25/6, Norfolk: nature writing and brexit

A marsh harrier calls from a storm-cloud strewn sky. A cat-like mewing from high, so high up it took me longer than usual to spot its grey wings disappearing in clouds. It called again, tucked its wings in and dived. At the bottom of its dive, it swung up — somersaulted through the air — and dived again. Skydancing in June. It disappeared over the far side of the reeds that rippled like water in the breeze. Two juveniles took the male’s place in the sky, one with food, the other tussling for it. Presumably the offspring of the male; I can’t explain the skydancing. Raising young takes the whole season and raptors usually only have one brood a year. BWP later tells me that they will display if an unpaired female ventures into the male’s territory.

Underfoot, a grazing marsh which after a week of torrential rain was sodden. The peat is springy and sprouting purple marsh orchids. Damselflies flickering into life from reeds beside the ditch — sudden sparks of blue that disappear on rest. Norfolk hawker dragonflies patrol these ditches, their beat a constant, rhythmic back-and-forth just above the levels of the reeds.  They hover at the end, wings too fast for the eye to see, bulbous green eyes glistening. And I wonder if they can see me and know I’m something other than the highland cows at the far side of the marsh, clinging to the drier ground.

 

***
Retreat is not defeat.

The consolation of nature is a phoenix — every time it is killed off as an idea it comes back again, re-emerging as something new. Ever since nature became something to enjoy, instead of something to fear, fight, tame or cultivate, it has been used to echo human feelings. Hence we have pastoral literature and elegy depending on whether you were celebrating or grieving. Darwin posed a problem, but only once Tennyson had ‘faltered where he firmly trod’, writing roughly a decade before evolutionary theory: ‘Who trusted God was love indeed / And love Creation’s final law — / Tho’ Nature red in tooth and claw / With ravine shrieked against his creed’ (I.M. LV-LVI). But nature is bigger and more complex than that. The war poets invoked English landscape, in part to remember what they were fighting for, in part for escapism from a world breaking apart around them. In the mid-twentieth century things got melancholy and angry. Nowadays we know that nature is more beneficial for mental health than anyone could have guessed. This is a general gloss, of course. But there is another way that retreating into nature is beneficial.

On Thursday Britain voted to leave the EU. The pound plummeted to its lowest rate in my lifetime. I was born in recession, left school in recession and now my future, at my glummest moments, looks like it will be one long recession too. I fear for my ecologist friends whose jobs depend on EU money and EU environmental law. I fear for the Thames estuary, for which European environmental law stopped it from being turned into an airport.

It is often said that we live in a post-truth age. Post-truth politics and post-truth media. These phrases imply there was a time when this wasn’t the case; when everything was something other than rival, competing narratives. Beauty is not truth – not necessarily anyway – but beauty is a reminder of the fundamental importance of the world around us. I don’t think we live yet in a post-beauty world.

On Thursday as the news of the vote was sinking in, I was miserable beyond belief. I was tapping into my inner Tennyson. All was woe, despair, and plotting dream emigrations. I’d head off to Sweden, Iceland, Canada, anywhere but here. Then I walked out into an unbearably hot afternoon, muggy to the point you could wade through the thick air, and by a shallow fast flowing river I found a colony of banded demoiselle damselflies. I watched them for what felt like hours, flitting from reed to reed, four wings flapping slowly, uncannily like how you’d imagine a fairy would fly. I watched them change colour: blue to green, dark to bright depending on the light, and angle and action. I was reminded that there was beauty in the world, and the importance of it — and not just for the state of my mind. And that the environmental protection that EU law afforded protects not just them but the farmland surrounding the stream, and the mid-Suffolk arable aesthetic ideal. I was reminded that everything is political. 

Nature writing can feel like an ineffectual response at times. A luxury. Rhapsodising while the turtle doves vanish and the economy sinks. But it is also fundamental and in the light of our vote for isolation, I think we need it more than ever: a close focus on ‘nature’ (howsoever you wish to define and use that word), beauty and the often hidden, often elusive, stories behind it. The difference one person behind a desk can make to the existence of a species is an important story. But so is the sheer beauty of it, how it makes us feel and behave: the fundamental reason behind why so many of us love the environment.

I am terrified for the future of our environment. But now, while we still have orchids, odonates, marsh harriers, clean beaches and migratory wildlife, we need to write about them, and the love of them, before they become forgotten things.

***

Nature doesn’t much care for borders.

The group of waders called ‘knots’ get their name from Canute: trying to hold back the tides that the birds race and forage in. The red knot were mostly birds that had failed to breed successfully in the high Arctic, either in Greenland or the far north of Russia. A great knot – the fifth record for Britain – was what the lines of twitchers were parsing the flock for.

I spent yesterday afternoon and evening on Norfolk beaches trying to find it. The afternoon at Brancaster, under a fierce sun broiling the air and turning the distant wader flocks into a singular grey smudge, warping and melting a pair of spoonbills in the heat haze. Clean golden sand. Clean sea. The evening was spent at Holme, feet half-sinking in and sloshing in the tidal flats. Behind us, in the dunes, a turtle dove purred, and a storm cloud darkened the horizon. When the great knot appeared, out from behind a clump of seaweed the excitement travelled down the line of assembled birders. Instructions barked out, reactions whispered: fifty people united in glee. 

 

The great knot belongs in summer in the far north east of Siberia. Upon departing the tundra they migrate the length of Asia, to spend their winter in the Australian summer, forming giant flocks on beaches. Or, occasionally, getting that mammoth migration wrong by 90 degrees and landing in the right habitat, with a similar species in the wrong hemisphere.

Nature doesn’t much care for borders.

Stag.

You fly like a man drowning. Frantically paddling, wings out of sync, legs akimbo, worried faces. Trajectory: downward. Down on your back.

Your natural reaction, I read, is to stay motionless — completely still — in the face of danger. I agree. So's mine. But being on your back at the bottom of Lewisham station stairwell is not where you evolved to be. Lewisham evolved around you. While you crept out at night from the dead wood pile, drunk on hormones and ready to wrestle, a city was built around you. Concrete towers grew tall and were felled. Metal and glass towers grew in their place. You stayed.

We guard you. People rush past, fear of the beetle in their eyes. We flip you the right way with our tickets. Your grappling hook feet still thrash for grip. Your movements jerky, like a clockwork toy that can't quite get going. Antennae waving — four points on the end, like fingers reaching out to hold onto air. Between your shields, gilt edges.

Down the stairs comes the only other person not afraid. He looks at us. Nice stag beetle, he says. They're rare now. We shepherd you to the edge. The bright lights behind you, the thick dark night of the undergrowth ahead. Your antlers twitch.