Our Place: Can We Save Britain’s Wildlife Before It Is Too Late?

by Mark Cocker

Jonathan Cape, £18.99

It is a cardinal principle in journalism that the answer to any headline with a question mark in it – “CHERYL PREGNANT AGAIN?”, “MESSI FOR ST MIRREN?” – is No. I wonder if that applies to book subtitles as well.

Mark Cocker’s first book since the publication of Claxton: Field Notes from a Small Planet finds his devastatingly perceptive eye refocused to a large-scale issue, not this time the global purview of Birds and People, which was perhaps the most important natural history book of the new century, but to the future of our wild places and the creatures that live there.

His main title is as cleverly ambiguous as his subtitle is bluntly interrogative. This is, indeed, a story about our homeland but it is also a manifesto of responsibility; it is our place to guarantee that the homeland has any kind of future.

We are in a strange situation culturally. Almost as many people get into their cars to explore nature as attend pop concerts and football matches. The chair of judges on the Forward Prize for Poetry in 2005 noted that more poems about blackbirds were submitted than about 9/11 or the war in Iraq.

This isn’t altogether surprising. The British think that “poetry” and “nature” are inherently related. John Clare’s “pen-scribbled” yellowhammer eggs are a tiny but potent symbol of the closeness in our minds between observing nature and writing about it.

Yet we’re in a strange fix here. The obvious analogy is with cookery. We buy more recipe books and watch more celebrity chefs (whose series now get the box set treatment) than ever before, despite the fact that more and more of us either dine out, phone in takeaways or buy ready meals by the pallet.

It may soon be that our engagement with nature is only through poetry or through the vicarious lens of television. And poetry is itself an endangered species, kept artificially alive and breeding through things like verse competitions and literary festivals. In the final pages of Our Place, Cocker returns to the more pessimistic end of his argument. “What happens when a country destroys the very basis of its creative responses? We may well find out. But I suggest that, along with the biological deficits inflicted by the

self-destruction of our land, we will incur system cultural loss.”

He recommends that you go to south Lincolnshire if you want to experience what denatured landscapes do to the human spirit. I recommend that you don’t.

Fortunately, a good deal of his account deals with the positive efforts that have been made to preserve our natural heritage and preserve it in states that don’t obviously lean to the themed accessibility of visitor centres and wheelchair-friendly pathways but which leave saltmarsh and dune and mudflat as richly desolate as such places are.

The coast, and particularly the north Norfolk coast, is dear to Cocker’s heart, and he shows early on what steps have been taken to preserve such places from the despoliation that leads to habitat loss and from there to the catastrophic drops in species numbers that we notice most painfully if we listen instead of looking. When did you last hear a yellowhammer, let alone catch a glimpse of its

dipped-in-mustard feathers?

In his early chapters, Cocker offers a brilliant potted history of such organisations as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (founded to protest against the fashion for egret feathers and grebe skins on hats and clothes) and the mighty National Trust. This latter is a fascinating organisation whose remit and working philosophy has retreated sharply from the unexpected radicalism of its Victorian origins but also from the main emphases of its predecessor, the Commons Preservation Society, which began back in Clare’s world of enclosure and mounting monoculture and which still exists as the Open Spaces Society.

Why did the Commons Preservation Society not continue to grow like the National Trust and become a settled component of our cultural Zeitgeist? Cocker reserves an unusually waspish tone for the National Trust, which he rightly identifies as a kind of toffs’ club, intent on “caring for Chippendale chairs as opposed to large copper butterflies”.

The very success of the National Trust is at the root of its unwillingness to flex what Cocker calls its “membership muscle”.

What might formerly have seemed like a spirited commitment to preserving the British environment, natural and built, has turned into a “transactional arrangement” and a darned good bargain. “For an annual fee of around £100, a modern family gains free access to some of Britain’s most important houses and their landscaped surroundings.

“This exchange is about value for money. For family weekend entertainment, membership of the National Trust is one of the best deals in Britain... Fear of offending its five million members is the tail that wags the dog.”

Potentially the most powerful campaigning organisation in the country, with clout that extends beyond any political party or pressure group, is now largely concerned with keeping us all behind the velvet rope and keeping our sticky fingers off the brocade.

It might be unfair to concentrate solely on the National Trust’s dereliction (although there is nothing that distresses the organisation more than a derelict country house), to the exclusion of the excellent work it and other organisations do. And it might be misleading not to reiterate Cocker’s painstaking

setting-out of the environmental catastrophe that awaits us.

But if the latter isn’t already understood, there isn’t much hope that even a writer of Cocker’s skill can get the point across.

The real punch of this book lies in its recognition that our seemingly religious devotion to the countryside, which we publicly avow by hanging little bags of dog mess from thorn bushes, is as comfortable and complacent as evensong and pub, and as pointless as buying little bags of freekeh and za’atar (because Nigella and Rick say so)

and leaving them at the back of the cupboard.

Cocker doesn’t provide a clear Yes or No to the question in his subtitle but he does make it clear that it is our place to save our place from disaster, and that looking at four-posters or buying osprey keyrings isn’t going to cut it any more.