On the first morning of our holiday, we walked a winding route through woods to the sea. Returning a few hours later, the same path was blocked by the carcass of a huge ivy-swathed Scots pine. While we’d been lucky to miss the drama of its falling by a few hours or minutes, it had ripped limbs from neighbouring trees, crushed, smashed, uprooted other plants, and no doubt terrified every sentient creature in earshot.
A moment of seismic disruption – but only destructive if you consider that moment in isolation. Wait a year or 10, and we might see that tree sustain as many lives and connections in death as it did in life. Our inclination is to look for conclusions, and seeing the bigger picture doesn’t always come naturally. It takes practice to encounter a river and intuit an ocean, a spring or a rainshower.
Three days before the tree fell, I’d unwittingly become involved in another, smaller drama, involving two carrion crows and a hunched form I first mistook for a rabbit, but which resolved into a crouching, defensive buzzard. As the dog and I loomed on their horizon, the trio took off, leaving slight flattenings of the grass. No carcass. The dog shoved her nose into the sward and inhaled deeply. I envied her additional sensory insight into whatever conflict had been unfolding.
My encounters with wild lives often leave me with the feeling that I’ve interrupted something – in fact, I’m sometimes accused of disturbing wildlife by merely existing in the same place. There is, among a subset of environmentalists, an idea that in order to allow nature to heal we must write ourselves out of the scene. But we’re neither spectators nor dramaturges in the theatre of life. We’re players. On an individual level, we are nature. Did I bother the crows or the buzzard more than they were bothering each other? Has my passing through a wood ever wreaked chaos to match that of a falling tree? Trees fall. Crows mob buzzards. Humans pass by. Species interact. That’s what makes an ecosystem.
Our systems have inflicted untold harm and we must change them. But hairshirt misanthropy won’t help. It may even sever the last fibres in our already threadbare tapestry of nature connection.
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