Revealed Biodiversity: An Economic History Of The Human Impact

An Economic History of the Human Impact

Eric L Jones

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9789814522588
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

Revealed Biodiversity: An Economic History of the Human Impact aims to show that for several centuries environmental conditions have been substantially the product of economic fluctuations. It contests the notion of perpetual decline in species composition. The arguments are supported by far more precise historical detail than is usual in books about ecology. The need to take the gains to human society into account when assessing environmental change is strongly emphasized. The book features case studies including England, the Netherlands, USA, East Asia, Brazil, and the areas of modern agricultural ‘land grab’.

This book is important for its close attention to the documented historical record of environmental change in several countries over several centuries; for its demonstration of how much wildlife populations have been influenced by fluctuations in market activity; for revealing the need to be sensitive to historical baselines; and for emphasizing the imperative of taking the gains to human society into account when assessing environmental change. It, therefore, has considerable significance for environmental and conservation policies as well as for future studies in ecological history.

Contents:

• The Long Term:
  • Crisis
  • Decline
  • Proper Baselines: The Example of English Butterflies
• England and the Netherlands:
  • Commodity Landscapes: Southern England
  • Agricultural Change: Southern England
  • Landscapes of Destruction: The Curse of the Pheasant
  • Landscapes of Destruction: The Sacrifice to Trout
  • The Netherlands: Reclamation and Exploitation
  • England: Reclamation and Exploitation
• European Expansion:
  • Europe's Expansion Overseas
  • Europe's Distant Reach
  • Pristine America
• The Modern World:
  • East Asia
  • The Modern Expansion of Agriculture
• Conclusion:
  • What Should We Conserve?

Readership: Students, academics (including economic/environmental historians, ecologists, historical geographers) or general readers interested in environmental history or economic history.

ENGLAND AND THE NETHERLANDS

4. COMMODITY LANDSCAPES: SOUTHERN ENGLAND

Given that [Lapwing and Skylark] benefited from the felling of millions of acres of Europe’s wildwood, the birds’ airborne displays were, in a sense, a hymn to Neolithic man’s agricultural triumph.

Birds Britannica (2005)

The level topography, tillable soils and reasonable climate of the hinterlands of Amsterdam, Paris and London were undoubtedly superior to areas north and west, yet the influence of these endowments is hard to separate from the effects of urban demand or new husbandry techniques. Intensive methods such as row cultivation and the sowing of various fodder crops spread during the middle ages. In addition, modes of landownership and the organisation of rural society modified the productive character of the soil, distorting and even dominating its raw potential.

Innovation was slow. Until the nineteenth century, there were few institutions devoted to pooling and sharing information about best practices. Large farmers and landowners across Europe did, however, buy the books that had begun to appear during the seventeenth century, and their marginal comments show they took the authors’ ideas seriously.ⁱ Lesser farmers, the great majority, were not literate or rich enough to do this for themselves, though they may have followed their landowners’ leads or bowed to their exhortations. Otherwise, much of the adoption of new crops and bewildering range of new rotations may have come about through ‘stimulus diffusion’. This amounts to trialling ideas that have been seen over a neighbour’s hedge or spoken of as worthwhile; it is half way between original invention and the importation of novelties from elsewhere. Direct importation was most apparent when the Low Countries adopted the methods of Lombardy. Eastern and Southern England brought them on from Holland.ⁱⁱ The sequence is familiar in outline, though once more the respective contributions of farm size, layout and tenure, as opposed to agronomy, livestock breeding and methods of tillage, elude universally accepted generalisations. All the aspects varied kaleidoscopically from time to time and place to place.

English agriculture became decidedly more intensive from the sixteenth century. Whereas in 1500, little fodder had been grown and livestock were often scavengers, pasture management was improved (especially after about 1650) by sowing a range of legumes often grouped under the umbrella term, clover.ⁱⁱⁱ Fodder plants had previously been located according to their suitability for different soils. This equilibrium was disturbed by the improvements in herbage, which permitted redistributions of agricultural ecology. The wider botanical implications and effects on the organisms formerly living in tracts of rough herbage remain obscure.

Consistent with agricultural intensification was a slow dwindling of concern with the intermediate goods that medieval landowners had been eager to produce close to home, such as pigeons harvested in dovecotes for their eggs and squabs (young), or carp reared in fish ponds.^iv Hunting and shooting were at first of practical significance. ‘The importance of the produce of the field sports of antiquity can hardly be over-emphasised, as far as the rich — and only the rich — were concerned’, wrote the twentieth-century Warwickshire landowner, Michael Warriner.^v Venison, pheasant, partridge and duck all supplied food quickly in the winter, whereas the carcases of livestock, hung for longer, could more easily go bad. (It was impolite to comment on the mustard used to disguise the taste).

Later the landed class ceased to rely on the produce of hunting on their estates, or from fishponds, or dovecotes. Ice-houses meant meat could be stored much longer, and agriculture was becoming more productive. During the eighteenth century, orchards and warrens were gradually moved away from country houses and out of their parks. Fish ponds were less movable but those in sight of the big house could be turned into ornamental duck ponds. An Act of 1765 ‘for the preservation of fish in fish ponds and other waters and conies in warrens’ was seemingly ineffective. Types of food formerly acceptable, like rabbit, fell in status to become food for the poor. The alterations were connected with the better farming, more extra-agricultural sources of income, and the growth of trade (for instance sea-fish became widely available). Yet, as they ceased to rely exclusively on local sources of fresh meat, so landowners began to rear huge pens of pheasants for the sake of the shooting battue. Access to the land was increasingly denied to the poor, this time in the sacred name of sport.

COMMODITY LANDSCAPES

One way of looking at the relationship between people and wildlife is to think of the landscape at any given date as if it were devoted to a single commodity, changing as markets changed. This may strike people whose first interest is the natural environment as overgeneralised and abstract, but it has the advantage of clarifying why landscapes and ecosystems altered from time to time as well as differing from place to place. The humanised landscape which now occupies most of the earth’s surface cannot be understood solely in terms of the dictates of nature.

The commodity concept is grounded in the natural endowment but the mediation of relative costs is needed to explain why cultivated landscapes vary so much. For example, different soils and climates — meaning different costs for farmers — may favour plantation crops or grain or live-stock.^vi The industries associated with the respective types of production will vary, as will factors of production, location of settlements, distribution of income and so forth, up to and including the entire trajectory of economic development. Although the notion is unavoidably mechanistic, and for completeness would need to take each historical period into account, these economic patterns require only a further step to draw a picture of the general variety of ecosystems.

The idea is akin to staple theory, in which the mode of production is determined by the dominant crop: the Canadian sequence (which was the type specimen) ran through fishing, fur-trapping, lumbering and grain-growing, the Australian sequence through marine products, wool, gold and grain. Each product required different inputs, was harvested from settlements located in different ways and prospered according to the world market for the commodity in question. The scheme was originally devised by the Canadian economic historian, Harold Innis. We need not follow the fate of staple theory at the hands of its critics to recognise a potential implication: the landscape characterised by a given commodity houses a specific ecology. When markets favour a fresh crop, the ‘living entourage’ is transformed as well. Certain species find congenial niches and prosper with the new commodity, but others fail to do so; their numbers fall and their distribution shrinks. The idea is admittedly incomplete, thanks to unexpected limits of plasticity or adaptability on the part of some wild species, and to the fact that cost schedules must in part reflect underlying nature. At its extreme, the staples idea might be dismissed as a deterministic thesis in which ecosystems are solely functions of economics; even so it remains suggestive.

A sequence of staples describes the pattern of export production in new lands better than it accounts for farming in the ancient entanglements of long-settled Europe. If we think back to sixteenth-century England, we find a mixture of products for household consumption or very local sale and a proportionately small volume of goods despatched to customers elsewhere. Rural households made use of every growing and living thing; because they were poor they could not afford to miss any opportunity. They could afford to harvest local nature because the opportunity costs of female and child labour were low — there was little else for them to do on the spot and they could not travel far to work. Local subsistence production continued quite late in some districts yet was not wholly distinct from production for distant markets. The pattern was seldom clear-cut since product markets and long-distance trade had existed far back in prehistoric times. Supplying the markets meant that some specialised and large-scale businesses arose to interact with the ecosystem and harvest its gifts.

Southern England is suitable for analysis because wide areas within it, notably the Cotswolds and Wessex chalk, experienced swings in land use resulting from alterations in relative product prices. From perhaps as early as the end of Roman times, these gentle uplands, settled and cropped during the Iron Age, turned into gigantic sheep-runs, whereas from the seventeenth century they were once more increasingly ploughed. Cultivation was at its historical height in the 1850s and 1860s, when cereal prices were high. J. G. Cornish, rector of East Lockinge, Berkshire, harked back to his boyhood home in Suffolk of which he said, ‘the intensity of cultivation undoubtedly diminished the picturesqueness of the country. One hardly ever saw an acre of land that was not cultivated’.^vii His observations fit any arable district. Such was the land hunger that the big straggling hedges were grubbed up, and the wide ditches filled in, to be replaced by straight and narrow gullies. Miles of wide grass verges beside the country roads were annexed by the adjacent landowners and quickset hedges were planted beside the now pinched roadways. Hedgerow trees were felled ‘ruthlessly’. The term is Cornish’s and he knew of a whole attractive wood grubbed up for corn land. It was the cereal grower’s Golden Age. When he came to know the downs on the Berkshire chalk, Cornish said, ‘it was like the good times in Suffolk on a more lavish scale.’

Successive depressions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reversed the situation with a vengeance, creating large areas of tumbledown arable. Ornithological records indicate that these periods harboured birdlife markedly different from the phase of cereal prosperity. In 1881, a couple of years after the onset of deep depression, Richard Jefferies saw that superficially there was little change, only a few spots having gone right out of cultivation. Most land continued to be tilled, but not so well, and while there were still plenty of cattle, they were fewer than before and of poorer quality. Ominously, however, the old tenant farmers had often quit and been replaced by less experienced men. From then on, agriculture on the chalk-lands went from bad to worse. Sheep runs replaced the highest upland fields that had been brought under the plough in the mid-nineteenth century. Crops on the remaining cultivated acres were no longer carefully weeded. The region became the quiet countryside of reminiscence that fills so many rural books, where the cereals were always bright with poppies and full of corn cockle. Big flocks of linnets liked the weed seeds and so did pheasants — it was the ‘Age of the Pheasant’, maximum game-keeping, and huge bags in the shoots.

The clay vales that lie between the chalk and limestone are harder to study. The long-term history of Whiteparish, Wiltshire, has been the subject of a detailed investigation which is indicative. It shows that the less pronounced land-use changes in the vales seldom offer the means for historical ‘experiments’ like those of the uplands.^viii Two-thirds of Whiteparish have a drift (surface) geology of Reading Beds, London Clay and Bagshot sands, all of which had been heavily forested in early times. In the Saxon and medieval periods, parts of the forest were slowly cleared. During the seventeenth century, fields were enclosed in the remaining wooded areas and on the downland, and new farms were established. The nineteenth century saw the enlargement of one park in Whiteparish and the making of a second; otherwise most eighteenth-and nineteenth-century developments related to the enclosure of existing farmland, including the amalgamating of small holdings that had been allocated at the Act of enclosure in 1804. This created the large fields (now even larger) which characterise the Whiteparish landscape. Overall, the experience of this parish, at least away from its downland end, was of subdued land-use changes unlikely to produce effects that will show up dramatically in the biological record.

While land-use fluctuations in the one-third of the parish that lies on the chalk may have approximated the see-saw experience of most southern English downland, what is noticeable about the remainder of Whiteparish is its incremental development. It is a model for the clays of southern England in general: woodland was slowly cleared, farms and fiel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• THE LONG TERM
• ENGLAND AND THE NETHERLANDS
• EUROPEAN EXPANSION
• THE MODERN WORLD
• CONCLUSION
• General Index
• Person Index
• Principal Species