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Until some time
after the middle ages, the only people capable of commenting on
wildlife, and giving us any sort of picture of it in relation to
humanity, were the monks and lords, and their educated servants. To
them, fairly naturally, birds were obvious and important economic
creatures ; those of which they spoke were large and edible, or
birds of prey. Practically all the literature, in fact, was about
hawking.
On the whole, the
natural world was seen to be the realm of demonic powers. It
was the founder of the Franciscan Order, Francis of Assisi who was
the first known person within the Christian tradition to exhibit a
nature mysticism. Previous ascetics were ambivalent. For
Francis, his union with nature became a mode of God's communication
of himself to humanity and humanity's union with God through a
perceived presence in the physical world. Saint Francis
represents a watershed in the development of Christian views of
nature. Some spiritualities after him flow from him. Others, such
as the Rheinland mystics, continue a Neoplatonic
tradition.
Such generalised
observations as were made, about plants and animals, were copied by
monks from Pliny and Aristotle. England did not appear,
in the middle ages, to be interested enough to breed original
observers. Small birds were of no note, unless they robbed
orchards; for this economic reason, alone, Matthew Paris gives us
an account of a crossbill invasion in 1251. Until 1544, when
William Turner wrote Avium praecipuarum
historia,there
was no book, or treatise, on fauna, that was original or
scientific. With respect to this, Turner is also called the
first ornithologist in the modern scientific
spirit. He
was the first critical naturalist. Not content, as were his
predecessors and many of his successors, to copy, simply, from
Aristotle and Pliny, he set himself the task of determining exactly
what the birds named by these men were, and of adding notes on such
of them as had come under his own,
personal,observation.
Turner was born in
Morpeth, Northumberland, 1508 and died in London in 1568. His
life was spent on the move and it cannot be said with
certainty that any one place of contact with nature stimulated his
writings. If one wishes to contact him materially it is
probably Morpeth in Northumberland where they should go. His
history of the principal birds mentioned by Aristotle and Pliny,
composed, as he informs the reader in his concluding address, in
less than two months, contains, besides the English names of the
birds, many interesting notices of their habits, as observed by
himself in his own country. His descriptions of birds from his own
observation, are most accurate, and much more intelligible than
those of many later writers. In speaking of the attegen he
gives a correct description of the black grouse, male and female,
though he doubts much whether the attagen of Aristotle and Pliny be
found in this country. With the red grouse, as a distinct species,
he was evidently unacquainted. He states that he had never seen or
heard the corn-crake, which he calls "a daker hen," except in
Northumberland. The water ouzel is as common on the banks of the
Wansbeck at present, as it probably was in Turner's days, but the
local inhabitants no longer call it "a water craw." His
youthful spirit may be encountered in Morpeth Chantry school
situated by the bridge that carries the old north road into the
town. It is now a museum and and craft centre.
The story of St
Francis and William Turner points to the important influence of
place on the development of personal philosophies about
nature.
For three hundred
years after Turner published, the clergy and certain lay dons more
or less took over the observing and recording of nature–only
in the last hundred years, since Darwin, has the laity played any
great part.
During the
eighteenth century, Gilbert White is the dominant figure. In 1766
White began his famous correspondence with Pennant, who was quick
to use the information and observations in new parts of his work.
Pennant, to give him his due, was an indefatigable worker, compiler
and traveller. He knew his geography, and his libraries, well. He
was more learned, in the strict sense, than White. And he was a
fine naturalist. But somehow he is always remembered as the
man to whome White wrote letters. As for White, his
Natural History of Selborne, first published in December
1788, has had so many editions that they are difficult to count. It
is the classic British nature book, full of new discoveries,
recounted without any obvious pride or emotion. Perhaps
unconsciously, White used the perfect scientific method in his
accounts and arguments, there is nothing preconceived.
For Gilbert White
and the natural history knowledge that he unlocked on his doorstep,
and for the existence and work of a regular school of his
successors, we have to thank the British system of bestowment of
Church livings. No other, better system could have been devised for
placing educated, simple, honourable, truthful and contemplative
men in the places where they were needed most–dotted evenly
all over the countryside, where they could record nature. Without
the clergy our knowledge of nature in Britain at all ages, but most
particularly up to the end of the nineteenth century would, quite
simply, have been poor instead of rich.
The Hampshire
village of Selborne is the place to make contact with the spirit of
Gilbert White, just as Morpeth is for Turner and Assisi for St
Francis. In this sense places have become the landmarks
for musing on the environmental writings of persons. The
environmental source of the writings of Thoreau, which provides the
structure this conceptual tree, was his sojourn atWalden
Pond–only a mile from the center of his village of Concord,
but a good deal farther removed in spirit–where he went to
recover "a true home in nature, a hearth in the fields and woods,
whatever tenement be burned."
These men felt
passionately that to lose touch with nature's vital current was to
invite disease of the body and disintegration of the soul. To
be thus disconnected from the ecological community was to be
incomplete, sick, fragmented, dying. In particular, the
nineteenth century Romantics generally, believed that a renewed,
harmonious relation to nature was the only remedy for the spiritual
as well as the physical ills that marked their
times.
Throughout history
all cultures and societies have manifested their attitudes, values
and beliefs in the personal imagery of literature and art, the
creation of which was often influenced by particular places. In the
context of Christianity, Francis of Assisi bonded with nature by
distilling personal attitudes towards spiritual devotion from
natural phenomena he encountered in the wooded hills of Umbria, and
the mountain of La Verna in the heart of the Apennines. Seven
centuries later, Charles Kingsley was influenced by boyhood
memories of meres and dykes in fenland, and the pools of Devon's
rocky shores, when he attempted to reconcile his devotional life
with science.
To the likes of
Victorian thinkers, such as Charles Kingsley and John Ruskin, who
were seeking spiritual readings of nature's signs, bonding with
nature meant coming to terms with science in society. Ruskin wrote
as a prophet of worse to come when he spoke of Alpine mountain
streams, that in his lifetime had become polluted through the
impact of railway tourism. Of the two,Kingsley is the better
educational model for today. Not only did he take up the new ideas
of ecology, which he termed bio-geology, but he also conceived a
practical value system for care for the environment, which we
cannot improve upon today.
Kingsley's life was
suffused with notions about nature, and his classic book, 'The
Water Babies', is a parable of notional values for children growing
up in an overcrowded world. Within the general message of 'be kind
to efts', he expressed the moral of his story as a notional
expression of the ecology of aquatic ecosystems threatened by
unthinking people.
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In a similar vein of creating
care-systems for nature, the 19th century witnessed a gradual
turning away from killing wild birds for pleasure. This is
particularly exemplified in the writings of local naturalists at
the turn of the century, such as Arthur Patterson of Yarmouth, who
became sickened by the senseless slaughter of wildfowl on Breydon
Water.
At this time,
important scientific notions about the workings of nature were the
product of local naturalists. The natural environment of East
Anglia was a stimulus for these amateurs, and a high proportion of
them, with the requisite wit or leisure, influenced national
developments in the biological sciences. The minimum necessary to
make a 'start with people' is to discover a local personage, and
answer the questions about who the person was, what they did, and
why their ideas about nature should remain
interesting.
Additional accounts of the following people
and places are being compiled.
Gilbert White of Selborne
John Clare of Helpstone
Peter Scott of Slimbridge
William Wordsworth of Grasmere