Once melted they left basins to fill with lake water. Then there was
the steady encroachment of reed and sedge, alder and willow, from the edges,
slowly laying down peat and squeezing the lake smaller and smaller towards
the centre of the basin. And finally as the peat of these mineral-loving
fen plants, fed by percolating ground water, built up to the water table,
there was a switch to acid bog vegetation fed by mineral-poor rain.

As rainwater came to dominate ground water in the wetting of the peat
surface, the acid-loving sphagnum began to build up its mounds and domes.
Most vigorous at the centre, the sphagnum growth eventually created a surface
like an upturned saucer – a raised bog or moss. Written in the layers of
peat, in preserved pollen and seeds, is the region’s environmental history
and, with it, the role that we humans had in it.

Compared with the extensive tracts of a century or so ago, there are
few raised bogs left in England – a handful of sites in Shropshire and Cumbria,
almost nothing in Lancashire, Cheshire and Staffordshire. Recently I stood
on the dereliction that is Lindow Moss in Cheshire. Its history was revealed
in the sections cut by the machines hacking out the sphagnum peat to be
packed in bags and sold because people are conditioned to prefer heathers
in gardens to those in their natural habitat.

It was a sad sight: bare, brown and bleak. And when, only months from
now, all the sphagnum peat is gone, they will start to mill the underlying
fen peat to mix with droppings from battery chickens on which to grow mushrooms.
Ten millennia of history will have been sacrificed to a crop of little taste
and less nutritional value and to gardeners who must keep up with the Joneses.

At Lindow, however, it is even worse than that. In 1983, a human head
appeared preserved in the peat and in 1984 a body, near intact from the
waist up. Legs, perhaps of the same body have turned up and last year yet
another body, or rather the 70 or so fragments of what had been a body,
had it not been mangled by machinery, were recovered. If the very existence
of a raised bog elicits a sense of history and continuity, the bog bodies
give personality to it.

One body, at least, was a sacrificial victim, probably a highborn man
thrice ritually killed, with an axe, by garrotting, and by having his throat
cut, perhaps to appease terrible gods in a dark phase of Celtic history.
Go and see it in the British Museum; it is a far more moving subject than
any jewelled bauble or elegant vase. He is one of us.

Lindow Moss almost certainly has more to offer, yet within years it
will only be a hole in the ground – the same hole that the ice left. We
will have destroyed some of our roots, burnt the family photographs for
want of a tiny sum to buy the site compulsorily, block the drains which
are drying it out, excavate it with a greater delicacy than the present
JCBs can offer and restore it as a regenerating wetland of immense cultural
significance.

Shortly before I visited Lindow Moss, Britain had just wasted 100 million
Pounds in futile repairs to a submarine which is now to be scrapped. We
will annually spend an unnecessary 10 million pounds to 20 million pounds
on a mis-directed reorganisation of the Nature Conservancy Council, which
was ruthlessly promoted against all informed advice, largely to appease
Scottish landowners already hellbent on destroying other sorts of peatlands.
And at the same time a paltry 5 million pounds a year is available for all
archaeological survey, conservation and management.

All sorts of reasons are given for the lack of enthusiasm in schools
for physical science and technology, but never that which might be the fundamental
one. Perhaps young people perceive that our current values of the pursuit
of wealth and power are hollow and react accordingly.

Brian Moss teaches and researches in the Department of Environmental
and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Liverpool

ABOUT 30 years ago, E. P. Odum wrote a textbook that was the first to
be truly ecological. He integrated the previously disparate strands of animal
and plant ecology, limnology and marine ecology into a recognisable whole
discipline. To students, perhaps more so in Britain than the US, it was
a revelation, for their training had been constrained by the anachronisms
of quite separate botany and zoology departments. Odum presented ideas of
productivity and energy, food webs, community organisation and stability,
succession and biogeography in a holistic way that centred on ecosystems
from the smallest to the biosphere.

Since then ecology has acquired its own ethos and must eventually emerge
as central to biological science in interpreting the relationship between
the processes and products of evolution in an ever changing environment.
The main thrust of ecology has reflected this. The concept of ecosystems
as organised units is less fashionable; the emphasis is now upon the relative
success of individuals, indeed even genes, in promulgating themselves ina
world that many see as antagonistic rather than cooperative. If order and
organis-ation appear, they are seen as either accidental or illusory. Even
intricate symbioses are cold-blooded arrangements of Machiavellian cunning.

Lately the cause of holism has, however, been espoused again, prompted
by James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. The biosphere of this planet is in
a non-equilibrium chemical state, and maintained so by the combined activities
of organisms to their mutual benefit. Some environment philosophers see
the biosphere as a super organism but most ecologists would find this unacceptable.

The maintained state, nonetheless, has a constancy which might seem
to imply something more than accident and the resurgence of the concept
of the biosphere as an ecosystem is one which greatly helps thinking about
global environmental problems.

Onto this new holistic stage then comes Odum’s new book. Not entirely
new, for it is admitted as an update of the 1963 Ecology, but it has been
much shortened and rewritten. It is intended not only for beginning ecology
students but also as a ‘citizens’ guide to the principles of ecology as
they relate to today’s threats to earth’s life support systems’.

I cannot judge how useful it will be to the citizens, for it is impossible
for a professional ecologist to put himself into this role, but I have to
say it did not excite me as much as the original version. Perhaps this was
because the fascinating detail has been removed so that only the principles
are left and these presently receive much publicity in many books and articles.
The tension between the reductionists and the holists does not emerge. This
would have added controversial spice which the citizens are quite capable
of following and adjudicating. More of the excitement of ecology comes in
another book for general readers (P. Colinvaux, Why Big Fierce Animals are
Rare, Allen & Unwin and Pelican, 1980), which works up from the detail
of examples to the general and in so doing makes closer links with the everyday
experience of most of us.

I have no wish to be churlish, however. Odum’s approach may well appeal
to others now as it did in the 1960s to me and there is room for all manner
of attempts to get important environmental ideas widely disseminated.

For example, in Odum’s first chapter he recounts the flight of Apollo
13, which was prematurely terminated when an explosion severely damaged
the life-support system for the astronauts on board in a way that could
not be remedied and which nearly ended in disaster.

Odum argues that if we are unable to maintain safely a relatively simple
life-support system which we designed and built, we should be extremely
circumspect in our tamperings with a much more complex one whose design
and structure owe nothing to us.

At the back of the minds of most of our political leaders is the notion
that we will solve our problems by more technical fixes to counter those
that created the problems. At the front of Odum’s mind and somewhere in
those of many of his fellow ecologists, who at least are relatively familiar
with the workings of the biosphere, is the notion that this view is deeply
wrong.

Brian Moss is Professor of Botany at the University of Liverpool.