The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy Read Online Free PDF Page A

slaughtered for its horn, believedin traditional Asian medicine, quite erroneously, to be a cancer cure. We knew the dodo for three times as long. The nightingale, the world’s most versified bird, was revealed in 2010 to have declined in England by 90 per cent in forty years; that is, to have vanished from nine out of every ten sites where it sang as the Beatles were breaking up. The Mediterranean bluefin tuna, a fish glorious in form and function but unfortunately glorious too in taste, is starting to look doomed by the appetites of sushi eaters; all seven species of sea turtle are endangered, three of them critically; and amphibians are sliding in a bunch down the steep slope to oblivion, with the golden toad of the cloud forests of Costa Rica famous for its disappearance, while the golden frog of Panama may not be famous, but has disappeared just the same. Loss is everywhere, and the defining characteristic of the natural world in the twenty-first century is no longer beauty, nor riches, nor abundance, nor, if you like, life force, but has become vulnerability.
    It cannot be stressed enough: these losses are not caused by natural events, such as tsunamis or volcanic eruptions. They are the work of people – of us – and as we continue to grow, and our needs continue to expand, so will the devastation. The proximate causes can be easily enumerated – we can see that they are habitat destruction, pollution, over-exploitation or over-hunting, the havoc caused by invasive species and, increasingly, a changing climate – but the ultimate cause of the great spreading ruination remains Homo sapiens : just one of the earth’s great array of millions of radiated life forms, whose numbers, having exploded beyond the planet’s ability to carry them, are now firmly on course to wreck it.
    In a curious historical coincidence, at the very time when the explosion in numbers was beginning, a new vision of the earth it was so direly to affect was vouchsafed to us. We can put a precise date on it: Christmas Eve 1968. The person directly responsible was William Anders, an American astronaut, one ofthe crew of Apollo 8, the first manned spacecraft to leave the earth’s orbit and circle the moon. When, on 24 December, he and fellow crewmen Frank Borman and Jim Lovell emerged in their craft from behind the moon’s dark side, they saw in front of them an astounding sight: an exquisite blue sphere hanging in the blackness of space. The photograph Anders took of it is known as Earthrise , and its taking was without doubt one of the profoundest events in the history of human culture, for at this moment, for the first time, we saw ourselves from a distance, and the earth in its surrounding dark emptiness not only seemed impossibly beautiful but also impossibly fragile. Most of all, we could see clearly that it was finite. This does not appear to us on the earth’s surface; the land or the sea stretches to the horizon, but there is always something beyond. However many horizons we cross, there’s always another one waiting. Yet on glimpsing the planet from deep space, we saw not only the true wonder of its shimmering blue beauty, but also the true nature of its limits. Seen in the round, not really very big at all – the Apollo 8 astronauts could cover it with a thumbnail – and most assuredly, isolated. Only the one. Nowhere else for us to decamp to, in the never-ending blackness. Thanks to Earthrise , we now understand it in the intuitive way, in our souls: what we are wrecking is our home.
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    The idea that something might be done about this, that a way might be found to hold back the tide of human destruction across the globe, has been one of the great moral and intellectual challenges of the last quarter of a century, given that the pressures involved are intractable and that the problem itself is fully acknowledged by relatively few. They are usually classed as environmentalists or conservationists. They are in every country,and