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Shooting birds for sport is not regarded as a suitable hobby for today’s
environmentalists. Yet Norman Moore, perhaps the greatest nature conservationist
of our time, spent much of his youth as a wildfowler. The apparent contradiction
typifies Moore, a man who refuses to be pigeonholed as a scientist, naturalist
or environmentalist. Yet over the past 40 years his work has catalysed revolutions
in all three arenas.

Moore has links with the earliest stirrings of the nature conservation
movement. His grandfather was a protege of Charles Waterton, who in 1821
set up the first nature reserve in Britain, and many Victorian naturalists
were family friends. Growing up in the 1930s in the East Sussex countryside,
Moore developed an early affinity to the natural world. When his parents
asked him what wish he would most like to be granted, the five-year-old
Moore replied: ‘That rare birds should be common and that everybody should
be given £100.’ This was an early sign, he reflects, of his conservationist
and political sympathies.

Moore feels that his generation and the British environmental movement
grew up together, in three stages. Moore’s youth saw the peak of what he
calls the ‘pioneer stage’. A few prophetic individuals saw what was happening
in the world and urged enlightened practices in agriculture, forestry and
fisheries, along with the establishment of natural parks and nature reserves.
Moore judges himself fortunate to have been involved in the second period,
the ‘stage of limited action’. During this time, in the years following
the Second World War, the government set up the Nature Conservancy as well
as the first national nature reserves and national parks.

In the 1960s, Moore was one of the few visionaries who saw clearly that
conservation could be effective only if seen as an integral part of all
human activity. This is the third stage, that of the universal acceptance
of conservation. Moore sees this idea as one of the most potent political
forces since Marxism, but one that will ultimately unite rather than divide
humanity.

Moore went to Cambridge to study zoology as the Second World War began,
and his two-year war degree was later augmented by an extra year on his
return from the war. Moore then went to the University of Bristol as assistant
lecturer. His passion for birds had long been accompanied by a fascination
for insects, especially dragonflies. He was inspired to study dragonflies
by the first popular book on the group, The Dragonflies of the British Isles,
published by Cynthia Longfield in 1937. She and Moore became lifelong friends,
and he eventually wrote a book in the New Naturalist series with Longfield
and Philip Corbet. Meanwhile, his part-time study of dragonflies so impressed
his professor at Bristol that he suggested it be submitted for a PhD. In
his spare time, Moore continues his research using a specially designed
field pond at his home near Cambridge.

Soon after Moore moved to Bristol, the Nature Conservancy was formed,
and he was asked to become regional officer for the southwest of England.
The Nature Conservancy post moved Moore from a sheltered academic world
into a more exposed position where he was responsible for policy decisions
that had crucial implications for national priorities. His first task was
to help to set up national nature reserves and sites of special scientific
interest in an area stretching from the Scilly Isles to Herefordshire. In
the 1950s NNRs were meant to provide protected examples of all the main
habitats found in the country. Now, says Moore, ‘they have become more important
as a means of protecting habitats as such’.

Selecting appropriate sites took up much of the resources of the Nature
Conservancy in its early years. Local natural history societies played a
key role in identifying important sites as there were then only three county
naturalist trusts. Ian Prestt, an early assistant to Moore and now president
of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), recounts how Moore’s
special qualities gained the respect of local naturalists. ‘They would be
expecting a government scientist in a suit, but instead they got Norman,
with his butterfly net, collecting jars and a vacuum flask.’ Naturalists
felt he was one of them and cooperation came easily.

No one then envisaged that SSSIs would have a critical role in conservation.
But Moore’s study of disappearing heathlands in Dorset in the 1950s convinced
him that not only isolated species but whole habitats were threatened with
extinction. The new role for SSSIs was to conserve the absolute minimum
necessary to maintain Britain’s flora and fauna – a task which remains challenging,
some say impossible.

Setting up NNRs and SSSIs implies a conflict between the interests of
agriculture and those of conservation. Moore soon realised that farmers,
who were being driven to produce the maximum yield from their land, were
becoming alienated from the wildlife around them and often were hostile
to nature conservationists. Moore helped to found the Farming and Wildlife
Advisory Group, a cooperative mix of farming and conservation organisations
which aims to encourage farmers to make the best use of their land for conservation
within the constraints of efficient farming. Moore’s involvement helps to
ensure that the organisation does not become merely cosmetic, and he held
the post of chairman for two years. Today, the FWAG continues to build bridges
between farmers and conservationists, with branches throughout the United
Kingdom.

By the end of the 1950s, Max Nicholson, the director of the Nature Conservancy,
was determined to set up an applied ecology research station. Its largest
unit was to be the Toxic Chemicals and Wildlife Section. Characteristically
naming someone else as the visionary, Moore remembers how Bob Boote, an
administrator at the Nature Conservancy, had urged study of the impact of
pesticides on wildlife. In 1959 Moore was asked to take charge of the new
section, based at the Monks Wood Experimental Station near Huntingdon.

From here, as the head of a close-knit team, Moore directed some of
the most important conservation research of the 20th century. What first
excited him about the team was its interdisciplinary nature. Moore despairs
at what he calls the ‘departmentalism’ that dominates most modern scientific
research. He brought biologists, ecologists, toxicologists and chemists
together in the same building. The initial remit of the section was to relate
toxic effects of pesticides to their ecological and population effects –
a marriage of toxicology and population dynamics.

As the group was being set up, naturalists all over Britain were reporting
hundreds of bird deaths to the RSPB every month. Although the evidence was
mainly anecdotal, it was obvious, as Moore remembers, ‘that something pretty
awful was happening’. Virtually nothing was known about the effects of pesticides.
Even more seriously, there had been no baseline research into what wildlife
normally existed on farmland. Moore wasted no time. His team had done the
groundwork even before Monks Wood was completed, using temporary laboratories
and his own spare bedroom.

The single most important discovery that Moore and his team made concerning
pesticides was to distinguish the relative dangers of the more obviously
hazardous but short-lived organophosphates from organochlorines such as
DDT and dieldrin, which remain in the environment much longer. These persistent
chemicals build up and pass along food chains. But this was a revolutionary
idea in the 1960s. Again, Moore has redirected praise from himself, on this
occasion to Vincent Wigglesworth, later professor of insect physiology at
Cambridge, who noticed as early as 1945 the indiscriminate nature of DDT
but whose warnings were ignored.

Based on his team’s work, Moore gave what could have been dismissed
as unscientific advice, but has now become known as the ‘precautionary principle’.
He had strong evidence that organochlorine pesticides could destroy vast
numbers of animals throughout the world, but it fell some way short of scientific
proof. Despite this, Moore advised that the chemicals in question should
be phased out immediately. Green activists of today might be surprised to
learn that such a far-sighted principle had a government scientist as its
author.

During this time, Derek Ratcliffe had organised a ‘peregrine enquiry’
on behalf of the British Trust for Ornithology. The aim was to determine
whether peregrine falcons were seriously damaging the population of racing
pigeons, as pigeon fanciers claimed. The survey showed instead a dramatic
decline in the number of peregrines in Britain. When an addled peregrine
egg was found to contain 200 micrograms of persistent organochlorine insecticides,
Ratcliffe and Moore came independently to the same conclusion – that the
decline in the numbers of birds of prey was due to persistent organochlorine
insecticides. They published a note in Bird Study on the findings.

The chemicals industry ridiculed the scientists for their suggestion,
based on the evidence of a single egg. The multinationals were clearly shaken
and enlisted the support of eminent academic agriculturists, some of whom
felt their life’s work was being threatened. We now know that the findings
of the two men were more prophetic than they realised. Soon reports came
in of organochlorine residues in biological material all over the world,
from cod liver oil in the Atlantic to penguins in Antarctica.

As new reports and specimens of suspected pesticide victims flooded
in, Moore’s team plunged into detailed research on sublethal effects, using
Bengalese finches as a stand-in for wild birds. Results from this and research
in the field led eventually to the banning of most organochlorine pesticides
for all except a few specific uses. The government report based on their
research admitted that its decision was based on circumstantial evidence
rather than irrefutable proof. A ‘precautionary’ precedent had been set
which, Moore says, scientists would do well to remember. The final proof
came when organochlorines were phased out and the populations of peregrines,
golden eagles and sparrowhawks gradually recovered. Moore and his colleagues
had predicted this recovery in their original work.

Moore’s maxim has always been to draw the best conclusions he could
on the evidence available. If used with rigour, circumstantial evidence
is a powerful scientific tool, he argues. ‘Of course the agricultural authorities
rarely demanded of themselves the level of proof they demanded of the Monks
Wood team,’ says Moore. New agricultural procedures, including the extensive
use of new pesticides, were often adopted without conclusive evidence that
they were effective.

Moore is amused by those who ask him whether Rachel Carson’s book Silent
Spring had jolted the Nature Conservancy into studying pesticides. His team
had begun work some time before the American conservationist’s book appeared
in 1962. His first contact with Silent Spring was when Lord Hailsham, who
answered for the government on environmental matters, read extracts of the
book in the New Yorker. Moore was sent a package containing copies of the
magazine and asked for his assessment. Suddenly, the world’s media were
fascinated with everything that the Monks Wood team produced. Moore says
that getting the media to present an accurate picture of his team’s results
was probably more difficult than the research itself.

Prestt, who eagerly followed Moore to Monks Wood, remembers a ‘happy
and impressive team’. Prestt sees in Moore a unique combination of qualities:
‘a broad knowledge of flora and fauna, and experience in both conservation
and research’. For the establishment, says Prestt, this made Moore a greater
threat. It led to open hostility towards him from agricultural and medical
professions during his years as the sole conservationist on the committees
that dealt with the safety of pesticides. Moore was accused of a conflict
of interests as his team, as well as carrying out research, made policy
recommendations. The accusation riled Moore’s team. ‘Surely,’ claims Prestt,
‘those who know most about the problem should be the ones recommending the
solutions.’ It was on this issue that the break-up of the Nature Conservancy
in 1973 hinged.

Moore remembers Harold Wilson being highly impressed by a visit to Monks
Wood in 1970 when he was still prime minister. A few weeks later Labour
was out of office. The Conservative government of Edward Heath, and perhaps
in particular its then minister for education and science, Margaret Thatcher,
was keen to implement the shopkeeper-spirited principles proposed by Lord
Victor Rothschild, under which the customer commissions research, the contractor
researches, and the customer pays. Non-applied research came to be seen
as a drain on resources. Monks Wood had made enemies of some academics,
especially agriculturists who saw the controlled use of DDT as the great
achievement of their lives. But the chemicals companies were the greatest
enemies of the pesticides division and used their political influence to
see its power diminished. The agricultural establishment felt Monks Wood
was mixing politics with science and used the old-boy network to make its
claims heard.

The Heath government split the Nature Conservancy into the Nature Conservancy
Council, which remained a quango, and the Institute for Terrestrial Ecology,
which included Monks Wood. ITE now depended partly on obtaining research
contracts. This split was tragic both for nature conservation in Britain
and for Moore’s career. He chose to join the NCC to continue his work on
Britain’s conservation strategy.

Moore’s colleagues from the Nature Conservancy who remained in the NCC
were so impressed with his work that they created the post of chief advisory
officer, the eminence grise of the conservation movement, just for him.
Nonetheless, Moore was removed from the role at which he excelled. Never
again would he be given a scientific team on whose conclusions he could
base policy recommendations. Both nature conservation and Moore had been
betrayed by short-sighted policies and the agricultural establishment, each
with their own hidden agenda. In contrast, Moore always remained ‘open,
truthful and honest’, says Prestt. Perhaps it was this that frightened governments
the most.

His first task at the NCC was to tackle a major issue that lay at the
root of the threat to Britain’s natural habitats – to study the impact of
agriculture on nature conservation and make recommendations. This brought
together many different strands of his career, and in a discussion paper
he attempted to answer fundamental questions. Why does wildlife matter?
Are we losing significant amounts of wildlife habitat? Are existing procedures
effective? The answers to these and other questions formed one of the most
important documents dealing with nature conservation ever to have circulated
around Whitehall. It went to every government department. Moore sees the
most important recommendation as being ‘that a forward looking rural strategy
for our national resources should be formulated, which recognises amongst
other things that wildlife is a vital part of the real capital wealth and
heritage of the nation’.

Moore spent months persuading members of the council of the NCC of the
merits of the report and its recommendations. Eventually agreement was achieved
and the document was published. Within four years the recommendations were
wholly or partly implemented when the Wildlife and Countryside Act became
law. There was one important exception. Moore’s principal recommendation
had not been adopted. There is still no national strategy for land use in
Britain. As a result, observes Moore, each contentious case is taken on
its local ‘merits’.

Why, he asks, does a government that applauds forward planning in industry
baulk at strategic planning for land? The only answer he comes up with is
that a Conservative government sees such a strategy as the thin end of a
land-nationalisation wedge. Yet a land use strategy, claims Moore, does
no more than presume that it must be right to conserve our best land for
agriculture and our best habitats for wildlife.

To the anger of his colleagues, Moore has been excluded from a role
on the committees of the NCC and its successors since his retirement in
1983. But Moore’s commitment to conservation has not decreased since his
retirement – indeed, it has shifted into a new gear. He first threw his
energies into writing a book, Bird of Time, published in 1987, which drew
on his experience in nature conservation. Rather than wallowing in self-congratulatory
memories, Moore’s book makes a plea for the recognition of nature conservation,
and it has become a standard text for conservationists.

Moore argues that the goals of the two other great realms of applied
biology – agriculture which feeds humanity, and medicine which heals the
sick – can be understood much more easily than those of conservation which,
he says, is associated in the public eye with ‘whimsical articles about
natterjack toads’. Moore believes that conservation is misunderstood and
undervalued mainly because we fail to see it in the context of time. ‘It
is only by thinking in terms of evolutionary time that we can perceive the
newness of our predicament and gauge the unique responsibilities of generations
alive today,’ he writes.

Moore does not always agree with today’s ‘green movement’. He refuses
to be drawn into the polarised debates now surrounding environmental politics
in Britain. He considers them to be largely destructive. He refuses to condemn
all use of pesticides, pointing out that they have increased food production
and saved millions of people from insect-borne diseases. ‘If I were living
in a hut in Africa,’ says Moore, ‘I would rather have a trace of DDT in
my body than die of malaria.’ Moore was sprayed with DDT when liberated
from a prisoner of war camp in 1945.

Opponents often say that ‘conservationists care more for peregrines
than people’. But as Moore points out, the most important thing is what
the widespread pesticide residues in such birds of prey demonstrated. The
damage done to wildlife warned us of hazards to people and their food supply.

Moore’s independence of thought is one of the reasons he has not let
himself become a media figure. He lives by the maxim that you can get an
awful lot done if you are prepared not to take the credit. ‘I want, above
all, to be effective,’ he says. Moore has certainly avoided praise. There
are plenty of green activists, he maintains, but a dire shortage of scientists
committed to nature conservation. A thousand marches will not persuade a
committee of government scientists to push for something if the scientific
evidence is not compelling. Moore provided the evidence, but has not been
acknowledged by the green gurus and philosophers. Yet he is not bitter and
sees a need for ‘all kinds of sage’ in the environmental movement.

Moore also has a message for the wider scientific community. He attacks
the change to contract research under the Rothschild principle. One of the
major reasons, he says, for his success at Monks Wood is that he was given
time to think. Moore despairs at the experiences of his fellow scientists
who spend most of their time chasing research contracts. Much of his pesticide
research would have been unfundable had these principles applied at the
time, as many of his projects, including some of the early work on PCBs,
were based on a hunch. How can Rothschild’s approach apply to nature conservation?
A wildflower meadow is, at best, a rather uncommunicative customer. In Moore’s
view, Britain has fallen from the position of a pioneer in conservation
to a reactionary state that has to be shaken into action to conform to even
the mildest European Commission directive. Conservation, he admits, attracts
a certain amount of pseudoscience, but he says this should not have led
‘timorous academics to retire into their safe fields of academic studies
and shun contact with environmentalists; rather, they should help tackle
the problems’.

Moore has few regrets about the progress of his career, beyond a rather
modest sadness that, after having been proved right so many times, he is
not asked for advice by government more often. Perhaps this is because he
says what he thinks is best for nature conservation, which may not necessarily
be what Whitehall wants to hear. Ratcliffe’s explanation is that he is simply
‘too modest, and lacking in the pushiness that tends to keep people in the
front of politicians’ minds’.

Moore remains optimistic and indefatigable. ‘He’s not a moaner,’ says
Prestt. He chairs the local management committee for Wicken Fen nature reserve
in Cambridgeshire, and is also active in promoting the conservation of dragonflies
throughout the world. He put his weight behind the defence of Scottish SSSIs
in the controversy earlier this year which led to the resignation of the
chairman of the new Joint Nature Conservation Committee, just months after
it was set up.

His principal message remains one of hope. He criticises the environmental
movement for making the environment an all-or-nothing conflict – the deep
greens versus the world. ‘How can ordinary people think they can take action,
when the problems seem so massive that they feel they can do nothing at
all?’ Moore has given a boost to young environmentalists by backing the
launch in January this year of a student-run environment centre at the University
of Cambridge, which aims to promote environmental schemes among colleges
and departments, and which bears his name.

Moore says that people alive today are the first to have seen the world’s
wildlife assaulted by such an agricultural and technological revolution
and the last who will be able to save the Earth’s major habitats. He believes
we can solve the problems if only those with power recognise the crucial
role of nature conservation.

Moore took the title of his book from lines by Omar Khayyam: ‘The Bird
of Time has but a little way to fly – and Lo! The bird is on the Wing.’
If Khayyam’s bird of time is ever successfully ‘on the wing’ for nature
conservation, it will be in a great part due to Norman Moore.

Tom Wakeford is reading Natural Sciences at King’s College, Cambridge.