When the Roman curia collapsed, the first sign was not the barbarian at the gates but the rats in the granaries. Today, Australian farmers face a similar harbinger: a mouse plague so thick that the ground moves, so relentless that harvests become graveyards. One farmer describes it as ‘like a decaying body’.
He is not wrong. This is not merely a pest outbreak; it is a symptom of a deeper rot. We have built a civilisation on monoculture, chemical dependency, and the hubris that we can outsmart nature.
The mice are not the problem. They are the consequence. They feast on our wheat because we have eliminated their predators, sterilised our soils, and turned farming into an industrial machine.
Rome fell because it forgot that grain comes from the earth, not from the treasury. Australia’s plague is a reminder: when you poison the land, the land poisons you back. The Victorian era had its ‘great stink’ of the Thames; we now have the great squeak of the outback.
We will survive this, of course, but only if we stop pretending that we are masters of nature. We are its tenants. And the lease is up.
