It was 7am on a Sunday morning as I walked to my friend’s yard. The horses needed to be fed, watered and the field poo-picked with enough time for me to eat and make myself presentable before church.
The only sounds were birdsong, the rooks calling, and my footfall along the road. No-one stirred.
The sun shone. The horse chestnuts were in magnificent flower. The hedgerows were green, and the ash trees had finally caught up with the oaks. The peace gave me time to think.
A couple of nights before I’d watched the Gala evening to mark Sir David Attenborough’s 100th birthday. The audience at the Royal Albert Hall gave him three standing ovations, refusing to sit down, expressing their gratitude for all that he’s done to show us the world and what is happening in it.
Thus stirred, I re-watched his 2019 programme on climate change. The world at that point was experiencing a 1-degree temperature rise on pre-industrial levels. It doesn’t sound like much, does it? Yet we have all seen that it led to more extreme weather events. Here that looks like unpredictability, wetter winters, hotter temperatures and more storms.
In the UK we are currently experiencing a 1.24-degree temperature rise on pre-industrial levels. In 2024 the world crossed the totemic 1.5-degree warming rise for the first time, after which frankly, all bets are off for climate certainty.
I thought about this as I walked the yard. The village is undoubtedly exquisitely beautiful. It was quiet, still and peaceful. But was I really looking?
Species loss
Where, for instance, were the swallows? Great clouds of them, as well as martins and swifts, were a feature of my younger years. Even a decade ago, drifts of them accompanied me and my much-beloved loan horse, Duke, as we walked to the field elsewhere in the county. This year, I’ve seen just two pairs of swallows. There has been a 40 per cent decline in their numbers in the UK in the last 30 years, due to fewer insects, habitat loss and fewer nesting sites.
What’s happened to the insects? According to the RSPB there has been a 13 per cent decline in invertebrates since the 1970s. Pesticide use, and lack of habitat are two big features.
If you’re an insect and you might naturally live in a meadow, you face a challenge as we have got rid of 97 per cent of our meadows.
You might want a drink, but here the village pond is completely dry. It’s not alone. More than half of Britain’s ponds have disappeared since 1900 due to agricultural intensification, urban development and lack of management.
So, at 7am on Sunday morning, the village still looks incredibly beautiful, but the subtext is not quite as it seems.
What to do? Sir David Attenborough’s 2019 programme offered a few helpful tips that enable us all to make a difference through our choices.
1 Reduce our consumption: everything that we buy has a carbon footprint in its manufacture and delivery. So, the argument goes, we can choose to buy less, but when we do buy something new ensure that it is the best quality that we can afford and therefore lasts longer.
2 Eat our food: we can reduce our food waste by eating everything that we buy, and also buying local, seasonal products that have a smaller carbon footprint than imported or highly-processed food.
3 Make our homes as energy efficient as they can be: that’s going to look different for all of us, but might be as simple as having insulation, thick curtains, or draft excluders. If we’ve got the funds, there are obviously other options.
4 Plant trees: we have the technology to take carbon out of the atmosphere. It’s called trees. Yet the UK has only 13 per cent tree cover. Every tree makes a difference in removing carbon from the atmosphere and even the smallest garden can be home to a tree…and all the wildlife that comes with it.
These might not seem like the cheeriest thoughts to be having on a 7am stroll, but they were helpful. If I want the village to look as beautiful as it currently does, if I want the swallows to return, then I can act in ways that might seem oblique. But, as the advert says, every little helps.