The Missing Word

‘One of the penalties of an ecological education,’ said the great American environmentalist Aldo Leopold, ‘is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.’ Hold that thought for a moment.

I spent much of last week wandering up the east Yorkshire coast, watching the North Sea slowly, or not so slowly, munching away at it. There is a 60 km stretch of coastline between Bridlington, in the north, and Spurn Point, in the south, which is retreating westwards at an average of 2 metres a year, and will continue to do so until it hits the chalk ridge 20 miles or so inland, in about 10,000 years time. I interviewed a number of people, from academics to folk whose original villages had effectively drowned, and I finished it off with a dawn walk to Spurn Point, to get my head around it all, and enjoy the beauty.

Spurn at dawn, any time perhaps, is a place of wild beauty, a refractor of layers of lights and horizons, and a magnet for migrating birds at both shoulders of the year. And, because it is a magnet for birds, it is a magnet for birders, mainly male, mainly middle-aged and mainly equipped with unfeasibly enormous telescopes and camera lenses. After all, the chance of a money shot of, say, that elusive pallid harrier is a strong incentive to put in all that extra effort and expense.

It struck me then, as it still does, that what was most exciting about the coastal erosion of the Holderness Plain (it’s proper name) is that it is the one issue that I have researched that actually cannot be put down to us and our behaviour. No, to find the culprit, you need to go back to the last glacial maximum, and understand the billions of tons of soft boulder clay that were left on the land as the ice retreated. It is that softness coupled with the narrowness of the beaches and the power of the North Sea, that has caused the erosion. (Not being mankind’s fault has not, I should point out, stopped mankind exacerbating the problem by pretending it doesn’t exist and continuing to build properties close to the coast, but that’s a different issue.)

So what point am I trying to make?

Well, quite a simple one, for the discovery of which, you will have to join me in my kitchen. This morning, I ate, my breakfast cereal watching a piece on BBC news about Virgin flying the first ever plane across the Atlantic to be fuelled by an ‘entirely sustainable’ biofuel that has 80% less emissions than traditional jet fuel. The piece was probably five minutes long, pretty technically informative but entirely devoid of the genius idea that us flying less might actually be the answer, rather than contorting technology to allow us to go on living our chosen lifestyle. This is brilliant, was the summary, because it means we can build more planes, which can fly to more places, and not worry about stuff like emissions.

And there’s the missing word. Less. It’s a word that no politician dares to utter lest we hold it against them, and fail to vote for them next time round. And yet it is so bloody simple. The day that we come to accept that, in most cases less, far from being worse than more, is infinitely better for a sustainably happy life, seems still to be miles away. Your political party won’t use it, and nor will mine. For the time being, we will all be guided by what is known in the trade as ‘human exceptionalism’, which basically means the maintenance of our right to trash the place over for our sophisticated pleasure.

Back at Spurn Lighthouse, by which time it was fully light and the glories of the Humber estuary glittered in front of me, I suddenly realised that I was staring over at Britain’s largest container port. The geography of it had only just started creeping up on me, and I hadn’t put the strange juxtaposition of the two places together. Which was that, whilst on my side of the channel, a few volunteers were spending their free time trying to reintroduce a handful of native oysters and some seagrass to improve the general ecosystem, on the other we were importing an annual 64 million cubic tons of landfill fodder and assorted other stuff, to fuel our human exceptionalism.

I know that some of my friends have started to believe that I have quietly lost my mind and I have to confess that there are times when I agree. Since September 2021, I have walked 7,000 miles (or three solid months) around this country, trying to understand it better, and trying to find out how I might spend my last years of energy doing something useful to help. I cannot un-see what I have seen, or un-learn what I have learned. I can only try to be a fair witness to it all, good and bad.

How weird, then, that the only overarching solution that I can see is to get rid of the electoral cycle.