The next important event was a lecture given on 8th July 1998 at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. The speaker was Dr Richard Groves, and his subject was 'Edinburgh Botanists and the Origins of Environmentalism in India'. This led me to his book Green Imperialism, which I read in 1999. One idea that lodged in my mind was that imperialism offers opportunities - on a grand scale - which do not normally occur within the home country itself. And the advantages are not only practical: there is also the encouragement to think on a grand scale. This article is all about 'thinking big'.

There may be much virtue in such sentiments as 'small is beautiful', 'count the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves', and 'charity begins at home'. We in Britain are perhaps rather fond of these ideas, and I do have the impression that in environmentalism too a profound parochialism pervades British attitudes. For instance 'The naturalists of lowland England are used to regarding nature in terms of penny packets and are becoming increasingly willing to take on vested interests over a precious few yards of turf or ancient woodland', unlike naturalists in northern Britain (Marren p.168).

Many of us have trouble just being internationalist, whether bilaterally or multilaterally - as is all too evident in our collective attitude to the European Union and to learning foreign languages. But internationalism is not enough: globalism, of which the biosphere is one aspect, represents a considerable advance beyond ordinary multinationalism. It involves not only taking all nations into account simultaneously, but regarding the whole lot holistically as a single unit on a different level of thought. If internationalism considers nations first and foremost, and the composite whole they form as of secondary importance, in globalism the composite whole is primary, and the components (nations, or whatever) are secondary.

I am coming to think that this habit of mind is not automatic. As an acquired skill it can be expected to depend to a large degree on the psychological and socio-political context of one's upbringing and education; and unfortunately post-imperial Britain seems a singularly unfavourable context for globalism.

That may well turn out to be an accurate forecast of the significance of global communications, but biosphere consciousness is not the same thing as global consciousness. 'Global consciousness' - which could indeed prove of inestimable value to environmentalism - describes the way in which something, anything, is perceived by the perceivers (how many of them, when, &c). 'Biosphere consciousness', on the other hand, describes the thing being perceived, namely the biosphere, no matter by how many people or whether simultaneously. I first came across the phrase in the sentence 'There is a rapidly growing biosphere consciousness, which is reaching the higher levels of many governments, and has often found its expression at the level of the United Nations' (Dasmann, p.288): and I was encouraged by the news. The term 'biosphere' can be used in various ways, but here it means the global ecosystem or ecosphere, i.e the sum total of the biotic and abiotic elements in the layers of the planet supporting life (Huggett 1999).

The two outstanding theorists of the biosphere are Vladimir Vernadski and Jim Lovelock. It is a measure of how seriously defective global communication was in the 1970s, when Lovelock was developing his Gaia theory, that he was unaware of Vernadski's seminal book The Biosphere, which had been published in 1926 - admittedly in Russian, but also in French in 1929 (Lovelock 1995, p.10). Lovelock's Gaia was published in 1979, and gave a tremendous boost to biosphere consciousness. But as a mass phenomenon it must have started in the 1960s, with the development of plate tectonics and the appearance of those stunning Apollo photographs.

It is significant that neither of these great theorists of the biosphere concept, in which life is such an important element, was or is a biologist. Nor are the meteorologists, oceanologists, seismologists, and plate tectonicists who work as a matter of course with the planet as a familiar entity, as an easily grasped object of thought. Vernadski was a geochemist, while Lovelock was originally an atmospheric chemist.

It is not that biologists are incapable of developing holistic concepts of life. The 'great chain of being' (Lovejoy 1936) was arguably a rather successful attempt to unite all life in a single comprehensive concept, which gave meaning to all the component parts. Darwin's evolutionary tree, the chain's successor, was another holistic concept. Assimilating and feeling 'at home with' such ideas involves a considerable leap in thought, if not a paradigm shift. Biologists have shown that they are in fact quite capable of such mental acrobatics, not only in developing and adopting the chain and tree, but also in adjusting from the pre-Lyell 6000-year-old earth to one with an age measured in millions, and now thousands of millions, of years.

The problem for biologists nevertheless does seem to be one of scale - not in time, but in space. A new holistic unit for biology should surely now incorporate the abiotic environment, much as was done successfully at a smaller scale in Tansley's ecosystem, and Sukachev's biogeocenosis of the 1940s. Vernadski's biosphere concept fits the bill exactly. I wonder whether, in biology, we suffer from a kind of tunnel vision, working as we normally do on a restricted time scale from microseconds to hundreds of millions of years, and on a spatial scale from microns to thousands of kilometres. On the other hand Marcus Chown (New Scientist 21st August 1999 p.47) has noted that 'The sheer chutzpah of physicists is amazing. Not content to speculate on the first 10-43 seconds of the Universe, they believe they can map out - at least roughly - the next 10100 years and beyond'. And the spatial scale they work on is equally mindboggling.

The biosphere, however, is at the upper limit or just off the end of the restricted spatial scale most biologists are familiar with. We must learn to 'think big'. This would help in collecting information about the biosphere, in understanding the biosphere, and in coping with biosphere-scale problems.

Groves points out that 'the absolutist nature of colonial rule encouraged the introduction of interventionist forms of land management that, at that time, would have been very difficult to impose in Europe'. Moreover colonial expansion promoted rapid diffusion of scientific ideas between colonies, and between home country and colonies, over a large part of the world (Groves, p.7) - not quite global consciousness, but tending in that direction.

Perhaps quite rightly imperialism nowadays has a bad image. This presumably relates primarily to the political domination by the metropolitan power of subject nations. In short, imperialism's democratic credentials leave something to be desired. In the history of environmentalism, moreover, the term 'imperialism' has been used to label the Baconian, Cartesian, Stalinist and Graeco-Christian programmes in which Man seeks to dominate an alien and unsacred Nature (Passmore; Worster).

It is not advocated here that we should return to old-style imperialism in the cause of environmentalism. There may however be some positive lessons in history. Leaving aside for the moment the problems of accountability and of source of power, imperialism offers the advantages of scale and centralisation. The small-is-beautiful approach is hopelessly inadequate for tackling biosphere-scale problems, and I wish to suggest that certain elements in the imperialist approach can be useful in environmentalism - such as technological standardisation of equipment and procedure, rapid communications, uniform enforcement of regulations, and the implementation of bold solutions to problems on a grand scale.

In the remainder of this article, however, I wish to concentrate on another aspect of environmentalism, one which attracts far less attention. It concerns a knowledge deficit. Anyone who has become deeply immersed in biosphere studies is acutely conscious of the primitive state of our understanding of the biosphere. After all, biospherology as yet hardly exists, and the prospects for its early advancement within biology are hardly promising, given the growing emphasis on laboratory specialisations and the virtual phasing out of whole-organism studies in many undergraduate courses. With the loss of the 'natural-history' approach, biologists' tunnel vision is likely to become even narrower, with the upper end of the spatial scale retreating from thousands of kilometres to a matter of metres, or even centimetres. Biospherology, on the other hand, requires expansion of horizons and enlargement of the imagination. It is time for the generalist to make a comeback.

Why do we need to know more about the biosphere? First - in order to predict change, and so try to prepare for it in psychological, social, political, economic, military and other ways. Second - in order to explore the possibilities of ameliorating the changes expected. Third - in order to mould public opinion, through formal and informal education, in such a way that (a) personal sacrifices necessary for biosphere reasons (such as reducing use of cars, paying more for fuel, having fewer children) will be understood, tolerated and even welcomed; and (b) that there will be similar tolerance for some powers necessarily being transferred from the market to governments (Passmore, p.193) and supra-state authorities.

In many spheres of research, the most powerful way to accumulate knowledge is through experiment. Experimentation with the biosphere is however undesirable, for both practical and theoretical reasons: there is only one biosphere, so that we cannot afford to risk experiments that may go badly wrong, and even if we performed such experiments there is no other biosphere to act as a control. Many branches of science get along well enough with little or no experimentation - palaeontology, meteorology, oceanology, plate tectonics, astronomy, epidemiology and so on - and rely instead on systematically collected circumstantial evidence. One thing we can already be certain of is that the biosphere is immensely complex. The data must be commensurate with the knowledge deficit, in other words with the degree of knowledge - including data and theory - desired but not yet achieved, and this means reliable and standardised monitoring of a host of variables on a permanent and global scale. The need for such a system was reinforced in my mind by an article on the mesosphere (New Scientist 1st May 1999): practically nothing is known about its detailed structure and dynamics simply because the measurements are lacking. The message is so obvious that it hardly needs stating.

How should appropriate monitoring be carried out? Having been uncomplimentary earlier about the tunnel vision of biologists and the parochialism of British conservationists, I hasten to make partial amends. One of the United Kingdom's great strengths is that we seem to have an unusual collective talent for certain types of monitoring, achieved through a successful partnership between a relatively small number of professionals and an army of highly skilled amateurs. Perhaps the first major product of such cooperation was the BSBI atlas of British and Irish plants mapped by 10 km squares (Perring & Walters, 1962). It was followed by numerous similar atlases of birds and other groups of organisms. Each is a valuable 'snapshot' of the state of the taxon over a period of at most a few years, but the full value of such an exercise emerges only when the survey is repeated sufficiently similarly for the earlier and later surveys to be usefully compared. (The second edition of the BSBI atlas, now at an advanced stage, is eagerly awaited.)

The immense amount of labour involved in these admirable projects suggests three things. Collecting such data is extremely labour intensive; it can realistically be carried out only in restricted areas favoured with the kind and quantity of expertise we have in the British Isles; and it gives only occasional 'snapshots' - one every few years or decades.

Biosphere monitoring must be organised differently. The data need to be collected far more frequently, if not continuously. Monitoring also needs to be conducted on a global scale, and with a high degree of reliability and standardisation.

The nearest equivalent is perhaps the worldwide network of meteorological stations, though this has sadly deteriorated in some areas on account of failings in some host countries. A similar system of biosphere monitoring should not have to depend on local funding, especially where some countries are economically or politically unstable, and where the work may have little immediate or direct relevance to the local population. Funding and administration need to be on a global scale. In short, an imperial approach is appropriate.

In this context the best modern substitute for a world empire is the United Nations. An organisation should be set up within or under the UN to institute and maintain a comprehensive system of permanent global monitoring of selected biotic and abiotic parameters. I am not aware that any such system exists as yet, but am heartened by the MABMon project, which represents a small but welcome step in the right direction.

The lack of major natural boundaries within the Soviet Union, except for the mountain ranges to the south, was also probably a major factor in the (perhaps misguided) expansion of the state to a size which has been difficult or impossible to govern satisfactorily over many centuries. There has accordingly been a continuous tradition of imperialism, from tsarist times, through the Soviet period 1917-1991, to the modern Russian Federation, which still occupies the vast bulk of the former Russian Empire.

It is easy to deride imperialism. There are however positive aspects to imperialism from the environmental point of view, and one of these is a tradition, at least among the governing class and scientific elite, of 'thinking big'. Some of the most grandiose projects - unfortunately in the cause of 'conquering nature' - were the notorious river-diversion projects promoted by Stalin and his successors. They involved diverting water, from rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean, southwards to drain into the Black, Caspian and Aral seas, with benefits to agriculture along the way. Whatever the merits or demerits of these plans - which were eventually cancelled by Gorbachėv in 1986 (Weiner 1999, pp.426-7) - they were a clear demonstration of the willingness and capacity to plan on an extremely large scale, with some attempt, however inadequate in this case, to foresee the environmental consequences. Another and this time completely benign plan on a similar scale is that idea of Prof.Syroechkovski.

Russians' familiarity with thinking and acting on a large scale - everything is big in Russia, even the microchips, so the joke went - made itself felt a few months ago when a poster arrived through the letterbox from Moscow. Produced by the Russian Bird Conservation Union, it shows bird flyways from the breeding grounds in Russia to virtually every other part of the Old and New Worlds to the south. Only eastern North America and western South America escape the blanket coverage. In a very real sense it shows Russia as the centre of the world, as well as comprising a good part of its land mass, and the captions reinforce the message: 'Russia's migratory birds - linking continents.... Birds are the most international of all creatures....' (Koblik).

In terms of biospherology, the jewel in the Soviet and Russian crown was and is (apart from Vernadski himself of course) the zapovednik system. In this respect there is a striking contrast between Russian and Soviet achievements on the one hand, and the lack of achievement in Europe and North America on the other. Over a century ago, in the 1890s, Russian scientists were advocating a system of strict nature reserves based on non-intervention management and restricted access. 'Zapovednik' is the Russian word for this type of reserve, meaning 'prohibited area'. The system was developed on an impressive scale, though it has to be admitted that it has had a rocky ride at times (Shtil'mark 1996). Nevertheless the plan was largely successful, representing as it did a systematic attempt to include all major landscape and vegetation types, with research facilities at each zapovednik and a standardised system of annual monitoring of ecological parameters (the Letopis' prirody or 'chronicle of nature'). Despite its ups and downs the system has been in operation for many decades, though is now suffering from inadequate financing and disintegration of centralised coordination.

By contrast there is no comparable tradition in the USA of strict nature reserves for scientific research and based on non-intervention management. The earliest (and only) American reference to the principle I have found is in Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, written in the 1940s. He clearly describes the Russians' etalon (standard) concept, calling it instead 'base datum'. The idea is that the strict nature reserve should serve as a kind of 'control' for observing changes brought about outside the reserves through ordinary processes of resource management as well as through ecological experiment. Regular monitoring of conditions and changes inside such reserves can also help understand general changes in the biosphere, and their effects on natural communities.

It would be naive, of course, to imagine that reserves can now be set up and maintained in complete isolation from anthropogenic influence, on account of the downstream effect if nothing else; but the zapovednik approach is the best option available, and the opportunity should surely be grasped before it disappears. It is reported, for instance, that some natural communities have already been lost altogether, such as those formerly occupied by certain species of commercially important fish. The culprit in this case is unrestricted trawling on the sea floor, which creates havoc among fixed benthos (New Scientist 14th June 1997, pp.3-4). Loss of such communities removes the possibility of further research into the natural ecology of these fish, which has obvious consequences for our future ability to manage their populations for sustainable harvesting. Leopold's own examples concerned studies of root ecology in trees and in prairie vegetation - potentially valuable knowledge which could be gained from undisturbed sites resulting from hundreds of years of vegetation development, but not from a plantation of the same species or attempted reconstructions of the natural communities on disturbed sites.

A further reason for preserving natural communities in as undisturbed a state as possible has been pointed out by Worster (1985, p.295). Ecological concepts have been unusually prone to influence from prevailing beliefs about the structure and functioning of human society. There is every reason to suppose, therefore, that radically new approaches to understanding natural communities will emerge as human society and our understanding of it evolve, and then surviving examples of natural communities will obviously be needed if ecology is to develop adequately as a science.

In contrast with the USA's justly famous system of natural parks, devoted principally to providing recreational amenities (Weiner 1988 or Weiner 1999 p.446) and involving active management, the Russians and Soviets developed similar national parks only much later, partly to relieve tourist pressure on some of the 'zapovedniks' where tourism was permitted. For most of the last hundred years they have instead been developing the zapovednik system, which is now of inestimable value to biospherology. The Soviet system is unfortunately split today between fifteen republics, but within Russia alone there are a hundred such reserves, some of enormous size and relatively unaffected by anthropogenic factors. There is also a long history of ecological monitoring at many of them - though admittedly probably of varying quality. The former Soviet zapovednik system is a strong candidate to be the basis for a globally administered and globally funded network of ecological monitoring stations - and it may not necessarily be the MAB 'biosphere reserves' that are the most suitable, dedicated as they are to a range of purposes other than scientific research. Moreover the Russian experience in setting up their system over a century and their imperial tradition of 'thinking and acting big' in science as well as in ordinary government and administration, could be invaluable in establishing a truly global monitoring system.