Points of debate on"man is the greatest destroyer of ecosystem
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Our calamitous capacity for damaging and destroying the natural world has become ever clearer in recent years, and is widely remarked on, not least in pages such as these; what is much less remarked upon is our capacity for mending it.
This week I stood on Salisbury Plain and watched through binoculars a huge corpulent bird strut like Pavarotti across the chalk grassland: it was a great bustard, a fabulous turkey-like creature hunted to extinction in England in the early 19th century. In a scheme driven entirely by the enthusiasm of a single man, David Waters, a former policeman, it has been reintroduced to Britain, with the release here of young birds from southern Russia where the species is relatively plentiful, and now is breeding again. The scheme has also won the backing of the RSPB and the University of Bath, and funding from the European Union.
The great bustard is the world's heaviest flying bird and a spectacular sight, and I was duly thrilled to watch it parade, chest thrust out, across the downlands of Wiltshire. But later something dawned on me: this was the sixth successful reintroduction of a vanished bird species I had witnessed in Britain since the turn of the Millennium. I have also seen sea eagles on Mull; red kites in the Chilterns; ospreys on Rutland Water; cirl buntings in Cornwall; and corncrakes in the Nene Washes in Cambridgeshire.
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All of these were birds that had been driven to local extinction, either through persecution or through changing agricultural practice, and they had been successfully put back into landscapes which once again they could grace, as indeed they did: I witnessed them all. And it struck me that in terms of repairing our increasingly battered planet, this, when you added it all up, was quite a lot of repairing.
That we as a species should have not only the capacity but also the willingness to mend the damage we are doing to the natural world around us seems to me a very unusual quality. No other animal does. I wrote here recently that we are the only species capable of destroying our own home, which you could see as the ecological version of Original Sin; yet even more strangely, you might think, we are also the only species capable of putting it back together, once it has been trashed.
Here are the two sides to our nature, what a friend of mine, a political analyst who is entirely unmystical, refers to as our good angels and our bad angels; and the question for anyone concerned with the future of the natural world in the 21st century is: which of them will prevail?
For although the successful restoration of six lost bird species in Britain is indeed a substantial achievement, it is only the minutest fraction of what would be required to stem the increasing rate of wildlife loss around the world, and that is loss not only of species, but also of habitats, ecosystems, natural resources and at the most basic level, genetic diversity.