The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by Michael McCarthy Page A

seen it before. Or perhaps, I saw it with a different part of me.
    Before, had you asked me about it, I would have said that the estuary was broad. It was long. It was flat. It was green. Or, sometimes, it was wet.
    Now I would say something different: it was wonderful.
    I loved it with as intense a love as I had ever experienced, and there, sitting on the embankment, in the sunshine and the wind, with the wild calls drifting to my ears, I looked on the natural world, and I felt joy.

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The Bond and the Losses
    So many powerful minds have addressed it, the unrelenting destruction of nature around the globe, so many experts have looked at the economics and the ecology and tried to reconcile them, so many thousands of detailed policies have been worked out and applied, so much intellectual effort and so much idealistic concern have been thrown at the problem, year after year after year, that the question presents itself at once: how on earth might it be the basis of a better defence, a better defence of the natural world, the fact that one autumn afternoon, more than half a century ago, a teenager sat looking down an estuary and suddenly felt happy?
    We think of ourselves, especially since the decline of Christianity in the West, and its replacement by our current creed, liberal secular humanism, as rational beings entirely; we pride ourselves that, faced with a Problem, with a capital P, we may employ Reason, with a capital R, and naturally find a Solution, with a capital S. We believe that this will deliver, every time. Rationality is ingrained in a million mindsets. Yet the world does not always work like that (as those who lived through the two world wars, mired in chaos and evil, knewonly too well). And there is another way of going about things, in dealing with the mortal threats that our planet now faces, which is to consider, not what we do, but who we are.
    Most of us probably think we know. We do not give it a second thought. But in the last thirty years or so, a new understanding, by no means yet widespread or popularised, has begun to dawn of what it means to be human, based on a simple but monumental perception: the fifty thousand generations through which we evolved as hunter-gatherers are more important to our psychological make-up, even today, than the five hundred generations we have spent since agriculture began and with it, civilisation. We possess the culture of the farmers, the subduers of nature, and the citizens who came after with their settled lives and their writing and law and architecture and money, yes of course we do, but deep down, beneath culture in the realms of instinct, at the profoundest levels of our psyche – the new vision has it – we remain the children of the Pleistocene, the million years-plus of the great glaciations, when the natural world was not subdued and we lived as an integral part of it, in coming to be what we are. The legacy inside us has not been lost, and in many ways it is controlling.
    The insight is from evolutionary biology, which in recent decades has moved on from exploring how, through Darwin’s principle of natural selection, the peacock evolved its resplendent tail and the parrot its formidable beak, to looking at how in just the same way people evolved to be people; specifically, it is from the relatively new discipline of evolutionary psychology, which examines the ways in which the human mind adapted itself to the issues that Pleistocene hunter-gatherers faced in their daily lives, as over thousands of generations they gradually evolved inherent traits and instinctive reactions which remain with us still. The consequent account of what appears to be psychologically ‘hard-wired’ inside us, the list of putative human universals, is long and fascinating,from our fondness for sweet foods to our fear of snakes and spiders, from children’s enjoyment of hiding to their predisposition to climb trees, from our ability to throw objects precisely at a target