Some of the largest and most well-known British environmental conservation movements exist in one of two camps. Both of these stem – remarkably unchanged – from before the industrial revolution.
The first camp is entirely practical. By the late seventeenth century, England had seen a century of political upheaval and civil war, and was a significant seagoing nation in both trading and naval terms. However, the ships were built of wood, and of course, trees take time to grow. In 1662, John Evelyn presented to the Royal Society what is widely considered the first paper on conservation, discussing the matter of tree conservation. By the early twentieth century, Evelyn was considered the most significant figure in the history of British arboriculture. The introduction to the 1908 edition of his book Sylva stressed the maritime nature of his influence: ‘the maintenance of adequate supplies of oak timber for shipbuilding ever remained… of very serious national importance’.
By the Napoleonic wars, Indian teak was largely used for shipbuilding, but Evelyn’s worries of forest depletion still made their way into public policy. In 1806, the first Conservator of Forests was appointed to oversee teak felling in the Malabar and Travancore regions of India.
The final form of the practical conservation movement came about after the First World War. Forest cover in Britain had been in constant decline, and military needs had increasingly been outsourced overseas. The war meant that there was a suddenly increased demand for timber, and Britain’s forestry reserves were almost depleted by the armistice – just under 5% of the UK was forested in 1918 (today this is 13%). The Forestry Act (1919) established the Forestry Commission to buy land and plant forests for the state.
The second camp of conservation is a Romantic one, led not by military and merchant interests but largely by the landed gentry. England’s most famous landscape gardener – Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown – can be attributed a significant role. Brown ‘designed landscapes on an immense scale, which provided a setting for mansions… surrounded by woodland, parkland dotted with trees and carefully contoured ground’. In doing so he created an English style of landscape architecture that looked to form an idealised yet naturalistic appearance.
This hunt for idealised nature was transformed around the turn of the nineteenth century by the Romantics. One year prior to Forestry Conservators being appointed in India, Wordsworth ‘wandered lonely as a Cloud’ and cemented the Lake District into the national consciousness. Sir Walter Scott’s novels gave the same treatment to Scotland, viewed as a distant land of ‘sublime scenery and heroic chivalry’ by the English aristocracy. The idea of ‘the sublime’ crept into philosophy and aesthetics. Burke wrote that ‘terror is in all cases… the ruling principle of the sublime.’ In landscaping and conservation, the sublime was tied to rugged natural landscapes that were at once too vast to comprehend and stunningly beautiful. This had its faults: the Lake District landscapes of Wordsworth are hardly natural. They are a product of millennia of human (and more particularly of sheep) activity.
Like the practical camp, the final form of Romantic conservation arrived after the First World War. The National Trust was established in 1895 to protect the nation’s coast from overdevelopment, but during the interwar years when death duties began to bite and country estates started falling into disrepair, the Trust began (in effect) to take over the role of landed gentry. It opened up land (including much of the Lakes) and houses to the public. Doing this at a time when public and private transport – and consequently, holidays in Britain – were becoming more widely available gave a buy-in for the general public to a fading Romantic flavour of conservation.
The problem with these two camps of conservation, particularly in their representations of the Forestry Commission and the National Trust, which are certainly amongst the largest and most well-known conservation organisations in the country, is that their aims are confused by their histories.
Forestry Commission woodland can feel ecologically dead: tall non-native conifers planted in sullied rows are accused regularly of ‘disfiguring’ the landscape. Indeed, if we had to fight another four years of trench warfare, this would be very useful. Even in 2022, the Forestry Commission defended conifer plantations for their key role in national security. The navy may no longer be wooden, but the Forestry Commission runs ecological conservation with defence and security in mind.
The National Trust isn’t doing much better, and has inherited the worries of its aristocratic forebears: exactly what should be conserved is unclear. Is it landscape? Environment? And if so, to what era should it be restored? Should Trust tenant farms be working or pickled in aspic? The Trust is so large and political that it doesn’t seem to know, and the growth of the Restore Trust movement within it demonstrates that there is more than one vision within the organisation. The Trust is a membership organisation, and members join to see Capability Brown’s gardens and to walk around the ‘sheep-wrecked’ Lake District. Beyond the internal confusion, the role of the National Trust seems to be at least somewhat Romantic.
A large chunk of modern environmental policy, both from the government in the form of the Forestry Commission, and from the charity sector in the form of the National Trust, remains – seemingly accidentally – in the two camps established at the beginning of the nineteenth century.