WHEN’S the last time you saw an eco-activist throw tomato soup at a painting in the Tate Gallery to make a point about meadowsweet? Or lie down in front of traffic to draw public attention to the plight of the harebell?
The diversity of our plantlife is under unprecedented threat but the weird thing is that, by comparison with the attention rightly focused on climate change, not many of us seem to care. Well, we should. An extraordinary project, the Plant Atlas 2020, is published today and it documents in unprecedented detail the loss of species over the last couple of decades. And it turns out that over half of Britain’s native plants are in decline. Non-native plants outnumber native plants in the wild.
Do we care? In London it seems like someone else’s problem. If farmers are using too much nitrogen fertiliser, killing off the plants that thrive on poor soil, that’s too bad, but not our issue. Except it is. If native plants are in decline then that has an effect on insect populations. And that, in turn, affects birds and small mammals. We are, as someone observed, all in this together.
And London does have skin in the biodiversity game. Greater London probably has the worst plant extinction rate of any region in the UK. According to biodiversity expert Mark Spencer at least 160 plants are now at risk of extinction here. “This extinction crisis is being ignored by the GLA”, he says Marsh sow-thistle and great water parsnip — and no, I didn’t know them either — are among the casualties of development.And yet half of London is green space.
Of course, climate change is devastating and a crucial part of the picture: it affects alpine plants; peatlands are critical in carbon storage.
But the real problem is that the climate crisis is sexy; the extinction crisis isn’t. Young activists don’t tend to lobby MPs and take days off school to draw attention to threats to ancient wildflower meadows (bye, corn marigold) or the way monocultures of boring sitka spruce have replaced broadleaf woods.
Yet, as David Attenborough has pointed out in his new series, Wild Islands, the flora and fauna under our noses is just as exciting and important as anything in far-flung parts. Look up the Atlas and see what I mean. Biodiversity matters. When it’s gone, all of us are diminished.
