Linescapes by Hugh Warwick
Linescapes: Remapping and Reconnecting Britain’s Fragmented Wildlife by Hugh Warwick Square Peg £17.99
We’re psychopaths. We walk like psychopaths, talk like psychopaths, draft legislation like psychopaths and, lest there be any doubt about the diagnosis, we’ve slashed the face of the UK deeply and repeatedly. And we continue to do so. We should be sectioned.
Hugh Warwick’s tremendous book is a lurid, mournful and sometimes enragingly upbeat account of the slashes: 9,800 miles of railway, 246,000 miles of road, 2,000 miles of canal, 71,500 miles of wall and 311,000 miles of hedge. These, he says, make the UK a land of ‘linescapes’.
Warwick is a warm, chatty writer – first-class company in a ditch or swamp. Sometimes he’s a sort of ecologically sophisticated Enid Blyton. His conversations with biologists, PR men and weirdos are lubricated with lashings of metaphorical ginger beer: Timmy the dog is often gambolling figuratively around, holding a hedgehog very gently in its mouth.
In Linescapes, Warwick’s conversations are framed by an alluring hypothesis: when we’ve made lines to fragment the land, to assert ownership or restrain livestock (as in the case of walls, hedges, ditches and dykes), the lines have ended up as agents of connection. And when our lines have sought to connect (canals, roads and railways), they’ve fragmented. An idea so neat can’t be quite true.
It is true that hedges and walls are capillaries that carry reviving wildness. Stoats ooze along walls; hawthorn seeps along hedges. Hedges, of course, in our denuded land, are crucial oases. You can easily find more than 2,000 different species in 100 yards of roadside hedge, and Britain’s hedges probably cover 100,000 hectares of land.
The hedges themselves are survivors: offspring of the woodland cut down to build ships and make way for livestock. We shouldn’t really hymn the hedges: we should lament the woods. That doesn’t contradict Warwick’s hypothesis, but it doesn’t sit with it well.
Ditches don’t fit at all: yes, things crawl along them, but they only need to crawl along ditches because the ditches drained and destroyed the wetlands. Modern ditches, by connecting shattered fragments, help to mitigate some of the damage they themselves caused. To rejoice in the ditches is like saying to someone, ‘Your house has burned down. Go and warm your hands on the embers. Enjoy.’
There are many examples, too, of nature defragmenting along the lines intended by humans for connection. Foxes spread into the cities along roads and railways, and many foxes still commute along them. There are foxes with a main address in the country who come to the city for pepperoni pizza, and foxes living under lawyers’ sheds in the suburbs who trot along railway lines to hunt rabbits and keep in touch with their rural roots. Canal tunnels are important roosts for several species of bat, and many plants gallop along roadside verges and hitch a lift on juggernauts.
Warwick’s devotion to his dubious thesis sometimes leads him to sup dangerously with the devil. No spoon is long enough. Warwick is gracious and positive when I want bile. He chats chummily with good people, with big hearts and zoology degrees, who are employed as part of green-washing operations by ecocidal maniacs, and he smiles on their efforts. Listen: roads are evil. Full stop. No amount of variegation in a central reservation will change that.
British roads kill more than a million vertebrates a year, including 100,000 hedgehogs, 50,000 badgers and more than 40,000 deer. American roads kill a million vertebrates every day.
Traffic noise drowns out the lower tones of birdsong, causing huskier, rural males to be cuckolded by higher-pitched urbanites. There is a grumble or a roar in most parts of England. Road pollutants are poisoning our children. Cars are dirty little podules of isolation in which, as Warwick splendidly says, we wield terrible power, through the ball of our foot, without responsibility. Roads trash ancient, irreplaceable landscapes to shave a few moments from a journey from a centrally heated house to an air-conditioned office. Just think of the spiritual poverty of a nation that does that. And think too of the intellectual destitution of the accountants who say that the damage can be off-set by planting some more trees. They’ll take 850 years to be remotely comparable to what you’ve shredded. Compute that.
Who makes these decisions? Well, you, I’m afraid, dear voter. And, even more, you, dear non-voter. There’s not a touch of real empathy with the natural world in our national policy. At best, a hard-faced Cabinet minister will say that an ancient woodland should be preserved because it can yield a profit if it’s shrewdly managed. Say that it should survive even if it costs money – because it’s beautiful, or resonant, or because you love it – and you’ll be met, for now, with a pitying look over those corporate spectacles. In a few years, I confidently predict, that sort of sloppy, romantic talk will land you in a re-education camp, run by Goldman Sachs, where you’ll chant the works of Adam Smith and stamp on primroses until you’re back in your right capitalist mind.
Warwick’s own credentials can’t be impugned. He’s one of the warriors of Twyford Down; a naturalist of great stature, with palpable empathy for the natural world. He feels these violations personally and painfully. To march with him along these linescapes is to learn, to laugh and, ultimately, to weep. For the lines are the evidence of profound national psychopathology, and are themselves pure hurt. This is a moving and important book. But it is too big a book to be squeezed into Warwick’s hypothesis. It’s not really an analytical book at all – and it’s all the better for that. Warwick cites Stephen Jay Gould: ‘We will not fight to save what we do not love.’ He has composed a profound, lyrical love song – and hence a powerful call to arms.