The frontline

One of the things that interest me about 'weeds' is that they are like rebel plants. You'll find them taking root in the most obscure and remarkable places throughout London. They are living evidence of nature in defiance against management.

There are very few aspects of the British landscape that are not 'managed.' One weird consequence of this is the abundance of funny shaped trees everywhere, trees that have had their branches lopped off to keep them within the urban safety requirements.

Lakes and ponds are particularly well managed. I was once very disappointed to learn that the fish in a lake I was fishing were restocked annually and, furthermore, were infertile.

Nature management is as old as the hills in England and spread far beyond its own borders. When England carried its mastery over nature to Africa through the colonies, suddenly the wilderness was defined, and ownership of its creatures established. Locals who had hunted as a livelihood became poachers and so started the whole african wildlife legacy we have today.

Perhaps this legacy began in such a place as Epping forest (that is if we don't go back into the psychology of the Garden of Eden) where, in the 12 century, Henry III asserted royal ownership and hunting rights over all the wild deer. The forest commoners where allowed to gather wood and foodstuffs, and to graze livestock, but the wild part and the right to destroy it, the valuable part, was Royal.

In Tudor times Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I hunted in the forest from the Queen Elizabeth's Hunting Lodge which still stands today as a museum.

The forest was saved from encroachment by the Epping Forest Act passed in 1878. The act stopped all illegal enclosure, halting the shrinkage of the forest that this had caused, and the Crown's right to deer and venison was terminated.

Until the outbreak of BSE in 1996 commoners still exercised their right to graze cattle and every summer herds of cattle would roam freely in the southern part of the forest.

Long horn cattle were reintroduced in 2001, to restore the balance that grazing had provided, but their movements are tightly restricted or should I say managed (as are the deer of the forest) to reduce conflict with traffic resulting from the increased urban population density.

It is extremely presumptuous of us to believe that 'nature', in its entirety, can be managed, especially against the sheer human weight that lies on its borders. The need to define, categorise, measure, control, conserve, contain has done little to prevent our awesome impact on the environment as a whole. Those nations with the greatest ethic of conservation have actually contributed the largest part of that global impact.

Maybe we shouldn't despair; as much as we feel that we have control over nature, it'll still live on, in its wild state, taking seed in the darker recesses of our world and mind, and I guess will choose to appear in the most unlikely and unexpected of places, the moment we run out of steam.

17 September 2008 - 8:26am — Philip Cartland