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We know from fossil records that the populations of many animal species declined sharply when humans expanded their range. There is no doubt that the world that existed from the emergence of Homo sapiens about 300,000 years ago until the beginning of human civilizations was far richer in large wild animals than the one we inhabit today. Art and literature all record this. Of course, these artistic and literary sources do not tell the whole story. They are not spread out evenly across space, time or biological class; they do not result from systematic selection; and they were mostly written by white men. Some of them are works of fiction or myth; many of them are anecdotal; some may have involved exaggerations, or be reports only of exceptional phenomena; and all should be subject to the normal rigours of source analysis. Many of the abundances described, moreover, were also probably influenced by human actions and should not be considered straightforwardly natural.   They are nevertheless important because, first, anyone interpreting a historical source that hails from any great distance in the past needs to remember that the world its creator existed in was probably more abundant than ours. When Keats wrote about a nightingale singing in north London, he was not writing about a rare or extraordinary event. When Milton described how “fry innumerable swarm”, he was describing something many of his readers would have witnessed personally. When Darwin wrote of “a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds and with birds singing on the bushes”, he was describing something more various and lively than we would be likely to encounter today. When choughs and bustards were put on the coats of arms of Cornwall and Wiltshire, these were not obscure choices. When Tennyson wrote of sparrows being speared by shrikes, he expected readers to know what he was referring to. When Shakespeare included “choughs that wing the midway air” in his description of Dover cliff, he probably chose them because they were typical 

 When John Clare wrote a poem about a wryneck’s nest, he considered himself to be writing about a fairly common country bird. When late-medieval men and women sang “Sumer is icumen in” , they were familiar with the sound of the bird they imitated in the second line. An understanding of lost bioabundance should be part of the basic background knowledge that readers bring to historical sources.This should also affect how we think about progress. Though optimistic writers like Steven Pinker have attempted to describe the history of the past few hundred years as one of improving quality of life for millions of people, brought about by improved nutrition, more reliable food supplies, better education, a decrease in violence and so on, these narratives, even if they are allowed to be true, need to be qualified by an understanding of what these improvements have meant for the natural world. What might in one account be “progress” might in another be a vast and unsustainable transfer of benefits from non-human living beings to human ones.Thinking like this can promote several different reactions. If we believe that humans tend under a diverse range of conditions to spoil and diminish the natural world, then we may be sceptical about the likelihood of humanity significantly mitigating the effects of the crisis. Humans will need to behave in ways that are historically extraordinary if the future is not to be one of continued disaster. It might also make us think that mitigation is the best we can hope for. Any hope of putting things back the way they were must be dismissed, not least because so many irreversible events, including extinctions, have already occurred. But thinking like this may also make us angry. Restoring wildlife populations even to what they were in the 1990s, although a desirable and ambitious aim, would be risible if even a partial restitution of what has been lost overall were sought.