THE UNITY OF ECOLOGY — DARLING 467 



oning from the number of sacks exported and allowing for some being 

 used at home, there were probably 15 million sheep in England in the 

 early 14th century. 



It has probably been insufficiently realized what effect tliis vast 

 sheep farming enterprise must have had on the landscape and wildlife. 

 Despite the patches of forest, the fringes of parklike country in 

 transition and gorse-clad cormnons, there must have been extensive 

 bald spots where open-field cultivation and sheep farming between 

 them would have destroyed all tree growth. The land of England 

 was being mined of its stored fertility, but in such a favored area do 

 we live that regeneration made good part of the loss in flora and f amia, 

 seen and unseen, and consequently that much of the lost fertility. 



Now comes the political act with its ecological consequences: this 

 economically prosperous sheep farming era was wrecked by taxes in 

 wool and on wool. Edward III was on the warpath, and wars, as 

 we know all too well, are an expensive form of dissipation. The 

 lords of the manor began to let their ploughed lands, and later their 

 sheep also as going concerns. The rates of exploitation probably in- 

 creased as the small men came in and had to create their capital. But 

 the removal of the Wool Staple to Calais was the disintegrating blow. 

 A system of husbandry was pretty well at an end, and before long the 

 Reformation and the advent of American gold started a period of 

 enclosure of land. This enclosure undoubtedly made for stabilization 

 and a husbandry based on maintenance rather than pure extraction. 

 The 18th-century introduction of leguminous crop plants and the 

 more skilled application of the principle of rotation produced a con- 

 version cycle of energy flow vastly in excess of that of the centuries 

 immediately preceding. Not all of it was translated into human in- 

 crease and economic prosperity. Hedges, hedgerow timber, increased 

 leisure (for the few) for such country pursuits as hunting and shoot- 

 ing, which needed a varied landscape, and not least the emergence of 

 the Romance poets in their delight in landscape, all contributed to 

 diversification of habitat which the wild flora and fauna were quick to 

 exploit in this favored climate. 



The story in Scotland has been less happy. The more acidic soils 

 did not withstand the sheep farming as well as those in England, if 

 we exclude the millstone grits of the English Pemiine Chain; the 

 Southern Uplands of Scotland are still in sheep, but are deteriorating 

 slowly. The Highlands, poorer and wetter and steeper, suffered their 

 hardest blow of deforestation and the coming of the sheep in the 18th 

 century, and have deteriorated to an ecological decrepitude which is 

 plain for those with eyes to see. The political situation is not yet 

 sufficiently ecological in climate to tackle this essentially biological 

 problem of rehabilitation in a biological and geographical manner, al- 

 though, as I said at the outset, it is improving. 



'766-746—65 37 



