“Virtual” libraries have their merits: there are practical and symbolic
reasons why information should not necessarily be constrained to a particular
physical location. But one of the virtues of traditional libraries is that they
are physical places. By dedicating a place to something, we symbolise the value
attached to it.

People may ask why we should keep volumes of Victorian sermons or outdated
school textbooks. The answer is that to make sense of the present we need
records of thoughts, insights and opinions that stretch back into the past, like
geological strata. Without this, we are at the mercy of the latest fads. We
cannot predict what later generations may find interesting or relevant. I recall
a history don at Oxford University in the 1970s lamenting the fact that a huge
collection of Victorian parish magazines had been used to make wadding for shell
cases in the First World War. He saw this as the destruction of a unique and
priceless research resource. We have to keep everything: we know from past
experience the dangers of being selective. To neglect or forget aspects of the
past is tantamount to rewriting history, and anyone who has read Animal
Farm knows where that can lead.

Between 24 March and mid-June, Britain’s Science Reference and Information
Service (SRIS) will open as a physical part of the British Library at the
library’s new premises in London. For the first time, science and humanities
readers will share the same building. The Berlin State Library goes one
better—everyone shares a single vast reading room there.

Above all, a library creates a community, a sense of being part of a happy
band of fellow-seekers after knowledge, even though they are total strangers and
no one talks to each other. Apparently, if you stand at the Kaaba, the holy
structure in Mecca, that Muslims face while praying, you feel an uplifting
sensation from being at the focus of so much religious attention. I have often
observed something similar, if secular, in a library when all the readers are
working happily and productively. Try doing that on a website.

But this community must be connected to the wider world outside. In its old
buildings, the SRIS was open to all. The move to the new site, just a mile or so
away, will change this: in the new British Library, as with most national
libraries, no one will be allowed in without a reader’s pass. National libraries
do not need restrictions on access any more than other libraries do. Universal
access is not something quaint and quirky. It ought to be a fundamental
principle of any society that citizens can educate themselves to any standard
they want, and surely our national libraries should be part of this.

Why not replace the elitist and disagreeable pass system with a
first-come-first-served system? It shouldn’t be hard for libraries to keep track
of how many people are in the reading room at any time, so they could have a
system whereby every time someone leaves the room, a new person is admitted.
There could be signs outside to indicate whether the reading room is full or
empty. Car parks can do it, so why not libraries? Enthusiasm and dedication, not
academic professionalism, would become the criteria for entry—if people
had to be turned away it would not be those without qualifications but those who
didn’t get up early enough. How pleasing.

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 “Dad”) is passing. If he mutters “Good girl”
the plant is a weed; if he screeches “Wretch! Vandal!” the plant is a flower.
This elegant vignette encapsulates our relationship with other forms of
life—some of which we class as “good” and “beneficial”, while others are
“bad” or “pests”. 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’s beneficial organism
is all too often another’s 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: “The blighters! The
˛ú±ôľ±˛µłółŮ±đ°ů˛ő!”

At bottom, the goodness or badness of most organisms depends on
context—on 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 “make up its mind”.
(His subsequent afflication with skin cancer was sad but ironic.)

No creature better illustrates this sort of injustice than the
woodworm—harmless 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—humankind, 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’s 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’t.

Such injustice is an example of how our relationship with “mother nature” is
all too often one of hypocritical self-centredness. We flatter ourselves that we
have intrinsic, natural “friends” in nature, our loyal allies against equally
intrinsic “enemies”, 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.