This fictional creative piece allows he voice of Edna to talk about her beloved fenland in the context of 'shifting baseline syndrome'. It is the second in a series of 12 essays on 'Shifting baselines' looking at different ecosystems and how they have become depleted in living memory. They are written in dialect where possible to acknowledge the language around nature that is being lost concurrently with nature itself. You want to know what the fen was. Well. Sit you down, th

Maps, satellites and the science of place From the ground, a garden can feel a bit like an island. A fence on every side, a gate, a boundary you mow up to and no further. You tend your patch, and the world beyond the hedge is somebody else's business. But if you see it from above, the way a swift sees it, or a satellite, or an ecologist bent over a screen, the fences dissolve. Your garden is no longer an island at all. It is one green cell in a vast, breathing tissue of garde

"Save the bees" may be one of most successful conservation slogan of our age. It is on tote bags and T-shirts, in supermarket campaigns and children's books, and it has done a great deal of good in waking people up to the plight of pollinators. But it carries a rather awkward problem. The bee that most people picture when they hear it, the honeybee in its wooden hive, is largely doing fine. In some places it is doing a little too well. And the bees that genuinely need saving

Dragonflies were mastering flight three hundred million years before the first bird. They hunt with incredible precision, live most of their lives unseen underwater, and one of them holds the record for the longest migration of any insect on earth. They are also a living verdict on the health of your water, and one of the very few wild wonders you can summon to your own patch by digging a simple pond with shallow margins and a few plants. A dragonfly hangs in the air at the e

Why the river you think is healthy and the garden you think is wild are both haunted by an abundance you never experienced, and what shifting baseline syndrome means for anyone trying to bring nature back. Stand on a bridge over a lowland river on a bright morning. The water runs more or less clear. A moorhen picks along the margin, willows lean over the bank, a couple of mallard drift past. It looks, by any ordinary reckoning, like a healthy river. A nice river. The kind of