In recent months, while the world’s attention has been on what we’re doing to the climate, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that – even aside from climate change – the rest of creation’s in a bad way as well.
We don’t always realise this. Over the last few decades we’ve been fed a diet of Attenborough documentaries which show an amazing world, but one seemingly untouched by human hand. Only recently this has begun to change. Scientists refer to the ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ as each successive generation of people accepts the world they see around them as normal, without realising how much nature has been lost in the past.
Have you heard of the Passenger Pigeon? You certainly won’t have seen one unless it was in a book, as the last living specimen, nicknamed Martha, died in Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Yet this North American pigeon was once the commonest bird on the planet, with a population numbering in the billions. Nineteenth-century observers recorded how the sky was darkened for several days as migrating flocks streamed overhead. It was so abundant, but is now extinct and lost from our collective memory.
