Friend or foe?
AS a Gloucestershire country lad, I was taught to rip up ragwort wherever I saw it. Shallow rooted, it came up quite easily. Everyone knew that it poisoned cattle and horses, so should be destroyed whenever and wherever it appeared. The world I then knew was preoccupied with war, with the aftermath of war—my parental generation had been through that business twice—with getting the boys back home and returning to normality. Throughout the nation, farm and garden production was still a prime concern. The niceties and needs of the natural countryside were not much recognised: Nature would, after all, take care of herself.
Biodiversity as an objective in its own right had not yet been invented. The term didn’t even appear until 1988, when it was coined by Raymond F. Dasmann, professor of ecology at the University of California. He had published a textbook,, as long ago as 1959, a farsighted work in the movement that is now the concern of the whole civilised world.
