Beastly

Euphemisms are the cloaks we employ to protect our sensitive souls. Control. Manage. Harvest. We know we do it, but we do it anyway. Other words can write things off. Wasteland. Quagmire. Swamp. Wilderness. It is empty. There’s nothing there. Language is so deeply ingrained in our psyches that we succumb to it even though we understand the mechanics of metaphor. Even our efforts to be politically correct produce ‘non-human animal’ – a negative term for what is not us. Non-rhinoceros? Non-pigeon? Other words shoot blanks. Like by-catch. A tiny word for a very big thing. A shrimp trawler throws 80–90% of the sea animals in its nets, dead or dying, overboard. For every pound of shrimps, 26 pounds of sealife must also die. That’s dolphins, turtles, sharks, whales. By-catch. I’ve mentioned ‘biodiversity’ (unless you skipped the introduction). Such a flatliner for everything that has life; the incalculable species of insects and fungi and slime, let alone a wren’s beating heart. ‘Biodiversity’ squashes the luminous zing, the sleek glory. Wild living community? Planet inhabitants? It’s not easy. But we need more to care about, more magpie garble, more moose who loom.⁷⁵

Here on Earth the human brain has shrunk. We’ve lost around 150 cubic centimetres in the last 20,000 years, about the size of a tennis ball.¹⁸⁴ The ratio of brain to body mass is called the encephalisation quotient, or EQ, but the human brain has shrunk at a faster rate than our once bigger, beefier Cro-Magnon body. It could be just a more efficient brain, or maybe, like our domesticated beasts, we have lost the need for the fast-thinking chutzpah of our wilder ancestors. Cognitive scientist David Geary suspects that Mike Judge’s 2006 cult film, Idiocracy, hits the nail on the proverbial head. Man in a hibernation experiment goes to sleep for 500 years and wakes up to discover he is the smartest guy on the planet. We have dumbed down. We don’t need to outwit wild boar or aurochs any more. We go down the shop. Water comes from a tap, light from a switch and cooked dinner from an oven. We don’t need to make a shelter, or see in the dark, or even to jumpstart the car. Since the Bronze Age the shrinkage in European male human craniums is the most pronounced. Heh, heh. For an idea of proportional scaling, anthropologist John Hawks suggests, ‘For a brain as small as that found in the average European male today, the body would have to shrink to the size of a pygmy.’ An upbeat interpretation is that a smaller brain is the result of selecting traits against aggression, which is actually back to the downbeat dumbing-down scenario, a dependent adult with juvenile characteristics who can’t do everything for himself.

Jerks – Ecological sense runs up against a profit-junkie world and loses every time. Save the planet or the economy, it’ll be the economy. Homo economicus consumicus insatiaticus. Our world is built on short-term interests. Sufficient is a dirty word. The ecological downside of profit (externalities*) is inconvenient to think about, so it is easier (and effective) to ridicule those who try to make you. Apocalypse-mongers, eco-miserablists, doomsters, disingenuous mopers, ‘the environmental Taliban’,¹⁹⁶ dippy, hippy, eco-la-las, grow-your-own-socks Utopian sentimentalists, eco-fascists, eco-Nazis, eco-terrorists, criminal terrorists! There are bunny huggers and predator huggers.** ‘Watermelons’ are green on the outside and red (communists) on the inside. Slap a hate label on a group, then charge your adversary with being privileged, naive, urban, elite or misanthropic. Buzzwords make it alarmingly easy. Just accuse someone of ‘virtue signalling’ or ‘rewilding’ to get them on the back foot or silence them. Somehow the term ‘rewilding’ has become toxic in the very places where revived ecosystems, restored nature and returned wildlife might have brought uplifts in jobs and local revenue. Who are these people coming in and telling us what to do? They want to turn the place into a wilderness and everyone will starve. The accusation against rewilding for taking land out of food production is something never levelled at golf courses, racecourses, pheasant shoots, grouse moors or motor circuits, and ignores the point that rewilding ventures don’t take productive agricultural land.*** Of course we must eat. But why pursue destructive, toxic, cruel, dangerous, expensive, short-term, soil-exhausting, microbe-killing methods? Rewilding is not about abandoning land or creating playgrounds for the rich. It is an ecological reboot that repairs our life support systems, for free. With minimal intervention animals do it for us. Browsing, grazing, defecating, disturbing, opening glades, transporting seeds, left to their own devices and natural processes animals create dynamic habitats that teem with life. This can solve some of our biggest challenges: insect collapse, soil health, carbon sequestration, flood mitigation. It’s the most exciting environmental fix out there, with legs on! The signalling is not the critics’ problem, it is the virtue. So little of nature is protected that ordinary people feel compelled to protect it themselves. The pity is the need to justify conservation on human-centred utilitarian grounds, not for the intrinsic value of the creatures with whom we share, or should share, the planet. Are we stark staring mad? Someone somewhere is missing the point. Maybe it’s me.