If you are old enough to have driven in Britain in the 1980s, you remember the windscreen. By July you could barely see through it. A run from Leeds to London in August finished with a bumper that looked like it had been to war and a sheet of glass you scrubbed with a sponge at the services while the engine ticked as it cooled. Moths in the headlights. Flies in the wing mirrors. The grille packed solid. Nobody thought it remarkable. It was simply the price of moving through a country that was still, in living memory, heaving with flying things. Drive that same road today. Stop at the same services. The windscreen is clean. Spotless. You could very nearly eat off it. We have the numbers, for those who want them. The Bugs Matter survey, run by Kent Wildlife Trust and Buglife, has had volunteers counting the splats on their number plates since 2004. Britain's flying insects are down by roughly four fifths in twenty years. Gone in a single human lifetime, while the rest of us noticed nothing at all. The birds went down with them, because the birds lived on them. A child born this year can grow up in the English countryside and never once hear a turtle dove, for the simple reason that there is almost nothing left to do the calling. And none of it, not one acre of it, happened on the grass. It happened in the arable fields, where the hedges were torn out for bigger machines and a single crop was sprayed over and over to keep it upright. The herb-rich meadow grazed by cattle still hums. The beetles, the pollinators, the ground-nesting birds, all still there, just about, on the pasture our ancestors never stopped grazing. So when someone tells you your steak is emptying the British countryside, ask them what grew on that field before it was drained and ploughed and sprayed to raise the oats for the carton in their fridge. It was grass, and there were cattle on it, and back then the windscreen needed cleaning.