Some Thoughts on Preservation

Someone on a film I glanced at on passing our television the other day (I don't watch many films, but others in the household do) spoke about setting up a "preserve for wildlife" - and I immediately fastened upon that somewhat inappropriate word.

Why is the word 'preserve' inappropriate?  Well, I spent a summer once preserving wildlife, as part of my university degree course.  I didn't enjoy it, as I don't much like killing things;  even annoying houseflies get shooed out of a window rather than flattened with a rolled-up newspaper.  I had to collect insects and other invertebrates along a particular stretch of hedge and woodland, and over a particular two month period.  I enjoyed observing them - flies, beetles, moths, whatever - and I enjoyed trying to make some assessment of numbers, and of the balance between species.  But I didn't enjoy catching and killing specimens, watching them die in a jar primed with chopped laurel leaves, and pinning them out on cork boards.

But, to be sure, they got preserved:  well and truly preserved.  I remember a story about a rare plant found in a field where, it was decided, it was very vulnerable to being destroyed by grazing or by the unwary feet of cattle or hikers;  so it had a fence erected around it to keep it safe.  What happened, of course, was that it got completely smothered by all the rank and rampant weeds that sprang up inside the fence.  By the end of the season, it had disappeared without trace.

Naturalists are careful to distinguish between conservation and preservation.  No living thing exists on its own, but always as part of an ecosystem, which may attain a balance but will shift, over a period of time and dependent on weather and other variables, from one balance to another.  Conservation is the management of ecological change;  the aim may be to ensure the survival of a species that might otherwise be at risk, but in the wild environment that can't be done by isolating it, only by managing things in such a way as to give it a better competitive edge.

The word 'preservation' gets used a lot about buildings, too, churches and cathedrals included.  It is a little more appropriate, of course, when used of a building, which is after all constructed of inert materials, stone and brick, glass and wood, which need protecting and at times replacing;  but it is not appropriate, surely, when used about the use to which that building is put.  I'm as quick as the next person to oppose change that is purely for the sake of change, but even so, change there must be - it's only dead things that don't change (though even they, of course, moulder and weather away).  A living church may need some conservation work, so that change is managed and does not cause unnecessary and harmful division, but a church that rejects all thought of change and opts for (self) preservation is destined to become every bit as dead as those little flies and moths I pinned to cork boards all those years ago.