Swifts

Swifts against the clouds

I love to hear the shrill cries of swifts in the summer. It is familiar and recurring and serves to remind us of the great cycle of nature, its mystery and wonder. So when they become rarer or are not heard at all what are we to make of it ? Is it that the swifts have gone elsewhere in search of their prey, or that they have not made it from their winter stations ? Whatever the reason it is a worry. What is the world coming to ? Can anything be done ?

So many questions and not many answers. If for some reason we, as a species, are at fault it is unlikely that we will be able to repair the damage we have done because we can have no real idea of how we did it in the first place. The great changes to the atmosphere and in fact to the whole ecosystem which we have unknowingly set in train are now irreversible and must play out. Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are now inexorably heading towards twice the preindustrial level. The writing, as they say, is on the wall.

Even if humanity were to disappear overnight, our legacy would not be a pristine Earth but a planet undergoing great, perhaps fatal changes to many species and environments. The seas would continue to warm up and acidify, the great ice masses of Greenland would launch fleets of glaciers into the ocean and finally melt altogether, the great expanses of permafrost towards the northern poles would no longer be icy but would turn to bog, releasing large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, dry regions would become ever drier turning eventually to desert, and a vast warming and drying would grip the Earth. Lovelock's scenario of a small band of habitable regions around the northern hemisphere's temperate regions would come to pass. The British isles would be a refuge for those creatures needing the relatively benign temperatures to survive. Some regions might perhaps revert to the vast jungles of 50 million years ago, gigantic trees thriving on the increased CO2 concentrations with new species evolving to live there.

The likelihood is that humanity will not disappear overnight. There will be more and more of us on the Earth for many years to come desperate to live like us here in 'developed' countries, desperate for fuel, food and any other necessary resource. There will not be enough coal or oil in the world, for ever more will be needed; there will be enough food but at what price to the natural environment (not only for other creatures but for us as well) ? Will life again become 'nasty brutish and short' and numbers of humans be reduced by the consequences of this.

Let us enjoy the swifts while we can.