Book Review- 'The Sixth Extinction'

Review: ‘The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History’ by Elizabeth Kolbert; Bloomsbury, 2014.

On one fateful day 66 million years ago, the Earth’s gravitational field captured an asteroid. It was travelling at around seventy thousand kilometres per hour on a flat trajectory. It slammed into the Yucatan Peninsula and generated a white-hot, supersonic shock-wave which was directed mainly northward. The author of this book quotes a geologist who said: “Basically, if you were a triceratops in Alberta, you had about two minutes before you got vaporized (sic)”. Trillions of tons of sulphur- rich material were blasted into the air, which led to a condition analogous to a ‘nuclear winter’. Whole orders, families, genera and species of plants and animals went extinct – most famously the non-avian dinosaurs. It took the world millions of years to recover from these catastrophic circumstances – but they are probably why we’re here, rather than some descendant of the dinosaurs.

There had, in fact, been four mass extinction events before the one described above. The most devastating was probably the one at the end of the Permian, some 252 million years ago when around 96% of all living things went extinct – although the reasons for that event are not as well understood. When interviewed recently (http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2014/mar/09/elizabeth-kolbert-whole-world-becoming-zoo) the author of this book, Elizabeth Kolbert, stated that life on Earth is “contingent” i.e. subject to chance or unforeseen circumstances. The title of her book is based on the rapidly growing consensus among scientists that we’re now living through the sixth extinction event in the history of life on Earth – and that our own species, Homo sapiens, is directly responsible for it. Our current epoch is increasingly being referred to as the “Anthropocene” because our species is now so dominant and has so modified the planet’s surface and atmosphere that the fate of the biosphere is now in our hands.

Elizabeth Kolbert is an American journalist and author. She is best known for her book on climate change, ‘Field Notes from a Catastrophe’ (2006), and as an observer and commentator on environmental matters for the ‘New Yorker’ magazine. This present book is brilliant, lucid, very readable, scientifically up-to-date, tragic and utterly terrifying. We learn that although certain species, such as the Great Auk and the Dodo, have been deliberately exterminated through over-exploitation in the recent past, more recent losses can be directly attributed to our gross and ruthless modifications of the planet’s surface and atmosphere – in particular there are direct links between species’ extinction and climate change. For example, carbon dioxide is soluble in water and produces a weak acid. As the CO₂ content of the atmosphere increases, the oceans become more acidic. This affects the viability of organisms that use calcium in their body plans; shellfish and corals are particularly badly affected. In tropical waters, reefs formed by corals provide ecological niches for thousands of non-coral species; if corals are damaged or killed, all of those dependent species are put at risk as well. Tropical rain forests contain hundreds of different tree species. Each tree species has specific habitat requirements and also provides niches for many other species of plants and animals. As temperature rises, trees which produce few seeds and/or are slow growing are at a serious disadvantage, and, consequently, so are their attendant species. Trees which produce lots of seeds and/or are fast growing can move uphill to cooler climes. But even the latter are still at risk because many rain forests are now so fragmented that there are limited spaces for them to move to.

The much vaunted ‘globalisation’ is a serious problem too. Many organisms have been (often inadvertently) transported around the world and have caused havoc in places in which they do not belong. Currently, Central American amphibians and North American bats are being wiped out by imported fungal diseases.

I took away two surprising ideas from this book:

1. This is undoubtedly the first extinction event in history which is being studied, in meticulous detail, by elements of the causal agent! In her research for this book, Ms Kolbert interviewed many scientists working in the field and accompanied some of them on their field trips. The ingenuity and dedication of these scientists is often astonishing.

2. Time scales can often be difficult, or impossible, to grasp; who can get their head round 66 million years – let alone 252 million years – for example? It is now, more or less, agreed that when humans migrated out of Africa, they exterminated large animals (mammoths, giant ground sloths, moas etc.) everywhere they went. Kolbert interviewed a paleobiologist, named John Alroy, who described this ‘megafauna extinction’ as a “geologically instantaneous ecological catastrophe too gradual to be perceived by the people who unleashed it.” The ominous fact is, though, that extinctions are currently happening within single human lifetimes. 

 

This is an important but scary book. Brace yourself and read it!

Dave Bishop, March 2014

Note: This review first appeared in 'Manchester Climate Monthly'. To find out more about Manchester's premier climate journal, you should e-mail the editor, Marc Hudson, on mcmonthly@gmail.com.

PS: I tried to add a picture of the cover of this book to top of this article but, for some unknown reason, this - bleep, bleep, bleep, bleeping - software wouldn't let me!! 

Here's a book review by our local moth expert, Ben Smart. Please note Ben's comment that many of his pictures for the book were taken in the Mersey Valley!

Field Guide to the Micro-Moths of Great Britain and Ireland 

British Wildlife Publishing (2012)

By Phil Sterling and Mark Parsons. Illustrations by Richard Lewington

 

This is a late review (of sorts), seeing as this book came out about 12 months ago.

I should declare an interest as I was glad to be asked to help out with the book in terms of collating the photographs for the book. It features more than 380 photographs of larvae and their feeding signs, and over half of these are mine, mostly of moth larvae found in the Mersey Valley.

It also features beautiful colour illustrations by Richard Lewington, Europe’s leading insect artist, of over 1000 micro-moth species.

The micro-moths are a fairly artificial grouping of approximately 1500 species. Most are (unsurprisingly) small and most are known by their Latin names, but the variety of life cycles make this a fascinating group to study.

Some of the larvae feed inside a leaf creating a distinctive pattern known as a leafmine. Some feed on dead bark, fungi, wine corks or owl pellets. The seeds, flowers and fruit of almost all plants are potential food for at least one species. Many are extremely specialised and will only feed on one particular foodstuff, often in one particular habitat. The photographs aim to demonstrate these feeding signs as many of the micro-moths may be more easily identified by observation of their early stages than by the adult moth, which is many cases is hard to find.

The illustrations of the adult moths are excellent and feature the moths in a natural resting position, rather than the unnatural ‘pinned’ appearance, as in a moth collection, that features in some other books. They also show the moths at 2 or 3 times life-size, and this helps to show the intricacies of pattern that feature on the wings of many of these species, despite the actual moths’ miniature appearance.

The photographs below show the adult and leafmine of one such species, Phyllonorycter trifasciella. The larva of this moth feeds inside honeysuckle leaves, causing the leaf to twist and turn on itself, making the presence of the larva reasonably easy to detect. It can be found in gardens, so if you have any honeysuckle there, have a look to see if you can see any of these twisted leaves.

 

This is probably the first time that anything approaching a handbook has been produced, that covers all the micro-moth families so extensively, and the book has opened up this area of nature for many more people. I was pleased to see that there are thirteen reviews of this book on amazon. Twelve of these give the book 5 stars. The thirteenth gives it four.

The book is available in softback and hardback. There is a link to the publisher below, although obviously other booksellers are available.

http://www.britishwildlife.com/viewbook.asp?bookid=24

Ben Smart, April 2013

Book Review by Andrew Simpson

Andrew is a keen local historian and has just written an historical account of Chorlton in the period between 1800 and the mid-19th century. Andrew's book should be available in the autumn of this year.

The Book of the Farm by Henry Stephens (first pub. 1844) new edition abridged and edited by Alex Langlands, pub. Anova Books (Batsford Ltd.)2011, (ISBN 13: 9781906388911; ISBN 10: 1906388911), 304 pp., £25:00.

Recently I walked the meadows in the company of David Bishop, and Ingrid Burney. It was one of those conducted tours that Dave and Ingrid do so well. David provided a detailed description of the plant life we encountered and Ingrid retold old folk tales fitting them into our surroundings.

It is easy to take the meadows at face value and assume that what you see is what it always was. But the land has been altered, by land fill tipping and before that by the construction of a sewage works. In fact even before the start of the walk I fell across someone who remembered living in a house by the footbridge across the brook when his father worked at the sewage farm in the 1950s.

Go back another hundred years and the place was different again. Much of the land was pasture and meadow land and was farmed in small parcels by families like the Higginbotham’s who settled in the township in the 1840s and were still here in the 1960s.

Meadowland as David’s is wont to tell you are perhaps one of the finest examples of how to sympathetically use the land. It is a skilled task and involves regularly irrigating the fields so that they can produce early grass for pasture.

I was reminded of this by the republication of 'The Book of the Farm' by Henry Stephens. I first came across it while watching 'The Victorian Farm' on TV and quickly found that it could be downloaded from Google Books has now been reissued by Anova Books as well as being available on Kindle.

It was written in 1844, and ran to countless editions. It was the manual for anyone wanting to be a farmer. Everything is here from what crops to plant and when to how to make a well, as well as sound advice on hiring labourers, the construction of a water meadow, and the best location for the milk house and cheese room. I learned which materials were best for building a farm house and how much I could expect to pay for materials, as well as the most up to date scientific information on planting wurzels.

It was a practical book and so “the cost of digging a well in clay, eight feet in diameter and sixteen deep and building a ring three feet in diameter with dry rubble masonry is only L5 [£5] exclusive of carriage and the cost of pumps.”

He calculated that that two brood sows could produce 40 pigs between them and that retaining six for home use the remaining 34 could easily be sold at market. So many of the smaller farmers and market gardeners in the township might well keep at least one sow and use it to supplement their income. Nor should we forget that these animals were destined for the table and so the slaughter of pigs was best done around Martinmas in early November because “the flesh in the warm months is not sufficiently firm and is then liable to be fly born before it is cured” and doing so in early November had the added advantage that cured hams would be ready for Christmas.

To read Stephens is to step back into the world that was Chorlton in the 1850s and for that alone it is worth making the effort to get a copy.

Andrew Simpson, May 2011

Book Review

'Here On Earth: A new beginning' by Tim Flannery, pub. Allen Lane, 2010, (ISBN: 978-1-846-14396-0), 316 pp., £14.99

The Sun, together with its attendant planets, including the Earth, condensed out of a cosmic cloud of gas and dust 4.5 billion years ago. Within a billion years, as the author of this book expresses it: “parts of [the Earth’s] crust had begun to organise into life”. Eventually there appeared microscopic plants and bacteria which split the CO2 rich atmosphere into oxygen and carbon. They also used toxic metals, dissolved in sea water, to speed up the chemical reactions which were essential to their existence. As they died and sank to the ocean floor the toxins were taken out of circulation and concentrated into the Earth’s crust. Hence living organisms modified the planet by making the atmosphere richer in energy (oxygen is a very reactive gas) and the oceans less toxic. The stage was set for life to become more complex.

Five or six million years ago several species of upright apes (hominids) began to appear in Africa. Two million years ago one of these hominids (Homo erectus) managed to migrate out of Africa and to colonise parts of Asia and Europe. Although H. erectus developed stone tools it had a smaller brain than modern humans and appears not to have possessed language; eventually, for reasons which are not clear, it became extinct. Fifty thousand years ago one of H. erectus’s smarter relatives (H. sapiens) also migrated out of Africa. These modern humans made their way around the shores of the Indian Ocean, eventually reaching as far as Australia. Some break-away groups then gradually colonised inland Asia, Europe and the Americas. Much of this story has only recently become clear as a result of genetic studies.

The impact of human beings on the rest of the world was catastrophic. Our fire and tool using, upright ape ancestors caused havoc, wiping out the megafauna (and much else) on five continents. In northern Eurasia, for example, there once existed a place called the Mammoth Steppe. This was a dry, frigid grassland populated by mammoth, woolly rhino, bison, musk ox, giant elk and horse. It took our species a while to adapt to this region’s harsh climate but once we had done so we wiped out all of these giant beasts - basically scoffing the lot! This mass extinction, particularly the loss of the mammoths, had a profound and devastating effect on the region’s ecology. Soon after, humans arrived in North America - which promptly lost 34 genera of large mammals, followed by South America which lost 50. Today we’re just mopping up what’s left - but we are waging this on-going war against Nature war with a ferocity that our ancestors could only have dreamed of. We have drenched the land with poisons and dug up the toxic heavy metals that the ancient bacteria had buried and spread them around again. Most dangerous of all we have extracted vast quantities of fossil carbon from the Earth’s crust and burned it to form CO2 - resulting in increasing climate instability.

In this book the Australian scientist, writer and explorer, Tim Flannery looks at this long and complex story from an evolutionary perspective. He reviews the life and work of Charles Darwin and his ‘Neo-Darwinist’ successor, Richard Dawkins - who reasoned, in his book ‘The Selfish Gene’ (1976), that we and other animals are mere ‘survival machines’ whose sole purpose is to ensure the perpetuation of the genes we carry. He goes on to suggest that the theories of Darwin and Dawkins are essentially reductionist and contrasts those theories with the more ‘holistic’ views of the co-discoverer (with Darwin) of the Theory of Evolution, Alfred Russell Wallace. Flannery tells us that while Darwin, “sought enlightenment by studying smaller and smaller pieces of life’s puzzle, Wallace took on the whole, trying to make sense of life at a planetary and universal scale.” He nominates the remarkable English chemist and planetary scientist, James Lovelock as Wallace’s modern-day successor. Lovelock, you may remember, formulated the ‘Gaia Hypothesis’ which suggests that the whole planet, from the core to the fringes of space, is one vast, self-regulating ‘organism’ and that continental plates, volcanoes, the ice caps, the oceans, the atmosphere and living things all play their part in maintaining an equilibrium which allows life to flourish. What humans are doing at the moment is the equivalent of sticking a large screwdriver into the delicate works of an antique clock and stirring it around. Lovelock believes that the coming climate catastrophe will kill 90% of us.

Flannery reminds us that, at this time in our history, we humans are not just ruled by our genes but also by, what he calls, ‘mnemes’ (Dawkins calls them ‘memes’) which are, basically, “ideas which have a living reality in our brains”. Science, religion and philanthropy are all examples of mnemes and they can act for good or for ill. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is another mneme, but so is the wilful mis-interpretation of the Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ concept which has often been mis-applied to human societies with disastrous consequences (Nazism or rampant, unregulated Capitalism, anyone?). Mnemes, of course, evolve far faster than genes.

Another concept which Flannery discusses is coevolution. This is natural selection triggered by interactions between living things. Throughout the history of life on Earth countless examples of coeveolution have arisen. Examples include microrrhizal fungi on the roots of trees and other plants and the relationship between the coral polyp and its algal partner. It’s an extraordinary fact that the cells which compose our bodies contain elements called mitochondria which actually power the cells. There is strong evidence that mitochondria were once free living bacteria which invaded the cells of our remote ancestors aeons ago. Incidentally, mitochondrial DNA is only transmitted through the female line and this fact was used to trace the paths that humans took out of Africa.

When considering the future of the planet and the living things (including us) which co-exist with it, Flannery invokes another duality – the competing possibilities of a ‘Medean’ future or a ‘Gaian’ one.
The palaeontologist Peter Ward has advanced the hypothesis that species will, if left unchecked, destroy themselves by exploiting their resources to the point of collapse; this is the Medea hypothesis. The other possibility is a Gaian one. Flannery suggests that our species has already evolved into a ‘superorganism’. If we survive the next couple of centuries we may possibly learn to restore the Earth. And then the planet, through her co-evolved human superorganism, would “be able to foresee malfunction, instability or other danger and act with precision.” My money is on a Medean outcome – but let’s hope that a Gaian future is not beyond the bounds of possibility and that this fine book will help to plant the Gaian mneme in the collective brain of humanity.

This is a remarkable book and if you are interested in the past, present and future of our planet and our species then I know of no finer summary of present knowledge.

Dave Bishop, April 2011

Book Review

'Eradicating Ecocide' by Polly Higgins, pub. Shepheard-Walwyn, 2010 (ISBN-13: 978-85683-275-8), 202pp, £17.95

In last Sunday’s ‘Independent on Sunday’ newspaper (23.01.2011) it was reported that a group of Swiss environmentalists are planning to give a ‘Public Eye Award’ to “the most evil corporation of the year” - that is the company that has committed “the worst corporate offences against human rights and the environment” . According to the article there are six candidates for the award including British Petroleum (of recent Gulf of Mexico infamy).

Another candidate, AngloGold Ashanti, is alleged to have contaminated lands with poison and to have tortured people in its company buildings in Ghana (now that’s really evil!). Nevertheless, AngloGold Ashanti has defended itself as follows: “The company seeks always to operate in a socially and environmentally sensitive manner befitting a responsible corporate citizen.” I bet their PR department spent hours coming up with that! But wait ... what do they mean by the phrase, “responsible corporate citizen”? What it actually means is that if AngloGold Ashanti is found to be guilty, in a court of law, of the crimes that it is alleged to have committed, it is the company that will be fined, not the CEO or the Board of Directors. This is because, in law, a corporation is a ‘fictional person’ and it is that ersatz person who is punished – not the real people who run the company! Most big corporations merely absorb any fines and move on. BP, for example, having trashed the Gulf of Mexico, will now move on to the Russian Arctic and will probably pay the fines it has incurred in the Gulf out of the enormous profits that it makes there (God help the Russian Arctic!).

In this book Polly Higgins explains how this curious and often catastrophic situation came about. Ms Higgins is a barrister who has devoted herself to the study of environmental law; in her own words:

“Law can be employed creatively and constructively, effecting overnight change. Innovation can be nudged to suddenly flow in a very different direction, sometimes in unexpected areas. Law can close one door and open another. Law can inadvertently create a positive discrimination. Law can change our values and understanding. The inverse can also be true. Sometimes laws are put in place that directly or inadvertently cause damage and destruction. These are the laws that need to be rooted out and transformed.”

In this authoritative, compelling and very readable book she shows, in meticulous detail, how governments have connived with big corporations to create damaging laws and a legal framework within which the corporations can operate with few restraints; as a result, “... BP have the ‘right to kill’ the ocean with impunity.”
After exposing the truth behind the compromise laws and inadequate voluntary codes favoured by big corporations to protect their ‘right’ to rape and despoil the planet as they please, Polly Higgins advocates the creation of a new ‘Crime Against Peace’: Ecocide.
At the moment there are four International Crimes Against Peace: Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes and Crimes of Aggression. Ms Higgins suggests that Ecocide should be the fifth and that for the purpose of international law it should defined as:

The extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment of that territory has been severely diminished.

Those found guilty of International Crimes Against Peace can be tried before the International Criminal Court which operates according to principles established at Nuremburg, that is:

Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced.

If that principle were to apply there would be no more hiding behind ‘fictional persons’ and it would be CEOs and Boards of Directors in the dock and under the threat of going to jail if they were to be found guilty of Ecocide.
This is a powerful idea and Polly Higgins portrays such an international law as nothing less than a bridge between a wrecked and eventually uninhabitable planet and one in which all life (including human life) is respected and valued.

This is undoubtedly the most important book that I read in 2010 – I urge you to read it too. You can buy a copy and learn more about Polly Higgins’s ideas through her website: www.thisisecocide.com.

What are you waiting for? Stop reading this and access the website now!

Dave Bishop, January 2011

Book Review

‘Call Back Yesterday: Northenden Remembered’ by Winifred A. Garner, pub. Neil Richardson, 2nd Edition 2002 (ISBN: 1-85216-147-7), 67pp, £5.75

I found this book in a newsagent’s shop, in Northenden, a few weeks ago. It’s a volume in Neil Richardson’s extensive series on local history. It was first published in 1986 and re-published in 2002. I confess that I bought it for the illustrations, but on reading the text I found it very interesting and affecting.

It is an autobiographical account of a young girl growing up in the Mersey Valley village of Northenden, between the First and Second World Wars. Winifred A. Garner née Payne was born in 1910 and died in 1992. In her book she outlines the lives of her parents and grandparents and then describes her childhood, teenage years and early twenties. The account ends with the birth of her daughter in 1935, two years after she and her new husband had moved into a (then) new house in Baguley. In a sense this is recent history – but it’s already a time that is rapidly passing out of living memory.

The first section of her book describes social relationships which would be inconceivable today. Winifred’s maternal grandfather secured himself a position as coachman-handyman with a well-off Northenden family. One of the daughters of the well-off family married a rich Manchester businessman. When the businessman’s family moved to Marple they took Winifred’s grandfather’s family with them and provided them with a cottage. Winifred’s mother, Deborah, worked as a ‘between-maid’ for the rich family and they paid her medical bills when she fell ill and advanced her education by allowing her to read all the books in their house. Later Deborah secured herself another position, with another well-off family, and this relationship seems to have been equally paternalistic.
Of course, paternalism was probably not always as idyllic as the above account suggests. In fact, at one point Deborah found herself working for a “very bad-tempered lady” – and soon left that employment. In addition, for every working class family who secured themselves a position with rich paternalists, there must have been hundreds who didn’t. But I believe that, when reading accounts such as this, one should be careful not to criticise the past by the standards of the present. By the time that Winifred came of working age these paternalistic relationships had largely broken down, and rather than go into service like her mother, she worked for a number of commercial enterprises in Manchester and Northenden.

Winifred seems to have had a very happy childhood and obviously grew up in the bosom of a very loving family. Both her father and uncle saw service in the First World War – but both returned safely. Winifred recalled spending a weekend sitting outside the Post Office waiting for her father to alight from a bus. Unfortunately, he actually returned on the following Monday afternoon, while she was at school.

Winifred tells us that in her childhood most children were expected to run errands for their parents and other adults. She seems to have relished this aspect of her life – and, if nothing else, it was probably very good for her socialisation. Writing about these errands gives Winifred the opportunity to describe various Northenden shopkeepers and tradesmen and their various wares, services, foibles and eccentricities.

Northenden, like most communities, seems to have had its fair share of eccentrics. One of these was old Tim Bardsley who would sit outside his terraced house in Church Road and wave his walking stick at passing (errand running) children and shout, “I’ll have you!” Winifred imagines him chuckling to himself at the memory of the children’s “scared faces and scurrying legs”. Another was the village constable, PC Scragg, who invited himself to a family party and left with his helmet on back to front!

Through the media of local folklore and events Winifred was also aware of a darker side to life. Eight years before her birth a seventy year old butler shot and killed his ex-employer and was himself shot dead by a policeman. By the time of Winifred’s childhood this murder had attained a prominent place in local legend. Another gruesome murder occurred in the 1920s.A 14 year old lad was abducted from Manchester and stabbed to death in a local wood. She also tells us that people often drowned in the highly polluted* river Mersey: children playing, rowing accidents and suicides. Bodies tended to be recovered from the Cheshire side of the river because the authorities on that side paid more for recovery than those on the Lancashire side!

Winifred witnessed the transformation of Northenden from a rather pretty, rural village to a Manchester suburb and in reading her book we witness her own transformation from a country girl to a rather fashionable young woman who obviously revelled in all the cultural delights that a big city, like Manchester in the 1920s, had to offer.

Sadly, time has not been too kind to Northenden. The major changes began in the late 1920s/early1930s when the neighbouring Wythenshawe estate was purchased from the Simon family by Manchester Corporation and developed into the vast housing estate that we know today (a transformation which Winifred and her family benefited from, of course). Because Winifred’s book ends in 1935 we learn nothing of subsequent changes: the rather brutalist town planning of the latter half of the 20th century, the motorway building which has left Northenden an island surrounded by roads and the river, and the laissez-faire developments of the last couple of decades which have relentlessly filled in many of its remaining open spaces. Still, in a few spots (Ford Lane, Boat Lane, St. Wilfrid’s Church and churchyard) we can still catch a glimpse of the village that Winifred knew and loved.

This is a delightful book, written in straightforward and eloquent prose; highly recommended to anyone with an interest in social history, local history or the Mersey Valley.
You can obtain a copy of this book by sending a SAE to Neil Richardson, 88 Ringley Road, Stoneclough, Radcliffe M26 1ET. I also note that you can buy all of Neil Richardson’s books via the Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society website (http://www.mlfhs.org.uk/).

Dave Bishop, October 2009

* Earlier this year, on a walk from Northenden to Didsbury, I was amazed to see huge shoals of small fish (gudgeon?) in the river all the way from the Tatton Arms to Simon’s Bridge. Obviously the river is much, much less polluted now than it was in Winifred’s day. This has to be a very definite improvement!

Book Review

The Herbalist: Nicholas Culpeper and the fight for medical freedom by Benjamin Woolley, Harper Perennial, 2004; Paperback (ISBN: 0-00-712658-1), 402 pp, £8.99

A couple of weeks ago I walked along the river bank from Chorlton to Fletcher Moss in Didsbury. I found a few interesting plants but my best find was this book in the Oxfam bookshop in Didsbury village.

The author tells the story of one of the most famous of all English herbalists, Nicholas Culpeper. Nicholas lived during the first half of the 17th century – one of the most turbulent in all English history. His life was relatively short but it was an eventful one. He was born the son of a country parson, but his father died when Nicholas was an infant. His mother took him to live with her father, another country parson who was also a Puritan (what we would call today a ‘religious fundamentalist’) and a biblical scholar. Nicholas’s relationship with his grandfather does not appear to have been a happy one. Eventually the grandfather sent Nicholas to Cambridge where he learned Latin but did not graduate. Then Nicholas really ‘blotted his copybook’ by falling in love with the daughter of a local nobleman – a circumstance which had the potential to severely embarrass his grandfather. The couple decided to elope and made their way, by separate routes, to the south coast. On her way to the tryst the girl was struck by lightning and killed. A heart-broken Nicholas was banished to London where he took up an apprenticeship in the Apothecaries trade. For a variety of reasons Nicholas eventually had to abandon his apprenticeship and then got married and set up an unlicensed medical practice with his wife. This practice, which was largely based on herbal remedies, offered “medical help to anyone who needed it, no matter how poor.”

And this was a time when medical help was desperately needed because cities, towns and villages were over-crowded, insanitary and breeding places for countless infectious diseases. People, especially young children, died in droves from everything from chickenpox to smallpox. Periodically plague would appear and wipe out thousands of people (well over 40,000 Londoners died in the ‘plague year’ of 1625 alone).

At the point in Nicholas’s life when he should have been settled another catastrophe befell England – the Civil War. This brutal conflict, a result of the religious, political, economic and social tensions which had been building up for decades, if not centuries, killed more British people, in proportion to the population of the day, than did the First and Second World Wars combined. Inevitably Nicholas was swept up in it and was severely wounded in one of the first battles of the war, the Battle of Newbury in 1643.

Woolley suggests that Nicholas never really recovered from this wound – but he had other battles to fight. Medical practice was controlled by the haughty and patrician College of Physicians. They were concerned that the Apothecaries were undermining their monopoly by treating patients. The Physicians succeeded in licensing the Apothecaries and insisted that they confine themselves to the preparation of medicines only. The only medicines that the apothecaries were allowed to prepare were those listed in a weighty Latin tome called Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, which had been written and published by the Physicians. Nicholas translated the Pharmacopoeia into English, added information on the medical uses of the various preparations, and succeeded in publishing it. This work was a best seller and severely undermined the Physicians’ monopoly. Bolstered by his new found fame Nicholas wrote and published several other works, including one on midwifery and his most famous work, ‘The English Physitian, or An astrologo-physical discourse of the vulgar herbs of this nation’ (alternative title: ‘Culpeper’s Complete Herbal’). This book, first published in 1652, was to remain in print for centuries. Nicholas died in 1654 aged only 37.

In this book Woolley contrasts Nicholas’s career with that of the most famous Physician of his day, William Harvey. Although they probably would not have had much sympathy with each other Harvey was just as much a rebel and revolutionary as Culpeper. In the 17th century medical orthodoxy insisted that all medical knowledge was contained in the works of ancient Greeks and Romans and, in particular, the works of the Roman physician, Galen. Harvey dared to contradict the Galenic tradition by describing the working of the heart and the circulation of the blood based on his own observations. Today Harvey is regarded as the father of modern scientific medicine whilst Culpeper tends to be dismissed as something of a quack and a charlatan – mainly because of his interest in astrology. Woolley points out that this is not a fair assessment. In spite of Harvey’s discoveries the Physicians still clung to Galenic methods, which involved such harmful practices as blood-letting and treatment with powerful emetics and purgatives. It’s suggested that they may have killed at least two kings: James I and Charles II with their deadly meddling (and they may actually have been implicated in the assassination of the former). On the other hand Culpeper’s work may have involved a bit of harmless astrological mumbo-jumbo – no more irrational than much of the Galenic tradition – but for centuries countless people swore by his herbal remedies and could rely on little else during times of sickness.

One aspect of this book that I found particularly striking was the chapter headings. Each chapter is prefaced with the name of a herb, Nicholas’s description of that herb and it uses, and some modern remarks and observations on the same plant. The twelve herbs are: Tansy (Tanacetum vulgare), Borage (Borago officinalis), Angelica (Angelica archangelica), Balm (Melissa officinalis), Melancholy Thistle (Carduus heterophyllus), Self-heal (Prunella vulgaris), Rosa Solis, or Sun-Dew (Drosera rotundifolia), Bryony, or Wild Vine (Bryonia dioica), Hemlock (Conium maculatum), Lesser Celandine, or Pilewort (Ranunculus ficaria), Arach Wild & Stinking (Garden Orache = Atriplex hortensis) and Wormwood (Artemisia absinthium). I have found nine of these twelve herbs in the Mersey Valley. Some, like Lesser Celandine, are common and found everywhere, whilst I have found Garden Orache only once. Of the remaining three, Sun-Dew was, until the mid-19th century, common on all the Mosses (i.e. peat bogs) hereabouts such as Carrington and Barton Mosses and Baguley Moor - but, with the draining of these areas, is now extinct. Melancholy Thistle once grew up around the Bury area and may still occur in the southern Pennines but I have never seen it in the Mersey Valley and don’t expect to do so. I have not seen Wormwood in the Mersey Valley for many years but it still occurs on waste ground in the city centre.

In spite of the plants missing from the above list many others mentioned in Culpeper’s book still grow around here and it is remarkable to think that, in a sense, we still live surrounded by the ingredients listed in a 17th century herbal!

I note that this book is still available from Amazon. I recommend it highly.

Dave Bishop, September 2009.

Book Review: Collins Flower Guide

Collins Flower Guide by David Streeter, C. Hart-Davies, A. Hardcastle, F. Cole & L. Harper, Collins, 2009; Hardback (ISNB: 978-0-00-710621-9), 704 pp; £30.

There are, of course, many illustrated guides to wild flowers on the market; some are much better than others. In my opinion, ‘dumbed-down’ guides, such as those based on flower colour, are a complete waste of money. A good guide should be well illustrated, based on scientific principles of plant classification, be up to date in terms of nomenclature and should contain information on such parameters as: plant dimensions, flowering time, distribution, habitat and relative frequency of occurrence (i.e. ‘common’, ‘rare’ etc.). Keys should also be available so that members of the more difficult groups can be separated from each other. Even in terms of our relatively sparse flora, this is a lot of information to pack into a single volume. Until the last few years most guides excluded more ‘difficult’ groups, such as ferns and grasses, sedges and rushes – but some recent guides, including the present volume, have begun to include information on those groups.

This latest guide from Collins has been eagerly awaited, not least because this publisher has a very distinguished history when it comes to publishing field guides. Their guides to birds, flowers, insects etc. are legendary and highly regarded. In addition they have been publishing their famous and definitive ‘New Naturalist’ series, on British natural history topics, since the 1940s.

The book’s text is by David Streeter, who is Reader in Ecology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Sussex. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the ‘New Naturalist’ series mentioned above, has served on the council of the Botanical Society of the British Isles (BSBI) and is currently president of the Sussex Wildlife Trust. He also wrote the text for one of my favourite wild flower books: ‘The Wild Flowers of the British Isles’, Macmillan, 1983 – which was superbly illustrated by Ian Garrard. Although this latter book is a little out of date now, I still refer to it constantly.

The new Collins Guide has been illustrated by a team of four illustrators: Christina Hart-Davies, Audrey Hardcastle, Felicity Cole and Lizzie Harper. My first impression is that some of the illustrations are better than others – although all are adequate. I am biased, though, as I was practically ‘brought up’ on the illustrations of the redoubtable Marjorie Blamey – whose work I regard very highly.

So is the present book any good? This is a difficult question to answer as such a book needs to be used for at least a couple of seasons to be sure, but it certainly meets the criteria for a good guide listed above. Having said that, I’m not sure that I would want to take it ‘into the field’; it’s not particularly portable and it’s too handsome a volume to get wet and muddy. Perhaps the paperback, scheduled for the autumn, will be more suitable for this purpose?
Should you buy it? Well, if you only want one book, and you’ve already got, ‘Wild Flowers of Britain & Ireland’ by Marjorie Blamey, Richard Fitter and Alastair Fitter, A&C Black, 2003, and are happy with that, you probably don’t need it. But if you want the very latest, super-dooper, all-singing-all-dancing plant manual, with all the trimmings (and I so desperately needed it!) you will just have to ‘shell out’ 30 quid for it (luckily I had saved a Christmas book token – ha!) ... or wait for the paperback, of course.

Dave Bishop, May 2009.

Book Review

Beechcombings by Richard Mabey, Vintage Books, Paperback ed. 2008 (ISBN 9781844139200), 289 pp, £8.99

If you have any interest at all in the British countryside and its wildlife then Richard Mabey’s books are essential reading. And if you’re interested in trees, and are confused by the plethora of books available on that subject, this present title is an excellent place to start.
Mabey’s books are always full of interesting information and thought-provoking concepts – and this recent title is no exception. Another characteristic of all his books is their personal quality – he never hesitates to tell us what he feels about the subjects that he observes and researches so thoroughly. If I may be allowed a personal note of my own, it is that Mabey has probably influenced the way that I see the world more than any other writer (and I have been reading him for more than half my life now). He has also directed me towards several other interesting writers. For example he alerted me to the importance of the 19th century labourer poet, John Clare whose native village of Helpston is within 10 miles of where I grew up in Peterborough (fittingly, Mabey is now the Patron of the John Clare Society). He also introduced me to the writings of that remarkable student of the British landscape, Oliver Rackham.
Mabey grew up in Berkhamsted in the Chilterns (you can see the remains of Berkhamsted’s Norman keep from the Manchester to Euston train). Beeches and beech woods are a feature of the Chilterns and hence Mabey has chosen to make the beech the focus of this book because, he tells us, “it has been the key tree in my own life.” Beeches are only native to certain parts of Southern Britain; we do have some fine examples in the Mersey Valley (e.g. at Jackson’s Boat and Ford Lane in Didsbury) but these were probably planted in the last 100 years or so.
Through a series of “discursive essays” , with the ‘beech focus’ described above, Mabey tells us of the history of trees in post-Ice Age Britain, the mythical ‘timber crisis’ during the naval wars of the 17th and 18th centuries and the subsequent invention of the plantation, tree-planting on great estates and its contribution to the social status of the estates' owners, the various explorations of natural beauty undertaken during the 18th century Enlightenment, the endless struggles between the forces of ‘development’ and ‘conservation’ which raged through the 19th and 20th centuries and continue on into the 21st century and the modern ecological view of trees and their role(s).
In a particularly interesting and illuminating passage Mabey identifies the ‘Great Storm’ of October 1987, which swept through southern England and laid flat 15 million trees, as a defining moment in our relationship with trees. Apparently ‘healthy’ (often planted) trees blew down whilst old, contorted ‘diseased’ veterans remained unscathed; and the subsequent ‘tidying-up’ of the aftermath of this remarkable event often did more damage than the storm itself. In subsequent years Nature showed remarkable powers of recovery and many wooded landscapes were given a new lease of life as a result of being thinned out.
For me the most depressing aspect of this text is the confirmation of my suspicions that many people remain remarkably ignorant about trees and continue to misunderstand and mythologise them. After the 1987 event the Tree Council (no less!) released the following press statement: “Trees are at great danger from nature.” Mabey describes this as an “extraordinary solecism” - which is a very polite way of putting it! He also tells us that when he shows someone an ancient tree or wood the question that he is most often asked is, “when was it planted ?” - as if, “The idea that trees have successful reproductive systems of their own seems to have passed out of the popular imagination.”
We live at a time in which the biodiversity of our country and of the world is under threat as never before. This threat cannot possibly be reduced if we do not understand the things that we are supposed to be protecting. This fine book should give everyone who reads it a better understanding of trees and our relationship to them.

Dave Bishop, January 2009

Book Review

Crow Country by Mark Cocker, Vintage Books, Paperback ed. 2008 (ISBN 9780099485087), 216pp, £8.99

Yes, I know that several of my previous articles on this blog have had a botanical slant, so why, I hear you ask, am I reviewing a book about birds?

Well, first, this is a very well written book about the British countryside, and that is recommendation enough. But, on a deeper level, it embodies a concept which fascinates me: the idea that common organisms in our environment are often more interesting and more complex than we usually give them credit for (if we notice them at all).

Mark Cocker lives in Norfolk, in the Yare Valley, and he appears to belong to that loose coterie of East Anglian writers on the British countryside grouped around Richard Mabey and Ronald Blythe. His particular interest is in the Crow Family (Corvidae). He tells us that, in Britain, this bird family is represented by seven breeding species: the Eurasian jay, black-billed magpie, red-billed chough, Eurasian jackdaw, rook, carrion crow and northern raven. Within that group he is especially fascinated by rooks and the jackdaws which often associate with them.

Mr Cocker tells us that, for several years, he has been attempting to unravels the ‘whys’ and ‘wherefores’ of rook (and jackdaw) nesting and roosting behaviour. His interest was first initiated by his observations of the spectacular displays created by flocks of these highly social birds as they left their roosts in the morning and returned to them in the evening.

In order to answer the questions raised by these displays Cocker has travelled widely both within and outside of the UK. At one point he came across an account by a Scottish woman who recalled that, during her Victorian childhood, she would lie in bed at dusk and from her window watch raucous flocks of rooks pass over the house on their way to their roost. Inspired by this account he embarked on an arduous car journey from Norfolk to Dumfriesshire and then spent an uncomfortable November evening on a wind-swept hillside from which he observed … well, I let you read it for yourself!

As well as being an account of some common, but remarkable and incompletely understood, birds, this book is also a rather profound meditation on Natural History and the naturalists who study it; highly recommended!