One of my simple pleasures in life is going for a walk in a bluebell wood in Spring. It’s something I really missed when living in Africa, and during lockdown, so we try to make an annual pilgrimage to a local wood.
We pick a time when the wood is covered with a blue carpet of flowers, together with pale yellow primroses and white wood anemones. It’s a joyful Creation experience.
Yet, as readers of this column will be aware, all is not well with Creation. The secular scholars Jared Diamond, Edward O. Wilson and others have adopted Biblical imagery to speak about the horsemen of the ecological apocalypse. They’ve been described in various ways, but one useful summary is that the four horsemen are habitat destruction, over-exploitation, pollution, and invasive species, with a fifth horseman representing our disconnect from nature. I plan to deal with each in turn over the next few columns, starting with habitat destruction.
