TODAY we think of John James Audubon as a painter, of birds mainly, but he
had the eye of a scientist as well as an artist. He was widely respected as a
naturalist; it was for his scientific achievements that he was elected a Fellow
of the Royal Society in 1830. Darwin himself was influenced by Audubon’s keen
observations. Out of this connection Gerald Weissmann, in Darwin’s
Audubon, discovers a web of links between the two men and, from that web,
references spin out to the social and professional worlds they inhabited.

As both scientist and artist, then, Audubon, was at home in the two cultures
before they had begun to drift apart into the mutual ignorance and distrust so
deplored a century later by C. P. Snow. It is tempting to suppose the gulf
between the sciences and humanities now stretches so wide as to be unbridgeable,
but in this collection of two dozen essays Weissmann, good doctor that he is,
provides an antidote to despair. He writes of medicine, his profession, but his
context embraces poetry, painting and music. In his hands, a tale about science
turns into a celebration of the achievements of rational thought. Others have
attempted this, but never, I think, in quite this way or so successfully.

In “The Doctor With Two Heads”, for example, he uses a painting called
The First Trial of X-ray Therapy for Cancer of the Breast to consider the
way in which the patient is portrayed and, from that, the way women were
portrayed as passive objects in much of 19th-century art. The arrival of the
research ship Atlantis II at Woods Hole Field Center in Massachusetts provokes
thoughts of Moby Dick and of the chivalry displayed on the Titanic, the wreck of
which Atlantis II had been investigating (hence the essay’s title, “Titanic and
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All these essays are informed by a deep compassion. “Bête Noire”
describes an ancient condition we call post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Puerperal Priority” recounts the resistance that had to be overcome before the
cause of an often fatal disease was recognised to be an infection carried by
doctors and midwives from patient to patient. Oliver Wendell Holmes, poet and
humorist as well as a Harvard professor of anatomy, played a major part in
working out the cause of puerperal fever. Weissmann tells us Holmes was the
model on which Arthur Conan Doyle based Sherlock.

Sometimes compassion is revealed as admiration. “They All Laughed at
Christopher Columbus” (the title is a line by Ira Gershwin) records the
navigational skill and superb seamanship of the admiral even during the last
decade of his life, when he was crippled by Reiter’s syndrome, an illness
Weissmann describes. Compassion may also lead to anger: here, it is directed at
those who pervert or misrepresent the scientific endeavour. Some, for example,
attack the idea of “value-free” science, maintaining that all science is a
social construct. This phrase, Weissmann reminds us, also sums up the view of
the National Socialists and of Lysenkoists.

He traces the steps by which genuinely brilliant researchers, such as Edward
Pernkopf of the University of Vienna, imposed National Socialist principles on
medical science, redirecting research into fields such as “racial hygiene” and
the “genetics of fitness”, that were far from value-free. Even then, though,
Weissmann’s humanity allows him to make fun of his targets, if indirectly. The
title, “Springtime for Pernkopf”, refers to the joke musical in The
Producers, one of the funniest movies ever made, in which Nazis are
portrayed as ludicrous.

The book is sheer delight. Wise, erudite, at times moving, always respectful
of human dignity, and sometimes witty enough to make me chuckle out loud,
Weissmann should really be appreciated in small doses: take one essay at a time
to allow for proper digestion. This is probably impossible, for the writing
encourages gluttony; one essay simply feeds the appetite for the next, so the
book is devoured in one great binge. If you plan to give the book as a Christmas
present, I advise you to buy it early so you can read it yourself before parting
with it.

The first task of a dictionary compiler is to define the subjects to be covered, the number of entries to be allocated to each and the average length of entries. Inevitably, this involves arbitrary decisions, but it is necessary if the work is to be kept to its prescribed length. This seventh edition of what used to be the Chambers, but is now the Larousse Dictionary casts the net wide. It offers nearly 50 000 entries on topics ranging from acoustics to zoology, from paper to ships, supported by comprehensive cross-referencing and a few simple line drawings. Then, for good measure, there is a series of appendices, some of which are not usually included in scientific and technical dictionaries. These cover, for example, paper sizes, taxonomy, constellations, and a full list of the geological column.

It seems churlish to find fault, but no dictionary is perfect and my complaints are minor. Soils are described under their old names, which are still used, but not their (ugly) modern names, such as aridisol and mollisol. I believe blue-green algae, listed as Cyanophyceae, are now classed as Cyanobacteria. Many agricultural terms are included, but not the main groups of pesticides. These are not serious faults in an impressive work that will be of great value to specialists venturing outside their own disciplines and to anyone who enjoys reading about science and technology. I began using it the day it arrived. At £45 the hardback may be too expensive, but the £19.99 paperback is splendid value. I warmly recommend it.

Books can change lives. In 1971, Pete Wilkinson was out for a drink when a friend handed him a copy of The Environmental Handbook, bought that day at a motorway service station. A few days later, Wilkinson, then a hard-drinking, gambling, unemployed truck driver, who, he says, ‘changed women and jobs with equal regularity’ and was subject to frequent mood swings, volunteered for Friends of the Earth. Within a week he was collecting nonreturnable bottles for the Schweppes protest that propelled FoE to the forefront of the environmental movement. The rebel had found a cause.

He spent the next five years on the staff of FoE, devising campaigns, writing, and drinking with journalists, in whose company he soon felt relaxed. But all was not well. At FoE, his participation was becoming ‘something of an embarrassment to the more academically orientated staff and advisers’, because of his fondness for swift direct action. So he left to work for the Post Office, a two-year stint that was ended by a telephone call from David McTaggart, another campaigner with little interest in the subtleties of debate. McTaggart had recently founded Greenpeace and invited Wilkinson to run its British branch.

Greenpeace was much more to his taste and his familiarity with the needs of journalists for attention grabbing events proved invaluable. The organisation bought ships, including a trawler called the Sir William Hardy, which volunteers refitted and renamed Rainbow Warrior. It planned campaigns against seal culling and whaling, issues with a high emotional appeal which could be presented as simple conflicts between good and evil. They were not original. FoE had long campaigned against whaling and, after all, the International Whaling Commission existed to conserve stocks through improved management. But it mattered little. Greenpeace was afloat, dramatic, photogenic, and Wilkinson carefully and skilfully nurtured a symbiotic relationship with the press.

Other campaigns followed, each comprising daring and sometimes witty publicity stunts, culminating in the four voyages Wilkinson made to Antarctica. In 1986, however, Wilkinson and the members of the Greenpeace board he had appointed were persuaded to resign. His influence over policy waned and he felt increasingly isolated in the growing organisation. Years later, McTaggart told him that he had been edged out because of his supposed left-wing sympathies. By the early 1990s he had left, feeling betrayed by campaigners he had befriended and trusted.

Inevitably, his account of the origins and history of Greenpeace is one-sided, but this detracts little from its value. His book describes the way his campaigns were organised and what they cost, and most of the campaigns are there. The internal politics of Greenpeace will surprise only those who have never worked for voluntary bodies. In my limited experience, they all operate very much as Greenpeace does. They are good at producing disgruntled former employees.

It is Wilkinson’s descriptions of the campaigns that are truly revealing and it is for them that I recommend his book. They were based on stunts, with topics chosen for the photo opportunities they afforded, a tabloid froth concealing outrageous exaggeration, distortion and ignorance of scientific principles. In a chapter called ‘Instant Experts’, Wilkinson writes of nuclear engineering: ‘It is as though a malevolence, dormant in the uranium for millennia, has been unleashed by the Faustian antics of human kind . . . Homo nuclear has bequeathed to the world a disease from which it will never recover’.

In such emotional descriptions, contaminants become life-threatening regardless of their concentration. The more photogenic animal species must be protected, regardless of the cultural cost to those who hunt them and regardless of the possibility that culling might, in some cases, save stocks from disease and overexploitation of resources. The dumping of waste at sea must be opposed, but nowhere does Wilkinson justify this opposition in the light of what is known about the movement of deep water off the continental shelves and about the cost and environmental consequences of storage on land.

This brand of environmentalism owes nothing to environmental science. By arousing public outrage through simplistic appeals to prejudice and sentiment, Wilkin-son constructed Greenpeace as a political organisation with an undeclared agenda, attempting to force change without resort to debate or democratic process.

Was this his intention? Clearly, to him it was all great, swashbuckling, macho fun, a series of derring-do capers undertaken in a mood of high euphoria. Yet the rage and moral certainty of the fanatic are never far from the surface.

Greenpeace has changed and so, to some extent, has Wilkinson. Towards the end of the book he admits the possibility of constructive innovation in collaboration with industry, albeit on his own terms.

Warrior is entertaining, very readable, and well illustrated. A jolly good Buchanesque yarn, it tells of how the medium became the message.

Michael Allaby is the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Ecology (Oxford 1994).

The intensification of British agriculture, that began around 1950,
was achieved by providing farmers with economic and technical support and
stable markets. The effect was to compel them to increase output to maintain
their incomes. This, in turn, led to a transformation of large areas of
countryside, which coincided with a growing popular interest in wildlife
and in rural recreation. Inevitably, conservationists of landscape as well
as wildlife found themselves opposed to farmers, who in turn resented what
they saw as an attempt inspired by sentimental ignorance to interfere with
their right to manage their own, private land as they saw fit.

During the 1960s, a series of conferences called ‘Countryside in 1970’
addressed the issue, bringing landowners and conservationists together in
an attempt to find common ground between two essentially irreconcilable
views. Arising from the conferences, the national Farming and Wildlife Advisory
Group (FWAG) was set up in 1969 with representatives from seven of the major
farming, landowning and conservation bodies. FWAG, it was hoped, would use
reason to persuade farmers of the possibility of producing food while protecting
wildlife. Farmers would become voluntary conservationists in the end.

Graham Cox, Philip Lowe and Michael Winter combed the archives and conducted
interviews in an academic study of the history of FWAG. Their results published
as The Voluntary Principle in Conservation amount to a broad appraisal of
the principle. The book is an authoritative but readable study containing
many a cautionary tale.

It describes the origin of FWAG, its grouth into a national organisation
and then into one based on county groups. Two case studies follow this account,
one in Wales, where most farmers rejected conservation advice, the other
in Wiltshire, where FWAG enjoyed a more friendly reception. The authors
end with a chapter they call ‘An uncertain future’.

Does persuasion alone produce major reforms? It seems not. The authors
are impartial, but the picture that emerges shows farmers to be arrogant,
as they refused to listen even to moderate conservation arguments and contemptuous
in their manipulation of FWAG. The group achieved few positive results until
the Wildlife and Countryside Act in 1981 provided it with a little legislative
support. Farmers were reluctant even to be seen in the company of professional
conservationists. County FWAG groups allowed farming interests to dominate
in an attempt to overcome their hostility.

Perhaps farmers had no choice. The only instruction and advice many
of them had ever received, from agricultural colleges, sales staff and government
advisers was directed exclusively at increasing profits by any practicable
means. When, in 1970, a Wiltshire landowner introduced organic methods on
his large farm, the despairing admiration of his colleagues revealed much
about the trend in agricultural education. What he was doing, one of them
said, ‘had to be right for the land in every sense of the word. But few
have the knowledge to farm properly now’. The most hostile interviewee the
authors met was the principal of an agricultural college.

FWAG managed to project itself as the principal source of conservation
advice to farmers, but the conservation measures it advocated were sometimes
little more than cosmetic, usually involving a modest amount of tree planting
or the construction of ponds. The recruitment of support from the owners
of large estates alienated small farmers. What the book describes as ‘FWAG’s
overwhelming commitment to compromise’ led it to concentrate on the restoration
of habitats of secondary importance while leaving farmers not only free
to destroy more valuable habitats but to feel they were being good conservationists
as they did so. Understandably, the organisation was strongly criticised,
partly for that and partly for concerning itself with wildlife habitats
while ignoring problems associated with the appearance of the countryside
and public access to it.

The book, says its jacket, is directed towards students, academics and
those whose work is related to planning and land use. No doubt it will be
of great value to them, but it should also be read by farmers and members
of conservation and environmental groups, who are more directly involved
in the argument. It will reveal them to themselves and, in its account of
the political, administrative and financial problems that have been encountered,
it shows the cost of intransigence.

*Packard Publishing, 16 Lynch Down, Funtington, Chester, West Sussex
PO18 9LR. Tel: 0243 575621

Michael Allaby is a freelance author with a particular interest in the
environment. He is also editor of The Oxford Dictionary of Natural History
and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Zoology.