Originally published September 2021.
Why preserving the irreplaceable benefits everyone and especially moths.
The names of moths are a delicious smorgasbord of rich imagery. Our evenings are festooned by Dusky Footmen and Ruby Tigers, Death’s Head hawkmoths and even the Scarce Merveille du Jour. They bring the pipistrelles and barbastelle who, through echo location, find and eat them. They bring the goat-sucker into our woods. Their hairy caterpillars feed our lost cuckoos. Ditches across our marshland flitter with ephemeral China mark moths, miniature ballerinas in trembling ivory. The very names evocative and musical, colourful and hysterical. How can you not smile at the Nut tree tussock, Oak beauty and Sussex emerald?
Through these progeny of ancient oaks and denizens of the teeming fun of our ditch water, I come closest to spiritual resurgence. Not, perhaps, in a religious way, but in a way that feels like clotted cream melting through my diaphragm. A physical affirmation of spirituality, pure, simple and awe inspiring. A relationship that brings me ease, through an eternally evolving continuum of wonder.
Henry Dimbleby, in a recent Ted talk, delivered in his role heading the National Food Strategy, has called for the development of an environmental metric in which to enumerate the wonder of nature. A heartfelt echo of the economist Dieter Helm, the champion of ‘natural capital’, there is a societal challenge to value the natural environment at every level. Both the recent Agriculture Bill and the coming Environment Bill hinge on greater accuracy in the conceptual valuation of wildlife. ‘Environmental net gain’ will be a requirement of future development. The philosophy is spot on, but the practicalities lie in a tangled thicket.
An ancient tree, especially an oak, contains a disproportionate bounty in both diversity and bio mass. The danger of putting a number on this to accord value can simply lead to the felicitation of trade or condone vandalism. The veteran tree cannot move, nor can it be replaced in the place that it simply is. A thousand small ones may not yield a single oak eggar, oak lutestring, oak rustic or oak-tree pug. This is why people chain themselves to them, calling for their value to be realised as irreplaceable. The challenge of attributing this level of value to irreplaceable natural assets must lie in what we call progress. Anything else is just destruction in fine clothes. Acid into the soul of ordinary people.
“So long as progress preserves the irreplaceable, the farm can offer considerable opportunity in rebuilding a bigger, better and joined-up wildscape”
Yet I am a practical farmer and I relish the deal. So long as progress preserves the irreplaceable, the farm can offer considerable opportunity in rebuilding a bigger, better and joined-up wildscape. Indeed, this is a deal that could save many farmers from destitution. As the housing estates advance towards our boundaries, but not onto us, they should bring a wave of tree planting, reed beds and small meadows, with access for the growing population carefully and flexibly managed. Places where they too can enjoy the unction of healthy countryside. But, in today’s brambled administration, they also bring litter, sheep worrying, cars, and noise and crime. The challenge is to convert the one to the other. To do the deal, to get the ‘net gain’.
Moths have vocal chords, which are used for two things: attracting a mate or repulsing an attacker. Inaudible to the human ear, the din of humanity drowns their sound as the lighting of our nights disorientates them. In enumerating our natural environment we must create deals that leave moth life augmented and protected. To protect the oak rustic the system of numerical order must reinforce natural capital. Numbers must not be used to explain why a man with his head in the oven and his feet in the deep freeze should feel about average. No, they must be distilled to achieve the stillness in which to hear the Lead-coloured Drab calling for love…
