COTTONGRASS SUMMER
BY ROY DENNIS SARABAND, £9.99
Cottongrass Summer:
Essays of a Naturalist
Throughout the Year won’t collect the headlines that a book by a celebrity natural history TV presenter might achieve, but I can’t think of a more important book that’s been written about British wildlife in the past 20 years.
That’s partly down to who the author is: Roy Dennis, the UK’s pre-eminent conservationist of the past half century. When he speaks, we all should listen. His musings on everything from why there ought to be more dead animals in our countryside to whether we should change the common name of the wildcat are all equally eagle-eyed.
But it’s also because he writes with such conviction, clarity, insight, depth and purpose. He understands better than anyone how times have changed. When talking about the “insect armageddon”, for example, he points out how raptor declines in the 1960s were found to be linked to the chemicals that were used in sheep dips and agriculture.
Today, we know that insects are also being impacted by a new suite of chemicals, and yet there is little change. Are our nature conservation bodies less able to affect change, he wonders; are politicians more negligent or big business more powerful?
“We need immediate change rather than more research,” he writes. “Governments and big business love research; it means they don’t have to do anything now.”
In just a sentence or two, he cuts to the quick. The talons of his typewriter rip open the carcass, laying bare the truth of why British wildlife is in the state it is. If you read any book about the environment this year, read this.
James Fair, naturalist