Howling to the Moon

Wonderings from a stormy morning

It’s pitch black outside. Someone has turned the tap on, wind rattles the walls and the windows, water lashes the house. The storm comes from the east, straight across the sea from Arran, blowing its fury directly against the back of us. The past few days have been cold, snowy, proper winter weather, the sort for which you wrap up warm and notice paw prints in the snow and patterns on the leaves, filling you with wonder and calm

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I’ve had a few days on my own this week, my husband travelled to Inverness to create a bookcase for our daughters new house. Good for them and good for me too. Billy the collie and I have walked together a lot, snuggled in front of the wood burning stove, read a few books, and watched some amazing TV programmes, listened to some fascinating podcasts, cherished Substack. And so I have been wondering.

If I was a she wolf I would howl in anguish to the moon, crying out at the stupidity of men who don’t listen to the wisdom of ancestors.

This week I have watched stories about the destruction of old growth temperate rainforests in Tasmania, including the ancient Tarkine  rainforest.

I have listened to the story of the Haida Nation in Canada, who fight to protect their ancient ancestral forests.

I have been left reeling that the people responsible for destroying these thousands of year old forests don’t cast their eye to this tiny island on which I live to see how ruined we have become, how small, how insignificant, how far we have diverged from the wisdom of our Celtic ancestors. We have become a barren land, forgotten our rich natural history, become used to bare hillsides, whilst celebrating the tyrannical overlords who have led us to this place. In the UK, I read in the State of the Nation report, that I live in one of the most depleted lands on earth, our wild animals and flowering plants are almost gone https://friendsoftheearth.uk/nature/its-official-uk-hostile-environment-wildlife

Evidence of nature’s decline is there for all to see

The decline is clear in the very real cumulative trends tracked by the successive State of Nature reports, and in documentaries such as Sir David Attenborough’s Wild Isles.

The latest State of Nature report builds on the previous 3 reports:

• The first State of Nature report  in 2013 found UK wild species had declined by 60% since the 1960s.

• In 2016, the second report found the UK’s most endangered creatures had fallen by two-thirds since 1970.

• The third report  in 2019 observed that the UK was among the world’s most nature-depleted nations: “It is widely accepted that the UK’s biodiversity had been massively depleted by centuries of habitat loss, management changes, development and persecution…”

• The new report  finds nearly 1 in 6 wild species at risk of being lost from Great Britain

For centuries we took and kept taking from our own land and then went away to plunder others, and look, here we we are now, we have nothing left. We sing a song of the plenty that we have known in our life times and the void that there is now, but it was not the true plenty measured in the time span of an old oak, we measured the time span of a human life or a human generation. And we say, this is what we must return to, those days of my childhood when cars were splattered with the bodies of a million insects. We lie to ourselves and each other, in our land we keep taking, plundering, we make ourselves feel ok by tinkering around the edges, planting a few trees. We are driving mass extinction and sleep walking into it.

Robert Moor speaking on Emergence Magazines Podcast says

“Historically, the image of future generations growing up with no ancient trees to enjoy has been one of the most potent images the environmental movement has drawn upon to combat the myopia of shifting baseline syndrome, the psychological theory describing how we perpetually normalize the ecological present and forget the past.”

From Emergence Magazine Podcast: Dendrochronology – Robert Moor, 19 Nov 2024

So I howl at the moon, and I cry to all the gods that are and were and will be. Wake up these foolish men that you have created or that created you, tell them loudly that they do not have dominion over the beasts, they are the beasts. They are not the lords of all they survey, they are one with a nest of ants. They are out of control, they have forgotten the rules of nature, they war, kill their own, destroy nature. They argue, scheme, waste the earth’s resources. They plunder and deny the plundering and they look to the stars to plunder more. We humans have no more right to this earth than the hard working honest springtails in an old growth forest.

Is there hope? Yes there is hope, when we band together, when we hold each others hands and stand up, when we listen to the wisdom of our ancient elders, when we create rather than destroy, when we celebrate the wonders of our world, then we take back power from the fools, and feed the earth with our love.

(All photographs are taken and owned by me unless otherwise attributed)