An idea whose time has come

TED HUGHES

The Environmental Revolution M a x Nicholson (Hodder & Stoughton 84s) Perfectly timed, and with an unusually qualified author, The Environmental Revolution manages to be several things—and all of them are important. Basically, it is a lhistory of conservation, worldwide and from the beginning. It includes a detailed survey of the movement in modern times in the us and in Britain, where most of the pioneering work was done. The author goes on to a wider account of the largely successful attempts to make the movement international. He gives a full picture of how things stand at the moment, and projects vivid panoramas of the earth's alternative futures, from which it is now within the power of man to choose.

The earlier phases were comparatively simple: in England the enlightened care of the land by pre-nineteenth century lan- downers, and in America the setting up of the first National Parks. The later phase has become vastly complicated, and involves the salvaging of all nature from the pressures and oversights of our runaway populations, and from the monstrous anti-nature that we have created, the now nearly-autonomous technosphere. From being the high-minded vision of a few rich and powerful men, con- servation has become the desperate duty of everybody. Max Nicholson who, as Director General of the Nature Conservancy from 1952 to 1966, writes with considerable authority, reveals a world of conservationists which is enormously active and energetic, in- volving great numbers of people. Yet why does his account come as a surprise?

This surprise is a measure of two things—the ordinary public ignorance of the issues at stake, and the failure of the con- servationists to make those issues known. The public ignorance is also a deep resistance, of course. We have a biologically inbuilt amnesia against the fears of ex- tinction. The failure of conservationists to publicise their anxieties, nevertheless, is not so easy to understand. To most of the world, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring came as an absolute shock. What has followed it, in the same vein, has been mainly the work of casual journalists. After ten years, the evidence of that book has not reached the average gardener, and it has changed the doings of the average farmer only so far as it changed the laws which in turn have forced him to change. The colossal mass of evidence simply has not been marshalled and sent to the one front that counts: the ear of the public. But there is more to it.

The fundamental guiding ideas of our western civilisation are against conservation. They derive from reformed Christianity- and from Old Testament puritanism. They are based on the assumption that the earth is a heap of raw materials given to man by God for his exclusive profit and use. The creepy crawlies which infest it are devils of dirt and

without soul, also put there for his exclusive profit and use. The story of the mind exiled from nature is the story of western man.

It is a story of spiritual romanticism and heroic technological progress. It is a story of decline. Sure enough, when the modern mediumistic artist looks

into his crystal, he sees always the last nightmare of mental disintegration and spiritual emptiness. But he may see something else. He may see a vision of the real Eden, 'excellent as at the first day', the draughty, radiant paradise of the animals, which is the actual earth, in the actual universe: he may see Pan, whom Nietzsche, first in the depths, mistook for Dionysus, the vital, somewhat terrible spirit of natural life, which is new in every second. This is what will survive, if anything can.

But the history of conservation is also the history of the opposition against it. Nobody understands the enemy better than Max Nicholson. For much of his life, his task must have seemed impossible. What good is a thousand miles of preserved coastline, when the sea is a stew of poisons and nuclear waste? He probably knows the wage of the contractor who dumps the poisons and the waste. He knows the kitchen-gardener who finds it easier to scatter poison for the slugs—poison which goes into the soil, the water and the birds—than to kill them with sunken saucers of sugared beer. He knows the ordinarily pig-headed bureaucrat who will see thousands of acres destroyed because he is playing his ill-informed pet idea like a chess game, and cannot bear to lose. He knows the mindless greed of big industry, and the shameless dealing of the government departments who promote and protect it.

The book is crammed with his knowledge of such things, and with the evidence he piles against them, yet his comments—though they are cautious—are anything but hopeless.

Inevitably, the main obstacle to his work in conservation has been Government op- position, in all its forms, and such things can never be publicised enough. If Government could feel the crisis of it, or if

the public could make Government feel the expedience of it, the industrial poisoning of the water-systems in and around England, for instance, could be cut to something negligible very quickly. A crash programme of legislation and subsidies, of applying technological means already well researched, would cost no more than a few strikes, and would not require much more Government time and attention than did Rhodesia. It could be dealt with, as it should be dealt with, as a war. It would transform England, and the example would go a long way to alter the world.

Max Nicholson moves over such things patiently in this book, which is a constructive book, more concerned to call the hits than the misses. He drops quite heavily on educa- tion and he has some hard words for the

Forestry Commission—though one wonders if they are having such an effect on the land as the happy petrol-sawyer who will fell your trees free just for the joy of gliding through the great trunks. His deadly buzz is the new song of rural England. Wherever the Forestry Commission has not planted its impenetrable sour parallelograms, the petrol saw is scraping the skylines. All these things wait only for a little legislation. Even the one great problem, which is behind every other, and which brings Max Nicholson's powerful hopes to a stop again and again, the ex- plosion of world population (now doubling every thirty-five years), rests with legisla- tion.

He presses on past all this. His hopeful, positive drive is one of the admirable things in the book. You can feel everywhere the pressure of his opening sentence: `. . . one thing in the world is invincible, an idea whose time has come.' The time for con- servation has certainly come. But con- servation, our sudden scientific alertness to the wholeness of nature, and the lateness of the hour, is only the crest of a deeper ex- citement and readiness. The idea of nature as a single organism is not new. It was man's first great thought, the basic intuition of most primitive theologies. Since Christianity hardened here into Protestantism, we can follow its underground heretical life, leagued with everything occult, spiritualistic, devilish, over-emotional, bestial, mystical, feminine, crazy, revolutionary, and poetic. Now it has suddenly re-emerged, within the last few years, presenting respectable scientific credentials through the voice of the com- puter.

By this timely publication of his book, and by the position he has achieved in public life, Max Nicholson becomes one of the prophets and chief publicists of this revolution. In the past, conservation's main weakness has lain in the over-specialisation of its experts, so that geophysics, physiography, hydrology, botany, zoology, genetics, biometrics, ecology, meteorology and the rest worked on in nearly complete insulation from each other. And none of them had a .vision of where they were going. And none of them had a public voice. Conservation lay scat- tered like the dry bones. They are now assembling at great speed. Max Nicholson is outstanding because he saw from the start that a total knowledge was essential. From his older generation of specialists, he is one of the very few who combine in themselves several of the vital specialisations, and a good knowledge of the others. He is the only one who adds to these advantages a talent for administration, an inclusive vision, and a formidable voice.

In an early chapter of the book he describes in detail the surface of the whole earth, most of which he has examined at Close quarters, as if on a flight round and round the earth in a spiral from north to south. Throughout the book, in the many fascinating photographs and their long descriptive comments, and in the charts of the appendix, he builds this model into a liv- ing miniature of the earth, seen from the conservationist's point of view—which is to say, from nature's point of view. The effect is unforgettable. He is not only showing us the Wholeness of this living globe. He is showing Us the extreme intricacy and precision of its interconnected working parts—winds, cur- rents, rocks, plants, animals, weathers, in all their swarming and yet law-abiding variety.

At the same time he is showing us the ex- treme smallness of it. The final impression of its finiteness and frailty is alarming—the tiny area of usable land, the fragility of the living cell. Moreover, with this model he puts the whole globe into our hands, as something now absolutely in our care. It is novel to look at it in this way—both frightening and exhilarating. The whole description—though he writes as always more for thoroughness than for entertainment—has a lasting imaginative impact. And what alters the imagination, alters everything. We hold this globe in our hands, and all the inherited ideas vanish : the evidence is too plain. This miniature earth has our stomach, our blood, our precarious vital chemistry, and our future.

Max Nicholson writes as a scientist. Throughout his life, from his earliest days as a naturalist and birdwatcher, he has stuck to scientific methods and scientific evidence. He has kept his faith in technology, even when it seemed the worst enemy. Yet he actually is a prophet, and all this dedication has been based on a sure intuition of what language would finally carry the weight, when he came to tell his vision. And beneath the dog- gedly objective exposition, the juggernaut- grinding through masses of fact, there is a real vision. As if he had managed to set every abstraction or bias aside, he writes from an imagination constructed out of the ac- tualities of the earth's life, and at times his otherwise omnivorous administrator's prose rises to riveting eloquence. His pages about the inter-relationship of nature and the in- most psychology of man, beginning on page 259, go beyond science, and leave most modern theology in a vacuum. They display tremendous imaginative grasp of the true life of the earth, the inner spiritual unity of nature. And they give some glimpse into the depths of the geist which is now taking a grip on everybody.

Nature's obsession, after all, is to survive. As far as she is concerned, every new baby is a completely fresh start. If westernised civilised man is still open to correction, presumably she will correct him. if he is not open enough, she will still make the attempt. This book leaves one more than ever con- vinced that the moment has come.