fourteenth birthday in June 1961; a third such sum the Christmas afterwards; and finally, £3 for the birthday which followed, when I was able to buy, for eight pounds ten shillings, a pair of 8 × 32 field glasses of no famous make, but which at least were serviceable. And so, with them slung around my neck, in the summer of 1962, when I was fifteen, I walked out into the Dee estuary looking for birds, and what I stumbled upon was wilderness.

•

The idea that wild places, those which remain wholly untouched by people, might be of value to us and even cherished and protected, rather than just being thought of as waste land or worse, is relatively recent, in historical terms. Once, of course, there were no wild places as such; during the fifty thousand generations and more we spent evolving through the Pleistocene, the epoch of the ice ages, as hunter-gatherers, when we ourselves
were an organic part of the natural world, all places were by definition wild; but then, in the greatest of all human revolutions, as the last of the ice disappeared about twelve thousand years ago, farming was invented. With the cultivation of crops and the domestication of animals, agriculture for the first time permitted stable settlements, it allowed for villages to be created, then towns, then cities and the rise of everything we call civilisation; but even more than that, it fundamentally altered our relationship with nature, from one of partnership, more or less – for even as hunter-gatherers we could be demanding partners – to one of formalised mastery and domination. We have spent most of the five hundred generations since, the Holocene epoch, breaking the sod and hacking the forest down and proclaiming our God-given right to do so, God-given quite literally – the Old Testament spelt out bluntly the farmers’ ascendancy over nature, and their entitlement to do whatever they damn well liked with it, in the famous lines of Genesis, 1:28: ‘and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’. Thus we long regarded wild places and wilderness, the bits we hadn’t managed to subdue or have dominion over, with near universal disapproval, indeed with a revulsion sometimes verging on horror. It was against wild places, after all, that the civilising struggle was being waged, to clear the forest and grow corn in its stead; the forest was the enemy, it held deadly wild beasts, and sometimes deadly wild men, as deserts did, or mountains. The civilised looked to the cities. What was there in wilderness other than the absence of everything that made life worth living? For aeons it was hated and feared and despised.

The shift in opinion that started to change this attitude, in the early 1700s, was fairly shallowly based: it was aesthetic. But it was effective, nonetheless. It began when English gentlemen
started taking the Grand Tour of Europe, in the course of which they survived the vertiginous crossing of the Alps, and enjoyed having been terrified. So arose the influential concept of the Sublime, the appreciation of the awe-inspiring side to nature, something which was not quite the same as beauty but which prompted admiration just as powerfully. It became an influential literary and artistic fashion, and in the second half of the eighteenth century it was joined by another, slightly tamer vogue for viewing the natural world, wild places and all, in a positive artistic light, the concept of the Picturesque. Their combined influence meant that by the 1780s, especially as turnpike roads were built and public transport improved, Britain’s once-despised wild scenery, on the River Wye in Wales and in the Lake District in England in particular, was attracting an increasing number of tourists, while in continental Europe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had sung the praises of the Alps and insisted on the innate goodness of the natural world and of man himself; and all of these streams of thought fed into the swelling river that was Romanticism, until as the nineteenth century began, William Wordsworth could proclaim himself, from first to last, a follower of nature, and he himself was followed by many more.

So nature finally found its champions; but they were not specifically champions of wilderness, of what we might call wholly untouched,
unhumanised
land. Much of Wordsworth’s Lake District, mountainous and awe-inspiring though it might be, was a farmed landscape, one way or another; it had people in it. It had Michael. It had Lucy. It could not really be called a wilderness. The champions of wilderness proper began to emerge fifty years later, in America.

It was only natural. In the United States, in this new-found world, the extent of completely untouched land was colossal, especially in the centre and west of the continent, which had never been settled. Wilderness was virtually the country’s defining landscape. Yet despite its magnitude, it began to come under
mortal threat as the nineteenth century progressed and the young country stormed headlong into the swiftest and most extensive mastering of nature the world had ever seen, breaking the sod and hacking the forest down on a continent-wide scale in just a few decades, as part of the westward expansion of the Frontier, an enterprise regarded by Americans themselves as so heroic that it came to symbolise for them their national character, with its virtues of individualism, self-reliance and independence. Year after year, the pioneers pushed further westwards and built their log cabins; the untouched prairies were ploughed; the ancient trees were toppled in their thousands; the indigenous inhabitants, the Native Americans, were evicted from their ancestral lands; and cattle replaced the buffalo herds, and the bear and the lynx and the wolf, all to the approbation of the citizenry as a whole.

And yet . . . even as this was all going on, doubts about the wisdom of so forcibly taming, often in effect destroying, the extraordinary wild landscapes which were being discovered in the west, many of them more freshly magnificent than anything in Europe, were growing in the minds of young America’s own nature writers, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, both of whom, as Transcendentalists, saw the unspoiled natural world as a way to spiritual truth. Thoreau went further and – perhaps the first person to do so – specifically championed the concept of
wildness
/
wilderness
. Although best-known for
Walden
, an account of two years living in a cabin in the woods, his forceful views on wildness are set out in
Walking
, a lecture given several times and published after his death in 1862, which contains the famous line ‘In Wildness is the preservation of the World.’ Thoreau saw man as being a part of nature, and he saw wild places not only as essential to human well-being, but also as a source of primitive strength; it was ‘not a meaningless fable’, he said, that Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, had been suckled by a she-wolf.

His support for wilderness was soon echoed by one of nineteenth-century America’s most noteworthy public men, George Perkins Marsh, who is barely known in Britain, an omission that needs to be rectified. A lawyer, politician, diplomat, and outstanding linguist, successively US envoy to the Ottoman Empire and to Italy (where he died), a polymath and universal man who was almost the Victorian-era equivalent of Thomas Jefferson, Marsh was also an ecologist
avant la lettre
; and in 1864 he produced a book which is the first-ever summary of the
ecological
consequences of doing what Genesis urged us to do, and of dominating and subduing the earth. American critics not infrequently link it with Darwin’s
The Origin of Species
, published just five years earlier, and while Marsh does not, like Darwin, overturn all previous conceptions of what humanity is and cannot be made the Englishman’s intellectual twin, there is no doubt that in challenging another enormous assumption which people had always made about the world, his originality is of a comparable order.

The assumption was that doing things to the earth had no cost. It followed on inevitably from the Bible’s declaration that the planet’s resources were put there by God for our use, and thus by implication were boundless. That was woven inextricably into the Christian mindset. It is hard to overstate how fundamental, in a still Christian world, was Marsh’s contesting of it. But in
Man and Nature (Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action)
he did that at length, highlighting the early Mediterranean societies, which, he said, had collapsed because the deforestation in which they had engaged had destroyed their water supplies. He bolstered his case with his own vast travel experience and mammoth erudition –
Man and Nature
is a dense read – and moved inexorably to his point, which was that in its headlong conquest of the Frontier, America was in grave danger of repeating the mistakes that these earlier societies had made, and ruining itself.

His was the first voice to enunciate these insights, now commonplace amongst us. And he went further. Such was the sweep of his learning and the depth of his vision that he felt able to generalise about the baleful influence of the human species on nature as a whole, as he perceived it, and he did so in words as darkly memorable about us as Adam Smith’s hard-headed remark as to why the butcher, the brewer and the baker provide us with our dinner. ‘Man is everywhere a disturbing agent,’ Marsh wrote. ‘Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.’

There, was the true value of wilderness, of unhumanised land: it was where the harmonies of nature, the balance and beauty of the natural world, remained. This was a far profounder assessment of its worth than the fact that it could give a gentleman a fright, and it became the intellectual under pinning of the devotion to wilderness which began to gain an increasing foothold in American thinking about the natural world. But it was not Marsh who orchestrated it. That was a torch taken up by John Muir, the Scots-born writer who emigrated to the United States aged eleven, in 1849. Muir spent his adolescence on his father’s farm in the wilds of the Wisconsin frontier, and after an accident in which he nearly lost his sight, he realised that the wilds were where he wanted to spend his life. In 1868 he moved to California and discovered the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, a wilderness supreme, and for the next forty years and more he informed a growing audience of their transcendental qualities and why they mattered, in lyrical and sometimes quasi-mystical terms: undisturbed nature, he said, was ‘a window opening into heaven, a mirror reflecting the Creator’.

•

By the end of the nineteenth century, then, the value of wilderness, something barely recognised in any other society, was in America formally and widely acknowledged, and the word itself, for long in use disparagingly – think of Jesus in the wilderness – was for the first time being used in a positive way. Thoreau, Marsh, and Muir had all seen something in wholly wild land which made the most powerful appeal to the human spirit, and their perception was increasingly shared. Muir became a national celebrity, not only for his writings but also for his wilderness activism, helping to bring about the creation of California’s Yosemite National Park in 1890 and becoming the founding president of the United States’ first major conservation body, the Sierra Club. By the time of his death, in 1914, the love of wilderness was becoming ineradicably established in the American mind, and as the new century went on it only grew, supported by thinkers such as the lyrical forester-philosopher Aldo Leopold, who called for a new ‘land ethic’ of ecological responsibility. It reached its climax in 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act, a piece of legislation establishing a National Wilderness Preservation System for America, a gigantic protection scheme for vast areas of untouched, unhumanised country, quite unlike anything else in the world.

But that was America. They could love their wilderness, because they had it. In Britain, although we cherish our countryside and its gentle beauty, and strive to protect it just as much, it is a landscape which has been farmed time out of mind; there is little that can justly be given the wilderness label, at least in its southern half, in the English lowlands. After leaving King Arthur’s round table in his quest for the mysterious Green Knight, Sir Gawain might have ridden through ‘the wilderness of Wirral’ –
few thereabouts that either God or man with good heart loved
– yet that was written some six hundred years ago, and by the time I came along, Gawain’s godless Arthurian wilderness
was industrial town and suburb: it was Sunny Bank and Norbury Close. It was long tamed. On the Wirral’s eastern side, anyway.

The Mersey side.

Where I grew up.

But the western side, the Dee side . . . well. Funny. It was not quite so clear-cut. I don’t mean the gentle farmland with its oak-dotted hedges and red-brown sandstone walls, the pretty villages of Caldy and Parkgate and Burton, but the estuary . . . when you first see it, when you come round the corner on to the Parkgate promenade, say, and it’s there smack bang in front of you, mile after mile of empty marshland stretching away uninterrupted to the Welsh mountains on its far edge and the sea at the far end . . . you are given pause. There’s a definite feeling of immensity facing you, of nature untouched on the grand scale, which is hard to ignore.