11
Nature Conservation and the New Natural History

‘Preserve or Conserve – I don’t care which: it’s all jam to me.’

James Fisher

Like many words which have entered the saloon bars of the land only recently, conservation – ‘the wise use of resources’ – can mean whatever the sayer wishes it to mean, which in this case will depend on whether you happen to be a naturalist, an arable farmer, a politician or someone making jam. Essentially though, nature conservation is the same thing as the older term, nature preservation. The naturalists and members of the British Ecological Society who championed the cause of preservation in the 1940s, knew that simply putting up a fence around a patch of protected land rarely achieved the desired results. Pearsall, Tansley and others had demonstrated in the wild what every gardener already knew – that nature is dynamic, that vegetation not only grows but progresses, and that pasture will turn into scrub unless something eats or crops the grass. Hence some form of continued use was necessary. These pioneers also wished to stress that the aim of nature conservation was not simply to protect, but to protect for a purpose, which to most of them meant scientific study. They began to talk therefore not of preservation but of conservation, which has connotations of activity (later called ‘management’), prudence and moral worth.

Norman Moore at Calthorpe Broad, in 1953, ‘examining probable Lestes dryas’. (Photo: English Nature)

Organised nature conservation has had but a short history in Britain, though volumes could be written about it. Norman Moore, born in 1923, has played a leading part in virtually every episode in the story, from the foundation-stone laying in the 1940s, through the pioneer years of the Nature Conservancy in the 1950s and the pesticide scare of the 1960s, to the ways and means of reconciling wildlife and agriculture that have dominated in recent years. It is not my intention here to tell that story, even in outline, but to stress the links between nature conservation and the new natural history, as represented by the New Naturalist series. The two grew up together, and both were a product of wartime aspirations. Many New Naturalist authors were closely involved in the evolution of nature conservation in Britain, and some of them, like Norman Moore, became full-time members of the Nature Conservancy and its field stations. The Nature Conservancy itself was not only the creation of men like Julian Huxley, Max Nicholson and Arthur Tansley, but also the embodiment of their ideas about ecology, planning and the responsible use of land. It represented, to elevate the theme a little, the apotheosis of the new natural history. And a remarkably early one.

Curiously enough, nature conservation did not take the preservation of endangered species as its starting point. As one can deduce from their books, most of the ‘professional’ New Naturalists were more interested in the processes of nature than in rarities. Hence, their advocacy of nature reserves was not so much as a means of preserving Kentish plovers and monkey orchids, but to provide undisturbed havens for scientific study, with a secondary educational role. We should remember that there was not, in the 1940s, the same urgent sense of habitat loss that there would be half a century later. ‘Digging for victory’ and military installations had, indeed, destroyed many ancient habitats, but they were regarded by nearly everybody as necessary expedients. No one then realised the implications of continuing indefinitely the wartime measures to boost food production, aided and abetted by a powerful agro-chemicals industry.

In its earliest forms, the crusade was not about safeguarding wildlife so much as creating greater access to the places where the wildlife lived. This issue had been simmering since the nineteenth century. The circumstances of wartime gave the advocates of National (i.e. People’s) Parks and better footpaths a platform as part of the promised land fit for heroes which, this time, would follow the war. People like Dick Crossman, Julian Huxley and John Dower had succeeded in persuading the coalition government to create a Ministry of Reconstruction in the interests of maintaining morale at home and support from the egalitarian-minded United States of America. This ministry was more receptive to new ideas than is usual in government. Planning for the peace began in the darkest days of the war in an atmosphere of idealism – and also the same sort of bulldog spirit that the New Naturalist Board possessed as it talked about books and butterflies while the V-bombs whiz-banged into London. One of its members, Dudley Stamp, expressed the prevailing ethos thus:

‘The better life must include not only food, clothing and homes – the general satisfaction of material needs – but also the satisfaction of the less obvious demands of the spirit. To use much misused words: cultural needs. Daily hunger is countered by daily food, but the need to deal systematically with the demands of the spirit, the vital need for recreation, had long remained less obvious.

‘Planning for the future was in the air. As, one after the other, our cities were bombed, plans were put in hand for their rebuilding. They were to have a green ring of rural land, productively used but not urbanised. There were to be large tracts set aside for quiet enjoyment. But enjoyment of what? Clearly the natural or semi-natural vegetation of mountain, moorland and coast, and with it the wildlife – the animals.’

Nature Conservation in Britain. Author’s Preface

The pioneers and prophets of nature conservation turned this popular movement to their advantage. Arthur Tansley and Julian Huxley, in particular, argued very persuasively that post-war planning must include reservations for wildlife among all the parks, green belts and beauty spots devoted to human needs.

Largely by coincidence, British naturalists had already put in a great deal of the necessary ground work through the work of the Nature Reserves Investigation Committee between 1942 and 1945, whose members included the ornithologist A.W. Boyd and the Director of Kew, E.J. Salisbury. This is one of the most productive examples on record of amateur and professional co-operation. With the genius for organisation that British naturalists had already demonstrated in the mass bird surveys of the 1920s and 1930s, the Committee tapped the vast reservoir of local knowledge in Britain to produce embryo lists of the best wildlife and geological areas and detailed recommendations for preserving them. Many New Naturalist authors took charge of their own patch. Norman Moore remembers producing a list of sites in East Sussex, including the ditch where he had recently discovered the scarce emerald damselfly. The geologist Frederick North, acting on behalf of the Committee in Wales, produced proposals for a National Park in Snowdonia, in which nature conservation was an important aim. He followed this up with a list of candidate nature reserves in the Principality with the help of other naturalists and scientists, including Bruce Campbell and Ronald Lockley. By the time the Nature Reserves Committee had concluded its investigations in 1945, it had produced a firm factual basis for nature reserve selection in England and Wales that has stood the test of time admirably.

The Nature Reserves Investigation Committee had no formal status, though its findings did help ultimately to shape the direction of nature conservation in Britain. In 1945, however, it was the future National Parks that commanded attention. The case for the Parks had been made by the dying John Dower in his well-known Report, and accepted by Government. But in the usual way, rather than taking immediate action, the government set up another committee to report on the report. This was the National Parks Committee under the Chairmanship of Sir Arthur Hobhouse. By taking clever advantage of the Whitehall system, Julian Huxley got the main Committee to set up two sub-committees, one on footpaths, on which Dudley Stamp was a member, and the other on wildlife: the famous Wildlife Conservation Special Committee, which Huxley chaired himself. This tactic put nature conservation and nature reserves firmly on the postwar agenda, riding on the back of the National Parks. By the same token, it helped to ensure that nature conservation would be seen as something separate from the Parks (a development John Dower would have deplored), as a science-led activity rather than one that catered for public amenity. Huxley and his deputy Arthur Tansley ensured that the Wildlife Committee would be manned by people who knew what they were talking about, another novel, some might say unique, innovation in the history of wildlife legislation. Among the team of 11 we note the presence of E.B. Ford, John Gilmour, Max Nicholson and Alfred Steers, with Richard Fitter acting as secretary. Whether by coincidence or not, Huxley was having New Naturalist dealings with Ford and Fitter at just this time, while Gilmour was, of course, a fellow editor. The team got down to work, and its report, published in July 1947, is the famous White Paper on the Conservation of Nature in England and Wales, better known by its Whitehall-ese code name ‘Cmd 7122’. Its central recommendation was the formation of a Biological Service to set up and look after National Nature Reserves, and to undertake research in support of its duties. There was not much in ‘Cmd 7122’ that had not been outlined already in one report or another, but this one commanded attention, not only because of its White Paper status but because of the elegance of its language and its strong advocatory message. At that time, the government was receptive to such arguments, having among its ranks keen country walkers like Hugh Dalton and Herbert Morrison.

Max Nicholson, Director of the Nature Conservancy in c. 1965. (Photo: Bruce Forman/Nature Conservancy)

After another wait while Huxley’s Scottish counterpart produced a similar but (despite Fraser Darling’s participation) less emphatic White Paper, the Biological Service was set up by Royal Charter in 1949. It was called The Nature Conservancy. The Charter laid down that the Conservancy should have permanent staff and be governed by a board of 15 members. Those who served on it under the Chairmanship of Sir Arthur Tansley included E.B. Ford, W.H. Pearsall, J.A. Steers and, later on, Dudley Stamp. Max Nicholson, also a board member, was appointed Director-General in 1952, after the resignation through ill-health of Cyril Diver. He held the post for the following 13 years until his retirement in 1966. It was Nicholson’s task to build up the Conservancy’s staff virtually from scratch at a time when suitably qualified people were thin on the ground. In 1952, the Geronimos of the Conservancy board might have seemed easier to find than the Indians needed to run the nature reserves and field stations. Gradually, Nicholson built up a close-knit team, among the early members of which were E.B. Worthington (Deputy Director), Norman Moore (Regional Officer for SW England), M.V. Brian (Head of Furzebrook Research Station) and Deryk Frazer (science advisor), later joined by Kenneth Mellanby as the first Head of Monks Wood Experimental Station and Morton Boyd as Regional Officer for Western Scotland.

Max Nicholson’s remarkable career as ornithologist, institution-builder and pamphleteer is too well-documented to repeat here in any but the briefest words. A man of supreme self-confidence, formidable intellect and gifts of leadership unusual in a naturalist, he made the Nature Conservancy very much his own show, maintaining its course through a shoal of unfriendly government commissions and predatory departments of state. He is one of two men, both ornithologists (the other was B.W. Tucker), whom the botanist and historian D.E. Allen chose to exemplify the combining strands of amateur and professional natural history in the twentieth century. Though no one would know it, Nicholson’s roots lie in the amateur domain – he didn’t like the Oxford zoology course and graduated instead in history – but he made a name for himself in the 1920s and 1930s through a series of bird books that were remarkable for their insights into behaviour and relations between birds and man. He was the first to organise a mass-count of a single species, the grey heron, using the media and involving birdwatchers from all over Britain. He helped to found the British Trust for Ornithology in 1932, on which he served as secretary, and took the lead in strengthening the important association between organised amateur ornithology and the University of Oxford, which culminated in the founding of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology. During the war, he became a Whitehall warrior, and his experiences of government and politicians made him a shrewd and vital player in the organisational game that led to the founding of the Nature Conservancy. He was (and is), in D.E. Allen’s words, ‘that always rare being – the practical visionary’.

As Director, Nicholson was responsible to the Conservancy’s board, though it is easy to be given the impression it was the other way round. But the board members were no non-entities and included some of the best-known names from the world of ecology. One of the most active was W.H. Pearsall, who took charge of scientific policy. Nicholson remembers him as a conscientious and dedicated member, with great influence in academic circles and among the coming generation of ecologists. Perhaps, his most lasting contribution was in education. Recognising that there was an urgent need for suitably trained officers, Nicholson and Pearsall organised a postgraduate diploma course in conservation at the latter’s own department at University College London. Launched in 1960, ‘the conservation course’ has run successfully ever since, and developed into a Master of Science degree. Pearsall’s scientific work on lakes, soils and succession might have been tailor-made for the management of nature reserves, though, starved of funds for equipment and full-time wardens, these places seldom received the attention they needed. The exceptions were reserves expressly designated as outdoor laboratories, like Moor House, a vast estate in the North Pennines, purchased (at less than £1 per acre) at Pearsall’s personal instigation.

Another influential member of the Nature Conservancy was J.A. Steers, the apostle of coastline studies and, later, of coastline conservation. Steers was single-minded in his dedication to Britain’s wild shores. During the 1930s he had travelled the world in the quest of coral reefs and tropical shores, but his genius loci had been the Norfolk coast, especially Scolt Head Island (which, not altogether coincidentally, was also made a National Nature Reserve). His contribution to postwar planning had been nothing less than the first comprehensive geographical survey of the whole coastline of Great Britain, acclaimed as a model of patient and meticulous compilation. He wrote a schools textbook and a New Naturalist book The Sea Coast largely on the strength of it. His report provided the basic information for coastal planning, and proved its worth during the devastating floods of 1953. Steers’ unique knowledge of the coast had made him a useful member of the Huxley Committee, and he went on to serve the Nature Conservancy in the same capacity. Max Nicholson recalls that the National Trust’s Operation Neptune project was conceived in his own office, and largely at Steers’ forceful advocacy. Steers was much involved with the Trust and the National Parks Commission as well as the Nature Conservancy; so far as he was concerned, their aims were (or should have been) much the same: the preservation of natural shorelines, unencumbered by coastal defences and bungalows.

J.A. Steers (1899-1987), author of The Sea Coast. (Photo: St Catherine’s College, Cambridge)

The Nature Conservancy’s England Committee enjoying a picnic lunch at Morden Bog, Dorset, April 1960. Dudley Stamp nearest camera, Deryk Frazer second from left, Norman Moore at the back. (Photo: Max Nicholson/English Nature)

Geographers like Steers must often have felt rather isolated among the ecologists and landowners on these committees, and the role of geographers and geologists in nature conservation is often under-rated. They provided an important academic link with planners, land-use commissions and the small, relatively tightly knit world of professional earth scientists. Among the most active was Dudley Stamp who, late in life, returned to nature conservation, chairing the Conservancy’s England Committee and wearing a similar conservation hat on the Royal Commission on Common Land. Like Steers, he was a natural compiler and cartophile (interestingly, they both collected stamps), whether it concerned land utilisation, the footpath network, English and Welsh commons or geological SSSIs. Nicholson remembers him as ‘a big benign character – though he could be sharp at times’. National service was second nature to him: he combined a strong sense of duty with an equally strong sense of his worth. Stamp drove himself hard, too hard. He died in harness, while attending an international conference in Mexico City in 1966. It was a paradox, but nonetheless fitting, that it was he, the geographical ‘outsider’, who wrote the nature conservation book in this series, though he did not live to see its publication.

In 1960, the Nature Conservancy established the most celebrated of its field stations in an enclave surrounded by the National Nature Reserve of Monks Wood. Under the directorship of Kenneth Mellanby, the Monks Wood Experimental Station had two main functions. The first, under Norman Moore, was to research the effects of toxic chemicals on wildlife. The second was to conduct the kind of research that was needed if the Conservancy was to look after its nature reserves properly, and advise other land-users to do likewise. This was field study elevated almost for the first time to professional scientific research with a specific goal – habitat management. At the same time, the combined efforts of the Monks Wood team produced a considerable amount of new fundamental ecological knowledge for publication in scientific journals. For at least a decade and a half, Monks Wood was a power-house of outdoor ecological research and survey of a kind that has never been equalled. It was an out-going institution, holding seminars on land management and the ecological effects of outdoor recreation, as well as open days and courses of lectures for students. Had the New Naturalist series started 25 years later, in 1970, it might well have been dominated by contributors from Monks Wood. We might then have had a Butterflies by Jeremy Thomas, Wild Flowers of Chalk and Limestone by Terry and Derek Wells, The World of Spiders by Eric Duffey and Nature Conservation in Britain by John Sheail and Derek Ratcliffe. Never before, and possibly never again, did so many talented New Naturalists work together under the same roof. As it was, several titles published in the 1960s and 1970s, like Man and Birds and Hedges are essentially ‘Monks Wood’ books, and others of similar ilk have followed in more recent times, notably Heathlands by Nigel Webb of Furzebrook Research Station and The Soil by Brian Davies, the recently retired Deputy Director of Monks Wood. If the Nature Conservancy was the embodiment of the new natural history, Monks Wood in its Mellanby years represented its spirit. Alas, good things never seem destined to last long. The scientific stations were severed from the Nature Conservancy in 1973, and in the drift of events the former have become more concerned with applied research funded by contractors and the latter with the executive and administrative work of nature conservation. Kenneth Mellanby fought hard against ‘the split’, but other counsels prevailed. ‘The split’ was a disaster for the new natural history. Under the new ‘customer pays’ principle, there was no more room for knowledge for its own sake. The new Nature Conservancy Council (NCC) did commission numerous scientific projects from its former scientific colleagues, but these were mostly to do with basic survey work. The people who would have benefited most from the new natural history were seldom in a position to pay for it. It had been a brief golden age.

Monks Wood Experimental Station in 1970, visitors’ accommodation to the left. (Peter Wakely/English Nature)

In his book, The Bird of Time (1987), Norman Moore saw nature conservation developing in three stages. The first was ‘the pioneer stage, the stage of prophecy’ when ‘a few individuals observed what was happening in the world and advocated enlightened agricultural, forestry and fishing practices and the establishment of national parks and nature reserves in order to stem the growing destruction wrought by industrial man’. One can trace different aspects of these concerns in the works of Frank Fraser Darling, Sir John Russell and Max Nicholson, and the wise use of resources is at least a minor theme of many of the earlier New Naturalist titles. Moore’s second stage, the formation of the National Parks and National Nature Reserves went some way to fulfilling the aims of the postwar naturalists, but, as Moore points out, conservation remained for a long time ‘a service for a minority run by specialists’. Since the late 1960s, the environmental bandwagon has begun to roll with ever-increasing speed, though in an uncertain direction. It would be a foolhardy industrialist, land-user or civil servant today who did not claim to be a conservationist. Indeed, the cry for our own times must surely be the recent Transport Minister who boldly claimed that ‘roads are good for the environment’. Moore hoped that conservation would provide a potent political idea that would tend to unite mankind. But, he admitted, ‘that time has not yet come’.

What is so disappointing about the trend of events during the past 15 or 20 years is that environmental concerns have moved away from their roots in field-based natural history. A large number of young people are evidently against fox hunting, but how many of them know much about foxes, or the relationship between a predator and its prey? Millions watch Bellamy and Attenborough on the telly, but how many of them can read a map or know how to use a microscope? Field study seems in some danger of degenerating into what for most people is a spectator sport. Birdwatching apart, it is becoming a passive activity in which one is led around and shown things by the ‘expert’. If one comes across someone pond-dipping or intent among the grass stalks it is much more likely that they are involved in some sort of academic project or ecological evaluation than simply looking at things for the joy of it. We have, it seems to me, lost some of the sense of wonder at nature that the Victorian and Edwardian naturalists had, and which the postwar generation shared in modified form. Conservation and the environment have become for many a moral crusade, but not one based on a better understanding of nature and Britain’s wild places.

I think contemporary scientists bear some of the blame for this. The older generation of New Naturalist authors were dominated by full-time academic scholars who felt a duty to communicate their work to a large public, and were able to do so in simple, direct language. Among them were five scientific knights (Darling, Russell, Salisbury, Hardy and Stamp), a dozen Fellows of the Royal Society and a Nobel prize-winner. Though few of them were well-known public figures, these were people whose expertise was known and respected in scientific communities throughout the world. They had helped to widen intellectual horizons and shape the society they lived in. Of more recent authors, only Winifred Pennington and Ian Newton have been made Fellows of the Royal Society. The younger generation have tended to be full-time members of staff of various institutions, while the gifted amateur naturalist has almost dropped out of the list altogether. The only recent holder of the latter ancient flame is Eric Simms, who has made a career from sound recording, broadcasting and writing, in the same spirit as earlier ornithologists of talent, like James Fisher and Ronald Lockley. The younger generation of authors are no less gifted than the older, but in general they are from a different milieu and have had fewer opportunities to broaden their horizons and make their mark. Of the greater scientific pundits of recent times, only two have written for the series: Sam Berry and Ian Newton. Where are all the others? Is it that they no longer feel able to communicate with the hoi polloi, or feel that doing so is no part of their social duty, or that they have little to say in any case that would be understood by the untrained? Perhaps, the complex and expensive machinery needed for experimental science today has meant a retreat from field-based study to more theoretical notions. Ecological science, it seems, has ‘lost caste’. If so, it seems reasonable to blame the ecologists.

So far as nature conservation in practice is concerned, field work has become not so much the mainstay as the antidote. One of the ironies for today’s ‘conservationist’ is that no sooner had nature conservation become a full-time career employing a relatively large number of people than it lost its original links with field study and was saddled with indoor forms that have nothing to do with nature: budgets, computer programming, paperwork, agendas and, most recently, the unintelligible dalek-croaking of the management culture in operation. If conservation is ever to unite mankind, and mankind and nature, as Norman Moore hoped, we seem to be going about things in a most unpropitious manner. In certain ways, and in certain moods, the divide seems more chasm-like than ever, the scientist at his data, the conservationist caught up in transatlantic managerial gobbledegook, and the average British family hopping into the car to visit a facilitised patch of country that has most of the characteristics of the now vandalised town park.

If human stupidity has for the moment triumphed over the goals of an earlier generation, at least the opportunities to become involved in useful field work have never been greater. The New Naturalist books show how much can be done with a good pair of eyes. When E.B. Ford was working out how evolution (or, if you like, God) works through the passing of genes from one generation to the next, his basic equipment consisted of a butterfly net and a notebook. The lives of the majority of British invertebrates are still little-known, and in his recent New Naturalist book Ladybirds, Michael Majerus shows how the amateur can still contribute to unravelling their mysteries. There are messages in the older books of the series that are as relevant today as when they were written. The modern emphasis on the ways and means of conservation so often ignores the question of what we are conserving nature for. The postwar pioneers saw national planning and nature reserves as means to an end, not an end in themselves. They looked forward to the British tradition of natural history flowering and flourishing with better-illustrated books, better opportunities for roaming the countryside, and a golden age of field study, informed and inspired by new forms of natural history. They would have applauded the, on the whole, successful building of laws and institutions on the foundations they laid in the 1940s. They would have been puzzled, I expect, by the decline of the amateur field naturalist (though James Fisher might have been happy enough with the size of the current membership of the RSPB). They might have hoped to see more natural history journals in which a large proportion of papers were written by amateurs. They might have been disappointed at what they would find at the average High Street bookshop. But they would, I am sure, have been amazed to learn that a certain natural history series published by Collins, was still going strong, having passed the hundred-book mark some time ago. So let us raise our field glasses to the authors and editors of the New Naturalist series, and to the series itself. From Butterflies to Ladybirds the library has kept bright the flame of British natural history for half a hundred years. Long may that flame endure.

Bronze bust of James Fisher by Elizabeth Frink. (Photo: Clemency Fisher)