A feather in the wind
 A
version of this piece was published in the Independent
on the 20th May 2000, under the headline ‘The vanishing
sparrow and the eye of God’.
The animal that the World Wide Fund for Nature has made
the mascot of fauna-friendliness is arguably a bit of
a flop. It may be strong on the aaah! factor, but the
giant panda never represented anything in the West except
a mixture of the exotic and the cute. The disjunction
between its appearance and its unattractive character
is pure kitsch. And we lose patience with its fussy
eating and even fussier mating, which make it in any
event a likely candidate for some natural deselection.
It is hardly a symbol that demands that we get real.
The sparrow is a different matter. This newspaper has
drawn the nation’s attention to its mysterious
and shocking decline – by 65 per cent across the
country since 1970, and by 92 per cent in towns and
cities – and once the fact is drawn to our attention,
it is difficult to ignore. A bird we are fond of, which
shows (we rather fancy) the same qualities of unassuming
courage and resilience we British take a pride in, is
vanishing. And its genuine fitness to survive makes
that a cause for serious alarm.
The warning is surely needed. For a long time, the
ecological crisis has seemed like the ‘phoney war’
of 1939. Somewhere, no doubt, vital ground is being
lost and heavy casualties are being taken, but here
at home life goes on much as normal. We are told that
every day another species becomes extinct; but when
we ask what died out yesterday, or last year even, the
experts um and ah. We’re told that fish stocks
in many of the world’s seas are approaching collapse;
but there is still no shortage of cod on a Friday night.
The destruction of the ozone layer is turning the sunshine
from an all-too-rare pleasure in this country into a
carcinogenic threat, but even government health warnings
count for little against the immediate attraction of
a glow of wellbeing and a tan – and as a consequence
the prospect of catastrophic global warming is all too
easily lightened by fantasies about a British Riviera.
No wonder politicians see no votes in ecological prudence.
But the fate of the sparrow in its appropriately modest
way brings the reality close to home. Most of us can
remember when they were a common sight – a chirpy
presence in our gardens, on our pavements, under our
eaves. Now they’re almost gone. Whether or not
this turns out to be our fault – and there are
several possible explanations that place the blame elsewhere
– it is a sobering reminder that nature is unstable,
and substantially beyond our control. The Government
should reflect on this as it continues to promote genetic
modification.
Perhaps, too, the sparrow reminds us of the comfort
we find in nature. In the materialism of our consumer
culture we have rather lost the vocabulary to express
our sense of this – ‘It does my heart good’
nowadays suggests cardiovascular exercise rather than
spiritual sustenance – but we continue to feel
it. There is a companionship in the non-human world
that enriches our lives, as any friendship does, in
ways we cannot easily define or measure. It is good
to have the company of bumble bees and hedgehogs and
even urban foxes that go about their business beside
us and put our own both stressed and pampered lives
in a bigger and much older context.
Why exactly it thrills us to hear a thrush sing, or
cheers us to find a robin watching as we dig, it’s
hard to say. Is it because we are moved by the unexplainable
fact that blind evolution has produced in them some
beauty, and in us the faculty to perceive it? Is it
because we are created beings, designed to share our
Maker’s pleasure in his handiwork? Whatever our
belief, the demise of the sparrow must make us stop
and ask: How much of all this are we content to lose?
For Christians, of course, there is a deeper resonance.
Jesus famously observed, ‘Are not five sparrows
sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten
by God.’ Usually we hear this as a ‘blessed
thought’, a kind of divine endorsement of our soft
spot for a feathered friend. But the birds that Jesus
was referring to were not plucky little fellows that
won his hearers’ hearts but plucked and roasted
little fellows that appealed to their stomachs. An unsentimental
crowd of country folk whose idea of a cheap snack was
a sparrer on a stick was told that every one was individually
known by God.
This opens up for us a radically different perspective,
quite strange to that self-centred ‘environmentalism’
which perceives the natural world entirely in relation
to ourselves and values it only insofar as it sustains
us or delights us or yields us information. Christians
who believe in a Creator who made the whole earth and
declared it very good should indeed be the pioneers
of practical green living, more careful than anyone
of a world whose worth in their eyes is determined by
its Maker’s love. For some reason, they generally
are not. If the fate of the sparrow galvanises only
them to change the way they live, the Independent’s
campaign will have done some serious good.
© The Independent 2000
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