In July 2020 this moth turned up on our front window. I checked it out and came to the conclusion that it was a Jersey Tiger, unaware that this would be an unusual find in North Somerset. I happened to mention this to someone much more experienced than me at identifying moths and he was adamant that I must be wrong. But I wasn’t wrong. It was one of the 30 new species that have turned up here in Bath in the past 8 years, along with Ivy Bees on our allotment and Roesel’s Bush Crickets across in Dyrham Park in large numbers. Great news you might think, but they are rather like the canaries in the coal mine giving notice of dangerous events around the corner; in this case it’s increasingly runaway global climate change. These species are not here because we are kinder to animals than we used to be, but because our climate has changed sufficiently already for them to survive here.
The reason we know they’re here is that a group of – partly amateur – volunteers have been compiling lists of sightings on Bath City Farm’s 38 acre site – 1250 species in eight years; a prodigious effort. What we don’t know quite as much about what species have disappeared, although even as I write this recorders and scientists are searching old (often handwritten) records and double checking identifications. The computerised records are then analysed to give us some idea of what’s gone. The recent BSBI 2020 Plant Atlas gives a dismaying account of lost and extinct plant species in Great Britain and Ireland. This all matters not so much because Jersey Tigers contribute £x to the economy but because we don’t know nearly as much as we’d like to about the contribution they might make to a broader conception of human flourishing. In our crazy – let’s say delusional – world, if things can’t be given a monetary value they are dismissed as unimportant and so not given priority. The car takes precedence over the wildflower meadow because you can ascribe a monetary value to it by producing some deeply dodgy statistics that prove how human thriving depends upon fast roads.
Thirty years ago we knew very little about the extraordinary contribution that fungi make to trees. Now we do know we are obliged to think harder about the desertification of millions of acres of old growth forest in favour of palm oil plantations, and the destruction of Welsh farmland so that it can be used by multinational corporations to offset their poisonous carbon emissions. I could weep at the illiteracy of the very idea of paying to pollute. I’m not against planting trees, I’m against hiding behind forestry using barefaced lies as a means of continuing to render thousands of species extinct.
Anyway here are the crickets – our grandchildren love hunting for them in the grass; and the entirely harmless Ivy Bees; all now within easy walking distance maybe just for a while as we wait for the fury to come!
