Julian Hoffman (2019) Irreplaceable. The Fight to Save our Wild Places.

Julian Hoffman is trying to find a place in our ponderous world for wonder, or what he terms ‘radical amazement’. The beauty of connection in the age of desolation.  ‘When it’s gone, it’s gone,’ he argues.

He asks what are those special qualities that make us human?

Our sixth sense, writer Rebecca Solnit calls it. Cultural as well as natural meaning. Lived experiences that act as in internal compass mapped by memory and spatial awareness.

I think there’s a bit of Robert M.Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) here in the idea of ‘quality’ being innate, often synonymous with beauty. We feel it more than we understand.  A kindred connection.

When Alan was wee, he caught a perch in the canal. He came back with it in his slimy hands to show his mum.

‘If we put it in the sink and run the water, will it come back to life?’

He was reassured that it would. Just in the same way that goldfish in plastic bags flushed down the toilet would swim back to the sea to find their mum.

Things just aren’t right. An economic system built on endless churn and buying new things.

Protected has become almost meaningless, he argues, in relation to The Marsh Country and the Hoo Peninsula. The Scottish government did their bit in rollback. They allowed—yet to be President—Donald Trump to build a golf course on the rare shifting sands of Aberdeenshire and the fifth largest dune system in Britain in 2008. A SSSI designation overlooked in the interest of jobs that never appeared.

Anyone that has being paying attention to the dispute over Greenland knows it’s the riches of oil fields in Antarctica that are being uncovered, ironically, made economically viable and within reach by global warming.  More importantly access to rare-earth minerals—which China almost has a monopoly—needed to build the next generation of quantum supercomputers.

‘Between 1980 and 2012, it’s believed that 40 million starlings vanished from the landscapes of the European Union, a loss of roughly 140 birds per hour’.

We are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction and ‘the generational acceptance and normalisation of a degraded planet’.

‘Since the 1960s, the nation has lost some 40 million breeding birds…71 per cent of butterfly…70-80 per cent of brown-banded carder bee…40 percent of insect species are threatened with extinction… the planet’s total insect mass is shrinking by 2.5 per cent per year…’

Irreplaceable is not a book overfilled with despair, although that’s part of the deal. It’s a book about resistance from ordinary people like me and you (well, not me, specifically). The kind of people that immediately get labelled anything from terrorist, loony left or socialist. Rights are only for the rich. It saddens me how much the future generations will miss, particularly children. Read on.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6