The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne
Between 1768 and 1787, Gilbert White brought to the Enlightenment the first in-depth, in situ study of an ecosystem. The text has never been out of print since it was first published in 1789. White’s Illustrated Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne reports on several aspects of Selborne’s environment: its geology, botany, zoology, and climate. Notably for a man of the cloth, the Reverend Gilbert White never invokes God or any higher power in his attempts to explain mysterious forces of nature. He keeps his letters literal, detailed, and secularly speculative. White’s narrative momentum is maintained through the progression of time, since the three dimensions of space remain fixed in his home parish. The single location distinguishes White’s epistemological strategy from that of his contemporary Alexander von Humboldt, who traveled extensively to understand geographical relations in ecology. Observations while traveling gave Humboldt the theoretical grounds for biogeography, as he de-tailed the importance of elevation in the distribution of plant types in the Andes range. In contrast, Gilbert White’s work is an early microcosm study because of his decades-long dedication to a circumscribed microenvironment. In a time when natural historians were engaged in a mania of exotic collection to fill cabinets of curiosities, White’s enduring absorption in his home parish shows an impressive degree of concentration on the biodiversity in his immediate purview. The wanderlust of the colonial scientist did not influence White’s own methods, though he kept up a considerable correspondence with traveling collectors and scientific societies in London (Worster 6).
White’s original use of phenology, the study of naturally recurring cycles such as the seasons, provisionally advanced knowledge according to Enlightenment expectations of stability. A devotion to ornithology predisposed him to detailing species migration according to predictable annual patterns. In spite of its phenological design, the Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne deconstructs the Enlightenment sensibility of coherent, patterned nature. By the end of White’s chronicle, the author views extraordinary events of ecological disturbance as essential to Selborne’s natural state. Critics have nearly always distilled White’s text down to precisely the inverse of chaos by celebrating its stable Enlightenment essence. The prevailing consensus on White’s work is that his letters from Selborne articulate an Edenic vision of man living in contemplative symbiosis with his natural surroundings. This balanced, preindustrial microcosm frame of reference massages the reader’s shoulders with visions of simpler times to which we may retreat, if only psychologically (Allen 50–51). Another perspective credits White with appreciating changes in nature, but only within the comfortable boundaries of a taxonomic challenge, citing “his fascination and delight in an ever-living yet ever-changing, ever-elusive, ever-miscellaneous nature” (Bellanca 77).
There is more than fascination and delight in Gilbert White’s letters: readers also receive a ration of confusion, awe, and horror. Although the first two-thirds of White’s chronicle are passably at peace with the world and imply the utopia of a stable and dynamic cosmos, to pin the whole work within this frame of balance deprives White of the credit he deserves for contemplating chaotic disturbance, the less comfortable mode of ecological thought. Before the end of his quarter-century of correspondence, White has grown into a more radical speculator on the complex dynamics around him. If Selborne were really a chronicle recording eternal peace, it would be functionally obsolete; a twenty-first-century visitor to the parish would recognize very little from White’s account. Selborne is a classic text for modern times not because it reinforces a set of established conventions about the balance of Mother Nature, but because White successfully divests the balance paradigm in favor of a more modern view of nature based on discord and contingency. The microcosm of Selborne, White discovers, was vulnerable to violent change and rapid degradation partially by virtue of its diminutive scope. These theories of chaotic endangerment have not been developed in the critical literature on White’s work.
By 1770, two years into his study, White is detailing the elaboration of precise methods of observation, and has coined for himself the title of “monographer” writing on a single scientific subject: “Men that undertake only one district are much more likely to advance natural knowledge than those that grasp at more than they can possibly be acquainted with: every kingdom, every province, should have its own monographer” (125).1 White is wary of being overwhelmed by too much natural information and losing the clarity of an expert’s vision in a specific sphere of knowledge. The Enlightenment filled shelves with surface-level, encyclopedic studies. Selborne has borders, and ample natural provisions within them, to keep his scientific interests sated. Another way to think about this kind of circumscribed environment is through the concept of the “ecosphere”—the regional environment that was the entire sphere of existence for most people before the Industrial Revolution. Preindustrial life centered on the ecosphere and the values of bioregionalism that ecological philosophers now cite as a necessary corrective to the “biosphere” mentality of globalization. Individuals in developed nations with a biosphere mentality expect goods to come from anywhere on the planet: they expect materials to be extracted in one location, parts forged in a second, components assembled in a third, and finished products sold and consumed in a fourth, without regard to the distance between places. The ecosphere or bioregional ethic, seen now in retrospect as the prevailing way of life before industrialism, advocates that consumers and goods should originate in the same ecological region (Buell 143).
Over the course of four letters, White comes to realize the strong potential of this serendipitous method of monography. It began with simple regional records designed to enable detailed migratory reports. But White’s instincts push his cataloguing science toward innovation: “For many months I carried a list in my pocket of the birds that were to be remarked, and, as I rode or walked about my business, I noted each day the continuance or omission of each bird’s song; so that I am as sure of the certainty of my facts as a man can be of any transaction whatsoever” (117). The key concept here is White’s notice of omission in migratory patterns. Not merely the presence of an identifiable species but also its absence become formalized as facts in the Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. Here is a crucial turn in methods of ecological knowledge. Science was accustomed to in-depth study of apparent, observable, material entities, but it had no clear interest in the gaps that are equally important to understanding patterns of species distribution over time, especially in disturbed environments. In effect, his monographic focus provides a crucial trial of the stability and continuity over time that natural history had previously assumed to be inherent in ideas like the great chain of being. This discovery of species absence shifts White’s original study of phenology into the modern age, and annual migratory cycles are discovered as shifting and unreliable. Modern phenology has become a central method of ornithologists who study the effects of climate change on migratory patterns.
The widespread appeal of White’s chronicle rests partially on his caring and concerned voice for all the creatures of Selborne. Revealingly, he shows more affection for oaks, turtles, and worms than for the “hordes of gypsies which infest the south and west of England” (179). White may be accused of class prejudice, but he is also making an implicit statement about the inherent value of nonhuman inhabitants. Human activity too often destroys the peaceable network of other species in Selborne. Where the oak is felled, the intrepid mother bird is struck dead (11); where hunters are unfettered by regulation, the partridges and red deer become rare or extinct, leaving a “gap” in Fauna Selborniensis (22); lowly worms, though despised, are essential to soil health. “Earth-worms,” White writes, “though in appearance a small and despicable link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make a lamentable chasm. [. . .] Worms probably provide new soil for hills and slopes where the rain washes the earth away; and they affect slopes, probably to avoid being flooded. Gardeners and farmers express their detestation of worms. [. . .] But these men would find that the earth without worms would become cold, hard-bound, and void of fermentation; and consequently sterile” (196).
White’s innovative thinking goes beyond the hierarchical great chain of being that was thought to extend from rocks, at the bottom, to plants, animals, humans, and finally God. Here, environmental stress is evident through the deletions in an interdependent biotic