Nature needs our stories!
Recently I travelled to France to visit my relatives. Seeing my family did me a lot of good, but equally important was being surrounded by healthy and abundant nature. I was reminded of the importance of spending time in these rich ecosystems, to make sure we don’t forget them and they don’t disappear. We all play a role in keeping them alive. Part of our responsibility is to share stories and fire up our imagination so we build up a collective memory of what nature can and should be. Here are some of my stories from France… What are yours?
As we drove up windy roads to get onto the Haute-Loire plateau, a remote area of central southern France, the woods and mountains started to emerge from the low cloud and I sensed the stress of the journey begin to ebb away. The minute I stepped out of the car and breathed in the fresh air of the wide, open French countryside, I felt intensely different.
My initial pleasure and relief at being surrounded by rich nature only intensified over the following weeks. Within a few days, I had seen countless birds, small rodents, and even a tiny baby salamander, so delightful in its orange and black-spotted coat. On our walks, we spotted more mushrooms than we could identify. And the thing that struck me most was the visual feast of the meadows. I couldn’t take them in enough, from the textures and hues of all the different grasses to the bright splashes of colour of the wildflowers. Astonishingly bright pink! Delicate small white stars! Warm golden yellows! Deep, frilly blues and purples! And flitting around, numerous butterflies of many different types. More than I’ve ever been conscious of before.
I grew up in this area of France. And although as a child I wasn’t directly aware of the richness of the ecosystem around me, I believe it deeply impacted my sense of what a healthy environment feels like.
In my current life in the UK, I have to actively seek out nourishment from nature. I journey to quiet, hidden places to get my fix. But the exposure I get to nature here doesn’t make me feel the same way I did in France. I often have to strive to connect with it, or squint at my surroundings to feel its beauty and its restorative qualities (ignoring the sound of the road nearby, or the pylons cutting through the landscape). The part of France I visited is not devoid of human influence, quite the contrary: agriculture and other activities have modified the landscape over millennia. Neither is it an ecological haven as there has been plenty of degradation and loss there too. But the balance between the human and more than human feels healthier, happier.
Spaces that are in ecological balance are few and far between in the British Isles. We’ve got used to the depleted nature around us, as cities and towns sprawl, agriculture intensifies, and the biodiversity in our fields and woodlands declines. What my trip to France reminded me is that we mustn’t forget what a healthy ecosystem looks and feels like. When we remember, we can strive to preserve and recreate them wherever possible.
This is essential for numerous scientific reasons. Rich and biodiverse ecosystems will help us draw carbon down from the atmosphere and limit global heating, and they will provide greater resilience to shock events like flooding and fires, to name but a few.
We also need this balance and diversity in our lives, for our own health and wellbeing. To thrive as humans, we need the fresh air, the bright colours and the varied sounds of nature around us. We need it because we are of nature but we have grown separate from it, and I believe we yearn deeply to reconnect. So many people are deprived of this richness, in ways which often map onto the unequal divides within our society.
I worry that we will forget what a healthy, abundant ecosystem feels like, because few of us are lucky enough to live near them. We as a species adapt rapidly. We get used to our changing environments and no longer remember how they once were. Charles Eisenstein describes this phenomenon well in the opening paragraphs of this chapter of his book, “Climate a New Story”. There is a concept used in ecology that describes this idea: the shifting baseline syndrome. It describes the gradual change in what we deem to be the normal state (i.e. the baseline) of the natural environment, due to lack of experience, memory and/or knowledge of its past condition.
So if now we grow up only seeing two species of trees in our forest and a butterfly once a week, we grow to believe that it is normal and don’t question whether it is healthy. We forget that the forest was once a rich jungle and that there were more butterflies than we could count. This is dangerous, because we lose the awareness of how ecosystems are being depleted and damaged, possibly beyond repair. I’m reminded of the story of the frog in a pan of water. If the temperature is turned up slowly and the water heats up gradually, the frog doesn’t notice and won’t jump out until it’s too late, and it eventually boils to death. Much like the frog, by forgetting how our ecosystems once were and failing to notice the changes around us, we are at risk of not realising the deathened state of our ecosystems until it is too late.
I’ve come back from France freshly determined to resist our tendency to forget. In order to address the ecological crisis at its root, we need to rebuild awareness of how rich and abundant life on Earth can be, and why this matters. Sharing experiences, and lots of imagination, will be needed to rekindle a sense of wonder and respect for nature. And importantly, we need to work to increase access to this richness for all, not just the privileged few who can travel to get their fix. Creating space for conversation and storytelling, artistic expression and sharing time in nature together will all play a role in rebuilding a healthier, more balanced relationship with our ecosystems. So join the conversation, share your stories!