MICHAEL WOOD ON GILBERT WHITE

'These days we take natural history for granted, from Life on Earth to Springwatch, television has enabled us to observe the most intimate moments of birth, life and death of the other species with whom we humans share this planet. It has brought home to us how all life on earth is interconnected and stands or falls together. But this idea is not our invention. It was first proposed by a remarkable, if eccentric, product of the 18th-century Enlightenment - a very unlikely character to cause a revolution in our way of seeing: Gilbert White, author of the world's first and greatest nature diary and the first ecologist.

White was an English country clergyman, born in Selborne near Alton in Hampshire in 1720, the eldest of 11 children. Educated at Basingstoke Grammar School and at Oriel College Oxford, he had dreams of making a career in the high academic society of Oxford. Thwarted in his ambitions, he ended up back in Selborne doing temporary jobs as a standby vicar in neighbouring parishes, and ultimately in Selborne itself.

White never married, and could easily have sunk into melancholy and mediocrity in his local Hampshire society - the kind of story Jane Austen would put into fiction a few decades later only a few miles away. But it was these very circumstances that created the naturalist. First in his Garden Calendar (from 1751) and then in his increasingly vivid and detailed nature observations in his letters to his friends, White created a new language of nature, which eventually brought his work to the attention of the scientific luminaries of the Royal Society in London. His mix of science and poetry, precision and beauty would be a marked influence on the Romantics. Wordsworth and Coleridge both loved his writing while Keats's debt to White's language and observations can be seen in his own ideas about 'the Poetry of the Earth'.

White's only book The Natural History of Selborne was published in December 1788, on the eve of the French Revolution, and has never been out of print since. There have been nearly 1,000 distinct publishings of the book, representing about 200 separate editions and translations, making it one of the most published book in English literature. The book was likened by Virginia Woolf to 'an epic novel, with a vast cast of characters of all species' arriving and interacting, the whole stage widening to admit the immense forces that shape history, landscape, climate and natural history. In White's hands the 'narrow' view of the parish becomes a glimpse of a whole world.

Of course, White's ideas did not arise in a vacuum, the late 18th century was a time of amazing change. White was a contemporary of Captain Cook, Clive of India, Wolfe of Quebec and Dr Johnson. His life spanned the wars with Louis XIV, the British victories in India, Canada and the Caribbean as well as the French and American revolutions. At home too there were dramatic changes; the old rural economy was coming to an end, the scientific and industrial revolutions were on the horizon. What Britain went through then, is what much of the world is going through now: industrialisation, development, and the shift from rural to urban economy. And one of the key concerns of the time - then, as now - was the relation of humanity to the natural world.

In its quiet and unobtrusive way, White's deceptively simple account of the comings and goings of the wildlife and animals in Selborne began the shift towards our modern ecological sensibility and taught us to look at Nature with joy, respect and empathy. In his intimate view of a parish and its life, nature 'watched narrowly' he has shown us how to see the intricate interconnectedness of the whole world.

In the advertising blurb to his book, White wrote with characteristic modesty:

'If I should have induced any of my readers to pay a more ready attention to the wonders of Creation too readily overlooked as common occurrences... or if I should, have lent a helping hand towards the enlargement of the boundaries of knowledge; ...or if I should have thrown some small light upon ancient customs and manners by these pursuits that contribute so much to health and cheerfulness of spirits then my purpose will be fully answered.''

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