I realised this the other day during a conversation with a friend, the
managing director of a large department store. The recent downturn in trade
is linked with high interest rates, he told me: people are not buying new
furniture because they cannot sell their houses, and they have not any spare
cash anyway because their mortgages have gone up.

But a man in the position of my friend can’t afford to be gloomy and
he was speaking of all this as a temporary setback. Ecologically more clued-up,
or so I thought, I said: ‘But surely, the green movement is going to be
thoroughly bad for business in the long term?’

At first, he thought I was joking; then he realised I was just ignorant.
He patiently drew attention to all the retailing opportunities that greenness
will bring, as customers throw out their tropical hardwood furniture and
CFC fridges and buy environmentally friendly new ones to salve their consciences
and impress their neighbours.

This conversation sent me back to a wonderful book, now undeservedly
out of print: The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen. He was
the man who pointed out what we now see as obvious: that high status attaches
to the appearance of wealth and that conspicuous leisure puts a person’s
wealth and power on social display.

Veblen is famous for having coined such cynical phrases as ‘conspicuous
consumption,’ ‘vicarious leisure’ and ‘reputable futility’. His book was
published in 1899, so some of the examples he chooses to illustrate conspicuous
leisure are a bit dated – women’s corsets, men’s top hats, brawny footmen
in frogged jackets and white gloves. Others – the study of dead languages,
ownership of fancy-bred dogs and racehorses, connoisseurship of what he
calls ‘creditable viands’ – can still provide us with unpalatable food for
thought.

Veblen held that despite a natural human liking for simple efficiency,
our appreciation of what is desirable and beautiful is always coloured by
what he calls ‘pecuniary reputability’ – in other words, the need to show
that effort or materials have been wasted in its manufacture. ‘In their
selection of serviceable goods in the retail market,’ he wrote, ‘consumers
are guided more by the finish and workmanship of the goods than by any marks
of substantial serviceability.’

Veblen was a Marxist, and was driven by the conviction that what he
saw as waste would have been better employed to relieve poverty. He was
criticised in the 1950s for his assumption that the economic ‘pie’ was of
only a certain size, but perhaps our subsequent understanding of the finite
resour ces of the planet Earth makes him look not such a fool, after all.

How do we get out of this bind, in which our need to be green has to
be reconciled with a desire for honorific consumption? So what sort of advice
would Veblen himself have given? I think he would have surveyed with amusement
such pseudogreen phenomena as fashion shows held in rainforest settings,
and charity nights out in which thousands are collected for green causes,
in exchange for hundreds and thousands being spent in conspicuous consumption
of elaborate dress, food, wine and entertainment. He would, I feel sure,
have noted with interest but without surprise that lead-free petrol makes
it feel OK to put a second car on the road. He would have shaken his head
at the hopeless task of making thrift fashionable, and he would have pointed
out that his analysis of shopping in 1899 is just as true of a supermarket
today.

‘Any consumer who might, Diogenes-like, insist on the elimination of
all honorific or wasteful elements from his consumption, would be unable
to supply his most trivial wants in the modern market.’

He was obviously thinking of all that colourful, printed packaging material,
and the glaze and patterning on loaves of bread.

He does offer a ray of hope, though, in the last chapter of his book
which is called ‘The higher learning as an expression of the pecuniary culture’.

After explaining, with his usual cynicism, that science was first practised
by priests because they needed a knowledge of natu ral processes. To work
magic and impress the ignorant, he points out that scientific knowledge
is evidence of time spent in study rather than in productive labour. The
application of science is therefore, by implication, prestigious.

So can science bring us to a proper understanding of what it means to
be environmentally aware? Unfortunately, Veblen warns: ‘Conventional insistence
on a modicum of conspicuous waste as an incident of all reputable scholarship
has affected our canons of taste and of serviceability.’ In other words,
useless science is OK, useful science is not; technologists can therefore
expect to enjoy much less prestige than the ‘pure’ scientists.

I can see a tentative way through. Perhaps if we are careful to boast
enough about the time and money we’ve wasted in learning what it truly means
to be green, we can get away with living far more simply and less wastefully,
and each of us do our bit towards saving the planet.

Caroline Dilke is a freelance writer living in London.

What should a responsible adult do in such circumstances? The religious
solution might have been to encourage the children to sew a little shroud,
and bury the dead animal with appropriate rites. The scientific way was
to demystify its death and turn it into a biology lesson.

‘Do you know,’ I said, ‘I think this shrew was going to have babies.
Shall we see if we can find the babies inside it?’

Tears dried in a twinkling. The other children were summoned with an
excited shout. We found a cork table mat, some pins and a pair of small,
very sharp scissors.

Without spilling a drop of blood, or upsetting anybody, I dissected
out nine perfectly formed, full-term shrew fetuses, each neatly attached
to a plump, pink, press-stud of a placenta. After arranging them tastefully
in a circle, I and my assistants went on to investigate the mother’s heart
and lungs, and her digestive system. We discovered what she had eaten for
her last meal; we counted the preformed turds in her rectum. As a final
flourish, the fleshy remains were placed on the bird table, where a crow
was later seen to carry them off.

Gruesome? No. Educational? I think so. And that is why I take issue
with Jeff Hecht who, in an article in New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ last month, suggested
that schools should abandon dissection classes (‘A lesson to be avoided’,
Forum, 19 May).

Children have natural superstitious feelings about dead bodies. When,
as a biology teacher, I cut up a rat for older students they would invariably
beg to be shown the brain. Why? Because there is magic inside our heads.
They were always disappointed when they saw the soft white material which
gave no clue to its function.

Skill is certainly needed in carrying out dissections in school. Any
teacher who has seen a child faint after watching a scalpel slice into a
bullock’s eye, or helped to remove the dead worm which some wag has put
down the back of a classmate, or met a solemn delegation of young vegetarians
who disapprove of cutting up dead animals, will appreciate the problem.

The eye is the greatest challenge. Injuries to the eye are painful.
A dead eye can still look at you. Your own living, sensitive eye looks back
at it, and sympathises with it. Worst of all, an eye contains jelly, and
black stuff.

Squeamishness and hysteria are easily kept at bay, however, when children
are shown the mechanics of the little natural camera, made out of rubbery
materials instead of metal, plastic and glass. With practice, the dissection
can be done elegantly so that nobody says ‘ugh’ and they all begin to think
differently about the connection between life and technology.

However cleverly a model has been constructed, it lacks the impact of
the real thing. Take a heart, for example. You can show children the heart
of a sheep and point out that it’s a pump that started to work when the
lamb was as tiny as a grain of rice, and kept on until it died. You can
get them to speculate on why the aorta needed to be so wide, while the pulmonary
artery could be narrow. If the heart is a plastic one, such details are
arbitrary and uninteresting.

One of the most powerful images in the laboratory is that of a preserved
human fetus. The small, touching corpse which might have become a human
being like themselves is far more likely to convince children of the realities
of their own early development than the most beautifully constructed take-to-bits
model – though it’s worth showing them that too, of course – and it stimulates
some very thoughtful questions.

The chief reason for teaching from real material is that it isn’t at
all obvious, until it’s pointed out, that living systems work like machines,
and can be made to work even when the animal is dead. My favourite demonstration
is the one where you connect a pump to a sheep’s lungs to make them inflate,
and blow air through its larynx to make it ‘baa’. This trick can electrify
a class of rowdy teenagers, and make them fall uncharacteristically silent,
but the important thing is to point out that there’s no magic in the event:
the larynx is just like a mouth organ, and that, too, would play a chord
if you attached it to a pump.

Children have natural, primitive beliefs that the difference between
life and death is magical, that a dead body is unclean, and that to cut
into it is to cause it pain. They’re never likely to learn otherwise if
dissections are banned in schools.

Unless, that is, they happen to find a dead shrew in a garden, and see
it carefully taken apart.

Caroline Dilke is a freelance writer living in London.

I discovered it all on my own. Although my parents had introduced me
to the delights of the V&A, science wasn’t culture so they themselves
never bothered with the buildings over the road.

It was sobering to enter the museum in those days, before the facade
got cleaned up and ice cream vans arrived. The outside was like a grubby,
elaborate biscuit, and inside it was a church, with stained-glass windows
and side chapels. It still is, but after my time they began to fill up the
nave with elephants, and now a diplodocus waves its empty head above a reception
desk and ticket machines.

There was no admission charge then, of course. If I’d had to pay to
go in I’d never have discovered it. But once I’d found the fish gallery,
the echinoderms, and the cases of weevils and birds’ eggs, I realised I’d
come upon something awesome: the variety of the kingdom of living things.

Sometimes, particularly if it wasn’t raining, I’d get the feeling I
was the only person poring over the glass cases. Occasionally, I’d exchange
a shy smile with some other lone devotee of the collections, and once, as
another chapter of my introduction to biology, I entered into a puzzling
conversation with a pale, avuncular man who later tried to assault me in
the sponge gallery.

I had no idea that the real life of the museum was taking place away
from public view, but when I found out that behind the varnished doors at
the ends of the galleries scientists were toiling over microscopes and collections
of specimens, I thought it entirely appropriate. That’s what scientists
did, and I longed to be one of them. In a sense, I was one of them.

It was a few years later that I first saw a gulf open up between the
museum’s staff and its lay visitors. In one of the first attempts to attract
a wider public, some pretty displays of birds and butterflies were brought
out into the entrance hall of the museum. Here, in front of a glass case
containing a peacock in full courtship display, I heard the following conversation.

Small child in push chair being wheeled past: ‘What’s that?’

Tired, desperate young mother: ‘Oh, shut up will you?’

The gulf yawned more widely after 1972, when the museum began to encourage
school parties to visit. I took some of them myself, because by then I was
a biology teacher. The whole trip was always an intense educational experience:
a journey by underground, perhaps their first; the discovery of the tunnel
from South Kensington station to Exhibition Road, and the way it echoed
to a scream; later, there’d be lunch on the grass outside the museum, if
the weather was fine, accompanied by sunbathing, flirtations and arguments
with members of other school parties. Finally, dog-tired by these unusual
excitements and laughs, the children would make the long journey back to
school – though somewhere in between, they might later remember, there’d
been a short interlude inside the museum. They’d seen a bewildering variety
of models and displays, and had pressed buttons, and been nagged to fill
in a worksheet. For all its brevity, that interlude had probably been rewarding;
perhaps some of them would visit the museum again.

But there’d been a gulf between what the museum stands for in the scientific
community, and what it aimed to put across to visitors. Those children from
the East End found much to marvel at and learn, if they were in the mood,
from clever displays picking out and illustrating a facet of biology –
the crumpled up piece of rubber to show the size of a human brain cortex,
for example, or the computer story in the main hall which deals with dinosaur
eggs. But nowhere would they have picked up the central idea that the natural
world is vast and various.

Last summer, on a beach in Dorset, I found six different ammonites.
I went to the museum hoping to identify them, remembering from my earliest
visits that there had been room after room of Blue Lias fossils, including
several complete ichthyosaur skeletons and an impressive mural of tangled,
long-haired sea lilies.

They’d all gone – hidden away behind the scenes. I was eventually directed
to a small section devoted to British fossils, on the upper floor of the
Geological Museum, to find that in one not very strenuous afternoon I had
gathered together a better collection of ammonites than the museum was prepared
to show the public. And wasn’t it a pity that when the film Jaws came out,
there were no sharks on show in the museum? Even given a fashionable fascination
with sharks, perhaps there will never be many people interested in the collections
for which the museum is famous. Maybe the school parties can be attracted
only by models and machines, and would have been bored by the collections
of exhibits which used to inspire a few scholarly young people. And yet
. . .

I went behind the scenes of the museum this week and talked to some
of the scientists who are bewildered by the museum’s new five-year plan.
They confessed that, like me, as children they had visited the museum and
had pored over those mahogany and glass cases, which looked so dull to non-scientists
and have now been removed. They talked wistfully of the metaphysical reasons
for keeping the character of the museum as it was originally conceived:
‘Man has a duty to respect the full diversity of life, and to understand
it,’ one of them suggested, and perhaps he was right.

I feel for them in their sorrow at the loss of research jobs in palaeontology
and botany, because as a visitor I regret the passing of the quirky, vanished
world in which, all on my own, I learnt to love biology. Tyrannosaurus rex
was terrifying enough as a mere skeleton to me; he needed no moving limbs,
or skin, or growl, to convince me that he had once ruled the Earth.

There are a few treasures left from those days, though, and one of them
is the great blue whale. If you go into the upper floor of the whale gallery
you can still look down at his marvellous, wise face, with its heavy brow
ridges and Delphic smile. Spirit of the museum, he keeps the secret I so
often puzzled over during my earliest visits: how did he, with his vast
bulk, ever get through the door? They’ll never get him out, I hope.

Caroline Dilke is a freelance writer living in London.