Local Alastair Humphreys

The map promised waterfalls. I was not expecting the 979 metres of Venezuela’s Angel Falls (named after the American explorer and pilot Jimmy Angel, whose plane crashed on Auyán-Tepuí in 1937), the volume of Inga Falls in the DRC (more than 46 million litres per second), or even the Denmark Strait cataract (an undersea waterfall plummeting unseen for 3,500 metres beneath the Atlantic Ocean). But the word ‘waterfall’ was not something I had expected to see annotated on my suburban lowland map, so I was excited to investigate. 
My heart sank when I saw that the stream ran straight across a golf course. Golf courses are like a certain type of model. At first glance, your eyes light up at the swathes of undulating lushness. But your passion quickly plummets at the emptiness you find, the lack of nature beneath an artificial, preened veneer. The golf course did not bode well for my waterfalls. 

I dug out a pair of shorts to welcome in June. My legs shone ala- baster white, brighter than the day’s glorious sun. The lightness I felt inside made me aware of how sluggish I had been throughout the dark half of the year. Today, though, I was alert and enthusiastic. Even bet- ter, a chalk stream kissed the corner of today’s grid square. So I began there, with the banks shaded by overhanging willow trees and lined with pink foxgloves, and with the clear water burbling. Trout nosed into the current beneath an arched brick bridge with an inscription saying it had been rebuilt in 1773. While the fish were free to swim, a ‘Private Property’ sign chained across the river prohibited curious explorers from enjoying the stream. 

I found an elevated spot where I could peep through the fence and look down on the new town being built across this blank grid square. Yet my map has never been blank. Even our brief history here stretches back hundreds of thousands of years to the Neanderthal hand axes dis- covered nearby, tools once used to butcher animals and make clothes. I’ve heard that sort of fact so often that it didn’t particularly astonish me. But learning that the axes were made by Homo heidelbergensis, an extinct species of archaic human, rather than by Homo sapiens, remind- ed me how rare it is for there to be just a single species within a genus (known as a monotypic genus). This is a dubious, lonely honour that we share with the dugong, narwhal, platypus, and not much else. 
There used to be nine species of human. That we alone remain is testament to our aggressive, expansionist success, wiping out many species on our march to dominance, from dodos and all of Australia’s megafauna, to the recent ivory-billed woodpecker and splendid poison 
Swifts 
frog (the first two examples when I asked Google which species have gone extinct recently). We are uniquely dangerous. 
But our success over the other Homo species was also down to our superior skills of communication and community. Yes, we wreck everything, but we are also well suited to fixing problems, if only we choose to do so. We need now to tell the stories that will ignite every- body to care about the perilous state of nature and the impact its col- lapse is having on people across the world. And then we need our local, national and international communities to work together to turn that around. Will we choose to balance our remorseless progress with con- cern and empathy? 

You should sit in nature for twenty minutes every day, they say, unless you’re too busy; then you should sit for an hour. I sat for a while on the bench on a small, triangular village green because I thought I was too busy to be doing this today. It was a cold and blustery morn- ing, so I was wearing a hat and gloves again and hunkering down into my collar. I’d hung all the washing on the line before heading out, but now it looked like it was going to pour with rain. I was also in a bit of a grump because this square looked dull on the map. But a few min- utes of stillness helped to settle me into a calmer mood and slowed my impatient mind. 
A sign on the green said the village was supporting No Mow May, which explained why the grass was peppered with wildflowers. In Britain we revere short, stripy lawns. But the charity Plantlife urges us to enjoy the beauty and the wildlife benefits that come from allowing lawns, greens and verges to run a little wild for a month. After No Mow May, up to 200 species can be found flowering on lawns, including 
Buttercups 
such rarities as meadow saxifrage, knotted clover and eyebright, as well as an abundance of daisy, white clover and selfheal. The longer you leave a lawn unmown, the wider the range of plants, while cutting the grass every four weeks generates the greatest quantity of wildflowers and nectar. 

My childhood bedroom overlooked a village green, and I have been fond of those open spaces ever since. My brother and I used to hang out there with our friends. It was our amphitheatre, the scene of day- long rugby matches, and a cricket pitch with the twin hazards of hor- rific bounce after cows had been herded across the wicket, and the risk of a lost ball if an exuberant shot sent it flying into the garden of the grumpy man who lived in the cottage in the centre of the green. 
Given that it was early May, it was apt that the pub on today’s charming village green was called The Green Man. Appearing in vari- ous guises over time – usually a green head sprouting leaves and foliage – the Green Man used to be a central figure in May Day celebrations. 
Green Man 
His origins are murky, but he has been carved in churches and build- ings for a thousand years as a symbol of spring’s rebirth. The Romans had similar figures, as seen, for example, in Nero’s Golden House pal- ace. Bacchus, god of wine, nature and harvest, was often portrayed as a leaf-crowned lord, so he might be the ancestor of our Green Man. 
The Gaelic festival of Beltane was a forerunner of today’s numerous worldwide celebrations of May Day. It was a community celebration of summer’s return. The origin of the word Beltane is ‘bright fire’ and, as always, bonfires played an important role in the rituals. Revellers danced around purifying flames to welcome the lighter half of the year after the long winter. When farmers led their animals out to spring pastures, they made sure to drive them between two fires to bring good luck. 

‘At any rate, spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can’t stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t... The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.’ 
George Orwell