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.
- 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.
