A naked woman in a pair of knee-high boots walks down a London street alongside Tory peer, Zac Goldsmith, her modesty protected only by her waist-length hair and strategically placed silhouettes of swifts. Why? Because she wants “swift bricks” made mandatory in all new-builds. And that’s how far you must go to bring attention to the environment. Hannah Bourne-Taylor’s Instagram account accompanies this photo with the caption: ‘‘The Devil whispered in my ear: ‘You’re not strong enough to withstand the storm.’ I whispered back: WE are the storm.” She has reincarnated the spirit of Lady Godiva to reach as many people as she can to help a small, heart-soaringly lovely bird, that we have pushed to the brink by ignorance. Bourne-Taylor is the brawn and brains behind the Feather Speech campaign for swifts (and sparrows, house martins and starlings), who rely on cavity sites to nest, and – with our new buildings – cannot find them. Her feathered speech is 2.19 minutes on YouTube: watch it.
Of course, a cheap, maintenance-free fix should be a no-brainer. Alas. In these urgent times another can is kicked down the road by Westminster. Science has increased our understanding of animals’ intelligence and their ecological roles – yet this is not carried into mainstream education, media, or politics. How much better off we and the planet might be if PPE (the Oxford degree that runs Britain) stood instead for Physics, Poetry and Ecology, incorporating the old meanings from the Latin, physica: “the study of nature”, and the old French fisike: “the natural science of healing”.
Swifts and all insectivorous birds will need our help to reverse the chemical tide of the agrochemical industry. The formidable eco-feminist, scientist and writer, Vandana Shiva, has dedicated her life to protecting seeds, water, soil, plants and the community, as well as fighting the chemical giants. Shiva advocates ecological farming, with biodiversity at the heart of sustainable systems based on the health of the living soil. She debunks the need to poison and pollute to feed the world and suggests the false metric of “yield per acre” – of nutritionally empty, chemically produced monocultures – should be replaced with “nutrition per acre”.
And here’s the madness. Despite the catastrophic poisoning of insect life, sometimes only 0.1 per cent of pesticides reach their intended target. Meanwhile, due to bioaccumulation there is more pesticide in human milk than in cow’s milk. Everything is connected. What we do to others we do to ourselves.
Women have long been the gatherers, the gardeners, the nurturers, and natural guardians of the world we live in
The longest war on the planet is the one man has waged against nature. The belief that humans are superior, with God-given rights, is so deeply ingrained that we’ve become psychologically separated from the interrelated community of which we are part. Now our manmade problems have endangered our home: the sea, the land, the freshwaters, the soil, the climate. If you “take take take” you don’t get “more more more”, you get a humungous problem.
Women have long been the gatherers, the gardeners, the nurturers, and natural guardians of the world we live in. The homemakers, who clear up the mess. Kate Raworth is an economist trying to bring us back within planetary boundaries, for the myth of “rational economic man” has led us astray into another religion, endless growth. The flaw in the model is simple maths: we live on a finite planet. Ecological sense runs up against a profit-junkie world and loses every time. If the choice is to save the planet or the economy, it’ll be the economy. Homo economicus consumicus insatiaticus. The ecological downside of profit (externalities) is inconvenient to think about, so it’s easier (and effective) to ridicule those who try to make you. Yet our world is built on short-term vested interests that violate the integrity of species and the limits of the ecosystem. What if women had been holding the reins? I suspect most women naturally know that ecological wellbeing and laws of nature are the most important things. No good housekeeper wrecks the actual house they live in.
It falls to women to be the vanguard for the defence of the Earth. Visionary Scottish barrister, Polly Higgins, sold her house to fund her mission to make corporate executives and politicians criminally responsible for damaging ecosystems. The best route was for “ecocide” to be recognised as a crime against humanity by member states of the ICC. Polly tragically died in 2019, but the campaign, Stop Ecocide International, run by cofounder Jojo Mehta, is the driving force behind a growing global movement to recognise ecocide as a fifth crime against peace. It’s a law that could change the world. Like the humble swift brick, it’s possible and straightforward – if only we could realise it.
With governments failing to look after the environment it has become a DIY affair, and individuals just get on with it. Restoring healthy functioning ecosystems is the best thing we can possibly do for biodiversity, the climate, our health, and the planet. For sheer scale, vision, and ambition, take Kristine Tompkins, who’s used her imagination and private business wealth to protect more land than any individual on earth. She calls it capitalist jiu jitsu for the planet. Over three decades Tompkins (with her late husband, Doug) acquired vast swathes of land in Chile and Argentina to first restore and return the lost species, and then to give the land back to the people.
In Chile, 700km of barbed wire was removed, but as she said, overcoming the barriers in people’s mindsets was harder. Tompkins knew the key to healthy ecosystems was bringing back lost species. Giant anteaters, condors, rheas, macaws, pampas deer, giant otters, ocelots, peccary, and tapirs are being returned to their homelands. For the first time in 70 years wild jaguars walk the wetlands of Iberá. A boon for tourism – and of course for them. To her many local employees Tompkins is respected as a guardian of their heritage and home, and as one of the biggest employers in the region. She has now gifted over two million acres to Chile and Argentina, the largest land donation in history, to leverage their commitment to the permanent protection of fifteen million acres across the two countries, including thirteen new national parks, and 30 million marine acres!
It seems to me that the protection of our beautiful world utterly depends on humans appreciating the planet’s other inhabitants, their ecological roles, abilities and mysterious selves. It’s why I spent five years writing about it in my book Beastly – to make the case that animals are the key to the planet’s health, but only if we can save them. Animals sustain the ecosystems that provide us with oxygen, food and clean water while drawing the carbon dioxide away – for free. They recycle nutrients, pollinate plants, transport seeds, build soil, filter water, fertilise both land and sea. Animals are the maintenance crew. A 2023 study from Yale estimated that thriving populations of nine key groups of animals (sharks, wolves, otters, oxen, wildebeest, bison, elephants, whales, and fish), could facilitate the additional capture of 6.4 gigatons of CO2 each year. Almost the amount needed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. I’d like to scrawl this across the sky. There exists no technology at scale that can do what animals have been doing for millennia.
Let’s go to one of the most inspiring and heartwarming evenings of my life. On stage at London’s Royal Geographical Society, a small smiling Mexican woman in a white dress with her black hair tied back in the style of Frida Kahlo, makes her acceptance speech for her 2023 Whitley Award – the extraordinary charity that funds grassroots conservation projects in the Global South. She is Yuliana Bedolla, a marine biologist who has dedicated her life to protecting those mysterious night-flying seabirds, the storm-petrel and the shearwater. Two islands off Mexico’s Pacific coast are uniquely important breeding grounds for a million nocturnal seabirds, yet 27 of the colonies had been decimated by invasive species. After decades of hard work clearing the islands of cats and rodents, the genius in Yuliana’s commitment was to educate, train and encourage the active involvement of the wives of local fishermen. The all-female team protect nesting sites, monitor birds, remain vigilant over biosecurity protocols, and in turn educate their husbands. Healthy seabirds mean healthy seas and a healthy livelihood for the small fishing cooperatives. By 2023, twenty colonies had returned to nest, and several new ones had arrived.
In Philippa Forrester’s book Wild Woman we meet Nyaradzo Hoto, a young ranger protecting rhinos and elephants in an all-female anti-poaching force, called Akashinga, the brave ones. Their success in taking down networks of poachers, without a shot fired, has been due to their innate ability to de-escalate tension. And so they police their own communities, changing the story for wildlife.
Women have been there, standing up and speaking out, long before we had a vote. Hats off to the gloriously named Etta Lemon, who fought to stop the feather trade (used for plumed hats) for 30 years. In 1883 she founded the Fur, Fin and Feather Folk, which merged with the Society for the Protection of Birds, to become the RSPB in 1904. And women are still doing what we’ve done naturally for millennia, looking after the home, but more urgently. After 53 years of tireless frontline environmental devotion, Angela King and Sue Clifford are still going strong. In 1971 Angela led the Save the Whale campaign for Friends of the Earth, floating giant inflatable whales outside meetings of the International Whaling Commission, until the moratorium on commercial whaling in 1982. Her next campaign was to end otter hunting. Thanks in no small part to Angela, otters are back in British rivers once again. In 1983, Angela and Sue Clifford (with Roger Deakin) formed the charity Common Ground to save the nature and culture of local distinctiveness. Working with artists, writers and musicians, their mission was to embolden people to speak up for the precious humble spaces so often in the lens of developers. An old orchard, a mill pond, an allotment, a bluebell wood, a hedge brimming with fruit and blossom and birds. To be a voice for everyday places.
How telling that the paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey picked three women, Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Birutė Galdikas to observe the natural behaviour of our closest cousins, the great apes, in their own habitat. He chose female humans for their natural empathy and calm, their sensitivity to mothers and offspring, the lesser threat they posed to males, and their unbiased minds. His prescience would give us the great female primatologists of the twentieth century.
Environmentalism as a feminine principle seems like a natural thing to me. It’s the convergence of nature’s creative power with women’s power in resisting destruction. Instinctively (yes) knowing to do right by the world. As Jane Goodall said, “It doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us.”
So… save the swifts, save the storm-petrels, the chimpanzees, the orangutans, the sharks, the elephants. Save the whale and the krill and everything in between. Save the rivers and the seas and the forests. There is an urgency like never before. WE are the storm. Let us speak common sense with naked thunder.
Keggie Carew is the author of “Beastly: The Epic 40,000-Year Story of Animals and Us”; she co-owns Underhill Wood, a nature reserve for flora, fauna, and the education of young people
