Baker considered it a kind of eulogy: “Few peregrines are left, there will be fewer, they may not survive […] Before it is too late, I have tried to recapture the extraordinary beauty of this bird and to convey the wonder of the land he lived in.”

Healing the planet has never been more urgent, and wonder – as a vital balm to Earth’s troubling wounds – has never been more necessary.

American author Elizabeth Kolbert has been describing our apparent suicidal disregard for nature for years. In 2015, she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for The Sixth Extinction, her stark journalist’s account of rapidly vanishing species.

Her most recent book, Under A White Sky: The Nature of the Future (2021), conjures an equally grim spectre: the sheer enormity of our man-made environmental disasters, she warns, means we can’t fix one without unleashing another.

Yet, when the alternative is rising seas drowning many of the world’s cities, what choice do we have? Which way do we turn? Our human power over the planet has put us in the driver’s seat, explains Kolbert, but we still have no sense of direction. “In the age of man,” she writes, “there’s nowhere to go.”

Critics worry, however, that thinking of forests as a climate solution first will inspire the planting of vast tracts of fast-growing trees. These large-scale plantations would do little to encourage other forest life. Any gains in the fight against climate change would be worthless, of course, if the crisis of shrinking biodiversity continues to imperil the world.

For Canadian academic and writer Glenn Willmott, nature’s diversity does more than support life; it is essential to our sense of wonder. His book Reading for Wonder: Ecology, Ethics, Enchantment (2017) links this ineffable feeling of awe to our possibly innate attraction to nature. Wonder – especially at things wild – is crucial to how we respond to, appreciate and understand the world.

Wonder is also something of an endangered species itself. As humans become increasingly urban, dulled by technology and distant from nature, disenchantment is spreading like wildfire. At risk is our sense of the world’s wild magic – a magic that is crucial to what it means to be human. “Wonder,” exhorts Willmott, “needs rescuing”.

British food journalist Dan Saladino agrees. In his new book, Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them (2021), Saladino offers a very particular but clear illustration of why diversity matters: our palates are being robbed of the range of rich taste experiences.

Since World War II, our systematic push to make foods more industrialised, predictable and accessible has reduced our diet to just a few varieties of crops and animals controlled by even fewer companies. Meanwhile, thousands of other lesser-known foods are being allowed to disappear.

That dwindling variety, however, is critical. The disappearing foods could hold the key to not only resilience and disease protection for our global food supply but also to the essential flavours and food experiences that reflect our human cultures, histories and heritage.

The legacy of these foods, argues Saladino, mirrors our relationship with the world. “The endangered foods in this book helped make us who we are,” he writes.

The same could be said to be true of all nature’s teeming diversity. It is why many of the extraordinary, often odd but always impassioned conservationists of the past have fought hard to protect it. In her book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction (2021), journalist Michelle Nijhuis offers some beguiling, revealing portraits of several of them.

Chinese conservationists call for ‘human-based’ approach to biodiversity

From nature’s great classifier Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century, to William Hornaday and Aldo Leopold at conservation’s 20th century frontier, to those working in the field today, the characters in this book love non-human life in a way that’s far more profound than humanity’s very practical need for it. “Though they often used pragmatic arguments to convert others to their cause,” writes Nijhuis, “their personal motivations ran deeper”.

Rachel Carson, the American marine biologist who launched the modern environmental movement with her book Silent Spring in 1962, is among them. As a conservation icon, Carson figures – explicitly or in spirit – not just in Nijhuis’ book but also in the other volumes discussed above.

That’s because Carson believed that the multitude and majesty of life’s fascinating forms both inspire wonder and – if we want to rescue the world – require it of us: “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race.”

In Willmott’s book (from which I cribbed that quote), Carson’s faith in the power of wonder is heartening. When she died from cancer complications at the height of her fame in 1964, she was planning another book that was to be called A Sense of Wonder. It was to be based on an earlier article in which she argues that responding to nature with childlike enchantment is essential to caring about it – and, importantly, to desiring to protect it.

Preserving wonder, therefore, is imperative not just for nature’s salvation, but for our own: “Those who contemplate the beauty of the Earth,” she writes, “find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.”

These days, wonder doesn’t come up much in discussions about saving nature. New conservation more frequently talks money. It attaches economic value to the “ecosystem services” that nature provides people: forest-filtered clean air, bee-pollinated crops, algae-captured carbon, etc. This is undoubtedly important – industry and policy types often respond best to the language of ledgers – but it is not, and cannot be, enough.

I’ve seen no calculation, for example, of the commercial worth of a vertiginous swirl of peregrine falcons. Nor can I imagine the practical importance of the eerie, otherworldly whoops of endangered white-handed gibbons I heard in Thailand’s Khao Yai National Park, or the slow, magnificent surfacing of endangered humpback whales I witnessed off the United States’ east coast. The power in these experiences has no price tag, but the impact can be tremendous.

Consider the falcons. These days, peregrines are no longer endangered in many jurisdictions throughout the world. It’s a rare conservation success story: pesticide controls and government reintroduction programmes (like the one for which I worked) have increased populations and almost certainly saved this incredible species from disappearing altogether.

These efforts were initiated in the 1970s and continued for decades, and they did so in the absence of any pragmatic or economic reasons for them. More likely, peregrine conservation (and the bird’s remarkable return from the brink) have had more to do with the message made clear in Baker’s book, by Carson’s plea and by the passion of the many conservationists and nature writers who came after.

As it happens, humanity’s time on this planet corresponds with the greatest period of species diversity ever seen. For most of the billions of years before people showed up, the planet survived quite nicely with fewer varieties of life. Perhaps it could do so again. It’s a possibility that our species seems determined to test.

Yet, whether Earth could carry on with fewer species may not be the issue. Without nature’s diversity to fuel our very human need for wonder, the more pressing question is, could we?