Anxiety for the future is natural, but don’t let it stop you trying to make a better world

One of the most famous opening lines in literature is “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” The Go Between, by L.P. Hartley, was published in 1953 and describes a boy’s formative years from the perspective of middle age. Perhaps the words resonate so widely because life is fleeting, and we cannot go backwards to undo deeds or take different paths.

When it comes to the environment, the past was certainly very different. I’m old enough to have a many decades’ perspective on our changing natural world. There are things I remember from childhood in the 1960s that have changed dramatically. Wild salmon used to run upriver in their thousands past the Scottish village where I grew up. The shrill cries of swifts filled summer skies and in the breeding season, seabirds jammed every ledge of coastal cliffs.

Today the cliffs and skies are quieter and the rivers emptier.

Such stories of loss are so commonplace it is easy to feel despondent. Nature, it seems, is in irreversible decline and there is nothing we can do about it. But during my childhood, every year whales were slaughtered by the tens of thousands to be turned into cheap margarine! What an appalling waste.