OUR VERY OWN MASS EXTINCTION

I often go to a friend’s farm in South West England. It is a thrumming, singing place. I like to lie under a tree and look up through the canopy. The air is gritty with the carapaces of flying, flailing things. Breathing is risky, for them and for me. I inhale them and feel them bounce off my windpipe. Life hums and throbs – it’s a loud, wild cabaret.

Sometimes, if I’m feeling brave, I climb over the barbed wire fence into the neighbouring farm. There are no trees here, just oil-seed rape that smells of the air freshener in a factory toilet. If I wade twenty yards from the border the only sound is the growl of a GPS-controlled