Biodiversity then and now: Gilbert White and COP16
Reflections from our chaplain, Andrew Norman
One of my special places of pilgrimage is the village of Selborne in Hampshire, once the home of the Revd Gilbert White. And one of my favourite books is his Natural History of Selborne. The book was first published in 1788 and is still widely read. What makes me regularly return to it is his love of place and his sense of rootedness. Gilbert White was born in 1720 in Selborne where his grandfather was the vicar. Many years later, and after an academic career, becoming a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, he moved back to Selborne and took his grandfather’s place. There he stayed until he died in 1794 and was buried in the churchyard.
Throughout these years he observed birds and animals in their own habitats patiently and consistently, establishing a scientific method based on the precise and steady accumulation of detail. But I love the elegant and insightful ways he expresses himself. The very structure of his sentences can make us feel the movements of a bird’s flight. He describes how woodpeckers “fly volatu undosu (in an undulating flight), opening and closing their wings at every stroke, and so are always rising and falling in curves.”
He watched the hedgehogs “that abound in my gardens and fields” and he noticed the curious way they have of eating the roots of plantains from the bottom upwards leaving the leaves. He searched out a litter of newly born hedgehogs and saw how at first their spines are soft and supple at which stage they are as yet unable to roll themselves into a ball for protection. He watched how they make a “deep and warm” place of hibernation “with leaves and moss: but I never could find that they stored in any winter provision, as some quadrupeds certainly do”.
But when was the last time I saw a hedgehog in my garden? Decades ago. How sad that is. It makes any chronicling of the natural world so valuable. But it means that I read Gilbert White with a lot of nostalgia. How much we have lost and are continuing rapidly to lose. The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. One in six species are threatened with extinction, and 95 species of animals, plants, and fungi have already disappeared.
COP16 continues until 1 November. Our own government faces many challenges. But vital among them is the need to set up the UK’s national plan for restoring nature – and to commit to contributing our fair share in the funding of global biodiversity protection.
The Oxford English Dictionary notes that Gilbert White seems to have been the first person, in a letter written in 1763, to have used x to represent a kiss. We too simply need to love the whole diversity of the Earth as he most surely did. Just watch this short film and see how children in the Norfolk market town of Harleston describe their love of the life around them in their own place and be inspired.
And let’s call on our government to protect and restore nature – come to our Zoom call on the Climate and Nature Bill on 4 December.
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