Riverwatch Paradise Lost? Compressed by the telescope of history, summers were always sunny way back when, just as winters were always crisp with snow. Wildlife was also profuse, but that comparison with today is far from an illusion. Denied access to fishing and other freedoms in early 2020, much of my enjoyment of the local watery environment beyond daily walks has been vicarious. My ‘sport’ has largely comprised mining memories of times long gone. In the early 1960s, I lived in Kent, later spending the early 1970s in Sussex before disappearing into the big city when going up to university. Roaming the countryside, I grew acquainted with small water bodies abounding on the clay. Some were dew ponds, others bomb craters, both a legacy of former times. All seemed to host families of water voles – ‘Ratty’ from The Wind in the Willows – frequently seen paddling the calm surface at dusk. Moorhens were ubiquitous, newts crept in thick water weed, and small fishes abounded in at least some secret watery wonderlands. I suspect virtually all of these minute wildlife oases are now lost. Most will have silted up or been filled in long ago, serving no use in the modern world. A minority might have been enlarged and stocked with bigger fish to meet bigger expectations. But memories of the wealth of three-spined sticklebacks, male fish brighter than peacocks in their spawning regalia, swim on with great affection in my mind. So too those pools hosting crucian carp, or the occasional rudd or tench, brightened by the dance of damselflies and the alarm cries of moorhens hiding in marginal weed stands or under tumbling willows, amongst so many other inspiring vignettes. I have a hankering for things simpler, slower and smaller in scale in every regard, as do many of my increasingly crusty colleagues. I wish I could find such a neglected pool again today, hunting minimonsters whilst being eaten alive by mosquitoes. However, today’s profoundly changed landscape economics hold no value for these seemingly inconsequential watering holes, razed under a model of progress rewarding only intensive farming, housing, roads and other hard infrastructure. These oases now live on almost exclusively as ghosts in my imagination. Yet, whilst many idylls romanticise past times that never really existed, those 1960s pondscapes were as real as the air I breathe today. It was no illusion that wildlife was 10
Signpost October 2020
formerly more profuse. For all the massed nature we see on television, did you know that 96% of the global biomass of mammals now comprises humans and our livestock? Scientific studies also find that, since just 1970, populations of many wild animal species have more than halved. The average rate of loss of vertebrate species over the last century is 100 times higher than background rates, insect populations are experiencing precipitous decline, and biodiversity loss is proceeding at such a rate that we are facing a mass extinction event. Authoritative global surveys found that 75% of the global land surface is already significantly altered, and over 85% of global wetland area has been lost. The loss of those small but important watery oases of wildlife, once so ubiquitously scattered across the southern English landscape in the distant days of my childhood, is of far more than nostalgic value. If the pause imposed on global human activity in 2020 has any meaningfully positive legacy, it should be that it causes us to reflect and chose a different pathway of development that values nature not merely for its inherent values, but as the principal and vital underpinning resource supporting future human security and opportunity. In this unique moment in human history we can choose, indeed must demand, a different pathway into a future of greater stability and prospects supported by recovering natural systems. We have to seize this unprecedented opportunity to rebuild our muchdegraded natural world not just for its beauty and inherent worth but as the irreplaceable life support system upon which all of our futures depend: “building back better” by addressing the foundations of the edifice of a more fulfilling future, not merely a swift return to short-term profit-taking based on their systematic liquidation. With global society now entering the 2021-2030 UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, there is no excuse for reverting to anachronistic habits perpetuating the serial destruction of natural systems essential for the continuing health, wealth, security and quality of life of all. Mark Everard
