A stay of execution

Oliver Rackham is quite clear from the beginning. This huge compendium of a book, the culmination of a lifetime’s work, will provide no answers. It will ask plenty of questions but has no theory to promote. It is not about the environment, the solipsistic idea that the world exists to surround man, but ecology, the interaction of organisms in the world. Trees are as much the actors as any woodsman, forester or conservationist. And where the idea of the environment is essentially simple — how does man either destroy or preserve what surrounds him — the idea of ecology is essentially complicated and even incomprehensible. Every detail counts, every relationship, however hidden, affects every other. Every theory, simply because it is a theory and has involved a level of abstraction and generalisation at its birth, is wrong.

This is the Rackham credo: be modest; don’t play God; confess your ignorance; attend to details; theories invented elsewhere and imposed here are usually no good; what was true a while ago might not be true now; what might be true now won’t be true soon. This great book on woodlands is in fact an enormous polemic on behalf of reticence, respect, care, attention and patience. Don’t prod lazy landowners into doing something about their woods. They might like to fence them off from the deer (‘Eat Bambi’ is the Rackham injunction) and they might like to coppice them and heat their houses with the product. Otherwise let the other actors play their part.

He is often very funny. His illustration of the cost of underwood in the 16th century is the bill for the faggots that burned Archbishop Cranmer in 1553. The nature of the woodpasture he loves — trees in grassland, long horizontal branches — is illustrated by the story of Absalom who came to a sticky end when leaving a battlefield by catching his head in the boughs of a low oak ‘and the mule that was under him went away’.