Category / The Clearing / Essay / The Clearing

What does it take to make a native plant or animal or fungus abandon its companionable habits to carve a path of destruction across the landscape?

Over the past few years, I have been looking into the complexities of this debate and I can tell you only one thing with confidence: it’s a huge, vigorous muddle.

In the final few miles we began to come across the bodies of dead birds: guillemots – first one and then another, and another, and another – feathers water-logged and bedraggled.

What happens when a tapestry that took millions of years to create begins to fray at the edges – and what does it mean that we are unstitching ourselves from other creatures, disentangling ourselves from those to whom we have been historically bound? We are living through those unprecedented questions now.

As we stand together for Remembrance Day For Lost Species, I want to raise a song for all of those beings knit together by the roots of prairie sod. Our work is not to eulogise them, but to fuel the fires of renewal.

The house sits atop a hill, half a mile inland off an unnamed road. Around it: fields, ferns, gorse hedgerows.