Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Response by Dr Oliver Rackham

Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen:  I am an historical ecologist and my interests are in how the countryside as we now see it is the product of centuries of interaction between plants,  animals and the human inhabitants who have made use of them.  I am not so much concerned with crops and gardens as with wild vegetation  especially woodland.

My studies began in the Cambridge area and from there I worked outwards until I now have interests in Sardinia, Crete, Texas, Australia and Japan.  This involves indeed a certain amount of language and linguistics as well as biological sciences[1].  But Essex has always been at the core of my studies,  and still is.  I first took to studying the Essex landscape some thirty years ago when Hatfield Forest, that unique place of European significance,  was pointed out to me by the great psychologist Robert Thouless, the expert on brain washing;  and maybe I have become brainwashed myself: I have published two books on Essex and the county figures very largely in my general books.  So I am particularly proud and delighted to have an honorary Essex degree.

Essex is very good for this sort of study.  It has one of the best county record offices in England and here I would give my thanks to the staff who were so helpful in the years when I studied there.  But as I have always maintained its no good trying to write landscape history from documents alone: you have to go to the sites and understand how they work, otherwise you will get it wrong.  Essex is very fortunate for so many sites with good documentation are still there to be studied.  There are obvious historic landscapes like Hatfield Forest and Chalkney Wood, where you can still see a medieval ecosystem in working order.  There are less obvious ones like Writtle Forest and Hainault Forest and there are some remarkably good sites in the most unexpected places, like the medieval woods of the Southend conurbation or Grays-Thurrock. 

Well,  in accepting an honorary degree I cannot help thinking that it is not just for me, but it honours all those who have worked with me over the years.  For some years I was working for what was then the Nature Conservancy,  now English Nature,  and I often went out with my old friend Colin Ranson, the Nature Conservancy’s  man in Essex, who alas died at a very early age. I think of him, and I think of people like his widow Susan Ranson who worked with me at Essex Record office, and John Fielding at Hatfield Forest and Brian Watmough in Rochford District Council and Jim Bingley, the Warden of Flatford Mill,  and my guest today, Simon Leatherdale of the Forestry Commission.

When I began working in Essex the woods and other roughland and wild places were beleaguered and shrinking.  Many of them had been grubbed out or replanted with conifers as was fashionable in the 1960s and I said that if this went on then there would be no wild places left by the turn of the century except in nature reserves.  Even Hatfield Forest was threatened.  But times have changed,  and manifestly this isn’t going to happen.  The fashion for unlimited agriculture has run its course, and the conservation movement has gone from strength to strength.  Woods, heaths and fens are appreciated for what they are and not just regarded as vacant land, which ought to look as if it is doing something useful.  And even the ancient woods, which I had thought were lost to replanting, have come back to life: the native trees have recovered from attempts to destroy them and are taking over from the planted trees.  This has been helped by two factors.  One is the weather: the planted trees haven’t stood up to the draughts of recent years and many of them were plucked out by the great storm in 1987. 

The other is the emergence of a new generation of foresters who have other things to do with their lives than try and try and try again to make ancient woodlands into spruce plantations.  Hatfield Forest has been splendidly managed by a succession of able wardens.  A measure of the new situation is that my guest on this occasion is the Forestry Commission’s man in Essex. 

I don’t want to be complacent.  There are new conservation problems,  the chief of which is too many deer.  There are more deer running around England now than there have been for a thousand years and they are of seven species.  Well, this is not altogether a good thing because English woods are not used to so many big animals, which eat the bottom out of them.  They destroy the oxlips and other special plants, they make woodland management impossible and ultimately they will destroy the wood itself.   Artificially large numbers of deer are a growing problem in all around the Northern Hemisphere.  If you want to see what too many deer can really do, go to Japan or Pennsylvania.  But there is quite a good example in parts of the Marks Hall Estate just down the road.

So in receiving this degree I think of my friend Colin.  He was among the few who refused to give in to pessimism in the years which the locusts had eaten.  I think he would be very pleased at how his optimism was justified, but he would remind me that my work was not finished.  May he rest in peace.

[1] Degrees from the Departments of Language & Linguistics and of Biological Sciences had been conferred at this Congregation.