An Environmental History of Britain

B.W. Clapp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317893028
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The present and future state of the environment gives rise to ever increasing concern, but much less is known as yet about the past: the damage that has been done since, and by, the Industrial Revolution; how far our predecessors were aware of it; the steps they took; and the gradual development of a wider concern for the state of the world and our impact on it. This timely and pioneering survey, designed for general readers as well as students and scholars, is a substantial contribution to that understanding.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

THE FIRST CONSERVATIONIST

The origins of the conservation movement are not easy to trace. Malthus, the founder of demography, has some claims to be regarded as the first conscious and celebrated conservationist, though he would not have understood the term itself, coined long after his death. The word ‘conservation’ in its popular modern sense – the careful husbandry of natural resources and of the meritorious works of man – first came into use in the United States in the early years of this century. It remained little known in Britain until the 1950s. Bertrand Russell, the philosopher and Nobel Laureate for literature, took pains to give the term a broad environmental meaning as if he feared that that usage was unfamiliar to his audience:

I mean by ‘conservation’ not only the preservation of ancient monuments and beauty spots, the upkeep of roads and public utilities, and so on. These things are done at present, except in time of war. What I have chiefly in mind is the preservation of the world’s natural resources.…¹

Malthus a century-and-a-half earlier had concerned himself not with natural resources in general but with food supplies. In his original 1798 essay on population he detected ‘an essential difference between food and wrought commodities, the raw materials of which are in great plenty. A demand for these last will not fail to create them in as great a quantity as they are wanted’. Quite why Malthus held this view is a minor mystery. When he wrote, the raw materials of industry were mostly of organic origin like food itself. The laws that limited food production might be supposed to apply to the production of wool, cotton, leather and timber. If growing numbers threatened to press upon the means of subsistence they would surely press upon the means of housing and clothing also. Malthus apparently came to realise this for, in the last edition of the Essay published in his lifetime, he expressed himself rather more cautiously: The powers of the earth in the production of food have narrower limits than the skill and taste of mankind in giving value to raw materials.’² These are not the words of a man seriously anxious about the extent of natural resources in general, and it is upon his demographic theories that Malthus’ reputation as a conservationist will have to rest. Though by no means the first political or economic commentator to notice the possible dangers of population growth – he had been preceded by Machiavelli, Sir James Steuart, Adam Smith and Robert Wallace – Malthus was the one writer in this group who drew out the full implications of the ‘principle of population’ and who succeeded in attracting wide and often hostile attention to his views.³

Malthus shifted his ground during the thirty years in which he wrote and rewrote his Essay on the principle of population, but he never abandoned the key point of his theory – that, if unchecked, population would grow indefinitely, perhaps doubling every generation. Food supply on the other hand was unlikely to grow so fast owing to shortage of land and inadequate agricultural techniques. His tone changed from the confident exaggeration and brutal expressions that slipped from his pen and gave so much offence in 1798 and 1803, to the liberal and humane concern for the labouring classes that obviously preoccupied him in the later editions of the work. And his early deep pessimism that little could be done to improve the lot of the poor gave way to a moderate hope that moral restraint combined with wise laws might improve living standards, lessen inequality, raise the status of women and promote freedom for the labouring poor. In all this Malthus concerned himself with what J S Mill was to call ‘the niggardliness of nature’, the prospective shortage of food if demand continued to grow. Awareness of the dangers of growth marks Malthus out as a conservationist.

GROWTH RATES

The key idea in the Malthusian system was the mathematical proposition that ‘no quantity can increase by compound interest and remain within finite limits’. A practical example of the working of this theorem may be helpful. In parts of Asia, Africa, and South America the population has increased since the Second World War at the rate of three per cent per annum compound. At this rate population doubles in 24 years, doubles again in 48 years … and therefore in 1000 years doubles more than 40 times! In other words, if such growth were sustainable, population would have increased 2⁴⁰ or a million, million times. Malthus had thought that such rapid growth could occur only in the most favourable conditions, which he detected in the United States. Elsewhere, he thought, slower growth was to be expected, but that would only postpone, not prevent, the day of reckoning when population became impossibly large and a finite world could no longer sustain it. What is true of population is also true of natural resources, mineral as well as organic; it applies as much to coal and iron as to wheat and timber. It is physically impossible to increase the production of these or any other commodities at compound interest for ever and ever.

Long before the idea of compound interest was applied to growth of population and the supply of raw materials, lenders had applied it to money. The Babylonians in 1600 BC were charging compound interest on loans – but in a world that regarded all interest charges as morally doubtful, interest on interest was decidedly unpopular. In the Middle Ages, if creditors charged compound interest, they took care to conceal the fact, and few examples have been discovered by historians. These scruples were being overcome in the sixteenth century, and the first printed tables of compound interest were published at Lyons in 1558 by Jean Trenchant. The first English tables were published by Richard Witt in 1613, and a second set by William Webster appeared in 1629.* Refinements in the use of compound interest allowed the true costs and benefits of decisions about savings and investment to be calculated. Insurance, land management, forestry, and mining could all gain from careful appraisal of true economic costs. The astronomer Edmund Halley (1656–1742) and the Huguenot mathematician Abraham de Moivre (1667–1754) provided the theory,⁴ and insurance offices, landowners, mining engineers, and foresters sooner or later began to apply it – Dutch insurers in the seventeenth century, some land stewards in the eighteenth, mining engineers and foresters in the nineteenth. Economists and economic historians were slow to use compound interest as a measure of growth rates. Hoffmann used them in his prewar study of British industry, but it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that it became second nature among British economists and economic historians to measure growth rates in this way.⁵ For advocates of growth – and for their critics – the idea of compound interest is now an important analytical tool. If compound interest did not exist it would not be necessary to invent it before discussing environmental questions, but its existence does permit a more precise account of growth and the dangers of growth.

ECOLOGY

If compound interest is the weapon that mathematics has given to the environmental movement, biology has supplied one even more powerful in the comparatively new study of ecology. The American writer H D Thoreau coined the term ecology in 1858, without attaching a very precise meaning to it. It was Ernst Haeckel, a German biologist, who gave the word scientific currency with the meaning ‘all the various relations of animals and plants to one another and to the outer world.’ A more homely definition, and one in keeping with the word’s derivation, would be ‘Nature’s housekeeping’. The idea preceded the term. In 1859 Charles Darwin gave a neat illustration of ecological forces at work when he demonstrated the connection between red clover and cats: the bumble-bee pollinates red clover, but is preyed upon by the vole; the cat, which eats the vole, is therefore a friend to bumble-bees and red clover. Other biologists playfully extended the analysis: red clover fed the cattle that provided the beef on which England’s greatness depended (Carl Vogt). T H Huxley went one better: the cause of plentiful cats was old maids, and old maids were therefore the cause of the greatness of England!

Despite this promising example, that included both flora and fauna, most ecological work before the 1930s was concerned with the vegetable kingdom alone. Ecologists studied the distribution of plants and tried to establish the succession of flora that would occupy a particular habitat until a climax or equilibrium was reached: in southern England the climax (if nature was left to her own devices) might be a forest of beech, %oak, or birch; in northern Russia, coniferous forest; in the American mid-west, grassland. The British Ecological Society was founded in 1913, having grown out of an earlier body, the Central Committee for the Survey and Study of British Vegetation established in 1904. By 1913 the National Trust had acquired Wicken Fen and Blakeney Point as nature reserves, both destined to become famous in the annals of ecology. For many years the great majority of the work published in the society’s journal reported the impact of natural forces – climate, fire, altitude, slope, rabbits, and so on – on vegetation. The impact of man as polluter or farmer rarely came into consideration. There were few articles on smoke or the condition of rivers, and the word pollution did not occur in the index to the first 20 volumes covering the years 1913–32.

Animal ecology got little attention, which was hardly surprising, since it was much easier to study plants that remained in one place than animals that moved about. The first English book on animal ecology – by Charles Elton (several had already appeared in America) – was published in 1927 and reviewed in the Journal of Ecology by A G Tansley. Elton laid down some key principles of animal ecology, including the food-chain and the ecological niche. The food-chain was an essential tool for ecologists, who in the 1930s began to trace the sequence of events when chemical poisons like pesticides worked their way through a succession of creatures. The idea of the ecological niche provided a justification for attempts to preserve some species, for example in sites of special scientific interest. These are simple practical applications of concepts that have a much wider bearing in the eyes of ecologists. As the volume of research grew, the British Ecological Society established separate journals for animal ecology (1932) and for applied ecology (1964).

The development of ecological studies has altered the tone of biological thought. While the idea of evolution was dominant, biology had a dynamic forward-looking attitude; change, very slow change admittedly, was to be expected from the working out of evolutionary forces. Man himself could not escape from the pressure for change. As with other creatures, it was presumed, his origins went back through earlier ancestors to the primaeval slime. And according to the theory, the whole history of evolution would be demonstrable if the geological record were less imperfect. Ecology, on the other hand, paid less attention to time as an element in biology: it studied comparatively short-run problems – the struggle for existence within and between species in a forest or in a pond, for example – and tried to determine under what conditions equilibrium might be established or restored. It fostered a conservative rather than a dynamic outlook, and it was no coincidence that some ecologists spoke in accents remarkably like those of Edmund Burke. The influential American naturalist Aldo Leopold distrusted all meddling with the natural order:

The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only those who know the most about it can appreciate how little is known about it. The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or a plant: ‘What good is it?’ If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. Have we learned this first principle of conservation: to preserve all the parts of the land mechanism? No, because even the scientist does not yet recognise all of them… . There is as yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus’s slave girls, is still property. The land-relation is still stricdy economic, entailing privileges but not obligations. … A land ethic changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members and also respect for the community as such. (Leopold, Sand-county almanac, pp 176–7, 218–20.)

Not all ecologists shared Leopold’s aversion to change. Some like Elton recognised that any natural equilibrium was unstable, liable to be upset by fire or flood, or by climatic or geological change. Others argued that certainty was unattainable, and that it would be better, say, to tackle pollution on the basis of imperfect knowledge, rather than to take no action at all for fear of possible adverse effects on the natural environment. But these are dissident voices. Ecology has become for many people a faith that arouses passions too deep for the compromises of politics.

Since Copernicus, man’s self-esteem has taken many hard knocks without being much dented. It was possible to brush aside the discovery that the earth revolved round the sun and not vice versa, for the earth seemingly remained the only living planet and man the master of it. When Sir Fred Hoyle wondered if other galaxies could field an eleven strong enough to play test cricket with the MCC, he was merely airing an eccentric hypothesis. Even Darwin’s Origin of Species and Descent of Man proved to be less wounding than at one time seemed likely. Advanced churchmen found themselves able to fit the theory of evolution into their scheme of things, and convinced Darwinians like Sir Julian Huxley saw man as the central figure in the natural world; Huxley believed that it was only through man that the process of evolution could go on. Ethology and ecology appear to have succeeded where astronomy and evolutionary theory failed. Ethologists have made the shameful discovery that man is a less merciful creature than the wolf or the greylag goose. Ecologists, with geologists and economists, have shown the limits of man’s power and the truth of the adage that, browbeat Nature as you may, she will have the last word. In ecology man is a powerful and disturbing influence but not necessarily the most important figure, or the most highly esteemed.⁶

THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT

Scientific findings do not necessarily arouse much public concern and the level of interest in environmental questions has waxed and waned over the years, without ever coming to the top of the political agenda. The rapid growth of towns in early Victorian Britain provoked some sanitary reforms, but atmospheric pollution and the state of the rivers received ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Half Title
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• Part One: Pollution and Amenity
• Part Two: The Prodigal Economy - and its Reform?
• Index