Wishing you Abundance (but maybe not as you know it)

Four days after I went on a wild goose chase to Norfolk, I heard the NASA chief scientist interviewed on Desert Island Discs. Hold her in your mind for a bit, but for now, let’s get back to those geese.

By which I mean that I was, quite literally, following wild pink-footed geese wherever they led me; from the goose fields near the shore to the recently harvested beet fields a mile or so inland and back again. It was census week; on the first day, 68,000 of them lifted off from Holkham; on the second, it was more like 80,000. That’s 80,000 two-kilo geese honking out the exuberance of a new day, against the paling sky; I watched as great ropes of them rose and fell, pulsing with distant intent and life, silhouetted against the thin sliver of yellow light above the watery horizon. I could hear them from a mile off, just as I could hear the huge flocks of golden plover and peewit that flew around me.

When the sky was fully light, I would walk along the sea wall and coast path seeking out other geese: the greylags, the dark bottle-shaped Brents, the noisy Canada geese and the Egyptian ones that nobody really likes any more. What I had come for was abundance, and abundance is what I found.

We talk a lot about biodiversity, but in many ways, biodiversity on its own is vanity. What we are missing is bio-abundance. Whilst you and I may thrill to the sight of a single linnet flying out of a hedge as we walk our Christmas turkey off, our grandparents would have been disappointed if there had been less than 80 or 90 of them there. Famously, there are 76% less flying insects around now than there were in 1986, to dirty our car windscreens and pollinate out trees. And yet, all we still talk about is the number of species we have, not the amount each one has in it.

Every now and again, this debate comes to a head, as, by way of example, it inevitably will in the next few years around the fate of the beautiful capercaillie. It’s already been extinct in Britain once (shot out of the skies), got reintroduced from Scandinavia, and now it is on its way out again, pushed there by a combination of deer fencing, pine martens and the deer that eat the cover it once raised its broods in. Like you, I would love to save it, and I hate to think that a species that can put a man on the moon can’t leave enough room for a turkey-sized grouse to mooch around its preferred habitat in peace. But, depending on who you listen to, there are only around 3-500 of them left, and that is not a viable population. Other reintroduced species (eg red kite and white-tailed eagle) are doing spectacularly well, so it is not all one-way traffic.

The clever thing is to farm, and to manage land, and to live, in a way that leaves enough habitat for each of our 70,000 resident species to live in some kind of equilibrium, but there are few signs that we are yet prepared to make those changes.

So instead, what we now do is put some of the finest genetic and zoology scientists on the planet to re-creating (we call the process ‘de-extinctions’) creatures that we have killed off long ago, such as the aurochs (remember your Asterix), the thylacene, the Passenger Pigeon and the Mammoth. These are sexy projects that attract some enormous funding, both from institutions and governments, and they end up at best with some hybrid that looks like what it is supposed to replace but- with the possible exception of the mammoth- serves no purpose that couldn’t be done by something we still have around.

My laboured point is that we should perhaps consider putting all the funding, and all those stupendous brains, towards just maintaining and enhancing what we still have left.

What got me thinking about this was listening to that NASA chief scientist this morning. A little bit of me is overcome with admiration that people are clever enough to send probes into deep space to come back a dozen years later with a pebble or two that other clever people can analyse and write learned papers on. But a much bigger bit just wishes that they would turn their minds towards this planet these problems and this precise time.

If they are clever enough to capture images of solar winds from 3.9 million miles from the sun, they are probably clever enough to make a better world for insects.

On which note, I wish you all sorts of joy and abundance for the coming year, but especially the sort that honks and flies to beet fields at dawn.