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England's Ecological Star
| Article
# : |
16705 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1989 |
2,832 Words |
| Author
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Kenneth Mellanby
Kenneth Mellanby was the founder-director of Monks Wood
Experimental Station, the premier ecological research center
in Britain. |
"The ecological scene in America is dominated by individuals, but in Britain it is dominated by a place, Monks Wood, the Nature Conservancy's main research station in Huntingdonshire." This was the view of Anne Chisholm in her book Philosophers of the Earth: Conversations with Ecologists (1972). The quotation continues: "There is a larger concentration of ecologists at Monks Wood than anywhere else in Europe, and the work done there, since it was set up in 1960, has provided much of the substance, as opposed to the verbiage, of environmental debate."
The British Nature Conservancy, set up in 1949 by royal charter, was the official body in Britain concerned with wildlife conservation. It had the responsibility "to provide scientific advice on the conservation and control of the natural flora and fauna of Great Britain, including the maintenance of physical features of scientific interest; and to organize and develop the research and scientific services related thereto."
The Nature Conservancy (NC) was a typically British institution. While it was government-funded, it was supervised by a council of independent scientists and thus relatively free from governmental interference (though financial sanctions were always possible if it got too far out of line with official policy). As soon as it came into existence, the NC started to acquire areas of ecological importance as National Nature Reserves (NNRs) and to appoint staff to manage them. Yet it became increasingly obvious that reserve management was a difficult task, involving much more than simply fencing in an area and doing nothing else--this generally caused deterioration, not improvement in the reserve. What was needed was much more ecological expertise to ensure that native species of plants and animals flourished. So the NC organized a team of scientists to this end and set them to work on a variety of problems in different parts of the country.
However, the NC became aware that a more systematic approach was necessary requiring a new, custom-built research station, set up primarily to work on the important problems relating to the ecological basis of wildlife conservation. The new station was planned to provide the ecological know-how in a form that would be of immediate, practical value to the parent body.
Setting Up the Station
A site in one of the most rural parts of southern England was acquired, with sufficient land for field experiments. It had the advantage of being
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