THERE is a magnificent simplicity and purity about the remote sub Antarctic island of South Georgia where I have spent the last week with the Foreign Office, British Antarctic Survey environmental scientists and others.

This rarely visited and uninhabited outcrop is home to the largest bird in the world, the Wandering Albatross. These massive gulls, whose nests we came within a few feet of, soar over the world’s oceans for seven years before coming back to their home nests to breed.

They live for up to 70 years and truly command their environment, yet longline tuna fishermen are devastating their numbers.

Even here, three to four days’ travel from the nearest human habitation, plastic is washed onto beaches and man’s influence is having detrimental effects.

The Patagonian toothfish and the Antarctic krill occupy uncharted depths, yet are being hoovered up by industrial trawlers.

Other species however are thriving - gigantic elephant seals, thousands of fur seals, and on one beach alone 250,000 king penguins.

Most heartening of all, the monarchs of the sea, those Leviathans, whales, are recovering from the dreadful depredations of man which we witnessed in the old whaling stations we visited at Grytviken and Stromness.

We attended a superb church service in the little whalers’ church at Grytviken, where the Rev Nicholas Mercer spoke of wilderness and wildlife. Skua and skylarks, penguins and pipits punctuated his sermon a few yards from Shackleton’s grave, just the other side of the rusting remains of the whaling station with piles of vicious harpoons lying around.

On our way back, we stopped off to visit the Falkland battlefields and paid our respects to the 250 fallen soldiers who are buried in the superb Commonwealth War Grave military cemeteries. I was especially moved by that of Colonel H Jones VC.

The unspoilt serenity of the Falklands landscape was brutalised by that terrible war, as is our natural environment brutalised by so much of modern industrialism.

I was visiting the bleak wilderness named Salisbury Plain on South Georgia when I came to hear of the chemical attacks by the Russians near its local namesake.

How can we humans destroy what is pure and good and simple by our foolish brutalities?

We have so much to learn from the Wandering Albatross and the Patagonian toothfish.