(^190) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
even if possible, would hardly be desirable. More importantly, as Yalden’s
own excellent work demonstrates so clearly, it is very hard to define
what actually constitutes our ‘native fauna’. Many important indigenous
species have been wiped out entirely, or now live in very restricted areas,
while many of our most familiar animals were introduced from abroad,
albeit often in the remote past. Probably around a third of our mammals
represent introduced species.^29 We still acknowledge grey squirrel, muntjac,
sika, Chinese water deer, and mink as aliens: ‘coming over here and
stealing our nuts’. But we somehow think differently about fallow deer,
rabbit, brown hare, harvest mouse, house mouse, black rat and brown rat,
to say nothing of the innumerable immigrant invertebrates living in our
homes and arable fields. As Rotherham and Lambert have noted, ‘what
is acceptable and what is alien vary with time’.^30 The little owl is now a
valued part of our fauna, but when introduced from France in the 1930s
it was considered a serious threat to native species.^31 Similar difficulties,
and contradictions, surround our flora. In the British Isles as a whole today
there are around 2,200 different species of indigenous flowering plant, but
over 1,100 ‘reasonably well-established aliens’^32 : nearer 1,800, according
to some estimates.^33 Some of these, moreover, provide sustenance for fauna
otherwise under threat: buddleia and other naturalized garden plants provide
excellent nectar sources; introduced trees do not necessarily support fewer
invertebrates, birds and mammals than native ones.^34 Again, reactions to
aliens are culturally conditioned, even irrational. Michaelmas daisy is an
obvious immigrant, but what naturalist does not bemoan the loss of the
immigrant poppy, almost sprayed out of existence in our neat, herbicide-
sodden fields? The fact that alien plants are a more important component
of urban than of rural environments may account for some of the hostility
shown towards them: precisely because they do not live in the countryside
they do not fit into our concept of what is ‘natural’. The extent to which
such species have established themselves beyond urban areas, and the scale
of the resultant damage to indigenous wildlife, are debated.^35 But most of
our rural environment has long been dominated by alien plants: fields of
cereals and associated weeds, plantations of foreign conifers. The voices of
those calling for indigenous purity of wildlife are drowned out by the sound
of the closing stable door.
The danger with historical approaches is that they can lead to a kind
of shifting and indecisive subjectivity, an uncertainty which might be
appropriate to discussions carried out in ivory towers, but which is of
little use in the real world, where decisions have to be taken about such
matters as how to deal with ‘invaders’. There are also dangers in driving,
as the logic laid out in the course of this book seems to suggests we should,
too substantial a wedge between the ‘rural’ and the ‘natural’. Apart from
anything else, if it became widely accepted that recent, urban and industrial
environments can be as good for wildlife as traditional, ancient, rural
ones – that nature resides in the town as much as in the countryside – it
elle
(Elle)
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