The terrible lesson of the bee orchid

We must fight to protect not only biodiversity, but bioluxuriance

Richard Mabey

At a stroke, the bee orchids have gone from our lane. Two summers of tropical grass growth have brought the verge-cutters out early, before the orchids flower and seed, and we won't any longer be able to see those fabulous, chimerical blooms, with their velvet bodies and sculpted pink wings, just an amble from the front door. It's a man-made demise, but not the end of the world. There are bee orchids a mile away in the opposite direction, round a patch of dry wasteground used for bike scrambles. They teem in countless millions around the Mediterranean. I've seen them sometimes with extraordinary opportunist impertinence poking up on people's lawns.

Yet the neighbourliness of our local patch is something that can't be replaced. For me, settling down in a new habitat in Norfolk, they completed a circle opened up one June day half a lifetime ago, when I saw my first on a picnic in the Chilterns, and knew that I had gone through some subtle graduation in the rites of botany. And, in a less dramatic way, their passing seems like a stitch dropped, part of a great unravelling.

It is these subtle processes of attrition, cultural and ecological, that are highlighted in the new British Red Data Book of plants. In May this revealed the shocking statistic that 340-odd species - 20% of our flora - are in danger of becoming nationally extinct. Note the qualification. These are not species about to vanish from the face of the earth. Many vulnerable plants of open habitats are at the edges of their range in our inclement island climate, and are abundant on the continent. The arable weeds, such as corn buttercup, that figure prominently in the list aren't even true natives but ancient, accidental introductions from southern Europe that are doing very well in their home countries. The species chosen as the symbol of the report - the beautiful blue field gentian - is prolific in Scandinavia.

This botanical Domesday Book is less about true extinction than impoverishment: the closing down of personal experiences, the vanishing of living landmarks that help define places and communities, the eclipse of the fundamental elements of those intricate, mutually dependent networks of animal and plant that make up ecosystems. It suggests that alongside the sometimes crude index of biodiversity, we need another: bioluxuriance, a measure of the spread of organisms, of their living where they belong, not herded into biological ghettoes and token nature reserves.

Yet if we're beginning to acknowledge and document this creeping erosion of the living systems we inhabit, why aren't we more bothered? Why isn't local extinction - the first, inexorable step towards a more comprehensive termination, after all - a source of horror, of self-interested panic, of public response? Perhaps, ironically, the acceptance of the process of evolution has credited it with almost supernatural regenerative power: the great engine of life will cope, somehow. Or perhaps we believe we will eventually be able to do the job ourselves, putting back into the wild species we've nurtured in captivity, even recreating vanished plants from strips of DNA.

Extinction is a fact of life, and doesn't have the power to shock any more. Stephen Jay Gould's extraordinary book, Wonderful Life, put paid to any lingering beliefs in the sanctity of species, or the inexorable "upward" progress of evolution. Five hundred million years ago there was an explosion of biological creativity that generated a variety of life far surpassing that existing on the earth today. All of it has vanished, been discarded, without a single human lifting a destructive finger.

Knowledge makes extinction a moral problem as well as a material one. Can we accept being conscious witnesses - or worse, accomplices - in the erasure of the unique outcomes of hundreds of millions of years of natural trial and error? And do we think we know enough to draw ethical lines, decide population sizes, judge which species are of most importance - not for us, but for the biosphere?

In the 1930s Walter Benjamin described the changed status that technological intervention gave to works of art. His celebrated essay could well be retitled Nature in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be." Authenticity in the natural world isn't only about humans' aesthetic experiences; it is about the actual existence of living organisms.

So many of the arguments about extinction are couched in human-centred terms. The arable weed will tomorrow be the staple crop. The wild orchid has an aura that the garden specimen lacks. Forgetting their hubris for a moment, these only work for a few species. At the end of the line, the one solid argument for the preservation of species is an a priori ethical one: they are important in their own right, simply because they exist, as part of the unfathomable intricacy of life. So, of course, are we, and if we can enjoy our common inheritance and good fortune - celebrate the inexplicable, extravagant mimicry of the self-pollinating bee orchid - then so much the better.

Richard Mabey's books include Flora Britannica and Nature Cure

WATERLOG. ROGER DEAKIN

It was at the height of this drenching in the summer of 1996 that the notion of a long swim through Britain began to form itself. I wanted to follow the rain on its meanderings about our land to rejoin the sea, to break out of the frustration of a lifetime doing lengths, of endlessly turning back on myself like a tiger pacing its cage. I began to dream of secret swimming holes and a journey of discovery through what William Morris, in the title to one of his romances, called The Water of the Wondrous Isles. My inspiration was John Cheever's classic short story 'The Swimmer', in which the hero, Ned Merrill, decides to swim the eight miles home from a party on Long Island via a series of his neighbours' swimming pools. One sentence in the story stood out and worked on my imagination: 'He seemed to see, with a cartographer's eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county.'

When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is - water - and it begins to move with the water around it. No wonder we feel such sympathy for beached whales; we are beached at birth ourselves. To swim is to experience how it was before you were born. Once in the water, you are immersed in an intensely private world as you were in the womb. These amniotic waters are both utterly safe and yet terrifying, for at birth anything could go wrong, and you are assailed by all kinds of unknown forces over which you have no control. This may account for the anxieties every swimmer experiences from time to time in deep water. A swallow dive off the high board into the void is an image that brings together all the contradictions of birth. The swimmer experiences the terror and the bliss of being born.

Natural water has always held the magical power to cure. Somehow or other, it transmits its own self-regenerating powers to the swimmer. I can dive in with a long face and what feels like a terminal case of depression, and come out a whistling idiot. There is a feeling of absolute freedom and wildness that comes with the sheer liberation of nakedness as well as weightlessness in natural water, and it leads to a deep bond with the bathing-place.

I am no champion, just a competent swimmer with a fair amount of stamina. Part of my intention in setting out on the journey was not to perform any spectacular feats, but to try and learn something of the mystery D. H. Lawrence noticed in his poem 'The Third Thing':

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one,

But there is also a third thing, that makes it water

And nobody knows what that is.

O Altitudo!

An Interview with Robert Macfarlane

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Brian Dillon

On 2 August 1802, Samuel Taylor Coleridge - who was already in the habit of scaling mountains and, instead of descending by the safest available route, making his way back down by the first, often perilous, pathway that presented itself—ascended Scafell, England´s second-highest mountain, in the Lake District. This time, on the way down, he got stuck, and found himself facing a twelve-foot drop to a ledge so narrow that "...if I dropt down upon it I must of necessity have fallen backwards and of course killed myself".
Coleridge survived, and in the account he later gave of the escapade, rehearsed some key terms from a mountainous aesthetic that has flourished for at least two centuries: the experience, he said, was one of prophecy, trance, delight, shame, pain, dreaming, madness, and laughter.
Robert Macfarlane is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he teaches English literature. He has recently published Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2007) and The Wild Places (2007), a tour and study of the wildernesses of Britain and Ireland. Macfarlane´s first book, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), essays a historical and personal description of the mixed aesthetic, moral, and scientific modes of mountain appreciation: from the crossing of the Simplon Pass by Thomas Burnet in 1672 to the disastrous attempt on Everest by George Mallory in 1924.