Lick a lizard if you want to become friends ...
When TV naturalist nick Baker was just 15, he and his family suffered a harrowing experience.
Baker was at home on his own when the police arrived to report a terrible road accident. his mother had been driving his brother home from football practice. now they were both in hospital, his mother on life-support, and his brother in a coma.
Baker doesn’t give us details of the crash, or even tell us whether they lived or died. The point of sharing this story with us is to tell us that he sought and found deep and meaningful solace in nature.
he had been smitten with the natural world — and badgers in particular — ever since he was eight and his grandfather took him to watch badgers going about their nocturnal business.
now, with half of his family fighting for their lives, his ‘monochromatic friends’ saved him from hours of therapy. ‘When I would slam the kitchen door and “run away” from it all, I was doing the exact opposite,’ he writes. ‘I was running to the one thing that made sense to me, the one thing that didn’t tire of me, didn’t mind if I shouted at it, or cried with it.’
It is a heart-rending tale, yet it doesn’t arrive until the very end of the book. I think the reason why is that, 30 years after that trauma, Baker wants us to engage intellectually, not only in a spirit of sympathy, with his argument that we should all embrace the ‘ rewilding movement’, which invites us to reconnect with the wonders of nature.
It’s hard to take issue with his eloquent thesis that we would all benefit from communing more with nature. After all, he is surely right to wail at the way human beings everywhere are becoming slaves of technology.
Dispiritingly, he recalls standing at a bus stop in Tibet, where every one of the 18 people waiting with him, some of them in national dress, were in thrall to their mobile phones.
even more depressingly, the local council in the Dutch town of Bodegraven has installed light strips in the pavements so that people know, without raising their eyes from their screens, whether they can step safely into the road.
We must fight this, he says, by disconnecting our devices and plugging into the world around us. We British are certainly in sore need of re-educating. A recent survey concluded that 98 per cent
of people cannot identify even five common species of tree.
Baker says we can use all five senses to rectify this sad state of affairs. He goes birdwatching with a blind man, Gary, who teaches him to identify not only the calls of bullfinches and swallows, but also what sort of day the birds are having.
Our sense of smell is primitive, and we’ll never be able to compete with the current world leader, the African elephant, yet we can still do much better at recognising what Baker describes as ‘a world of waft’. All it takes is practice. Once you’ve had your first smell of fox, for example, you’ll never forget it.
Tasting the natural world even has a scientific name: zoophagy. Baker explains how our tongues can help us comprehend the lives of other creatures. I’m happy to take his word for this, but apparently the yellow ooze that a ladybird emits when it is alarmed tastes absolutely horrible, acting as a warning to potential predators: eat me and you’ll regret it.
Baker also recommends touch as a fundamental weapon in the rewilding process. ‘In our bipedal way of life, our feet are for the most part the only direct physical point of contact with the earth, and we go and put them in boots,’ he laments.
Well, I can’t say he’s persuaded me to go barefoot through the woods any more than I’m planning to lick an anxious ladybird, but this is still a beguiling and convincing book.
And before we next go shopping for a fancy gadget, we could all do worse than to remember its empowering conclusion: ‘You’re a proud owner of the most important tool kit you could ever possibly own, and it’s the one you were born with.’