Book review: Irreplaceable by Julian Hoffman: Are we the bad guys?

Starting as dusk gathers on Brighton pier and the evening strollers are transfixed by a murmuration of starlings, Julian Hoffman takes us around the world showing us how human activity is ravaging the wonders of nature that both nourish our sense of wonder and are vital to our health and wellbeing as part of a thriving ecosystem. It is not a happy book. The awe that Hoffman superbly captures at the beauty of the natural world only underlines what we are destroying by our wilful blindness and our obsession with economic growth and measuring everything with a short-term monetary value. From a previously unknown species of spider in an abandoned English quarry to the magnificent Balkan lynx and the few scraps of tallgrass prairie in the American midwest, we are pushing out irreplaceable biodiversity with roads and shopping malls and monocultured crops. 

The author makes it clear he is not merely arguing for preservation for nature for its own sake, but because it is vital to human health and survival in the short, medium and long term. In one chapter he writes about an established set of allotments in London that not only provides food for locals but an area of green growth teeming with life, and an area of abandoned "waste ground" in Glasgow that nearby residents have turned into a park and nature reserve. Both are under threat from development and he begins by telling us "Of the following two places, one will be saved, the other destroyed." 

He does show us successes, and how small groups of determined people can fight and even sometimes win against the encroachment - as well as the above, there is some success on those tallgrass prairies, a patch of ancient woodland not five miles from where I write this (which, along with mention of other Sheffield woods in which I played as a child and have visited regularly since really brought home the value, as if that personal connection were needed), the former British Army testing site that, due to the danger of left-over munitions has remained undeveloped and become a remarkably vibrant and important habitat. The rejection of a new motorway that would destroy much of the Gwent Levels on the South Wales coast. 

However, despite this, I was left feeling bleak at the prospects. Yes, I am a depressive and currently managing a particularly low patch which may feed into my pessimism, but these patches seem so fragile, so vulnerable, so at odds with the economic forces that see everything as a resource to be exploited. In his final chapter he points out how many pieces of good fortune were needed to ensure that we still have a few slivers of the Cambridgeshire Fens that are undeveloped, and when we see that a drug for cattle is approved in Europe despite evidence that it is responsible for almost eradicating vultures when used in India, or that - despite a law and specific court orders making mining small islands in Indonesia completely illegal, this is openly ignored and corporations land heavy equipment to strip the vegetation and topsoil to scour the minerals beneath, causing run-off that buries and poisons the most valuable reefs on the planet, I find it difficult to hold out hope of change. 

I have known since I was young that talk of "destroying the Earth" is pure hubris. We are a blip on this planet and, whatever we do, it will continue and repopulate itself with new organisms, new diversity. We are here now, for this moment, and have a choice of how to treat our home and the creatures we share it with, a choice for the legacy we leave our children and grand children and great grand children. 

Still, as the cartoon says, for a brief glorious moment we had great shareholder value. 

Increasingly, I think I'm on the side of the David Morse character in 12 Monkeys.

Book review: The Wild Places by Robert MacFarlane: poetry of the outer and inner landscape

In The Wild Places, Robert MacFarlane sets out to find if there are any such environments left within the British Isles. The book begins contemplatively, with the author journeying to one of his favourite local places, a beech wood outside the city of Cambridge where he lives, climbing a tree as is his wont, so he can sit and observe, and be part of, this sylvan idyll.



This sets the tone wonderfully. From the very first sentence, you realise that you are in for a special experience; the quality of MacFarlane’s prose is quietly spectacular, largely understated but with the rhythms of good poetry and this, combined with his eye for detail and a mind that connects the landscape and the animals and our inhabitation along with more personal experiences, make the book extraordinary.



Over fifteen chapters MacFarlane travels across Britain, and to Ireland, to experience the places he considers most “wild” and natural, initially using as a guide the travels of the legendary Irish King Sweeney, who was made to wander the wild places as a beast following an act of betrayal.



From the island of Ynys Enlii, off the Lleyn Peninsula, where Wales reaches it most Western point toward Ireland, on to Scotland - to Coriusk on Skye, Rannoch Moor, Coille Dubh ( The Black Wood ), Strathnaver and Ben Klibreck, Cape Wrath and Ben Hope before crossing the Irish Sea to the desolation of the Burren. MacFarlane finds even more poetry in these places than their evocative names suggest - along with the rest of his journey, to the high ridges of the Lakeland fells, the Kentish Holloways, the storm-lashed beaches of Norfolk, Essex saltmarshes and, finally, my own back yard, the moors above Hope Valley in the High Peak. His writing conjures the landscape like nobody I’ve read, the individual feel and sense and rhythm of each place, drawing the reader to it - even when, as in attempting to spend the night on the frozen Ben Hope in Northern Scotland, for the first time he feels how truly hostile a place can be and is genuinely afraid.



Each section of travelogue is also woven through with skeins of history - both of the regions, and more personal history. This becomes more pointed when MacFarlane’s friend Roger, with whom he has discussed many of his trips, have shared ideas and thoughts like the oldest of friends, who has accompanied him on several excursions, falls suddenly ill.



The final trip to the Peak District brings the book full circle, as he is shown where to find snow hares by John, who had piloted the boat out to Ynys Enlii, and then a final coda where MacFarlane returns once more to the beech wood. He may have found that there is, perhaps, no true wilderness in the British Isles, in that there is no land that has not been shaped by humanity and our works, but that the wild is still there to be appreciated and respected, should we wish to look for it, that we need to protect it for our own health and benefit, but it the wild places will be there long after we have gone.




5/5, and an instant addition to the Favourites shelf