Being connected

Christmas is a great time for reading and I have enjoyed spending the past couple of weeks making progress through an ever increasing pile of books.

Monographs of the common tern, a year in the life of a salt marsh, discovering the problems associated with salmon and tuna population declines, a biography of Alfred Wallace and an Italian detective novel have all been enjoyed to varying degrees.

The theme from all of them is that everything is connected. As John Muir once said (and I'm paraphrasing) you can pull one part of the natural world but you will soon find that it is connected to the whole universe.

How many of us have considered this? Do we really associate manufacturing in a far-flung country with riverside logging that has changed the habitat for spawning salmon, damaging an ecosystem, leading to the decline of salmon and those animals that feed on salmon, which has resulted in less salmon being caught, jobs lost and local economies collapsing?

Probably not. Who is at fault? Probably everyone.

Consumers who want cheap goods, companies that want to increase their profits, legislators for allowing it to happen and we all fail to see the bigger picture - how things are connected and the impacts of our actions.

A number of recent TV programmes have claimed that there are currently 350,000 empty homes in the UK and yet our government seems to think that building is the answer to all our problems.

But only if you think the problem is just GDP.

In the Devon village that I was in last week there are numerous properties for sale which have been on the market for several months and yet just four miles down the road work has started on a 2000 home development on, what was, agricultural land. And it was good agricultural land with hedges, trees, grassland and streams. The type of land that encourages declining bird species and mammals. And yet the bulldozers have already made light work of it.

What is the bigger picture here?

We seem to think that because we have become a race that is good at surviving then it must be the same for everything else. But birds, mammals, invertebrates, trees and shrubs don't have access to our medicines. If there is a decline in available food they can't ship it in from across the world - they simply die.

When we fell a tree, dig up a shrub or remove a hedge do we consider the impact it might have? Do we even realise how many animals might use it or it's place in the food web?

There has been a lot of talk of austerity measures and I've spoken to a number of people who have been reflecting on their priorities and concluding that there is more to life than designer labels and having the shiniest, most technology advanced TV. Could someone pass this information on to the Chancellor.

Let's try and get a sense of being connected with our world, enjoy it, learn about it and then perhaps we won't treat it like some sort of throw-away fashion accessory.