We went along paths I have known since childhood. Tracks once wide enough for a forestry gang, for two Suffolks abreast, a chain between them to tush logs out of the wood. These were not wild places in the romantic sense. They were worked landscapes. Forestry, farming, ditches, rides, margins, beet fields, potatoes, oilseed rape, pine in rows. Human country. But it was alive.
And what I remember most is not scenery. It is abundance. The Birdsong. Humming insects. Bugs and butterflies. Ladybirds. Lacewings. Bee hawkmoths. Minotaur beetles. Looper moths. Wood wasps and sawflies. Cobwebs so thick in the rides that the whole forest could shimmer in the morning, millions of minute refractions strung between pine, bracken and grass.
These are not the romantic wistful thoughts of an old man, but the real, lived experience of this young, older man.
Now the same paths are eerily still, unsettlingly lifeless. The silence is not dramatic. The silence is so much worse than dramatic. It is ordinary. Normal. If you didn’t know any better, unremarkable.
This is the part people miss. Ecological collapse does not always arrive like fire or flood. It arrives as absence.
Land is skilfully exploited, profits maximised, extraction optimised. Row upon row of managed pine sits among tens of thousands of acres of sugar beet, potatoes and oilseed.
A landscape simplified for production becomes fragile. The more we strip out complexity, the more we reach for rescue chemistry. The more we reach for rescue chemistry, the more we damage the small life that holds the whole thing together.
The oaks tell the same story in a slower, darker volume. Acute Oak Decline brings black weeping lesions, splits in the bark, thinning crowns, and sometimes death. It is not one villain. It is stress, bacteria, beetle, heat, drought, weakness, opportunity.
A healthy oak can resist much, a stressed oak not so much. Heat and drought make ancient strength vulnerable. A tree capable of a thousand years of life, gone in three.
The real grief is that our children may inherit the paths. They may know the track, the pine rows, the field edge, the dog pulling ahead, the mud, the ditch, the gate. But not the humming air. Not the glasswork of spiders. Not the common abundance of beetle, moth, fly, bird and small mammal that made the place feel alive.
We do not know exactly what future we face. That is part of the fear. It is unforeseen, and in many respects unforeseeable. But we know enough. The seasons are less reliable. The weather is more violent. Vital life is diminished. The trees are stressed. The old resilience is failing.
The pragmatic conclusion is plain: reduce the pressure. Use fewer poisons. Restore margins, hedges, ponds, woods and wet ground. Let the land hold water, plant flowers, let wood rot. Rebuild the conditions for life. Rebuild abundance. Rebuild our respect for nature.
