seTTing T he sCene: The naTure of naTure^17marked a peak in biodiversity. Some animals, it is true, had become extinct
over the centuries, but they were outnumbered by the extensive range of
flora and fauna intentionally, or inadvertently, introduced by man. From
rabbits to rats, poppies to sycamores, the countryside was, and indeed
still is, full of creatures which, in the views of some, should simply not be
here. Quite how we have come to think of these, and the hedged fields,
heaths, moors, meadows and woods which make up our traditional rural
landscape, as our ‘natural heritage’ is one of the themes of this book. But a
more important concern is the particular character of these habitats: how
they were created and sustained; how they were radically transformed and
replaced in subsequent centuries by industrialization, demographic growth,
and agricultural change; and what effects all this has had upon the nation’s
biodiversity.
Investigating these matters is by no means straightforward. It requires
a degree of expertise spanning a range of disciplines, in both the sciences
and the humanities, that nobody alive really possesses. Moreover, much
of the documentary evidence which is available for the study of our past
environments is meagre or misleading or both. Although from the eighteenth
century an expanding interest in natural history provides us with a variety of
observations of flora and fauna, it is usually difficult to convert these into a
reliable picture of the actual frequency of different species in the landscape. In
particular, as recent experience shows, variations over time in the numbers of
particular plants or animals, and even their apparent extinction in a locality,
can simply result from differences in levels of observation and recording.^78
To an extent it is possible to model past populations of plants and animals
by examining the kinds of flora or fauna found in similar habitats today. But
this too can be a hazardous procedure for – as the recent development of the
fox as an urban species attests – animals and plants can change their habits
and preferences over time.
On top of this there are theoretical problems. Words like ‘rarity’,
‘extinction’ and ‘biodiversity’ are slippery and problematic, especially in
terms of how they relate to different geographical scales of analysis. A species
can become extinct in one area but flourish elsewhere; ‘biodiversity’, while
usually employed to mean the maintenance of natural variety through the
conservation of the range of organisms characteristic of particular districts,
is sometimes used more loosely, simply to mean the total number of different
plant and animal species found in any area, which is not quite the same thing.
Such caveats should always be borne in mind in the pages that follow. What
remains certain, and underlies all the arguments presented in this book, is
that nature has never existed outside of or independent from the activities of
men. The natural lies embedded in the social and the economic: its history
is largely, though not entirely, that of successive forms of social, economic,
and agrarian organization.