The darkest hour may be just before the dawn, but the darkest morning comes well after midwinter, when the jollity of Christmas has long since faded away.The latest sunrise is almost three weeks after the December solstice. It might be a fresh calendar year and a new start, but as I cycled out today it was one of the bleakest weeks of the year, with barely eight hours of daylight on my map. 

The January sun, when it eventually showed up, skulked low and reluctant across the sky. There had been a roaring in the wind all night and the rain fell in floods. And now in the morning I was on my way masochistically to what looked to be one of the most nature-deplet- ed squares on my map, in one of the most nature-depleted countries on the planet. This crowded map lies on the outskirts of a large city, so there are many pressures on its space, including farming, transport, 

industry, housing, and recreation. Everywhere you look, you see human impacts on the landscape, ranging from landfill sites to relaid hedges. 

There was little need for the cartographer to use any green ink here; the whole square was a grey grid of boxes representing buildings. Colour came only from two busy roads, marked in yellow. There were just four scraps of footpath, little more than a couple of hundred metres of cracked tarmac, broken glass and dog mess. I felt in more need than usual of nature’s gladness, but could I find any of it here? 

The tragedy of the commons, that individuals ignore what is best for society in pursuing personal gain, suggests that humans can- not manage a common resource. Why do we care so little about the Earth? Is it because we assume it is limitless? Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s perspective on Earth changed after flying to space. He said, ‘You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.” ’ 

Why do we care so little about nature and its tragic decline? Is it because we have stopped noticing it? It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. It is not that the world is too small, but that we miss so much of it.