On my first night in the jungle in Panama, I spotted blue reflective glints on the ground. I was making my way back to my tent by the light of my head torch. As I turned, there they were\u2014among the leaves and debris\u2014gleaming with a profound bright turquoise. What were they? Drops of rain or dew? Some sticky, blue-tinged sap excreted by one of the many millions of plants I knew nothing about? I\u2019d already seen the nests\u2014like clay bags hanging from branches\u2014of the oropendola bird, whose call sounds precisely like someone dropping a marble into a bucket of water: plop-sploosh. Who knew what other wonders awaited me? Fascinated, I knelt down in my long, mosquito-proof trousers and brought my head closer to one of the bright-azure reflectors. And then I saw it. Each of those thousands of tiny blue reflective glints was\u2026a set of spider eyes.\u00a0I double-checked the insect-proof zip on my tent every night after that.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was incredibly lucky\u2014in so many ways\u2014that I was travelling with Margaret Atwood. She is at home in wild nature: her father was a Canadian Forestry Board entomologist. She had suggested this birding trip to Dari\u00e9n with the extraordinary company Naturalist Journeys. When I told her about the spiders the next day, she immediately got out her own torch to have a good look. No matter how much you know about the wild, there\u2019s always more to learn. And it was certainly on that trip to Panama that my new novel The Future<\/em> started to germinate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Germination and other plant metaphors are extremely apt. The jungle teems with life. I had heard that before, but until I was actually there, I couldn\u2019t imagine what it meant. Everywhere you look is alive. The ground throngs with beetles, millipedes, and plants: seemingly dozens of species in every square inch. The trunks of the trees are covered in mosses that are themselves full of tiny insects; the sky is filled with birds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At dawn and dusk, the chorus is almost too loud to speak over. At night, the howler monkeys crash through the jungle. I had previously experienced nature as calm and quiet. It was in Dari\u00e9n that I realised that what I\u2019d thought of as \u2018nature\u2019 is the denuded, half-dead, withered agricultural landscape of the United Kingdom. Pretty fields and manicured gardens are all very well, but they\u2019re not wild nature. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What I felt, when I realised this, was grief. I\u2019m in my mid-forties now, and even the pockets of nature I remember from my suburban London childhood\u2014scrubland next to the Tube lines, picking wild blackberries, hedgehogs in the garden at night, sometimes with their hoglet young, little prickly buttons\u2014are gone. According to the WWF, the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How has it happened? I\u2019m a novelist concerned with power. I am interested in the forces\u2014seen and often unseen\u2014that shape us, make us do certain things, and believe things even about ourselves without our truly being aware of them. We thought our abundant natural world would always be there. We got excited about looking at our screens\u2014and there was a lot of money to be made convincing us not to look away. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We mistook a text-prediction tool for \u2018artificial intelligence\u2019. A virtual companion cannot make up for the lost companionship of the natural world. Listen, I love technology. It\u2019s just that its place is to enrich our Around the time I was in Dari\u00e9n, I read that technology billionaires had built themselves survival bunkers so that they don\u2019t need to live through a climate or environmental disaster with us. This struck me as a doctrine of despair. If the richest people on the planet have these bunkers, it means they have no need to try to make it better for the rest of us. That\u2019s how power works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
lives, not to replace them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n