(^188) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
habitats. It is arguably here, in particular, that an historical perspective
on English wildlife is most useful. Current understandings of what many
of these key habitats should be like are largely based on observations and
descriptions made when natural history first became culturally important,
in the early and especially the middle decades of the nineteenth century. But
by that time the various forms of management that had brought them into
existence were already in decline. In particular, it is easy to underestimate
the extent to which moors, heaths and other common land were exploited
for fuel, as much as for grazing, in the period before industrialization; and
how far the cessation of regular cutting and digging changed their ecology.
Further declines in the intensity of exploitation came of course in the later
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as these areas became less regularly
grazed, leading to further changes in their character: and their often current
derelict or semi-derelict condition makes it particularly hard to reconstruct
their earlier nature, or natures.
Historical research can certainly help to elucidate the circumstances
which shaped such habitats at the varying stages of their development, and
especially the contribution made by human activity. But the relationships
between society and economy on the one hand, and the environment on the
other, are usually complex and subtle. They have sometimes been simplified
in the past by ecologists who, while accustomed to seeing infinite complexity
in natural systems, fail on occasions to assume the same of human ones. It
might appear obvious, to take but one instance, that a decline in farming
fortunes in the first half of the twentieth century, and thus in the intensity with
which the countryside was exploited, should have been a boon to wildlife:
but, as we have seen, and for some very complicated reasons, the inverse
was probably the case. Yet while the links between the form and extent of
habitats, and social and economic developments, are indeed often infinitely
complex, they are always there. Man, not God, made the countryside, and
to manage valued habitats into the future, we need a more sophisticated
understanding of their human as much as their natural history.
The habitats created by industry and urbanization can also, as we have
seen, have conservation importance. This has long been true: the gravel pits
which have become important wildlife reserves in the course of the twentieth
century have their medieval counterparts in the flooded peat excavations
of the Norfolk Broads. Nature does not reside only, or even now in some
districts mainly, in the countryside. Most ecologists are fully aware of this,
but the wider public still tend, in an unproblematic manner, to equate
nature and the rural. Kelcey has noted how, at the same time as agricultural
intensification wrought increasing havoc on the traditional countryside,
industrial development ‘contributed much to the continued existence of
rare and unusual species... prevented some of the common species from
becoming rare, and led to diversification of habitats.. .’.^24 And it is hard to
argue with such a view. Of course, this is not to adopt an entirely relativist
position: not all artificial habitats are equivalent, in interest or diversity, to
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