A mirror to Nature
GILBERT WHITE’S ECOLOGICAL REVOLUTION James Burkinshaw
TE ACHER OF ENGLISH
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merican poet, James Russell Lowell described I also find the word “conversation” fascinating here. White Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of was no anthropomorphist (except, perhaps, when it came to Selborne as “the journal of Adam in Paradise”. Timothy, his pet tortoise), but he was extraordinarily alive to It is a delightful image: the gentle, eighteenththe subtleties of animal behaviour and the complexities of the century parson wandering the woods and relationships between species and environments: “The language downs of his quiet corner of rural Hampshire, a natural of birds is very ancient and, like other ancient modes of speech, landscape that he observed in such intricate detail and with very elliptical; little is said but much is meant and understood.” such a sense of wonder. White saw animals as having an inner existence independent Adam’s expulsion from Paradise, in the Book of Genesis, of humans. They were not Cartesian machines there to be represents our species’ agonising alienation from the rest of controlled and exploited (“ipsa scientia potestas est”); they were nature. The instrument of our Fall is Knowledge: human selfcreatures as complex and, ultimately, unknowable as we were. consciousness. However, 2,000 years after the Genesis narrative Indeed, when White is paying attention to detail, he is was written, philosopher Francis Bacon claimed that it was paying respect. That is why it is so important to him to find the knowledge that held the key to human power right words - not just “a few synonyms”. His over nature ("ipsa scientia potestas est") in his biographer Richard Mabey notes that he “never Meditationes Sacrae (1597). Bacon helped shape openly appropriated (animals’) lives as evidence WHITE SAW a scientific revolution, predicated on human for any moral or theological theory; they are ANIMALS NOT mastery of nature. A century and a half later, respected for themselves.” For that very reason, AS CARTESIAN Gilbert White would pioneer an ecological White is conscious that he must be objective, not MACHINES TO revolution based on respect for the natural romanticise what he is seeing: “It is the hardest BE EXPLOITED world. thing in the world to shake off superstitious BUT CREATURES White was suspicious of an over-reliance on prejudices; they are sucked in as it were with our AS COMPLEX reason and abstraction: “Bare descriptions and mother’s milk . . . become so interwoven into our AND ULTIMATELY a few synonyms . . . all that may be done at very constitutions that the strongest good sense is UNKNOWABLE AS home in a man’s study but the investigation of required to disengage ourselves from them.” WE WERE. the life and conversation of animals is a concern White was sensitive to the intricacy of the natural of much more trouble and difficulty and it is not world, the essential role played by its most to be attained but by the active and inquisitive.” His dismissive apparently humble denizens: “The most insignificant insects and reference to “synonyms” reflects his awareness of the limitations reptiles are of much more consequence and have much more of terminology to truly characterise the complex nature of what influence in the economy of nature than the incurious are aware is being described. For Gilbert White, “trouble and difficulty” of . . . Earth worms, though in appearance a small and despicable were part of the point: knowledge had to be experienced, had link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make a lamentable to be earned. chasm . . . a good monography of worms would afford much
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