88
THE ESSEX NATURALIST
stations. Its green hills sprout masts and pylons. Its old oak-
woods are clear-felled. Its grasslands, once bright with wild
flowers, are now ploughed and re-seeded. Its water and its air
are polluted. We seek peace and no longer find it. We know that
progress has its price, but we all wish that somehow ways may be
found of enjoying it without losing so much of our natural
heritage".
Our own county naturalists' trust put it in a rather different
way. "The spread of human populations, the increasing demands
upon our land of agriculture and forestry, of housing, industry and
holiday-making, and of military training and defence are steadily
reducing the amount of unspoiled, wild country left to us".
During and after the Second World War, Parliament had such
problems under consideration. Even in the dark days of 1942
there appeared the Report of the Committee on Land Utilisation
(the Scott Report); in 1943, there were the First Report of the
Nature Reserves Investigation Committee (the second appeared
two years later) and the Memorandum by the British Ecological
Society on "Nature Conservation and Nature Reserves". In 1945,
there came recommendations from the Biological Committee of
the Royal Society that a Biological Service should be established;
in the same year, the Dower Report on National Parks in England
and Wales contained a recommendation that there should be a
"permanent organ of Government . . . called the Wild Life Con-
servation Council".
Immediately after the War, the Government's 'Wild Life Con-
servation Special Committee' reported on "Conservation of Nature
in England and Wales" and in 1949 there was set up a body of
scientists and laymen (to be known as The Nature Conservancy)
"to provide scientific advice on conservation and control of the
natural flora and fauna of Great Britain; to establish, maintain
and manage Nature Reserves in Great Britain, including the
maintenance of physical features of scientific interest, and to
organise and develop the research and scientific services related
thereto". This is a national body, one of the country's five official
research councils, and is under the control of the Privy Council.
But this is comparatively recent history; the Society for the
Promotion of Nature Reserves was founded in 1912 and the first
county naturalists' trust, that for Norfolk, in 1926. In a rather
more specialised field, the Society for the Protection of Birds was
founded in 1889—and was granted the Royal Charter in 1904.
The formation of the Society for the Promotion of Nature
Reserves has just been referred to and this Society, through its
County Naturalists' Trusts' Committee (formed in 1958) is the
spearhead of the voluntary nature conservation movement in this
country to-day.
Within three years of its formation it had compiled a list of
two hundred and eighty potential nature reserves in the British
Isles, together with particulars of their more important features
and of their ownership. The Nature Reserves Investigation Com-