In nature literature, Ireland has often been treated as a kind of ecological sub-habitat to Britain and Europe. Although it has a narrower range of flora and fauna, its ecology is actually unique and among the most complex in the world. Yet until recently, there have been few authoritative up-to-date reference texts (bar Tim Robinson's poetic Aran books, Frank Mitchell's The Irish Landscape or, for the initiated, Webb's Flora), so my heart skipped a beat when I spotted the bulky Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History, published by the Stoneybatter-based Lilliput Press in Dublin.
In fact, the book encompasses many histories, from 27 contributors across 658 pages, and its range of disciplines make it something of a skyburst: geology (John Feehan, Patrick N. Wyse Jackson), map-making (J. H. Andrews), mammalology (Patrick Sleeman), ornithology (Clive Hutchinson), entomology (James P. O'Connor), metereology (Brendan McWilliams) - as well as Sean Lysaght's literary-critical take on nature-naming, or Dorinda Outram's wrangling with the science-historical paradigms of Michel Foucault.
The book answers a slew of nature questions, as well as coughing up factual gems: the fact that, North and South, there are 160,000 legally held shotguns and only 10,000 members of bird clubs (more people shoot game than are interested in conservation); or that the Helga II, which pounded hell out of Dublin in 1916 (destroying the printing presses of Robert Lloyd Praeger's popular journal The Irish Naturalist), had been the dredging ship in the great Clare Island Survey of 1909-11. Or did you know that the native red deer was eaten to extinction during the Famine? That populations of Daubenton's bat were decimated by the destruction of bridges during the Civil War? Or that during the great efflorescence of aesthetics and politics in the 1790s, the turnip also arrived in Ireland?
On another level, in outlining the evolution of the concept of nature and landscape, the book records the oft-ignored history of Irish science alongside political and cultural developments. Apart from being largely untouched by the Renaissance and the industrial revolution, internationalist ideas percolated into Ireland almost since late Roman times, and the book digs into the colonial expediencies of Elizabethan mapping and forest clearance; the Philosophical Societies of the Enlightenment; the great endeavours of the 19th century; how science largely suffered when the south parted company with Britain; and the increasing environmental concern since the 1950s (when the birdwatchers of the Irish Ornithology Club, meeting in the Brazen Head, refused to admit women members).
Interestingly, its editor is a 54year-old Professor of English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, born in Belfast and educated at Queen's (where he briefly studied zoology under Prof R.A.R. Gresson, as part of his Arts degree in the 1960s). "My very first paper, when I was 17, was about the birds of Rathlin Island," says Foster. "It was turned down by the Irish Naturalist Journal, but they handled it very nicely."
Having published his Colonial Conse- quences: Essays in Literature and Culture, Lilliput took on the present book seven years ago. "To bridge the world of science with the world of criticism," says Foster, "I enlisted the help of Helena Chesney, Keeper of Zoology at the Ulster Museum, as associate editor, and she was also indispensable in raising funds, because this is a very expensive book." (It was funded by the An Taisce/ the National Heritage Council in Dublin; the Belfast National History and Philosophical Society, and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland).
Explaining the gap he perceived in the literature, Foster comments: "If the story of the study of nature, and the perception of nature in Ireland has not been told satisfactorily, it's partly that the Irish Cultural Revival, headed by Yeats, was not interested in it, and as a result, it languished in neglect until recently. But I'd say this book now is as much a symptom as a cause, it comes out of a general sense of cultural reorientation. There is a kind of hidden arrow we try to reveal, so that figures like Robert Lloyd Praeger, Robert Templeton, Edward A. Armstrong and Spotswood Green can be properly rehabilitated." Another close to his heart is John Macoun, the 19th-century Canadian naturalist: "I was delighted to find he was from the North of Ireland."
Both scientifically and culturally, Foster found the job a voyage of discovery - ["]particularly that people like Sean Lysaght, David Livingtone and Mary McGeown were already working in the area." Livingstone's essay is one of the most fascinating - an account of the rocky reception of Darwinism in Belfast after a lecture by John Tyndal in 1874. Told against a backdrop of a massive evangelical revival in Ulster, it features the colourful character of evangelical Anglican William M'Ilwaine, the original "big Ian", who vowed no surrender to evolutionist heresies.
Foster went about structuring the book in terms of, firstly, short histories of the various "natural sciences", mostly from experts south of the border, including Donal Synnott, director of the Botanic Gardens in Dublin. Then there are essays on the "cultural implications of the study of nature", such as Chesney's lucid historical essay, "Enlightenment and Education" - though, curiously, like many pieces emanating from Belfast, its historical line largely stops at partition.
Thirdly, Foster envisaged "bridging essays" on selected habitats. Thus, the UCD scientist-conservationists, Peter Foss and Catherine O'Connell, outline the importance of bogland (its political history is developed elsewhere); polymath Eoin Neeson gives a trenchant treatise of the devastating historical exploitation of Irish woodland; while Terence Reeves-Smyth gives a nostalgic paean to the "mixed, cultivated habitats" of demesnes, the remains of which, he claims, are a repository of species diversity.
Inevitably, Irish nature-history evokes rumbling political ghosts, and there is considerable, sometimes contentious, overlap between the essays - not least with Foster's own four long pieces which, over 140 pages, amount to a fifth of the book - "observations and episodes which set the matter in a way."
He glides from earliest records of the Celts and early Christians, through to the to the excursions of Irish-born soldier-naturalists and clergymen-ornithologists, "sojourning in the Empire"; the Ulster Scot diaspora to the Americas; the 19th century when, just as professional science was carving up into specialised fields, amateur nature study exploded into what would become the influential Belfast Natural History Society and Naturalists' Field Clubs, particularly among Quakers and other Dissenters. "Due to certain social disabilities, they were largely excluded from the so-called hard sciences of physics, chemistry and geology, disciplines were really the domain of Trinity and the Anglo-Irish."
He also discusses nature imagery associated with Irish nationalism, shaped by the human and ecological wastage following the Famine; and finally leaps from the Irish Revival to today's nature heritage industry and the computer technology of artificial life, which he dubiously predicts will have effects as profound as has the work of Freud, Darwin or Copernicus.
Nature in Ireland is not definitive by a long chalk, but it is certainly a major, thought-provoking landmark. Says Foster: "I'd like it to be a kind of nursery of ideas. For students, there are about a hundred dissertation topics, either exposed or just beneath the surface. It might be a bit thick and compendious, but it's meant to be a beginning and not an end.
"At another level the whole thing is obscurely autobiographical. From the age of 13, I've been a keen weekend bird watcher, and when I was a boy I used to haunt the Ulster Museum. It was very much a Victorian museum before it was done up in the 1960s, the glass cases packed with specimens.
"There's a kind of connection with my last book, The Titanic Complex, a homage to the engineering subculture of Belfast - the city is actually a kind of addendum to these industrial sites. The male side of my family were all involved in some way in those engineering works, so again it's autobiographical, but I suppose most criticism is at the end of the day."
Of his own Presbyterian background, Foster says: "My people were all from East Belfast, in range of the shipyard. My grandparents were working class, and my father and his brothers, through night school, worked themselves up into the lower middle class, and by dint of the 1947 Education Act, I was able to elevate myself into this kind of academic middle class. Actually, geographically, there's a gentle hill from east Belfast up toward south-east Belfast, and the ambition of the family was to rise steadily up that hill. So finally, I was able to complete my parent's pilgrimage."
Although he owns a property in Vancouver, he recently bought "a piece of this soil, a house on the seafront in Portaferry, Co Down. It's modest but marvellous - I can sit up in bed and watch the Brent geese and the curlews on the shore beneath me."
So, is he going to retire there? "We'll see. I've got a Canadian passport and a British passport, and I enjoy living in two places - I'm quite happy eight miles up in a jet."
In the meantime, Nature in Ireland joins a recent shoal of significant publications: Stars, Shells & Bluebells, the biographies of many overlooked Irish women scientists; Cork University Press's exquisitely illustrated Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape; Frank Mitchell's classic work, revised with Michael Ryan, Reading the Irish Landscape (Townhouse); and the Collins Press reissue of The Way That I Went (1937) by Robert Lloyd Praeger, the giant of Irish nature studies. As one essay in Nature in Ireland remarks, a problem with Praeger's legacy was that the generation immediately following him was daunted by the perception that he seemed to have exhausted the field.
Nature In Ireland: A Scientific And Cultural History is published by Lilliput at £20 in paperback, and £40 in hardback.
