Thought for the week: Close and personal

‘When were you last close to crowds of grasshoppers?’

'The statistics pour down on us, telling us that we – we human beings – have wiped out sixty per cent of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970.' | Photo: Rawpixel / Unsplash.

A member of our Meeting holds a regular poetry group, where Friends and their friends offer either favourite poems or their own work. Last time, I read ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ by Thomas Gray.

Afterwards, what struck me about the poem was not so much the number of quotations – even clichés – that have survived, like ‘Far from the madding crowd’, but an almost passing reference to ‘the moping owl’ in the church’s ‘ivy-mantled tower’.

When did you last see, or even hear, an owl perched on a church tower? And if I had read this passage from John Clare, would you say: ‘Yes, I’ve experienced that’?

Summer is a prodigal of joy. The grass
Swarms with delighted insects as I pass,
And crowds of grasshoppers at every stride
Jump out all ways with happiness their guide;
And from my brushing feet moths flit away…

When were you last close to crowds of grasshoppers? Rose Flint, one of our finest contemporary poets of nature, nails the problem in her poem ‘Flocks’:

How is the emptying world for birds
that once flew in tumbled flocks of hundreds?
There is no shield against the wind, no
wisdom songs, no safe community of others.

I am now in a state of grief over this. The statistics pour down on us, telling us that we – we human beings – have wiped out sixty per cent of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970. What is to be done?

That age-old question has received, this time, a striking answer. Someone put two words, two concepts, together: Extinction; Rebellion. We are facing a mass extinction. And we will rebel. The ‘XR’ movement has adopted (like CND in the 1950s) a simple, clear symbol: an hour-glass surrounded by a circle. XR activists have clear aims for governments (being honest about the current situation, reversing policies that lead to destruction) and, for people at the grassroots, they want 3.5 per cent of us to become activists, too. Our systems are toxic, they say; we need a culture that is healthy, resistant, and adaptable; and we need to leave clean, free space for other creatures to thrive. On 17 October 2018, activists from Extinction Rebellion held a sit-in in London, to encourage their members to participate in mass civil disobedience. Their actions continue.

I realise that I have used two different personal pronouns as subjects of my sentences: one is ‘they’, the other is ‘we’. I’ve asked myself, can ‘they’ become ‘we’?

Personally, I am weary of decades of protest, from Greenham to the Iraq war and beyond. I am seventy-five. Brexit, fires and floods, Donald Trump and fake news: I need to protect myself from despair. But I love lapwings, and curlews, and voles, and hares. I will do what I can, which is to write. Can you do what you can? Can we all do something, and pray?

You need to login to read subscriber-only content and/or comment on articles.