Did you know that between 1970 and 2015, the United Kingdom destroyed 56% of its listed historic buildings?
Thousands of churches, castles and country houses: all of them demolished in the name of progress. It’s truly scandalous – or at least it would be, if it were true. In fact, since 1970, we’ve done a reasonable, if not perfect, job of preserving our architectural heritage.
Sadly, the same can’t be said about our natural heritage. I took the 56% statistic, above, from a piece in the Guardian by Michael McCarthy – and it applies not to old buildings, but to farmland birds:
“Most notable is the case of farmland birds, which by the government’s own admission declined by 56% between 1970 and 2015; it is estimated this represents a loss of at least 44 million individuals. Over huge swaths of the land, once beloved species such as the lapwing, the spotted flycatcher, the cuckoo and the turtle dove… have simply vanished.”
And it’s not just birds:
“in the past 50 years in Britain, through the intensification of agriculture, we have destroyed well over half of our biodiversity, and the populations of birds, butterflies and wild flowers that once gave the landscape such animation and thrilling life have been utterly devastated – the figures are there…”
“…the fields may still look green in spring, but it is mostly lifeless scenery, apart from the pesticide-saturated crops: it is green concrete.”
In what is supposed to be an age of environmental awareness, McCarthy is struck by our failure to recognise the scale of destruction:
“Yet its most remarkable aspect is this: people still do not perceive it. In the past decade, specialists in conservation have come to understand the magnitude of the loss, but for the public at large, and indeed for most politicians, it is simply not on the radar; we are faced with a sort of mass cognitive dissonance, a nationwide unawareness of what is obvious.”
I was lucky enough to grow up in the High Weald, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in south east England. I’ve spent countless happy hours wandering along its sunken lanes and branching footpaths… and yet never quite shaking off a sense of eerieness.
That might seem odd because the Weald is a soft and gentle country, a place of rolling hills and wooded valleys. However, it also a graveyard. Like most of rural England, it is landscape cleansed of its wildlife by decades of agricultural intensification – and, before that, centuries of persecution.
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