So the animals must pay for our dysfunctionality. Japan, swayed by some notion of nationhood, asserts itself by declaring its resumption of whaling. Revenge is being wreaked on the Save the Whale campaigns of the 1970s and 80s – the bedrock of modern environmentalism – and all those yoghurt-knitting hippies. Killer whales and belugas are kept in “whale jail” in the far east of Russia, as far from prying eyes as possible – ready to be sold to marine parks in China. Highly evolved animals are stolen from the sea and people buy tickets so their family can watch them perform in artificial pools thousands of miles from home.

Meanwhile people stand on the banks of the Thames, at the aptly named Gravesend, hoping for a peek at a lone lost beluga. (I decline to call it by its presumptively gendered and anthropomorphic name). Animals have become entertainment, and must therefore bend to our will, adopt our demotic. There are protests when prisoners are allowed to pet goats for therapeutic purposes, but plaudits when spy cams are sent into the natural world as if in extension of our own over-surveilled and tracked existence, and serious public discussions as to whether a film crew in the Antarctic should dig some penguins out of a hole. As if we weren’t in a deep enough one already.

We have to deny the innate beauty of animals because we know we are destroying their world. Newly discovered species can barely raise their heads in the jungle or the ocean depths. “On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation,” as WG Sebald wrote in his melancholy The Rings of Saturn. They are the bycatch of our remorseless progress, like the roadkill of whom Barry Lopez, the great American nature writer, observed: “They are the ones you give some semblance of burial, to whom you offer an apology, who may have been like seers in a parallel culture.”

In an essay for the online magazine Aeon, Gary Kroll, professor of history at the State University of New York, wrote: “We must understand that getting in a car, plane or train, that ordering a book from Amazon – all are destructive acts … Wildlife deserves an apology.” We even suborn the weather. Storms are given human names, as if to announce our control over the climate, even as we destroy it. These are the ultimate anthropomorphisations: Storm Emma, the beast from the east. Weather forecasters talk about “useful weather”, as if the heavens had been invented for our utility.

But now, for a few days, that insatiable human speed has slowed down. Like a sudden fall of snow, it’s as if the turning has forced an amnesty between us and the rest of creation. In the interregnum that this end of the year creates, the natural world briefly resumes its sway. We have time to peer up at the moon, see shooting stars, smell air that isn’t filled with diesel fumes; some of us even dare to swim in the sea, relishing the barbaric cold for the way that it reminds us we are physical beings, alive and mortal, and the way that the tides determine another kind of timetable. It awaits a new start. Lying on our backs, we might look up at the night sky where stories began, as John Berger said.

That space and stillness might hold any kind of possibilities. The sea and the sky might be our last big vestiges of hope, for all that we have done to them. This is a sanctified time because it reconnects us with the animals we are. The instinct to hunker down, to hibernate, to be with one another, physically – not on a device. Perhaps even to regain the ways we once navigated the world, our natural GPS, sensing magnetic fields in the way whales and birds do. A new sense of direction. A different kind of tracking. Wouldn’t that be a lovely gift to find left over, stuffed behind the Christmas tree?

• Philip Hoare is an author. His latest book is RisingTideFallingStar