'One and the same historic landscape': a physical/cultural perspective

The paper reviews, from a British perspective, the ecological contribution to landscape conservation. It focuses upon the development of an institutional framework for the study and stewardship of the 'living' heritage, the enquiries required of ecologists as to how plant and animal communities functioned, and the increasing support given to what came to be known as 'creative conservation'. Such endeavours, as were often pursued under the self-conscious title of 'historical ecology', have, in their turn, called for a greater discernment in the use of the term 'naturalness' to describe any protected area, let alone the larger countryside

Wartime rodent-control in England and Wales

Within the wider context of endeavours to assess pest damage to crops, the chapter focuses on the contribution made by wartime research to more effective rodent-control, both immediately by way of statutory regulation and through such peacetime reconstruction measures as the Prevention of Damage by Pests Act of 1949. A conspicuous part was played by the leading animal ecologist, C.S.Elton, and his Bureau of Animal Population, both as to the technique and organization of rat and mouse control and more generally to concepts of the management of wildlife populations in the post-war period

Nature's Spectacle: The World's First National Parks and Protected Places

National parks have always been an emotive and iconic symbol, ever since the first parks of the modern era were created in the mid-nineteenth century. This book, based on original research, delves deeply into their character and significance, and the larger context in which they developed. The book celebrates the deserved attractiveness of the parks as wilderness or "spectacle" to millions of visitors, but also emphasises how there was nothing inevitable, self-sustaining or without cost in their magnificence and accessibility. Those early parks were a powerful unifying force as national 'playgrounds', especially as motor transport democratised their use. However they also provoked bitter conflict in their dispossession of local communities and perhaps deliberate segregation of people from scenery and wildlife. That first century of national parks, which concluded with the significant break of the Second World War and the subsequent development of more international approaches to conservation, left an uncertain legacy. It was a fragile foundation from which to build what became an integral part of today's conservation movement

Pesticides and the British environment: An agricultural perspective

Pesticides formed an essential part of the post-war 'chemical revolution' in British farming. Advantage is taken of surviving files of the Ministry of Agriculture to extend what might otherwise be learned from the archives of the nature-conservation bodies in reconstructing historically the course and significance of moves to protect the environment from the side-effects of such pesticides. The files reveal how, from the very first reports of the unintended impacts upon horticultural crops, the manufacturers and users of such products were required to heed the consequences for other user-interests in the countryside. However circumstantial the environmental evidence might be, such impacts on game and wild-animal life warned of a potential risk of the more-persistent pesticide residues to human health itself

Torrey Canyon: The political dimension

It is forty years since the Torrey Canyon oil-tanker disaster of March/April 1967. The unprecedented scale of the pollution and its impact on the Cornish coast is commonly perceived as an important trigger to the environmental movement of the 1970s. The article focuses on the political response to the immediate stranding and destruction of the tanker, the pollution of the beaches, the legal and scientific advice tendered, and the longer-term repercussions for ‘the machinery of government’. If not a trigger, such exposure to public criticism accelerated the incremental pace by which ministers and their officials responded to the increasing significance being given to pollution issues