The Guardian view on this false autumn: an uncanny beauty
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Version 0 of 1. Across Britain we are witnessing processes that look familiar but are too early and not what they seem. We must use them as a warning to act Across Britain, the woods are turning orange. Drifts of dry leaves are growing on forest floors and eddying into street corners. Hawthorn and rowan, elder and holly berries are all ripening, and the ferns are fringes of gold. From a distance, it is beautiful. But the air is still warm and summery. And all of it is two or three months early. Holly berries usually ripen in November or December. Blackberries, traditionally a late August treat, began ripening at the end of June. This turning and leaf fall is not the usual gradual preparation for winter in temperate zones but a stress response by trees trying to conserve water. We are now in a false autumn, caused by heat and drought. And it feels wrong. John Ruskin coined the term pathetic fallacy to describe the way in which writers connect weather to human emotion. He intended it to be derogatory, and it’s true that it is a hackneyed literary gambit. But it is used so often because it tracks how atavistically connected even the most urban, screen-tethered humans are to the physical rhythms of our world. “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall,” wrote F Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, and underlying his assertion is trust in the universe, and a deep consolation: when all else fails, nature will follow a cycle beyond the level of thought. There is, therefore, something deeply unsettling about such a graphic alteration of familiar rhythms. Droughts are not unknown in Britain, of course, and too many parts of the world are wearily familiar with far more severe versions. But increasingly they are occurring in the context of a climate emergency, and unprecedented heat. And the beauty of a false autumn, specifically, has an emotional effect, a deep uncanniness, something mysteriously suggestive of evil or danger; in that idea of evil is also an assertion of moral failure. Cultures across the world contain rites for the propitiation of the weather; a sense of responsibility for the natural world – and the belief that it will punish us if we fail it – is as old as humanity. One of the reasons the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is so viscerally effective is the directness with which it links the shooting of an albatross – the destruction of innocent wildlife – to a terrible change in the weather: no rain, just blistering, death-dealing sun. We may not understand the mechanism, but at an instinctual level it feels right. And in a similar way it has not really been a surprise to hear that birds are struggling. In London, young swifts were seen falling out of the sky. Fewer – and too early – nuts and berries mean some animals will not live through this winter. Older trees, with their longer roots, will hopefully survive, but young trees may not, with all that means for further warming. There will always be a degree of uncertainty about the causes of specific weather events, but we cannot deny that we have not taken care of the albatross. Now we must hope we are doing enough to make sure that these eerie golden days are not an autumn of autumns. |