Question: why should the arrival of a new vaccine in Dar es Salaam in 1960 indirectly treble the number of giraffes 500 miles away and ten years later?
Answer: because the local cattle no longer infected the up country ones with rinderpest, who passed on the compliment to the wild buffalo and wildebeest, whose populations in the Serengeti soared, resulting in 1.5 million animals cropping the grass right down which meant that, in the dry season, there was only a tiny fraction of the normal number of bush fires, which meant that the trees grew tall again, which brought back the giraffes. Welcome to the Serengeti Rules, which set out how the different ‘trophic cascades’ between keystone species (in this case the wildebeest) and just about everything else that goes on both above and below it in the food chain.
This is genuinely more fascinating than anything I have written afterwards, so spend a happy half hour or so listening to a thoroughly entertaining scientist explaining how your world works.
By the same token, in what passes as the ecosystem of my brain, one viewing too many of Robert Jenrick in my Sunday paper has caused me to undertake not to buy anything from any company with a river in its name for the duration of 2021. How so?
Because Caroline was bored of me going on about it, which caused her to say ‘why don’t you do something useful instead of moan?’, which caused me to go to my desk and sign up with a particular political party as the most vaguely useful thing I could think of at the time, which caused me to check out what their policy was on tax avoidance, which led me directly to realise that the only power I really wielded on this earth was with my wallet, which caused me promise before the Gods of the market that I would only spend my money in 2021 with companies whose behaviour coincided with my ideas about what is a fair level of corporate taxation, however inconvenient.
Because my wallet, which has been as hypocritical as anyone else’s in the past, is going to learn how to behave from now on. Because then I don’t have to be boring about it any more, and wonderful indie book stores (and any other sort of shop) like One Tree Books or the Petworth Bookshop will spread the benefit respectively around their local communities.
And whilst I accept that this makes for a poor look out for Thames Water, Clyde Holdings and Columbia Pictures, that’s the policy.
Which leaves only the question of what Robert Jenrick is for, but I think we can accept that this one is unanswerable.
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