Many moons ago, when I was researching festivals from around the world, I came across Plough Monday, which is the first Monday after Twelfth Night, I was a little baffled at the time as very little ploughing takes place in the Winter nowadays. Any celebration past or present usually marks a significant occasion, for a very long time Plough Monday was seen as the start of the agricultural year, the day to start ploughing. In reality little ploughing is thought to have taken place on Plough Monday itself, it was more usually the start of mischievousness on the part of the ploughmen, who would variously dress up, sing and dance, often in disguise, in their hunt for work. It was also a time for ceremonies to wish for a plentiful harvest. The Church held its own ceremony on Plough Sunday, when a plough would be blessed and a good harvest prayed for, a service that in some areas has continued to this day.
I gave little thought to this change until I read more recently that it has had a dramatic albeit largely un-noticed effect. Nowadays most land is ploughed in the Autumn, pretty much straight after harvesting, the land gets no rest. Ploughing in winter gave the land a pause, a rest, a chance to recover and increase its fertility as the stubble rotted down. Not only does the land get a rest but the stubble is a food source for a whole ecosystem of fauna, I have read that a stubble field is like a giant bird table. The decline in seed eating birds that spend some or all of their time in the UK, such as skylarks and yellowhammers, is thought to be related to this change. We all know that ecosystems are complex, like a spiders web, if you pull on one of the threads it will start to gently unravel.
I am sure that there are many more subtle changes like this, not only in agriculture but in other industries too, which have effected ecosystems without us really noticing. I have read about moths being so abundant in the evenings that you would have to clean your windscreen if you drove after dark. I am remember this as a small child.
My children and their generation will never know what things were like in the past unless we talk and write about them. I am glad that there is a proliferation of nature writing describing events such as moth snowstorms. I am also glad that in the past year the environment has been talked about so much. Whether or not I agree with what people are saying, or the actions they are making, I very much hope that the environment will stay centre stage for the coming year too. That policies in our home countries will be made that lessen our impact on the natural world. The fires in Australia, the Brazilian Amazon and California are so difficult for those of us who live in cold wet places to imagine. They are devastating, destructive and have the potential to destroy ecosystems and make some animals extinct.
It would be so easy for us to become completely demoralised, to live in fear of it all being too late to do anything and that we are all doomed. I refuse to believe this is so, and live in hope that we can all make a difference, however big or small the changes to our lives we make, we are all activists with the decisions and choices that we make every day. We need to be mindful of our impact on the environment as we go about our daily lives.
Do you have hope too?
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