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?