The headlines from Australia are, by now, familiar in their horror. A plague of mice, biblical in scale, is ravaging the fertile plains of New South Wales and Queensland. Grain silos are turned into writhing nests. Hospital patients are bitten in their beds. Farmers set fire to their own fields in desperation. It is a catastrophe that speaks not merely of bad luck, but of a profound ecological and agricultural mismanagement that should give every British thinker pause.
Let us first acknowledge the sheer magnitude of the event. We are not speaking of a few dozen rodents in a barn. We are speaking of a population explosion so vast that the creatures have become a secondary plague in themselves, fouling machinery, destroying stored harvests, and spreading leptospirosis. The agricultural experts from Britain who have been consulted shake their heads with a mixture of sympathy and silent superiority. They speak of the collapse of natural predator populations, the overuse of certain pesticides, and the monoculture farming that leaves the landscape vulnerable.
But we must go deeper. The mouse plague is a symptom of a broader intellectual decadence, a refusal to think in terms of cycles and balances. For decades, Australian agriculture has pursued a model of maximum short-term yield, ignoring the warnings of ecologists. The result is a landscape stripped of its native resilience. The mouse, an opportunist, fills the vacuum. This is the same pattern we have seen in the fall of great civilisations: the silting of the Nile, the deforestation of Easter Island. A society that forgets its dependence on the natural order is a society that will be humbled.
And what of Britain? We sit in our green and pleasant land, tutting at the Australians, but we are not immune. Our own fields are increasingly given over to monoculture. Our own hedgehogs and barn owls, natural predators of the mouse, are in decline. Our own use of rodenticides has created resistant super-mice in our cities. The difference is one of degree, not kind. The Australian plague is a warning shot across our bow.
Some will dismiss this as alarmism. They will point to modern technology, to genetic modification and chemical warfare against the vermin. But technology cannot replace wisdom. The Australian farmers who now deploy poison and fire are fighting a symptom, not the cause. The cause is a broken relationship with the land. It is the same broken relationship that has led to soil degradation, water scarcity, and the loss of biodiversity across the developed world.
I write this not to gloat, but to provoke. The mouse plague is a mirror. It reflects our own complacency, our own arrogance. We imagine ourselves masters of nature, but nature always has the final word. The Romans thought their aqueducts and roads made them invincible. Then came the barbarians, but also the malaria and the lead poisoning. The Victorians thought their industry and empire were eternal. Then came the Somme and the Great Depression. We modern Britons think our supermarkets and climate control make us safe. Then comes a mouse.
What is to be done? First, we must abandon the fantasy of control. We cannot eliminate the mouse; we can only manage it. That means restoring hedgerows, protecting birds of prey, and rotating crops. It means accepting a slightly lower yield in exchange for a more stable system. It means thinking like a gardener, not a factory manager. Second, we must invest in ecological monitoring, not just for mice but for all the indicators of collapse. Third, we must cultivate a national identity that includes humility before the natural world, not just domination.
The Australian mouse plague is a tragedy. But it is also a lesson. The question is whether we are wise enough to learn it before the plague reaches our own shores. I suspect not. We will read the headlines, shake our heads, and return to our monocultures. And then, one day, we will have our own plague. And we will wonder, with the same pathetic surprise, how it came to this.
