Dieback is a sign of a much bigger problem, says Colin Tudge

Britain’s ash trees are dying, victims of ash dieback; we seem likely to lose 75-95 per cent of them in the next 30 years. The proximal cause is a fungus, Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, which hails from warmer climes and is taking advantage of climate change.

But then, undeniably, global warming is caused by us, human industry. And because of it – and because of general pollution and humanity’s expropriation of land, for farming and building and mining and all the rest – all wildlife is now under threat.

The root cause of all these ills, always, is us – the way we run the world. We surely are not evil but the prevailing economy, our methods of governance, and much of the law are at odds with ecological reality – the way the world actually works.

And behind this misalignment lies the belief that we human beings really do know what we’re doing, or at least the experts do; and that we have the ability, the right, even the duty, to take the whole world by the scruff and beat it into shape for our own material benefit – or at least for the benefit of a privileged minority.

This at least is what the world’s most powerful people apparently believe, and the rest of us for the most part do what we’re told, or simply do our best to survive in a dysfunctional world.

Indeed, compared with all that’s going wrong in the world as a whole, the death of Britain’s ash trees may seem trivial – and who among the urbanised majority actually notices?

But the ash – together with the oak, the small-leafed lime, the beech, and, until recently, the elm – is one of the five broad-leaved species that since the last Ice Age has largely defined Britain’s landscape, and inspired much of our folk-lore. Ash was and is used to make furniture too, and oars and waggon wheels – wherever there’s a need for smooth, strong, springy timber: the perfect foil for unyielding oak.

Yet, as we have seen time and again in living memory, species that may seem too common to warrant a second glance and landscapes that may seem permanent, as if they were part of God’s original creation, may be transformed almost overnight.

Thus the elm was once so common in the West Country that it was called “the Wiltshire weed”, and is a prime feature too of John Constable’s Suffolk landscapes. Yet, beginning in the 1960s, Britain’s elms have been all-but wiped out by Dutch Elm Disease, caused by the fungus Ophiostoma, which apparently was introduced on timber imported from Asia, and is spread by the elm-bark beetle Scolytus.

And of course what’s true of trees and plants in general is equally true of animals. In Britain the once wondrous flocks of lapwings and the haunting cries of curlews have all-but disappeared even since I was a lad, victims of ultra-commercial agriculture. So too the once ubiquitous house sparrow. Nothing is safe however abundant.

Similarly, in the eastern United States, the American chestnut was once so common that a squirrel could leap from tree to tree without touching the ground all the way from Maine to Georgia – or so it was said.

The chestnuts supported a huge variety of wildlife and were a staple for entire nations of human beings. But commercial foresters thought it would be a good idea to cross the American native trees with related types from Asia that have bigger nuts, and the Asian imports carried a blight fungus called Cryphonectria parasitica to which the Americans had little or no resistance.

Now the entire American species is reduced to a few stragglers which – in typically heroic but post-hoc style – biotechnologists are trying to protect by genetic engineering.

And at the same time the huge flocks of passenger pigeons that in the 19th century blackened the skies and broke the branches of big trees when they roosted had all but disappeared by the 20th. They were cheap and easy meat and the last one was shot in 1901.

Behind all our collective follies lies a hugely inappropriate mindset: ignorance – particularly of ecology; insouciance; hubris; lacking all sense of the sacred, with the perceived need for “economic growth” trumping all other considerations. This is the thinking that dominated COP26 and it all too obviously falls very far short of what’s needed.

We cannot give up hope, or we are truly sunk. But if we give a damn then we – people at large – must take the world’s affairs into our own hands. Idleness is surely an ideal – the time and freedom simply to appreciate this world and indeed to be human. But the ideal will have to wait, or there will be no world to appreciate.

We – people at large; ordinary Joes and Jos – have to get stuck in. The demise of the elm and the ash before our eyes, brought down by inadequate import laws and our assaults on the climate and by the perceived need for short-term profit, may in a global context be matters of detail, but they make the point very clearly.

Colin Tudge’s latest book, The Great Re-Think, is available online and from some bookshops.

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