Tim Ecott

We seem to be wilfully blind when it comes to nature. Right now, Australia is in the grip of an unprecedented environmental disaster. The largest living structure on Earth, the Great Barrier Reef, is mortally sick. Across hundreds of miles of ocean, from Papua New Guinea and all the way southwards along the east coast of Australia, the reef is dying. Famously, the GBR is the only living structure visible from space – almost two thousand miles long and about the size of Germany. It’s suffering what the scientists call ‘bleaching’, a process where corals eject the algae that give them their bright colours, and turn white. They do it when they suffer stress, most commonly when the water in which they live warms up by more than 1°C above what they are accustomed to.

For 40 years, ever since Jaws set box-office records and struck terror into the hearts of a generation, there’s been a counter-movement to rehabilitate the reputation of sharks. Marine scientists were appalled by the film, and have spent nearly half a century telling us that these sinister creatures are just misunderstood. Very few sharks are dangerous, they say. Do not be afraid! But I’ve dived with hundreds of sharks, and I’m scared of them. Sharks are terrifying — that’s what makes them great. I’ve been fascinated by sharks ever since watching Jaws as a teenager. I have more than 40 books about them on my shelves and I read any report of shark attacks I can find.

Once again, a feeble desire to be democratic and appeal to potential church-goers has led the C of E into muddy waters. No, I'm not talking about women bishops, but the Church of England's much more significant — and damaging – decision, rubber stamped last Sunday, to remove the Devil from the liturgy of Baptism. Instead of being asked to reject ‘the devil and all rebellion against God’, parents at a Christening will now blandly be asked to ‘turn away from sin’. The change of language means the liturgy is now so removed from the original Book of Common Prayer as to be unrecognisable, but members of the Synod were told that a pilot scheme of the new version in selected churches had ‘proved extremely popular’.

In Tórshavn, capital of the Faroe Islands, I met a man who first helped his father kill a whale with a sharp knife when he was eight years old. The spouting blood soaked his hair and covered his face like warpaint.  He remembered the warmth on his skin, a contrast to the cold North Atlantic in which they stood. These days we assume that people who kill whales and dolphins must be bad. Flipper and his cousins are our friends, and notwithstanding that unfortunate business with Moby-Dick, those who pursue whales for their flesh must be terrible human beings. We know now, as Herman Melville did not, that cetaceans are exceptional mammals, highly intelligent with elaborate social networks and close family relationships.