nature should not be moralised

there are no villains in this story

The land has swallowed up the sky and the sea, or perhaps it is the other way around. Either way, the whole world is white: the edges of the hills have dissolved into cloud, the snow-hugged beaches have dissolved into atlantic froth¹. There is nothing here to anchor the eye except, far out to sea, way out beyond the breakers, a thin line of gunmetal blue. But that is all. No solidity, no line or edge, no body but my own.

Later, this place will come alive: a flock of pumping hearts and hot blood and wings and beaks and smiles and laughter. I will watch two kids on a quadbike pull a third along on a sheet of plastic, and I will see a gaggle of children build a snowman adorned with a neckerchief, and there will be dogs diving into snowdrifts like arctic foxes, and the rabbits will be digging in the snow, and the songbirds will be gathering at the feeders, and the ravens will be cackling somewhere high, and a goldfinch will land on the only thistle tall enough to break the back of the snow.

But that is all to come later.

For now, the world is sparse.

For now, there is only unmarked snow (the quiet hush of it) and the white-skinned sea (the quiet roar of it) and the blanket of sky (the quiet thick of it), and not a soul in sight.

Until, someone comes.

Someone slicing up the white.

She² is a great black-backed gull, Larus marinus. The largest gull in the world. With a wingspan of five and a half feet, she has a crimson mark on her beak that looks like dripping blood, and a back so black and wings so long that as she flies she seems to cut the world in two.

She is a punctuation mark—an exclamation mark—in this blank landscape; there is no ignoring her. She is shouting out into this vast expanse: I am here! I am here!

Last summer, I watched a black-backed gull drown a rabbit and then swallow it whole. The rabbit was screaming for minutes. Black-backs are infamous for such behaviour; they are pirates, scavengers, killers, often top of the food chain (that is, when sea eagles aren’t around), and they commonly pluck ducklings from their mother’s side, and drown small mammals, and bully other scavenging birds so that they can have the first sumptuous taste of a corpse.

Last week I wrote about how some birds will pluck the eyes out of live-stranded cetaceans. The great black-backed gull is one such bird. An undefended eyeball is just too nutritious to resist.

As you can imagine, many people dislike them because of this. Perhaps you are one of those people. Perhaps you were not one of those people, but you are now you know what they do to survive.

You’d be in good company. Ornithologist Arthur Cleveland Bent once said of black-backed gulls: “It surely seemed to be a king among the gulls, a merciless tyrant over its fellows, the largest and strongest of its tribe. No weaker gull dared to intrude upon its feudal domain.” (Bent, 1921)³

And perhaps I could have buried these details—the drowned rabbit, the corpses, the snatched ducklings, the stolen eyes—and told you instead about how black-backed gulls form strong pair-bonds, cooperatively raise their chicks, and engage in group preening (grooming) sessions⁴. Maybe you’d like them then; or, at least, maybe you wouldn’t dislike them. But maybe we would lose something important in that telling; maybe we would flatten something, reshape something, force something into a box that is the wrong size for its knotty, expansive bones.

I think much of our understanding of nature has been flattened by dominant cultural narratives. It is the Disneyfication of nature⁵. Films like The Lion King, Bambi, The Jungle Book, Finding Nemo (to name just a few) are great examples of this: in these we anthropomorphise the natural world, put animals into a human moral framework (just think of the poor hyenas in The Lion King), while also sanitising the brutal indifference of nature (good will eventually win! Awful, terrible things don’t happen without eventually being fixed!).

This Disneyfication worries me, and I’ve been trying to pin down why. I think it’s because of this: not only does it lead to a misunderstanding of how the natural world functions—as a complicated and multifaceted web, full of dissonance and juxtapositions, joy and pain, light and shadow, and, perhaps most importantly, utter indifference to human feeling—but also because it undermines what we really need to be working towards, which is this: respect for and conservation of entire ecosystems, including not only those species who fit a curated and sanitised image of nature, but also the species who do not fit that narrative. Like the powerful, predatory black-backed gull.

You might wonder if it really makes much difference. If a sanitised, moralised and romantic view of nature is what makes somebody care, what harm can there be? Surely, if anything, this would help rather than hinder conservation efforts?

I’ve been pondering this a lot lately, and have found myself thinking back to something that happened in early spring, 2018. My partner and I were driving through a Cornish village when I saw a magpie pinning an animal down on the tarmac. As we got closer, I saw that the animal was a slow worm, a species of legless lizard. Without thinking, I jumped out of the passenger seat of the (slowly) moving car and tried to snatch the injured slow worm from the magpie, only pausing because my partner shouted what are you doing?!. In this pause, the magpie flew away with its meal.

Only later, when I really examined my behaviour, did I realise that while this may have looked like a selfless act, it was not. After all, if I had saved that slow worm something would still have died that day—a magpie needs to eat. Perhaps it would have been another slow worm, perhaps a chick or a mouse. Or perhaps the magpie would have died, if it had found no other meal. And by saving that particular slow worm, I’d also be condemning its future prey (slugs, earthworms) to death.

No, I’d tried to save the slow worm because (i) I was empathising⁶ with it but not with the magpie (nor the magpie’s alternative prey, nor the slow worm’s future meals), and (ii) I was not ready to accept the complexity of our interconnectedness, that all life is built on death’s back, that brutality is often beauty’s mirror. I wanted a Disneyfied version of nature, one without darkness or death or struggle, one where our human hearts are catered to and coddle. And when that is not what I saw, it struck me as wrong.

As if the magpie was breaking a promise.

As if the magpie was the villain of the story.

A friend who teaches a university conservation course told me that once, on safari, a group of budding conservationists became extremely distressed at the sight of a lion hunting a gazelle. She felt that the students were not just upset about the impending death of the gazelle, nor simply empathising with its plight, but that they seemed angry at the perceived injustice of it. As if the lions were being mean, somehow.

And when I was recounting the story of the dolphin stranding to a friend last week, she was horrified when I mentioned that a bird had pecked at the blowhole of one of them. That’s so horrible, she said, I just never think about nature being cruel.

Cruel. Villain. Mean. Tyrant. All of these words have such deep moral roots.

I don’t think anyone can be blamed for moralising nature. It’s not a personal flaw, but a perspective that our culture perpetuates—and not only through Disney films, but in a more general way. We are constantly being told that nature is good for us⁷, that it is beautiful and peaceful and wholesome, that everything ‘natural’ is ‘right’. And we are therefore shocked, outraged, when we see the darker side of nature; the gorier side, the side of claw and tooth and flesh and death, and complete and utter indifference.

I don’t think we can be blamed for this, but also I think that we must challenge ourselves to break free from these perspectives and try to stop imposing our moral values onto the natural world. This is important because moralising nature inevitably leads to us valuing some species more than others, and we simply cannot afford to do this. We must value the whole, because without valuing the whole we will not do our best to protect it, and if we do not protect the whole, then the vast, interdependent, impossibly complex web of life becomes more fragile; more likely to fracture, to break. The web needs the magpie as much as the slow worm, the lion as much as the gazelle, the black-backed gull as much as the rabbit she drowns. The web is not for us to manicure, is not for us to curate, is not for us to moralise. The web has no victims and no villains. The web is just the web.

And in this world where humans dominate and destroy and extract and exploit, the web—all of it—needs our protection.

I watch the black-backed gull bank and swoop low over the rocks, then rise up, up, up, into that blank white sky.

Later, this place will come alive with pumping hearts and smiles and laughter, gaggles of snow-drunk children, cackles of ravens, a highway of rabbit prints in the snow.

But, right now, in this quiet dawn, there is already life.

There is a great black-backed gull on the hunt for her next meal, her pumping heart just as vital and as beautiful as any one of ours.

A great black-backed gull snatches a common eider duckling. By needsmoreritalin - own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10501260.

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1. I wrote this some weeks ago. Sadly the snow has all gone now; we are back to rain and gales.

2. It is very difficult to tell male from female, but we have a terrible habit of defaulting to male when we don’t know sex, so consider this my small protest.

3. Bent, A. C. (1921). Life histories of North American gulls and terns. United States National Museum Bulletin 113.

4. Palestis, B. G., & Burger, J. (1998). Evidence for social facilitation of preening in the common tern. Animal Behaviour, 56(5), 1107-1111.

In this paper, there is anecdotal evidence of socially contagious preening in black-backed gulls. It’s worth noting that there are very few behavioural studies of black-backs though. We really don’t know much about them.

5. I don’t think I coined this. If you’ve seen it before, please let me know where!

6. I will explore empathy and how it intersects with conservation (for better and, sometimes, for worse) in a future essay.

7. Which is true. Empirical data shows time and again that getting out in nature improves wellbeing, but I often wonder how much this is to do with the way spending time in nature reframes our understanding of ‘self’ and our place in the world, rather than because nature is inherently soothing/calming/healing (because while it can be all these things, it can also be the antithesis).