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"A man is related to all nature."
ÌýÌý--Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are animals.

Humankind likes to kid itself that it is superior to other creatures (language, music, sense of humour) - but Shakespeare, Elgar and Coco the Clown won't stop us contracting swine flu.

It all comes as a bit of a shock. We have long attempted to tame the natural world, to treat it like a wilful child. As someone once said, "a lawn is nature under totalitarian rule".

But our failure to control a brainless bug - one that still has the audacity to imagine that we're down there with the pigs and the chickens - preoccupies our politicians and press.

No, nature will not be tamed. And there is a good reason for that: we are part of nature too. This was brought home to me the other day when studying the maps and archives of Britain's oldest nature reserve, .

When the National Trust bought the first two-acre strip exactly 110 years ago this week, it was assumed that one man - the "Keeper of the Fen" - could keep a watchful eye on the landscape, and that nature would pretty much do the rest.

But the NT had made a fatal miscalculation: fatal, at least, for the swallowtail butterfly and the fen orchid.

The fen was the product of complex interaction between plants, birds and animals. And fundamental to its existence were the apparently destructive activities of one animal in particular: man.

Here is an irony. The government, anxious to protect another fragile habitat, the peat bog, wants 90% of composts and soil improvers to be peat-free by next year. But the end of peat digging at Wicken Fen has contributed to the local extinction of the delicate and beautiful fen orchid (see image, right, by ).

The orchid was last seen at Wicken on Poor's Fen, an area of land given over to the local parish for the church poor to come and cut peat for their own use. These activities helped this fragile flower by reducing competition from more vigorous plants. Once the poor no longer needed peat and could get coal, the peat diggings stopped and the fen orchid was overwhelmed.

Victorian entomologists and naturalists, including Charles Darwin himself, knew the richness of the habitat. Some bought up tracts of fenland to create the reserve - but, , if they returned today, "they would surely ask whether the National Trust were the worthy guardians of their beloved Fen".

The rural culture - which had cut the sedge for roofing and animal bedding - disappeared and the along with it. Its seeds may still survive in the peaty soil and occasionally a rare plant will push through the surface if the land has been disturbed, but the violet has not been seen at Wicken for more than a decade.

Without human intervention, the fens quickly became covered in scrub and vital habitat was lost. That iconic species of early entomologists, , has gone despite attempts to re-introduce it.

Swallowtail butterfly, from the

The extract below from the data now on the site reveals how, in 1851, RA Julian "saw great quantities of swallow-tail butterflies".

The insect was re-introduced in the 1990s; Tim Bennett reports the project has now failed. The swallowtail has left Cambridgeshire.

Montagu's Harrier bred at Wicken until 1947. But the Wicken committee decided that its preferred site should not be cut for sedge in case the birds were disturbed. The land went to scrub and the harrier flew elsewhere.

These days, conservationists ape the principles of the ancient harvesters to protect what is left of the fen. Sedge cutting (see , right) takes place every three years in mid-summer and "brinking" and "slubbing" (two excellent Scrabble words) help manage the water courses.

Such intensive conservation management has its critics, though. Some believe that we should move to an "extensive" or "naturalistic" management programme. Instead of trying to counteract nature, man should work with it.

So, for instance, grazing animals would be free to eat where they please, :

"Several seasons of dry weather will concentrate the herbivores in the areas where water can be found and grazing is lush. This concentration will reduce the growth of vegetation in these areas whilst at the same time significantly reducing grazing pressure in the dryer areas. Most aquatic or marginal plants will be suppressed in the wet areas with reed beds giving way to wet grassland. In the dryer areas where grazing is reduced, taller vegetation will ensue, eventually leading to woodland. As the weather follows its cyclical path and seasons become wetter, the reverse will happen."

This is a much less predictable approach to conservation but, it seems to me, it is a philosophy more in tune with an acceptance that man is not god. We are part of nature too.

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