DO OR DIE

Joe and Michael, two wise and won­der­fully en­thu­si­as­tic re­tired en­to­mol­o­gists from the Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois, came to our Pri­o­rat farm 12 years ago. They set traps in four re­mote places on the Serra de Llaberia, seek­ing to catch one species of fly.

You are most wel­come, we said. We have plenty of the lit­tle bas­tards through the sum­mer and into the fruit­ing of au­tumn. Take as many as you want. And they did, sit­ting for hours at the kitchen table sift­ing, find just one spec­i­men among the great pile.

How many kinds of fly are there, you may well ask? We did. We have seen enough over the years, as have we all, to know they come in such a va­ri­ety of shapes, hues and sizes (all equally an­noy­ing and vile).

Well, there are, or rather were, al­most 100,000 known species of fly.

I can­not de­fine the num­ber ex­actly, for two rea­sons. We hu­mans have never man­aged to get close to iden­ti­fy­ing them all, and, sec­ondly, we may never do so be­cause they are dis­ap­pear­ing at an apoc­a­lyp­tic rate.

If you haven’t read the Feb­ru­ary re­ports on in­sect de­cline you need to.

A com­plex com­pi­la­tion of more than 70 sci­en­tific pro­jects on di­min­ish­ing in­sect num­bers around the world con­cludes with a sim­ply stun­ning fact – more that 40% of species are threat­ened with ex­tinc­tion. To put that into con­text, it is eight times faster than the al­ready deeply alarm­ing loss of mam­mal, bird, and rep­tile species.

It is yet an­other pointer to the rapid col­lapse of the eco-sys­tem on which all life de­pends. It is the frag­ile food chain, pol­li­na­tion, the re­cy­cling of death into new life, of waste into nu­tri­ents and the cir­cle of ex­is­tence. And, yes, there can be lit­tle doubt that we, the all-know­ing, don’t-like-it-so-squidge-it bulls in the china shop, are di­rectly re­spon­si­ble with our un­sus­tain­able in­tol­er­ance of in­con­ve­nience, our van­i­ties and our bizarre and ac­cel­er­at­ing at­ti­tude that the nat­ural world is an­other order of which we are not part.

Boy, are we a piece of work. The in­sane human pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with self is com­ing to a head. Apolo­gies for the shock tac­tic, but we will be over be­fore we have barely begun, tak­ing every­thing with us.

Bru­tal his­to­ries, the dy­nas­ties now dust, ages of en­light­en­ment that fade and flare, the re­lent­less os­cil­lat­ing of wildly vary­ing be­liefs and causes, al­most gen­er­a­tional and fre­quently shat­ter­ing – are truths we con­stantly re­visit. Yes, Mad.

Life is so alarm­ingly fluid. Any­thing set in stone is never for ever. What mat­ter be­yond all, we all in­stinc­tively know, of course, are peace and liv­ing in har­mony with each other and all other liv­ing things.

With talk of the onset of an­other mass ex­tinc­tion on mir­a­cle Earth we ob­sess about our­selves, our pride, our wrestling with the an­i­mal within us, the con­found­ingly un­lim­ited ca­pac­i­ties we have for cu­rios­ity, kind­ness and harm.

Some­times it is very hard to fathom who or what is on trial. The fact is we all are.

PS In an at­tempt to do some­thing, I am rac­ing to un­der­stand how lit­tle I know, while try­ing to re­mem­ber it is never too late. It mat­ters a great deal, for ex­am­ple, that I thought I had a rel­a­tively deep ap­pre­ci­a­tion of trees and their sig­nif­i­cance, that I knew enough. In that sen­tence I have summed up how stu­pid and small I am. There are more than 60,000 species of tree. Read their life sto­ries and how they com­mu­ni­cate, a won­der­ful odyssey .

Then plant one.