These wild isles
Image: Suzanne Christiansen
I am definitely a fangirl of Wild Isles, David Attenborough’s latest BBC offering on television right now, which focuses on the very islands I currently live in, the United Kingdom. It has been very inspiring and alarming at the same time. It also has led me to look at our own local murmuration of starlings, which in this case, living as I do in London, happens on top of the Primark.
In my humble opinion, being reminded that one is part of a larger ecosystem is not a bad thing. Attenborough also reminds us of the loss of the ecosystems that have already occurred, noting that the UK is one of the most depleted countries in the world, with nearly half of British wildlife species declining since 1970.
Meanwhile, the NGOs such as WWF, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, The Wildlife Trust, the Woodland Trust, as well as the Open University, are all using this opportunity to help get the public involved in trying to alleviate these issues.
I think it’s a useful tool to help with water issues and the plastic pollution crisis. I suspect we will be seeing a lot more initiatives coming up in the near future for these. Climate change is a thing now, but to paraphrase a person I recently interviewed, It’s never too late to be the planet you could have been.
So, as the clocks have moved forward, I took advantage of the extra light to stay out in the garden this weekend. There has been a lot of discussion about whether gardeners should dig or not, but I am opting for a bit of both, as I am keen to keep the birds happy in the back garden. This includes robins, who, as the great man reminds us in episode 2, think this of us: “To robins, a human with a spade is just a pig on two legs.” So, getting those worms up for the robins is a good thing. Not for the worms, however.
- Suzanne Christiansen, editor, Dairy Industries International.
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