Prologue

Summary

The man was returning, after a gap of thirty years, to the landscape in which, as a teenage boy, he loved to wander. He could remember clearly the forest of Scots pine and birch through which he would walk almost every day and, beyond its fringe, the fast-running river that joined the loch to the sea. He could still picture the hillside that rose from the opposite bank of the river: amongst the heathers and bracken, he would, on clear days, see deer, fox, rabbits, even weasels and badgers – all of them under the watchful eyes of the red kites that circled above.

Three decades on the place was very different. The forest had gone: only the stumps of the trees remained, jutting from muddy soil criss-crossed by bulldozer tracks. The river no longer tumbled, but flowed languidly, towards the sea, its surface covered with scum from a salmon farm built further up the loch. On the hillside beyond, the heathers and bracken had disappeared, burnt by fires resulting from the freak temperatures of the summer. There would, the man knew, be no deer, foxes or rabbits inhabiting this desert. Most of them would anyway have become victims of the shooters who, in recent years, paid large sums of money to kill almost anything that moved. The red kites, with no animals to keep an eye on, had flown elsewhere.

As he looked at this devastated environment, the man fought to suppress the animosity, hatred even, that he started to feel towards humankind. The desolation before him was, after all, down to human beings, not “the forces of nature”. This was so even with the heathland fires, which registered humanly engineered climate change. Nor were the interventions responsible for the desolation the result of honest mistakes or of benign intentions gone awry. Instead they manifested human failings: greed, hubris, cruelty, indifference, mindlessness, and many others.

Incipient feelings of hatred towards human beings were not new to the man. Whether on his travels, through watching television documentaries, or reading about the fate of species and environments, he had encountered many other instances of human depredation of the natural world.