Signs and wonders. Omens of black portent. Part of an American looney’s ear has been shot off by another American looney. The proposed presidency of the earless looney had been endorsed by Atomic Kitten’s Kerry Katona. A computer went wrong and everything in the world stopped working everywhere. On Tuesday it was reported that Chris Packham regretted having once ridden an elephant. Last Sunday was the hottest day ever. A lioness hath whelped in the streets. Graves have yawn’d and yielded up their dead. Suella Braverman sat in for James O’Brien on LBC and the last surviving member of the Four Tops died. Surely we are living in The End Times. The optics, as they say, are not good.
But last week I sat outside at night alone on my Welsh mountain holiday, drinking draught Bwtty Bach beer from a plastic flask and reading an old Brigid Brophy paperback. For a moment I was happy beyond measure, forgot the world beyond, and stopped worrying. And then I saw something was awry in my idyll. I looked up at a security light, a stark halogen glow between the grey stone wall and the bright buck moon. Not long ago, in such a night as this, such a lamp as that would always have been hazed by a fuzzy penumbra of buzzy invertebrates. But tonight the air around it was hungry and dead, the entomological equivalent of an empty Republican convention room, where no one at all turns up to listen to Boris Johnson.
Thirty years ago, when I was young and ungrateful, a woman took me to Barnes wetlands at night and clapped bat detector headphones over my ears, and I listened to the skriking of the sonar as vampire shadows swooped over the surface of the water, devouring insect clouds like basking sharks cutting through plankton, or Yvette Cooper’s grasp of facts slicing through the wet toilet roll rhetoric of Lee Anderson.
And, four years back, in one of those profound lockdown moments, I stood alone in Hackney Marshes at sunset, keeping the required social distance from the doubtless virus-ridden boat dwellers, and saw great flocks of invasive green African parakeets dive bomb the River Lea for swarms of our British bugs, the fat foreign birds undeterred by Suella Braverman’s £700m Rwandan deportation threats. At least somewhere during the pandemic – in the waters of an ancient marshland and on Michelle Mone’s luxury yacht – life went on as usual.
But last week in Monmouthshire the formerly fecund evening was bereft of life. I immediately thought of the bats, which once would have feasted on the insect cloud. And sure enough, last Sunday, sudden hard evidence of pesticides, habitat loss, and above all the pervasive effects of the climate emergency we have caused, was confirmed, as Britain’s 18 insect-hungry bat species starved, crashed and burned. Imagine a world without bats, or at the very least one in which they are all seriously malnourished? Would DC Comics have been able to build a vast franchise on the premise of a man having the powers of a weak dying mammal?
But on the plus side, now you can sit on the terrace of your holiday let and watch ecosystems collapse in real time. And yet you still can’t see the Green party on the BBC news anything like as regularly as, for example, Nigel Farage and the various iterations of his numerous PLC parties, despite their comparable share of the vote. We’re running out of air and those pointing this out aren’t getting any airtime. David Attenborough crawls towards the terrible truth like a Galapagos turtle, his beak opening and closing unheeded, despite his many Baftas. And that is why we must protest.
But can anyone afford to take to the streets? A conscience is costly. On Thursday of the week before last, five Just Stop Oil protesters, whom history will judge as heroes, were sentenced to record jail terms for non-violent protest. Their families must be rightly proud of them. Michel Forst, the UN’s special rapporteur on environmental defenders, declared the judgment “a dark day for peaceful protest… It should put us on high alert on the state of civic rights and freedoms in the United Kingdom.” At least we are world leaders in something! That and food banks.
Judge Christopher Hehir sentenced the Just Stop Oil protesters to four to five years each, further crowding the prisons the Tories abandoned. But in January Hehir handed a suspended sentence to a former policeman who had sex in a patrol car with a drunk woman he offered to take home, and last September he was similarly lenient to a man who drove a car into the gates of Downing Street while carrying a phone full of indecent images of children, impressively managing to commit two quite distinct offences simultaneously, like Gary Glitter starring in Fast & Furious.
But within a few years, when the climate crisis renders life untenable, the angry public will demand a retroactive Nuremberg-style investigation into who allowed the death of everything to proceed. Then Hehir himself will be in the dock, hoping for the leniency he once offered a joy-riding paedophile.
I’m having trouble coming up with relatable material for my forthcoming live standup show, Stewart Lee Vs the Man-Wulf. But hey, anybody remember insects? Anybody remember bats? Anybody remember life on Earth? What the hell was all that about, people? What was the deal with that livable environment? Remember when, as she was being sentenced, Just Stop Oil’s Louise Lancaster said, “all other means of democratic persuasion have failed”? I’m here all week. Try the fish! Oh! There aren’t any.
Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee is available to stream on Now TV. He is previewing 40 minutes of new material in Stewart Lee Introduces Legends of Indie at the Lexington, London, in August with Connie Planque (12), Swansea Sound (13) and David Lance Callahan (14)
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