February Theme: Wilderness
Stories for all the wild places, those we’ve lost, we still have and those that might be again.
This Month We Write Stories for All the Wild Places
In December, my wife and I watched David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet; it’s a film both wondrous and despairing.
I can remember Attenborough’s voice throughout my childhood — listening to his infectious excitement at the wonders of the natural world. He gave voice to the nature-loving grandfather I never knew.
Sharing stories and explanations of why this odd little creature did what it did and how those great behemoths balanced out an intricate system so vast it boggled the mind.
A kindly man living a singular life so close to the natural world he adores, an enviable achievement. He’s spent his life sharing the diverse beauty of our planet.
Then, to see him describe how much of it has been lost. Losses that started when he first set out but had not yet become visible.
Our reefs have become bleached and dead boneyards. Our forests once hugged our lands like green blankets now lie splintered and fragmented. Our planet’s lungs — the rainforests, drying, burned and choking with smoke. Cleared to become feed land for animals we don’t need to eat.
And as we start to head into the corner to lap 8 billion people on our small blue dot, we need to think about whether we should.
In a world where our own human diversity is often less than celebrated — we need to consider if we are becoming a species that seeks to unwittingly homogenise our natural world.
Stamping out the wild places and filling the world with neat little squares of farmland. Replacing once boundless diversity with a handful of species in their teeming billions.
I myself have seen the acidic ocean bleaching in Bali, swimming after turtles while gliding over barren, broken shards of too white coral. I’m lucky to have been born in Africa, to have seen the Big Five since I was a child, and on many a holiday since. Although it may be the Big Four if rhino poaching continues unchecked.
These great animals, lion, elephant, buffalo, rhino and leopard live in a tiny fenced-off sliver of our country. While vast tracts of empty land in the Karoo are given over to what a lonely motorist on the N1 highway may see as a sheep here or a cow there.
But it’s not all doom and gloom, changes are being made, many thousands of people work daily to preserve what we have. Here in South Africa, fences are being taken down to make the multinational Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. Creating a place that “conserves wilderness and peace in areas where there was once conflict.”
Attenborough also shows us what other minor changes we can make to re-wild our world. To bring back its resilience with its biodiversity because this diversity is strength both in nature and in our societies, regardless of what our opportunistic leaders sometimes yell at us.
I encourage you to watch the film; it’s not political nor judgmental. It’s a poignant reminder of this planet's beauty paired with a stark message of what we are putting to the flame.
This month let us write stories that celebrate the wild places, those we’ve cherished and lost, those that we’ve kept safe and those we might bring back.
Our first prompt lands this Friday.
All the Weekly Prompts:
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