Ghost Species

The historian and folklorist George Ewart Evans regarded the elders of the East Anglian countryside as ‘survivors from another era’. ‘They belong,’ he wrote in 1961, ‘essentially to a culture that has extended in an unbroken line since at least the early Middle Ages… The sort of knowledge that is waiting to be taken down from the old people is always on the brink of extinction.’ But, Evans asked, ‘what is…the place of the small farmer in the new, evolving economy of today… Is there a future for him? Or are we to be reconciled to his extinction, attributing it to something that was as inevitable as a thunderstorm?’

Extinction presently seems inevitable. The Wortley farm, like almost all small farms in East Anglia, now exists on a diminishing island of habitat. Approaching Methwold Hythe, Justin and I had driven for miles through the land of the Shropshires, a mega-farm of over 12,000 acres. ‘Shroppy’s nearly swallowed us up!’ Eric said to me that January afternoon, with indignation and a hint of pride that they hadn’t been gulped. The scale of the Shropshires’ operation is immense. Two years ago, when an unexpected May frost gripped the Fens, it was rumoured that they lost a million lettuces overnight.

Disappearance of all kinds preoccupies Eric. There is a spectral quality to his vision: he sees the past more naturally than he sees the present. The first time I went with Justin to visit him, on a hot August day, Eric took his stick from behind the door and walked us round his meadows, farm buildings and garden, talking all the while. I soon realized he was perceiving a different place from us: a farm where fences were mended, where pigs rooted in the straw, where the great chalk barn was uncracked and where horses grazed in the field behind the yard. ‘Ah, you know, the boys don’t see these things that I see,’ he told me.

Listening to Eric talk that day, I was reminded of the evolutionary concept of ‘ghost species’, an idea that entered conservation science in the mid-1980s. A ‘ghost’ is a species that has been out-evolved by its environment, such that, while it continues to exist, it has little prospect of avoiding extinction. Ghosts endure only in what conservation scientists call ‘non-viable populations’. They are the last of their lines.

The soft-shell sea turtle is a ghost. The desert bighorn is a ghost. The tiger is a ghost, as is the sawfish. Show specimens of these species may live on in zoos, parks or aquaria, carefully curated, perpetuated through captive-breeding programmes. But hunting, habitat loss and pollution mean that, in the wild, these creatures have now passed into their spectral phases. Some of the most remarkable ghost species are to be found in the world’s coral reefs. In those great stone cities are organisms about whose lives we know hardly anything and whose forms we can barely conceive of: the mountainous star coral or the Nassau grouper. Some of these creatures are angelic in their form, some demonic and none can exist outside the reef. They are almost all now ghosts, or near-ghosts, as the world’s reefs are presently dying because of pollution, overfishing and, above all, the increasing acidification of the oceans. If the world’s coral reefs are bleached into extinction, it will be the first time that human action has successfully annihilated an entire ecosystem.

The species most likely to become ghosts are those that are most place-faithful – which is to say, those that have evolved over long periods of time in response to the demands of a particular environment: reef, desert or jungle. Species whose specialized skills are not exportable beyond that environment and whose specialized needs cannot be satisfied elsewhere.

Historically, the idea of ghost species has been confined to the non-human kingdoms. But sitting in Eric’s kitchen that January day, it seemed clear that there were also human ghosts: types of place-faithful people who had been out-evolved by their environments – and whose future disappearance was almost assured.