Irish Examiner View: Dramatic licence made real - Nature mends as we struggle

97 Hawksbill Turtles, which are endangered, hatched on a beach in Brazil on Mar29

If scriptwriters stuck to more or less the truth, the understood and the understandable, our world would be a far duller place.

Fantasy, the gap between our experience and the stories we embrace, is a cornerstone of film.

Dramatic licence is the yeast that lifts so many works out of the ordinary so they might to engage and capture an audience.

One often exploited by directors of post-dystopian films is to show, just days after whatever catastrophe they use to build a story occurs, is the speed with which nature reclaims the urban landscape.

Wolves prowl main street almost before the dust settles; ivy shrouds the bank before survivors realise they are not alone.

Trees achieve years of growth in just a few nights.

But maybe this is not fantasy? Maybe this is what might happen when our race is run?

The pandemic and the forced absence of man from so many settings offers a glimpse of how very quickly we are not at all missed and how nature resumes what it was doing before we tried to master it.

This is already happening on a deserted beach in Brazil where nearly 100 endangered sea turtles have hatched.

The 97 hawksbill sea turtles hatched on Sunday in Paulista, in the state of Pernambuco.

At the same time the European Space Agency show carbon emissions have declined sharply in recent weeks.

These rejuvenations must inspire even at this dark moment because they show how close we still are, if we really want to, to saving the natural world.