Second paragraph of third chapter:
It seemed to me that the changes that have occurred to the landscape in Britain are so profound that, even in the relatively unspoiled fragments of habitat, perhaps all that remains is a pale shadow of their former natural glory. It is hard to know for sure. Without a time machine, we can never really know what it would have been like to be a naturalist rambling through the British countryside in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, other than by reading their books and notes. We might infer from the fact that there are old recipes for cowslip wine – which require as the first step the collecting of two buckets full of cowslip flowers – that they were once much more common than they are now, but we can’t know how common, or how abundant the bees were that visited them, or how numerous the worms that burrowed beneath their roots. This said, it occurred to me that there might be a way of gaining an insight into what Britain used to be like – by going to Eastern Europe. I had heard that in parts of Eastern Europe agricultural systems remained little changed, having escaped the drive for increased yield that afflicted Britain from the Second World War onwards, and which was subsequently driven throughout Western Europe by the Common Agricultural Policy’s labyrinthine and often perverse system of subsidies for farm ‘improvement’.
A heartfelt and passionate book about bumble bees, and how the destruction of the traditional landscape in the name of agricultural productivity has made us all poorer. Goulson is dedicated to the study of bees, and goes all over the world to find them (there’s a particularly vivid section in Argentina). He conveys well the frustrations of research on small, fragile and often hostile invertebrates, and the grim situation of species disappearing from the face of the planet before they have been recorded. Now that he mentions it, isn’t it weird that bats are strongly protected by the law when other animals (less cute perhaps) are not? This is an eloquent call for more thought about and care of our natural heritage, and you can get it here.
I’m glad to say that we have a wildlife-friendly garden here, and we do see bumble bees buzzing around in the summer. I’ll take a closer look this year.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2017, and the non-fiction book which had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on both of those piles, and last in my 2017 intake, is Rule of Law by Glynis Breitenbach; one more to go before that.
