The joy of bluebells, Nature’s Viagra
WILDLIFE THE MOTH SNOWSTORM: NATURE AND JOY by Michael McCarthy
(John Murray £20)
WE ALL know nature has healing powers. Whose spirits haven’t soared with a swift? Who hasn’t been soothed by a sunset? But for a young Michael McCarthy, it offered something far greater: an escape from insanity.
It began with a buddleia bush, covered in butterflies.
At the age of seven, the kaleidoscopic sight of it instantly captured the author. ‘Butterflies entered my soul,’ he writes.
In the background McCarthy’s mother’s mind was falling apart as she suffered the first of three mental collapses that saw her admitted to an asylum where she underwent brutal electroconvulsive shock treatment.
His father was absent at sea and his sensitive eight- year- old brother screamed his distress in the street. Little wonder that McCarthy desperately sought out normality in the pages of The Observer’s Book Of Butterflies.
He even tried to hatch the creatures himself: a five- shilling postal order brought two purple e mpe ro r caterpillars to McCarthy’s home on the Wirral. Unfortunately, they promptly died. So did a second batch.
This isn’t a misery memoir thinly cocooned in fashionable nature writing, though.
We learn that Freud, as much as a love of flora and fauna, helped McCarthy, and a final, lyrical and i nt e ns el y moving chapter addresses his adult relationship with his remarkable mother, whose ultimate recovery, strength and devotion shine through.
BUT McCarthy doesn’t linger in the consulting room. His real interest is in the cure that the world around us offers and, more than that, the pleasure it gives — unfathomably so. For after all, unlike fear or hunger or lust, joy is not essential to our survival. Which makes it worth pondering.
As a seasoned environmental journalist, McCarthy has had more time than most to do just that. And he’s come to a striking conclusion. Joy in nature is in our genes he says; it’s evidence of a bond going back to our hunter-gatherer days on African savannas.
‘We may have left the natural world, but the natural world has not left us,’ he declares.
And as a guide to its greatest hits, he’s irrepressible.
Blossom, for instance, is ‘a bright banner with spring written on it’, while a yellow brimstone butterfly is like ‘a piece of sunlight . . . loosed from the sun’s rays’. The 4,000mile migration of cuckoos from Africa, which McCarthy follows online, makes him want to lay hands on strangers and drag them to his computer to marvel.
And the moment bef or e entering a bluebell wood is, we’re told, ‘ like the minute before sex ... the elevated heartbeat, the skin- prickle, the certainty of impending pleasure’.
However, this book is more than a simple paean to the glories of the wild world. It is also an impassioned protest against its destruction.
Looking back on his childhood in the Fifties, McCarthy enumerates the losses. Once upon a time, not so long ago, ‘Hares galumphed across every pasture. Mayflies hatched on springtime rivers . . . Larks filled the air and poppies filled the fields’. Not any more.
Even the cheeky, chirpy house sparrow has gone from our towns and cities, so when McCarthy finally tracks some down in the centre of London, he’s cock-ahoop: ‘They might have been the rarest birds in the land, red-backed shrikes or black-winged stilts . . . such was my delight.’ For this self-confessed ‘Lepidoptera lover’, however, it is the loss of the ‘moth snowstorm’ that symbolises most potently the damage we humans have done.
Moths in summers past would routinely bring cars to a halt as they wound through country l anes. Headlights would be dimmed by the beasts, such were their numbers, and cyclists had to keep mouths closed.
Now the ‘ snowflakes’ come singly, if at all.
Who is to blame? ‘Step forward, Farmer Giles, with your miserable panoply of poisons.’
MOdErN farming methods have laid waste to the countryside, McCarthy argues, and a host of depressing statistics follows.
Between 1967-2011, the turtle dove population of Britain declined by 95 per cent, and that of the spotted flycatcher by 89 per cent. Wildflower, butterfly and, yes, moth numbers have all tumbled, too. In fact, Britain has lost half its biodiversity in the past half-century.
Yet shocking as these figures are, they can cause us to glaze over. And that’s where McCarthy advocates getting personal.
For it’s only by appealing to the heart, not just the head, that he believes the planet will be saved.
Only when we recognise the joy it brings us will we truly grasp what we stand to lose.