A WILDER FUTURE


O “


nly connect!” EM Forster’s words – from his novel Howard’s End – are about the need to improve human relationships, but let’s borrow them, for they say a great


deal about the world we live in today. “Live no longer in fragments,” Forster added – the perfect moto for bees, toads and water voles. And just as good for our own relationship with nature. We need more connections. Just as more and beter


connections enrich human lives, so we need exactly the same things to keep the wild world wild. It’s a problem that’s been sneaking up on us


across the years. We can visit a fantastic nature reserve, but when it’s surrounded by industry, houses, roads and intensive farming, it’s an island – lovely but doomed. We have allowed the human world to take over our countryside. But we can fight back, and the way we can do


so is by joining up the good places, by soſtening and freeing our landscape, by allowing wild places and wild things to connect. We can, for example, make flower-filled roads for bees.


Cumbrian Wildlife | September 2019 33


RED-TAILED BUMBLEBEE: NICK UPTON/2020VISION


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