In 2023, the State of Nature Report announced that Britain was one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries. This can have been scarcely surprising to anyone conscious of the ever-emptier countryside, and perhaps even expected for a small island that gave birth to the Industrial Revolution. But Lee Raye’s many sources reveal that the process has long predated the steam engine, with far-reaching effects not just on the natural world but on national psychology.
The 14 species featured in this book once bulked large in the British consciousness – as living beings and also as metaphors, morals, similes and symbols. They gradually vanished from view, impoverishing both the environment and our imaginations, and we now long for them: as amputees suffer ghost pains in their missing limbs, we feel the loss of animals once central to our culture.
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