London
Beside my bed I keep a collection of Beryl the Peril annuals from
the early 1970s, featuring the eponymous heroine from The Topper comic.
In one story, Beryl instructs the reader in how to distinguish between flowers
and weeds: you ostentatiously uproot the plant when your father (an incompetent
authority figure simply known as 鈥淒ad鈥�) is passing. If he mutters 鈥淕ood girl鈥�
the plant is a weed; if he screeches 鈥淲retch! Vandal!鈥� the plant is a flower.
This elegant vignette encapsulates our relationship with other forms of
life鈥攕ome of which we class as 鈥済ood鈥� and 鈥渂eneficial鈥�, while others are
鈥渂ad鈥� or 鈥減ests鈥�. The choice is often made solely on the grounds of convenience
or whimsy rather than any inherent quality.
This leads to some terrible injustices, and one person鈥檚 beneficial organism
is all too often another鈥檚 pest. I remember as a child standing by the family
raspberry canes marvelling at the tiny shoots of wild grasses peeping from the
mulch around the cane stems. A few millimetres high, the grass shoots were a
miraculous, vivid green, of a pure colour I still remember. Beside me, my
mother, a naturalised Yorkshirewoman, who had put down the mulch to prevent this
very event, scowled at the shoots and scolded: 鈥淭he blighters! The
产濒颈驳丑迟别谤蝉!鈥�
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At bottom, the goodness or badness of most organisms depends on
context鈥攐n their location in time and place relative to our wishes. Not
even the keenest wildlife conservationist would be prepared to accommodate a
Bengal tiger or white rhinoceros in the sitting room. The same applies to more
physical phenomena: former US president Ronald Reagan once complained that he
was unable to understand why ozone was a bad thing, a pollutant, at ground
level, but a good thing high up in the atmosphere. He chaffed the scientific
community with grindingly daft logic for not being able to 鈥渕ake up its mind鈥�.
(His subsequent afflication with skin cancer was sad but ironic.)
No creature better illustrates this sort of injustice than the
woodworm鈥攈armless insects whose noble ancestors left their imprints on
fossilised trees from days long gone by. In the wild, they perform a vital
function by breaking down wood in dead trees for which few other organisms have
a use, and so stop it piling up and cluttering the place. They kill nothing,
merely scavenge the dead, and make a vital contribution to the stability of the
ecosystem. Nowadays, however, they have a ruthless competitor for dead tree
matter鈥攈umankind, which wants the same resource for its houses, firewood,
furniture, breadboards and so on. Trees are felled and removed, and any lucky
enough to live until a natural death are removed from the woods. As a result,
the woodworm, with its habitat and food supply removed, is increasingly rare in
the wild in the developed world.
An even crueller fate awaits any woodworm that happens to come across wood at
the other end of the production chain. While attempting to tuck into its dinner
in the harmless and beneficial manner of its forebears, a woodworm found
munching into joists and furniture is branded a pest and doused with poisonous
chemicals.
Few organisms suffer a more unkind treatment. The woodworm鈥檚 food, home,
indeed its entire way of life, is moved from a place where its presence is
welcome, to one where it is reviled. Caught between the Scylla of development
and the Charybdis of pest control, the woodworm is becoming a cause of worry for
conservationists (well, at least those with an entomological bent). We treat
this admirable animal with pure caprice, trapping it so that it is damned if it
tries to live in its aboriginal habitat and damned if it doesn鈥檛.
Such injustice is an example of how our relationship with 鈥渕other nature鈥� is
all too often one of hypocritical self-centredness. We flatter ourselves that we
have intrinsic, natural 鈥渇riends鈥� in nature, our loyal allies against equally
intrinsic 鈥渆nemies鈥�, but this is merely our conceit. With the debate raging on
about the morality of foxhunting, British foxes at least must be wondering
whether humankind sees them as noble free spirits or vicious serial killers. As
the woodworm might tell the fox (and us), we have only temporary allies and
antagonists in nature, fitted to their roles merely at our convenience and its
context.