Pierre Poivre and the Networking Naturalists: Pioneering Environmentalists of the Eighteenth Century

By Gillian Jones

Although climate change is seen as a very 21st-century concern, back in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century naturalists around the world in places as far apart as Mauritius in the Indian ocean and St Vincent in the Caribbean were becoming aware of what they referred to as desiccation, the drying of the land and absence of rainfall due to the cutting down of large swathes of forest trees.
This book traces the connections between those naturalists, scientists and men of letters to reveal the surprising truths that they discovered and which must inspire us to follow the trail they blazed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jun 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398469648

Gillian Jones

Gillian Jones has travelled widely, first as a teacher and subsequently with the British Council. In 1971, flying from Colombia to Brazil, over endless miles of green forest canopy, she was startled to see a yellow- orange gash in the greenery, a mark which signalled the start of the Amazonian Highway. It was an image that stayed with her and later she would write her screenplay about the destruction of the Amazon rain­forest: one which has still to reach the silver screen. She took courses with the Open University on Environmental Ethics and followed up with a novel, Blade of Light, the first of a trilogy of ‘stories of suspense with an ecological edge’. Gillian grew up in Kent, surrounded by Kentish cobnut trees. She is a fellow of the Linnean Society of London.

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Introduction

Alexander von Humboldt, the great German naturalist, scientist and explorer whose life spanned two halves of the 18th and 19th centuries, was the first to describe the interdependency of the multiple parts which make up the natural world. He showed how plants and wildlife occupy niches and form a web of life, a single system which includes the clouds, the air and the waters, which humans are a part of and entirely dependent on. Humboldt has been called the first environmentalist, whilst the term ecology, which describes the phenomenon, was coined by Ernst Haeckel, another German scientist. Humboldt’s name is commemorated in hundreds of places and phenomena, and not just the Humboldt current off the Pacific coast of South America, the name with which anglophones are most familiar. Joseph Banks was the botanist and naturalist who sailed with Cook on his voyage to the South seas and went on to be President of the Royal Society and founder of Kew Gardens. Together, Humboldt and Banks can be said to define the era of 18th and early 19th century naturalists but there were many others, perhaps less well-known today, who deserve to be better known. I came across a network of them whose stories fascinated me and whose concerns prefigure so clearly the concerns faced today, biodiversity, de-forestation and above all climate change.

The first to come to my attention was Pierre Poivre. His insights were gained from travels in the east and his subsequent visits to the island of Mauritius confirmed his view that humanity must work with nature and not subjugate it. The second was a clergyman- scientist who demonstrated that plants breathe and put moisture back into the atmosphere rather than just absorbing it. His revelation had profound effects on naturalists, especially in France, confirming and backing up what Poivre had to say on the role of trees and climate.

We say we live today in an interconnected world but, in the 18th century, those ideas were moving surprisingly quickly between England, France, Mauritius and on to the West Indies where Alexander Anderson at the Botanic Garden of St Vincent was absorbing them and was in touch with the garden of Pamplemousses on Mauritius, with the Chelsea Physic Garden in London, indirectly with Joseph Banks and the island of St Helena and with botanists on other Caribbean islands. In South America botanists were documenting the vast riches of the continent and playing host to Alexander Von Humboldt. One woman accompanied the naturalist Philibert Commerson on the voyage of the French Captain Bougainville to circumnavigate the globe, calling in at Otaheite/Tahiti. Descriptions of that island fuelled the growing mystique of islands, the theme that was taken up by the author Bernardin de Saint-Pierre whose writings enthused the wider reading public with his defence of nature.

My final essay focuses on the topic of the herbarium, another project dear to enlightenment collectors. It is thanks to such collections that, to take one recent example from the Herbarium at Kew Gardens, it is possible to identify and recover plants such as Coffea stenophylla, the coffee variety which can flourish in warmer climates better than the predominant arabica and robusta and might just save our morning coffee from climate change and extinction.

What could be the importance of all this? Perhaps it is to point out that we have been here before: that scientists and naturalists have seen what might come in a world that fails to place nature at its centre. Perhaps the sad conclusion is that the world at large took little or no notice and, consequently, today we are on a course for disaster. But the opposite could also be the case: that network of scientists and naturalists forms a thread, from Humboldt, who inspired the founders of environmentalism in North America, and Joseph Banks, whose massive influence encouraged botanic gardens and reforestation across many areas of the English-speaking world, to the others who are described in these pages. Their work, and the evidence they left, need to be placed centre-stage again, to inspire the world to use their legacy, to do what they did and on a far larger scale.

Pierre Poivre: Environmentalist and Philosopher

A picture containing flower, plant Description automatically generated

Bust of Pierre Poivre in the Pamplemousses Botanic Garden, Mauritius

(Credit: Benoît Prieur – CC-BY-SA)

‘She sells sea shells on the sea shore.’ How many tongue-twisters can you remember? Here’s another one: –

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper!

If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper,

Where’s the peck of pickled pepper that Peter Piper picked?

The answer to that question is: probably on the Île de France! Today, Mauritius.

In the course of his action-packed life, Pierre Poivre brought spices from the East Indies to the island known in those days as Île de France, today as Mauritius. Born in 1719 in Lyon, the son of a silk merchant – for which that city was famous from Roman times up until a disastrous infection in the 19th century almost wiped the industry out – the young Pierre was educated by the Jesuits. He took an early interest in botany and the natural world and entertained a great desire to travel and explore the world. The Jesuits had missions in far flung areas of the globe and also acted as diplomats for the French government so, when he was still too young to be fully ordained, Pierre Poivre signed up to the Society of Foreign Missions and a missionary’s training, and in the year 1740, aged 22, he bade farewell to his family and set out to join the Society’s mission in China. From then on it seems to have been one adventure after another.

Not long after his arrival in China he was arrested; on what grounds it is not clear. However, whilst in