when god is an excuse for greed

of redwings and rage

I am walking on the northwestern edge of this small island I call home, looking out to a wild Atlantic. It is mid-afternoon, but the light is weak and low.

I raise my face to the sky and let the shallow winter sun lake upon my face. When I open my eyes, I see the white lips of the waves lit up in the long light, bright against the dark water.

I will never understand the spectrum that an ocean contains: in this yellow light it is a warm purple with hues of blue, but it is shifting constantly, a palette just beyond my grasp.

The sun sets. The sea darkens. The world becomes a muted version of itself. The wide expanse of moor and cliff and ocean feel like an open palm. I have always loved these bleak sorts of landscapes; have always been drawn to wide open spaces, sparse and quiet.

It was this that first drew me to the Orkney Islands: the bare fields, open cliffs, huge seas and huge skies; the way space seems to gift itself to our small human bodies. The world feels more expansive, here; as if it is yawning out to us, inviting us into something a little more edgeless.

In the gloaming, along with the sound of wind and waves, I hear the high-pitched call of the redwings overhead. These are the final migrating flocks; most have passed over these islands already. Forty thousand of them have migrated over the Orkney Islands this autumn, a number I find difficult to fathom. For a week, all we saw was wave after wave filling our skies, and all we heard was the whistle of their calls.

Altogether, more than half a million redwings will arrive to the UK from Scandinavia this winter. Or something like that; it’s hard to say. In three generations, there has been a 30% decline in redwing numbers, so each year we are likely to get fewer and fewer in our skies.

Around half of UK bird species have declining population sizes. I wonder how much that is astonishing now would once have seemed barren: the birdsong in our skies nothing compared to the choirs of the past; the migrating flocks just a whisper of what once was.

Shifting baseline syndrome is often talked about in conservation science. It’s the idea that our baseline expectation is informed by what we, personally, have witnessed in our lifetime. This means that over time, our collective understanding of what is normal shifts. When we witness changing habitats, warming weather, declines in wildlife numbers, we are usually using what we have known in our own lifetimes as the reference point, not what previous generations have known.

This means we lack perspective on how extreme the changes in our world are. Each generation, we slip further down the slope of biodiversity loss, climate change, habitat destruction – but we slip inch by inch, so we do not notice quite how extreme the fall is, quite how incredible the incline.

If our great, great, great grandparents could witness the world as we know it now, would it break their hearts? The dawn air void of song. The summers empty of insects. Forests lost. Landscapes vast and barren. Skies, almost blank.

I’m interested in this idea of shifting baselines not only from a conservation perspective, but also a political one. Generally, humans become more pessimistic about politics as we grow older. We often start naïve and full of hope about what our politicians might be able to achieve, but year on year, as we witness the people in power being bought by the big boys with money, as we witness false promises and hollow words, we accept that politicians often do not act in our interest. Especially when it comes to long-term problems. Especially when it comes to climate change.

At first, we hope for international agreements to end the extraction of fossil fuels. Then we hope for a promise to slow it down. Then we hope for just one promise, just something, just anything at all.

This works in their favour, of course, this declining expectation of action. Shifting baseline syndrome in the political sphere turns rage to apathy, screams of how could they to mumblings of of course they did.

I, for one, have been doing little more than rolling my eyes when I read about the ridiculous state of affairs at COP29. Global leaders are supposedly meeting to discuss how they will tackle climate change, but fossil fuel lobbyists have received more passes to the meeting than all the delegates from the 10 most climate-vulnerable nations combined, and the meeting has been used as a place to engineer yet more fossil fuel deals.

The leader of COP29 said that fossil fuels are a gift from god, and no country should be penalised for using what god has gifted them.

The leader of a meeting aimed at mitigating climate change said this.

What does his god think about the fact that burning these fossil fuels is going to ramp up the likelihood of mass displacement, starvation, extinction? Why does his god care more about money than living beings?

Of course, this is not about god at all. It is about greed. God is an excuse.

I find myself overcome with apathy.

I am still trying to understand how to change my apathy into something more meaningful, into something that might make some small morsel of difference. Addressing my shifting baseline is important, I think, and probably the first step: I need to expect something again – decision, action, progress.

This, alone, is perhaps my first small act of protest.

So, too, is reminding myself that the tsunami of redwings flying over this island, that the great waves of starlings and the gush of the sparrows are all, in fact, a mere trickle of what used to be normal.

That what I consider bleak and beautiful landscapes are actually starved and depleted lands.

That the world is struggling, and that it can be so hard to understand the scale of the struggle within the frame of a single lifetime, but it does not make it any less true.

That what I need to feel is not apathy, but rage.

On the northwestern edge of this small island, I raise my face to the sky, let this autumn dusk paint me blue.

I listen to the last of the redwings’ whistles, fading into the dark.

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