Country Life

Let us not betray Nature

‘If we can defeat this devastating challenge, we can find solutions to climate change and the heartbreaking loss of biodiversity’

IN the months since Easter, when the long-suffering Editor last asked me to contribute to these pages, the country, and the world, have experienced changes we could never have foreseen. Uncertainty has become a steady state; the previously unimaginable has become unexceptional; the extraordinary has become normal.

At such a time, it is tempting, and understandable, to focus on the losses, the failures and the challenges. However, if the life of the land teaches anything, it is the need to look at the long term; at the deep and enduring strengths and qualities that continue through the slow rhythm of the Seasons, through Nature’s ever-rejuvenating generation of new life. We must respect the temporary fury of the waves, but we can trust the steady character of the tides. We must judge by the Season, not the storm.

Over the past months, amid all the disruption to the outward appearance of our lives, what has been increasingly apparent is the profound strength of our society: its resourcefulness, its compassion and its stoical determination to keep doing the right thing, despite all challenges. Nowhere has this been more apparent than

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