PART ONE: THE ABSOLUTE IMPORTANCE OF NATURAL HISTORY
Why wildlife matters – and why Britain needs to introduce a GCSE in Natural History
In 2011 the wildlife campaigner and author Mary Colwell began to publicise the idea that we – Britain; society; the world – need a GCSE in Natural History. With help from the outgoing Green Party leader Caroline Lucas and Tim Oates of Cambridge Assessment she prepared a formal proposal to put to government and as she describes in British Wildlife (May 2025: vol 15 number 6 p 391) it was finally announced on April 21 2022 “to much fanfare and news coverage” that the new initiative would indeed begin.
But it didn’t. For reasons that have not been revealed, some members of the Conservative government that was still in power in the summer of 2024 raised objections. Now, though, with encouragement from the new Green MP Ellie Chown, the Labour government has picked up the baton and in March 2025 the new Minister of State (Education), Catherine McKinnell, announced:
“The government is pleased to confirm that we will be moving ahead with the new GCSE in natural history. The GCSE will enable more young people to benefit from the opportunity to learn about the natural world in more depth at key stage 4 [which means at ages 14-16].”
So here, at last, is good news; a residual hint of sanity in this increasingly precarious and insane world. In her British Wildlife article (everyone should read British Wildlife!) Mary Colwell offers good reasons why the new GCSE is a good and necessary idea, and suggests the kinds of things that ought to be included in it.
For my part, I suggest that no subject is more important than natural history and that its omission from formal educational curricula has been and is a huge and damaging oversight. I am not a teacher but as an interested outsider I would like to offer a few thoughts. There’s an enormous amount to discuss, and I hope at least to make a start in a series of blogs under the grand heading of “Fellow Creatures” (or as Robert Burns said in To a Mouse in 1754, our “Fellow Mortals”).
The following outlines the issues that I suggest should be discussed. Doubtless the details will change as the series unfolds but this is how I see things now. As always, I do hope that others will add their voices.
So:
Introduction: What Natural History is and why it matters
Natural History is the study of wildlife and, more generally, of the natural world — the biosphere. It matters both for anthropocentric reasons — what our fellow creatures do for us, human beings. And it matters for reasons that might be called biocentric, or ecocentric, or – best of all – Gaiacentric. Indeed we might reasonably ask: “If the natural world with all the creatures within it don’t matter, then what does?” For as John Ruskin remarked in 1860 in Unto This Last
“There is no wealth but life”
What wildlife does for us: the anthropocentric reasons for taking the natural world seriously
The natural world provides us with all kinds of very obvious material benefits which are commonly referred to as “natural resources” or “natural capital”. Indeed it is a veritable cornucopia. It also brings enormous and critical psychological benefits. In this year’s Summer/Autumn edition of RSPB Magazine (pp 33-39) various members describe how being outdoors and watching birds helped to cure or at least to live with depression or ADHD and so on, and gardens of course and trees and lakes and even potted plants may be similarly uplifting. Animals too of many kinds are increasingly employed as therapists. It isn’t just a matter of companionship. Or at least it is – but companionship means more than physical presence. It implies a measure of empathy; and animals can be deeply empathic. There’s a huge literature on companion dogs and horses in particular. (The jockey turned novelist Dick Francis spoke of “my friend who happens to be a horse”.)
All this – the unhappiness and mental disorder that so often result when we lose touch with other species, whether wild or as companions – suggests that our need for other creatures whether animals or plants (or mushrooms or seaweeds), and for wild places, is deeply embedded in our psyche. We are undermined psychologically if we are deprived of the natural world and the companionship of other species just as we are weakened physically by lack of food. Evolutionary theory suggests that this is bound to be the case. After all, natural selection favours the creatures and their genes that are best adapted to the circumstances they are born into — and “best adapted” implies mental as well as physical adjustment.
But the truth of all this, and the importance of it, has yet to dawn on the policy-makers. The official designation of animals in Britain — “Livestock, Game, or Vermin” — is symptomatic of the prevailing mindset.
On the broadest front of all it ought to obvious that if the global ecosystem, the biosphere – Gaia – collapses then we, humanity, must collapse with it. All this ought to be obvious but again, the world’s most influential governments and the corporates and the miscellaneous assemblage of the super-rich who dominate the world are wont to ignore or indeed to deride whatever they cannot neatly accommodate within their own particular ideologies. As we all know, some in high places still deny the reality of climate change, even as the flames and the floods edge closer, just as science has long since predicted must happen. Or else they seek to assure us, in tones of sweet reasonableness, that to change direction would be too expensive, so there’s no more to be said.
The modern world is shaped by the neoliberal economy – an all-out, no-holds-barred global competition for material wealth. Neoliberalism is capitalism stripped of moral constraint. The market makes the rules, including the rules of morality. Profit is the goal and the sine qua non. To be sure, the care of wildlife can be profitable but it is not generally as profitable as a great many other things and so it is that for neoliberal governments like ours wildlife and the conservation thereof are seen as an add-on, low on the list of priorities. Ancient forests are swept aside to make way for the latest government wheeze, like, say, HS2. Such schemes are not intended primarily to improve the general quality of life but to make oodles of money for the entrepreneurs. They are also supposed to “create jobs” which, as we invest more and more in ever smarter robots and AI to replace human beings and reduce costs, becomes ever more necessary (although we should of course be asking much more than we do when and if the bots are really necessary). In practice, too, as HS2 so glaringly demonstrates, the wheezes do not always work out as intended. To quote Robert Burns again:
“The best-laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft agley”
Indeed so. Modern physicists call it non-linearity.
More and more in these neoliberal times the natural world like everything else is required to pay its way, and is taken seriously only insofar as it can be made profitable, at least for people in positions of influence who are deemed ipso facto to be the most important. When the German/British “Buddhist” economist E F Schumacher first coined the expression “natural capital”, in Small is Beautiful in 1973, he intended it to mean the natural world itself, including the landscapes and waterways and all the creatures they contain, and all the essentials that they gift to us for free – fresh air, clean water, fertile soils, and the light and warmth of the Sun. But the concept has been corrupted, as all big ideas tend to be. Nowadays in official circles natural capital is construed in banker’s terms — the price the various components of the natural world might realise in the global market. Nature’s benison is re-conceived as “ecosystem services”, all of which must be “fully costed”.
The thinking behind neoliberal economics is too crude even to keep the world’s finances on an even keel, let alone the natural world in all its intricacy. Indeed, although many and perhaps most political ideologies and economic theories contain some grains of wisdom, none in its pure form matches up to life’s reality, and none should be imposed in its idealised form upon humanity or on the natural world. Thus we should certainly take heed of Marx but we need not turn ourselves into “Marxists”, and although markets are certainly useful we should not make a cult of them, as the neoliberals do. But that’s another story for another time.
Be all that as it may, extreme, materialist, anthropocentricity is seen to be “rational”, because it brings us, or some of us, or a lot of us, short-term material benefits. It must be rational to serve our own self-interests, must it not? Indeed it seems perverse to do otherwise. And in the hard-headed post-Enlightened world rationality is deemed ipso facto to be good. Rationality implies calculation and logic which, done carefully, are seen to be infallible. Rationality alone can bring us certainty, and lead us to the truth (can it not?); and – surely? – we need to root all that we think and do in truth. Then again, one of the antonyms of “rational” is “irrational”, which is commonly taken to mean mad, and we wouldn’t want to be ruled by madness, would we? (Even though we are, as described in my blog on June 22, “The Madness of King Donald”.)
So it is that in practice, only the materialist, anthropocentric, and narrowly neoliberal ideas and policies are deemed to be “realistic”, and worthy of serious discussion by serious people. Evidently it is more realistic to strive for ever-increasing wealth and to dismiss the resulting destruction as “collateral damage”, unfortunate but unavoidable, than it is to take the natural world seriously and seek to live in harmony with our fellow creatures, and keep the Earth itself in good heart. That idea persists even when, as now, the collateral damage seems likely to prove terminal. (And, as discussed elsewhere on this website, the world is in fact dominated and shaped by psychopaths. The best-laid schemes indeed.)
To be sure, a great deal is happening of a positive nature – the techniques and science of wildlife conservation are coming on apace, and many millions of people worldwide support a myriad different NGOs worldwide, from the international biggies like the WWF and IUCN, to the hugely influential national groups like Britain’s RSPB and the BTO and the Woodland Trust and so on, to the many thousands of more local and specialist wildlife societies; and wildlife has an ever greater and altogether wondrous presence on TV and books on wildlife abound. Very obviously, people the world over really are interested, and concerned.
Governments gather at intervals in high-profile conferences and sign many a solemn agreement to attend to one or other of the world’s more obvious environmental shortcomings. It’s easy to be cynical – all those big cars with smoked windows, and helicopters and private jets, and bodyguards and armies of journalists on exes — but good things do come from all this nonetheless. The conferences do at least serve to focus attention on serious matters and often give rise to agencies that do at least make some difference. But much of what’s agreed in public is ignored in practice, if not openly dismissed. Very few governments meet their allotted targets. Those who fall short tend to argue (a) that they can’t afford to do whatever was demanded of them or (b) that there is no point in acting unless everybody else does too or (c) that the environmental targets are less pressing than the other things they have to deal with (including their immediate need to spend more on defence since one or other of their rivals is kicking up), and so on and so on. In the real world, too, of course, governments of every stripe, everywhere, often find themselves at odds with the transnational corporates, who have their own plans and constraints and are often richer and more powerful than most governments are.
So it is that the world as a whole is in a state of schizophrenia. Despite the conferences and the solemn declarations of intent, government policies and the prevailing (neoliberal) global economy continue to push the world in the wrong direction. Thus Britain’s present Labour government is promoting renewable energy but is also committed to economic “growth”, or as both Truss and Starmer like to say, to “Growth, growth, growth!!” Overall and most importantly the Zeitgeist is still dominated by the perceived need for more and more material wealth, and especially private wealth – and all in the end is underpinned by the exclusively anthropocentric idea and feeling that only human beings really matter. It does seem though that many and perhaps most of the ostensibly anthropocentric people who have most influence in the world don’t care much about most of humanity either. It is very hard to believe that Netanyahu, say, or Putin or Trump, or the Far Right in general, including our own dear Nigel Farage, give a damn for anyone beyond their own blood relatives and cronies.
The truth is that if we really do care about the present plight and the future of humanity then a narrow, materialistic, neoliberal, and exclusively (and highly selective) anthropocentricity won’t do. We need to value and indeed revere our fellow creatures not just for what they do for us but for their own sake. Our fellow creatures matter whether or not they benefit us. They would matter even if our own species had never appeared and there was no-one around to appreciate them. We need indeed to shift the Zeitgeist: to cultivate and promulgate attitudes that might properly be called biocentric, or ecocentric, or – best of all – Gaiacentric (more on Gaia as this series unfolds).
Wildlife matters because it matters!
Fortunately, many and I suspect by far the majority of people in the history of the world, and in the present, do not see the natural world purely as a resource – as a cornucopia installed for our express use. In the long history of humanity this exclusively anthropocentric attitude is surely recent. It presumably was engendered or at least reinforced by the advent of agriculture, which is rooted in the idea that we have the ability at least to some extent to control nature, or bits of it, for our own convenience. The idea has grown too that we have a right to do so – as reflected in Genesis 1: 26 which in the King James translation reads:
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
Modern scholars suggest that Genesis was written about 2500 years ago when farming in one form or another was already the norm over most of the known and habitable world. This anthropocentric attitude has surely been further reinforced these past few centuries by the rise of capitalism and the felt need to commodify, and by particular threads of science and of technologies that give the illusion that we really do understand the natural world and can control it. So at least in the modern western world – which is widely seen as the model for the rest to follow – the idea has grown up that we have both the God-given right and the know-how and the technical ability to manipulate and re-shape the world at will. Or, in practice, according to the whims of Donald Trump and Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu and miscellaneous oil sheiks.
How people felt about the natural world before agriculture and high-tech and the modern growth-oriented economy came on board can never be known in detail. We cannot get inside the heads of our far-gone ancestors. We can though, surely, learn much from the world’s remaining “indigenous peoples” some of whom still live primarily or even exclusively as hunter-gatherers. Of course it is perilous to assume that any group of people alive today sees the world in the same way as our distant ancestors who lived in a world very different from our own, and in any case were highly heterogeneous and perhaps held many different points of view. But modern-day indigenous people living traditional lives do at least remind us that there are, in fact, many different ways of looking at the world and that current standpoints, various and wide-ranging though they may appear to be, in truth represent only a segment of the range open to us.
As for our pre-agricultural and early agricultural ancestors, we can at least imagine what they must have felt and believed. And we can reasonably infer from the paleontological and archaeological clues they have left behind them that to some extent they feared the creatures they grew up with, and to some extent they revered them, and in any case recognised their presence as fellow beings that had to be come to terms with. But they could not aspire to control the natural world for their own convenience, and might well have seen any claim to actual ownership as blasphemy. But what was once unthinkable is now taken for granted.
Mercifully however, although the idea that we can control and own the natural world and have a right to do so is now dominant – the Zeitgeist indeed – it has never been universal. Among the dissenters in modern times were and are the Romantics. Attitudes and beliefs of a Romantic kind run through all of history and impinge on people in all walks of life – philosophy, theology, science, and even politics and economics. But it is generally agreed that the artistic and literary (and theological) trend that scholars call “Romanticism” reached its apotheosis in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The Romantics in particular embraced and promulgated the idea that nature is sublime. Crudely, “sublime” is often taken simply to mean “excellent” or “aesthetically pleasing”. But the German theologian Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) captured the idea most cogently in The Idea of the Holy, first published in 1917. He coined the expression
“Mysterium tremendum et fascinans”
This very obviously means “a mystery both awe-inspiring and fascinating” – which, I suggest, is exactly how we ought to regard nature. Many people do see nature in this way and it surely is the case that most of us who have had any real contact with the natural world do feel the awe and fascination and the mysteriousness in our bones (or heart or guts). The materialist-neoliberal attitude to nature may prevail, and shapes modern “environmental” policy, but I feel in my own bones that this does not reflect the deepest convictions of most of humanity. This is surely true in all fields. Democracy is surely intended to imply that the deepest feelings of humanity are reflected in policy but alas, no-one has yet managed to make democracy work the way it should. But I digress.
Otto, in The Idea of the Holy, also coined the term “numinous”, from the Latin numen meaning “divine will”. This implies a sense of transcendence: the idea that behind the universe, or embedded within it, or both, there is an intelligence at work. This hypothetical intelligence makes the universe happen and indeed, perhaps, gives it purpose and direction. Some people equate this putative intelligence with God. This kind of idea cannot be tested by the methods of science but it is certainly plausible and if true it is of profound importance; and an idea that is plausible and potentially of huge significance deserves to be taken seriously. It surely should not be dismissed out of hand (as I discussed in my blog on March 5th, “Is atheism just a fancy name for bigotry?”). Specifically, by “numinous”, Otto meant “divine presence”. Many people, including a great many who reject formal religion, nonetheless claim to be “spiritual”. But many who make that claim equate spirituality simply with emotional uplift, as they might experience as they listen to the music of Schubert, or Cleo Laine. Or more specifically they equate spirituality with aesthetic sensibility. I suggest though that the term “spiritual” should always imply some sense of transcendence. But that’s just my take on things.
Decades before Otto published The Idea of the Holy, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) anticipated the thought in The Prelude (XIII. 66-73):
“A meditation rose in me that night/ Upon the lonely mountain when the scene/ Had passed away, and it appeared to me/ The perfect image of a mighty mind/ Of one that feeds upon infinity,/ That is exalted by an under-presence,/The sense of God, or whatsoe’er is dim/ Or vast in its own being …”
Long before Wordsworth the general sense that the natural world is divinely inspired – and is forever beyond our ken – was beautifully encapsulated in one line by the Herefordshire cleric and poet Thomas Traherne (c 1637-1674):
“An ant is a great miracle in a little room and no less a monument of eternal love than almighty power”
Yes indeed. An ant in its intricacy and subtlety, or a wasp or fly, the creatures we regard as pests, and swat with a rolled up Radio Times, far surpasses any human artefact.
In sharpest contrast, the Oxford biologist and former professor of public understanding Richard Dawkins, in his role as the world’s most famous and eloquent atheist, rejects any hint of transcendence, and hence of God, and would surely therefore reject the idea of the numinous, with its sense of divine presence. Yet he nonetheless embraces the idea of the sublime. Thus in “The Survival Machine”, an essay in John Brockman’s The Third Culture (1995), he says:
“The universe is genuinely mysterious, grand, beautiful, awe-inspiring”
He is content nonetheless to insist that science provides all the explanation we need. Wordsworth’s “sense of God” is surplus to requirements. For as Dawkins says elsewhere:
“There’s real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality”
Even more hard-headed than Dawkins is his Oxford colleague Peter Atkins, a professor of organic chemistry. He wrote:
“There is no reason to suppose that science cannot deal with every aspect of existence. Only the religious – among whom I include not only the prejudiced but also the underinformed – hope there is a dark corner to the universe, or of the universe of experience, that science can never hope to illuminate.”
[From: “The Limitless Power of Science” in Nature’s Imagination – the Frontiers of Scientific Vision. Ed John Cornwell, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995. Quoted by John Lennox in God’s Undertaker, Lion Hudson, Oxford, 2007].
Well, I like science too but as the Lancaster and Oxford chemist and historian of science John Headley Brook argued in Science and Religion (1991), and biochemist and Oxford theologian Alister McGrath discusses in Dawkins God (2005), and the Oxford mathematician and Christian teacher John Lennox outlines in God and Stephen Hawking (2010), science and religion are not inveterately at odds as is often supposed. Indeed the two are complementary and feed into each other – in truth a two-way flow. The Catholic Church has long since recognized this and many a scientist, including some of the greatest, have been and are devout Christians or Muslims or Jews or Hindus or whatever. The present Dalai Lama too takes a keen interest in science and high tech.
Many scientists agree with prof Atkins, but by no means all, and perhaps only a minority. Thus as Albert Einstein no less wrote in Living Philosophies in 1931:
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead — his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of true religiousness.”
It is significant that Einstein, one of the greatest thinkers in the history of the world, speaks expressly of feeling. For in truth, although some scientists and other hard-heads in all walks of life make such a virtue of their hard-headedness, and of cold calculation and logic, and of course we cannot do without these things, in practice our understanding of the world, and in particular our moral sense, our sense of right and wrong, is rooted in intuition – in feeling. Thus in the 18th century another of the world’s greatest thinkers, David Hume, wrote in his Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1740:
“The rules of morality … are not conclusions of our reason”
And more broadly he said:
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions”
Modern ethical committees, however, seem largely to have forgotten Hume, and prefer the “Utilitarian” ethics which Jeremy Bentham summarised in the late 18th century as
“the greatest happiness of the greatest number”
Many philosophers and prophets have argued these past few millennia that moral principles are not merely human inventions for human purposes and cannot and should not be framed in purely anthropocentric terms. But Bentham was very much a child of the Enlightenment and sought to purge moral philosophy of any mystical tendencies. His idea has been further corrupted in the neoliberal world and it tends nowadays to be assumed that happiness can and will be increased by greater wealth – that richer means happier. Hence “Growth, growth, growth” is seen to be morally as well as materially desirable. And all this is seen to be unimpeachably rational. Anyone who argues otherwise we’re told is not being “realistic”.
Beyond doubt, the sentiments espoused by the Romantics and indeed by Einstein resonate strongly with a great many people; and I suspect would resonate with most people. So why aren’t they acted upon? How can it be that even in putative democracies like ours is supposed to be, governments continue to adopt attitudes and pursue policies that so many people find repellent and are so obviously destructive, not to say potentially suicidal? We might of course ask the same question in all contexts. Why do we put up with such unfairness in society when most people including small babies – and various intelligent social animals – are known to have a strong sense of justice and injustice? Why do we support and vote for an economy that creates and exacerbates such inequality?
One obvious answer as discussed elsewhere in this website is that those people who crave wealth and power most obsessively are most likely to achieve it, largely because the rest of us aren’t that keen to take charge. Most of us just want to get on with our own lives. So inevitably the present world is dominated by super-ambitious power-seekers like Trump and Putin and Netanyahu, and by tycoons like Musk and Bezos and Murdoch, and miscellaneous crazed generals. Also, in this post-Enlightenment age we put huge store by rationality and by what we see as reasoned argument; and the idea that we, human beings, should concern ourselves exclusively with our own species, or our own community, or indeed our own family and cronies seems, at least so some people, to be eminently reasonable. Conversely, the feeling that we should take care of creatures that do us no obvious good and may even do us demonstrable harm may seem positively perverse.
It seems reasonable to argue too, at least with fingers crossed, and if you don’t probe too deeply, that the material world can be treated like a cornucopia, and that we have both the ability and the right to exploit its resources as we will. The Trumps and Musks of this world are not alone in feeling this. The idea that the world and all its riches are God’s gift to humanity is a strong theme in Judaeo-Christian theology and teaching. Indeed, in past ages, excessive concern for the natural world was sometimes condemned as paganism, and/or as pantheism. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1667; he died surprisingly young!) was banished and worse for seeming to suggest that God is nature.
So the general feeling has evolved these past few centuries that for us, human beings, to take what we want from the Earth for our own material benefit is very obviously the rational thing to do. And it is obviously sensible to behave rationally – isn’t it?
But the kind of arguments deployed to defend and exalt wildlife don’t seem to be “rational” at all – unless, as is only sometimes the case, we can show that care of wildlife brings measurable, quantifiable, material benefit. Is it rationalto suggest that the natural world is “sublime”? Is it rational to suggest declare that ants are “a great miracle”? Is it rationalpositively to revel in mystery, as Dawkins accuses religious people of doing – even if, as Einstein himself declared, the sense of mystery is “the most beautiful thing we can experience”?
No indeed. Such suggestions are not “rational”, as rationality is generally understood. They are expressions of feelings, and feelings are fickle and personal, not to be relied upon. The idea that the world is a mystery is an anathema to many mainstream scientists who see it as their task in life to dispel mystery. Ideas of transcendence should be replaced with explanations – theories – that are ultimately rooted in mathematical reasoning that cannot be wrong. The idea that the universe is a miracle should be laughed out of court. Or at least, in case we should be thought philistine, it should be reserved for Sundays when for an hour or two we are allowed to put rationality on hold.
For in truth, such notions do not belong in the cold world of calculation, or of utilitarian ethics. They are in the realm of metaphysics. And as the Oxford philosopher R G Collingwood pointed out in the mid-20th century, metaphysics may be seen as “the sum of all absolute presuppositions”. And an “absolute presupposition” is an idea that cannot be further analysed, but must be, and is, simply taken for granted. Absolute presuppositions indeed are intuitive: what we feel in our bones to be the case.
All religions are clearly metaphysical in essence. All bona fide religion after all, including the non-theistic ones as Buddhism is assumed to be, are rooted in the idea of transcendence: that the physical world we observe and measure is just the surface of things. But – here’s the irony that is often overlooked: science is rooted in metaphysics too – in unprovable assumptions. Notably, science at least of the mainstream kind is rooted in the idea of cause and effect. But as David Hume pointed out, cause-and-effect is not provable. Always we infer cause and effect from correlation – from the fact that B at least fairly consistently follows A. But correlation is not cause.
Moral philosophy, despite the best efforts of Jeremy Bentham and others, is also inveterately metaphysical in nature. Whatever the “rational” arguments, the feeling of right and wrong is in our bones. Thus however Netanyahu seeks to rationalise and hence to justify his depredations in Gaza and the West Bank, we feel in our bones (or most of us do) that it is simply wrong. Wicked indeed. And no amount of special pleading can erase that feeling, and neither should it.
In reality, then, all human thought, even the most unimpeachably rational, is rooted in intuition: in a feeling in the bones. Thus the hardest of materialist and anthropocentric hard-heads feel and claim that they have freed themselves of all mere sentimentality and of inherited beliefs left over from earlier times. But they too are rooted in their presuppositions. Thus they generally take it for granted that human beings are the only creatures that count; and behind that is the ancient idea that there is indeed a scale of life, a hierarchy, with us at the top; and it is further presupposed, without further argument, that because human beings are the most powerful species of all, and (we like to think) are uniquely able to take control, we therefore have a right to take the rest of the world by the scruff and bend it to our exclusive will, or indeed whim. But the “therefore” in that last sentence is very questionable. In short, the self-claimed rationalists are rooted in their own bone feelings just as much as Wordsworth and Thomas Traherne.
The idea that nature is miraculous, and indeed sacred, very obviously springs from a feeling in the bones. The lesson is, though, that we should listen to our bones: ask what it is that they are telling us. As St Augustine advised circa 400 AD:
“Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi. In interiore homine habitat veritas”
— which means:
“Do not wander far and wide but return into yourself. Deep within man there dwells the truth.”
Yet although our bone-feelings – intuitions – are deep-rooted within us, they are not inflexible. They can be and are modified or even abandoned in the light of experience and education. Overall, then, I suggest, we need consciously to listen to our bones – and also to cultivate the intuitions to which they give rise. We need to change the prevailing attitude to the natural world — to shift the Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist surely can be shifted. And Natural History – close-up interaction with our fellow creatures – can help us to achieve the necessary change. We need to see for ourselves and not simply to recognize but to experience just how wondrous the natural world really is, and how privileged we are to be in it, and how much is being sacrificed for no good reason at all, even though the principal destroyers claim to be so reasonable.
One final irony – or rather a huge serendipity: a reverent attitude has great practical relevance! The long-held idea that we can do what we like to the natural world and that it will always come up smiling to serve our ends is, very obviously, extreme folly. So our recent forbears took rabbits and foxes and come domestic cats to Australia and pigs and possums to New Zealand and cleared vegetation the world over which has caused landscape (and villages and towns) to flood and erode the soil – and so and so on. Ill-informed and mountebank politicians who usually have very little knowledge of science at all, and even less acquaintance with the philosophy of science, are wont to assure us and presumably believe that science and high tech and more money can dig us out of any hole we may dig ourselves into. (Jacob Rees-Mogg comes to mind in this context).
But this is hubris, which the old Greeks felt was the greatest folly of all. Hubris is the belief that we know more than we do, and can do more than is the case, and that we have a (God-given?) right to do as we please, and that we have the god-like power and right to re-structure the world to our own convenience. I suggest indeed that most of what has gone so spectacularly wrong with the modern world is rooted in hubris.
The antidote to hubris is humility — which as argued elsewhere on this website (under “The Big Idea / Mindset”) should be seen as one of the prime and indispensable human virtues. Unless we treat the natural world with due caution, our fellow creatures and we ourselves are sunk. We may not be able to wipe out everything, as James Lovelock told us, but we can certainly perpetrate mass extinction and make life intolerable for the survivors — which we are well on the way to doing. The ideas of a metaphysical nature – the theology and the poetry that encourage us to view the world as a miracle, a wonder well beyond our ken, sacred indeed, and to treat it accordingly with reverence – all encourage the humility and the caution that are vital if we are not to wreck the Earth beyond recovery.
In short, metaphysics isn’t just for metaphysicians and clerics and poets, or for self-indulgent dreamers and hippies. The attitudes of humility and reverence it engenders are of huge practical importance. We may develop science that beggars belief (and are so doing) and hold endless high-profile conferences and pass the most high-sounding resolutions — but without an appropriate attitude it all must fall far short. The evidence that this is so is all around us.
So where stands Natural History?
Because wildlife matters, wildlife conservation matters. As a sine qua non, as argued above, effective wildlife conservation requires an appropriate attitude. It also needs know-how – provided in the main by the best possible science, and in particular the eclectic science of ecology (which I want to argue, to borrow an expression of St Thomas Aquinas, should be seen as “the Queen of the sciences”). And thirdly, we need good technique; to be as sure as we can be that our interventions do achieve what’s wanted. History shows that it is very easy to do more harm than good.
Natural History, which in my primary school days we called “nature study”, has a vital role to play in all of the above. Thus the role of science is to explain what’s out there, as far as we are able; and Natural History shows us what there is to explain. In general, science, the facts of the matter and the explanations then co-evolve, and take us forward. As Sir Peter Medawar put the matter in an essay on “The Nature of Scientific Thought, Process, and Writing”:
In short, there’s a great deal to be looked at, which is why I feel this whole subject needs a series; and that a GCSE in natural history, at least to get the show on the road, is long overdue. Indeed natural history — and metaphysics — should be at the core of all formal education. Their absence from standard curricula is, I suggest, a prime reason why so many people in positions of influence seem to have so little grasp of the things that are really important in this world, which in turn does much to explain why the world is in such a mess, and why, despite the huge and often brilliant efforts to put things right, the world continues to deteriorate and is taking humanity with it.
I do hope as many people as possible will join in, and help to develop the ideas,
To be continued …
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