Fields are weird, pass it on
In which Hari discusses grass, NIMBYs, and shows a distinct lack of gratitude for a ground beetle.
I spent all weekend in a scout camp picking up arrows and hiding flags. My HEMA club had their yearly group combat weekend and I was marshalling, because the thought of fighting dozens of people for two days straight made me feel physically ill. I had a lot of fun, as was expected – everyone was very sweet and funny, as they as always are, and I got to witness a lot of sword-related mischief. I was unnerved by one thing, though – where’s all the wildlife in our grassy fields?
I am not one to be picky with my nature, as you may know. I love slugs as much as butterflies (which is just as well as both eat my cabbages), I think wasps are as cool as bees (even if they scare me), I am impressed by every little bug and fly and moving blob. But that’s the thing – there weren’t any. I was excited to be out in nature with my friends, and I saw one ground beetle (pictured above), one wasp and one money spider over the entire weekend. Where were all the living things?
There is a distinction to be made here: lawn is not quite the same as grassland. A tended lawn tends to only have domestic grass, whereas grassland can have a variety of different grasses, small ‘weeds’ and other low-lying plants. There was some grassland at this camping site (though the amount it was trampled through, every invertebrate in that vicinity was probably crushed), but the majority of what we were dealing with was monoculture lawn. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, monoculture in this context means ‘growing lots of one thing’ which, in this case, is grass.
I am not saying that everywhere has to be a haven for bug life, but it does concern me that there seems to be a distinct lack of havens for bug life. This year, The Big Butterfly Count reported the lowest numbers of butterfly sightings since their records began in 2010. The Guardian reports that numbers of beetles and wasps in Britain are also declining. We’re fucking it up lads, but how?
Over 70% of the land in the UK is agricultural land. A good 65% of that is grassland. So, just under 50% of the UK’s land is grassland. Specifically, what we might term monoculture grassland. While there are probably a variety of grasses growing there, and perhaps some clover and/or daisies and/or buttercups are creeping in, a significant proportion of that land is completely flat, and designed and planted to be walked on and eaten by livestock. That, in turn, is a significant proportion of the UK that is not given over to biodiversity. I’m not saying we don’t need to eat; we do. But when another almost 1% of land is given over to golf courses, which are notorious for their use of pesticides and inorganic fertilisers (their excessive use of water notwithstanding), and another 6% is given over to housing, we are running out of areas where the more-than-human can actually live. Trendy lefty newspapers keep talking about it, but until we develop sustainable agriculture practices that prioritise biodiversity and stop using insect- and bird-damaging chemicals, I’m pretty sure the number of bugs is going to go down and down and down.
Another obvious factor is hitting insects and other animals with cars. The UK has one of the densest road networks in the world, because the country is quite small, and we collectively decided in the 1960s that everybody hated trains. The privatisation of the rail networks we do still have also causes an issue for biodiversity, as the trains are so expensive and the service on them is so shit that no one actually wants to use them. When it is almost always cheaper to drive, you’re onto a loser. Don’t tell me that you can get to London for £20 on the bus, have you ever been on a long-distance bus? Almost no one would willingly subject themselves to that.
A lot of the remaining land we have is also ‘kept’ by various councils. ‘Keeping’ land usually means trimming it to the point where it all looks like grass, because otherwise people complain. I saw a woman pulling dandelion heads off the side of the road back during No-Mow May because ‘the council wasn’t going to do it, so she would’. We feel entitled for the country to be ‘tidy’, forgetting that we take up the majority of the space, and things other than us need to live here too. Dandelions are one of the earliest and most abundant food-sources for pollinators, and we only don’t like them because some landscapers in the 1800s decided things looked better if they were flat and green. Feel free to NIMBY a new industrial estate behind your house, but for the love of God, please let the bees have some lunch. They literally keep us alive.
This year, our crops in the allotment were staggeringly bad. I can’t help but wonder – not that I have any evidence – if part of the reason for that is that there simply aren’t enough pollinators to go around. Where we would usually be infuriated by the sheer amount of wasps trying to eat our lunches, we’ve seen hardly any. Where I usually can’t get near certain plants for bees, the beds are eerily quiet. I fear we are beginning to see, on a small scale, the impact of something far bigger and more uncomfortable.
‘What can be done, then, Hari?’ I hear you say. ‘You’re supposed to be all about solutions, not problems.’ Plant up local areas with as many bulbs and pollinator-friendly plants as your local council will allow. Write to your MP. Get a group together and organise a mass crocus plant. Campaign for orchard trees to be planted in your community. Make all your outside spaces look like a jungle. Plant native flowers and trees. You know all this stuff. It's not easy, because a lot of people don’t care as much as you. The best thing you can do is try to show someone else the benefits of living in harmony with nature and invite them to share those experiences with you. The more people we can encourage to see nature as a friend, rather than an annoying neighbour, the closer we’ll get to bringing our insect populations back up to scratch.
I would like, when the unit combat weekend rolls around in 5 years’ time, to be complaining to you that we couldn’t move for wasps. That the fighting had to be called off because butterflies were impairing the combatants’ fields of vision. To be honest, though, I’ll just take seeing more than one ground beetle.