Wildlife in depression, C.1870–1940^159[marginal] lands, some of which are probably part of original England, and, if
the war should continue for long, I imagine that a great drainage scheme will
be instituted which will eventually dry up many of the existing sanctuaries for
wild life’.^123 In the same year the government’s Nature Reserves Investigation
Committee was formed and in 1949 the National Parks and Access to the
Countryside Act, as well as establishing the first National Parks, also set up
the modern system of Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) – designated
areas protected, because of their importance in wildlife conservation, from
intensive agriculture or development.
Conclusion
The period between c.1870 and 1939 was not, in any simple and
unproblematic manner, a ‘golden age’ for English wildlife, as many
contemporaries were aware. The activities of gamekeepers, the establishment
of state forests, the widespread decline in traditional management practices,
and the continuation of intensive agriculture in arable districts, all damaged
long-established habitats and led to continuing declines in a number of
species of flora and fauna. In Cambridgeshire, for example, Preston has
noted how rates of plant extinctions actually rose in the first 30 years of
the twentieth century.^124 Yet at the same time, a variety of organizations
devoted to the preservation of the countryside now came into existence. As
state intervention in economic and social matters became more usual and
acceptable, demands grew for coherent policies of land-use planning, and
for legislation to protect important landscapes, habitats and species. Most
conservationists saw the continued expansion of towns, the improvement of
roads and the spread of suburbs as among the most important threats to the
natural world. But just as some types of essentially artificial habitat in the
countryside were being destroyed or altered out of all recognition by social
and economic change, novel ones were emerging in urban and industrial
areas.