Pity the poor butterfly, reduced in its urban environment by 69 per cent, compared with a 45 per cent fall in the countryside. But is its fate any wonder? Our urban and suburban streets have become deserts abandoned to the car, where walking is a subversive act and trees are offensive structures to be hacked down to size or uprooted entirely should they dare to get in the way of our careering traffic or let their leaves fall.

In this dystopian drawing-in of community, in which wildness is untidy and scary, the weighty hegemony of tonnes of steel is ranged against the fragility of the butterfly, its wings invisibly spotted with diesel particulates.

When a bee flew into my local corner shop, a grown teenage boy flipped, swatting at the innocuous insect and declaring how much he hated them. I told him he’d be dead without bees. You can imagine the look I got.

One summer afternoon, I came across two young lads poking at a stag beetle in the gutter, about to stamp on it. I stopped my bike and picked it up to show them what a fascinating, alien creature it was, in its techno-armour like a living Transformer.

Peering at it through new eyes, they ended up positively enthusiastic about the beast: Something amazing, crawling along the pavement.

Growing up in suburban Southampton in the 1960s and 1970s, the streets were yet to be appropriated by three-car families. You could still see the gardens. Our road was lined with an erratic avenue of often self-sown trees. The cutway that ran behind the houses was a covert highway for wildlife: Foxes, hedgehogs, grass snakes. Badgers crossed the road in the twilight. Those openings in the built environment made them good places for subversive humans, too. Fertile imaginations bred in those gaps.

If the definition of utopia is “nowhere place”, then it seems apt to apply it to suburbia, a place caught between other locations. The 1800s began with most people living in the country; they ended with exactly the reverse ratio, a remorseless process that the poet, John Clare, railed against.

In the 20th century, the rows of Tudorbethan villas crept out into Betjeman’s Metroland, while a yet more doomy 1930s writer, T.H. White, declared that soon the New Forest would become a tube stop.

Our urban lives blur the rhythms of the seasons and deaden our exposure to nature. We don’t know the long-term effects of deprivation of natural stimuli for ourselves and our children. But as in that hoary chaos image of the beating butterfly wings, everything is connected. The fleeting, papery thing of a few days’ beauty is an evanescent symbol of a nowhere place. It holds so much in those wings.

Great coloniser

We were once as nomadic — those of us unable to afford a mortgage might still feel that way. As Henry David Thoreau, another great coloniser of the urban-in-the-wild, noted: “We no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.”

Recent events only prove that the unconstructed world — the stuff that happens at the edges of our existence, the birds that flutter above our heads — still has the power to restore our sense of transcendence, perhaps even our humility.

In his 1885 book, After London; Or, Wild England, Richard Jefferies, another 19th-century visionary, predicted what would happen “after London ended”. He reasoned that within weeks of such an apocalypse nature would reclaim the suburbs, and the butterflies would fly again.

Jefferies imagined a post-human scenario from the streets of Surbiton where he lived — an area soon to be swallowed up by the city. But his other lyrical writings offer us a timely message in this season of tyrants and tyranny, with their glorious, microcosmic vision: “Down by the dusty road ... comes a sulphur butterfly rushing as quick as if hastened to a butterfly fair. If only rare, how valued he would be ... for the sulphur butterfly is the February pleasure ... between the dark storms and wintry rain”.

Far from chaos, there is beautiful, metamorphic order in those beating wings — and a salutary reminder that we are just as transitory.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

Philip Hoare is the author of Leviathan or, The Whale and The Sea Inside.