Nigeria Content Online

What was once
simply known as ‘nature study’ metamorphosed into biology and more
recently emerged under the camouflage of what is now commonly referred
to as ‘ecology.’ This week, we are reminded by the United Nations of
World Environment Day on June 5th, in a year that is also dedicated
globally to biodiversity and the gorilla. In view of the acknowledged
deleterious impacts of global warming, but also because of scholarship
infused into public opinion by the American entomologist, Edward O.
Wilson and others, research of the natural world and its conservation
will increasingly graduate into a Darwinian process of survival.

Nations that ignore
the health of forests, rivers, lakes, and their coastal habitats run
the risk of ecological disasters, economic collapse, social dislocation
and political instability. Judged by the state of our physical
environment, it appears that Nigerians are blind to a perception of the
proverbial handwriting that everyone else sees on the wall. Citizens in
this country who either enjoy a pension, or not, but had gone to school
in the 1940s and 50s will not easily forget the green, hardback
textbook, “Nature Study for West Africa,” by one legendary
A.J.Carpenter. If they went on to secondary school, science textbooks,
often supplied free-of-charge in those days by school authorities were
lying in wait: Stone and Cozens biology,physics by Nelkon, the chemistry of Holderness and Lambert, and the dreaded mathematics in C.V.Durrell.

Messrs Stone and Cozens were principals of Government College Umuahia in the 1950s.

A.B.Cozens, the
more famous and celebrated of the two authors was a seminal figure,
some sort of icon in Eastern Nigeria, where the Nigerian Field Society
was conceived and founded by Frank Bridges, a Government Administrative
Officer in 1930.

Unsung and unknown
to many, the Field Society still exists to this day under the
leadership of David Okali, professor, in Ibadan, with memberships in
Nigeria and in the United Kingdom. Simply, the Nigerian Field Society
is 80 years old.

The Society’s
publication, The Nigerian Field, first appeared in 1931 and has
continued with the objective ‘to encourage interest in the fauna and
flora of Nigeria, its history, legends and customs, its native arts and
crafts, its science, sport and hobbies.’ This magazine serves as a
resource that has laid the foundations, cornerstones and columns
supporting nature conservation in Nigeria and West Africa.

What is known in
international circles about tropical forests and their biological
diversity is to an appreciable extent the result of work accomplished
and published by the Nigerian Field Society. Despite these cutting-edge
achievements in colonial times, Nigeria presently does not possess a
single comparable botanical garden or museum of natural history.
President Goodluck Jonathan who happens to be a biologist should give
some thought to a natural world that is rapidly decaying around us.

Clueless generation

The colonial
administrators and teachers from the United Kingdom described
everything of natural and cultural interest they came across – from
chewing sticks to sculpture, from the cult of Adamu-Orisha to elephants.

The treasure trove
of The Nigerian Field includes accounts on reptiles by G.S.Cansdale and
G.T.Dunger; mammalian biology and zoogeography by J.H.C.Ball,
J.C.Happold and M. W. J. Jeffreys; botanical and forestry studies from
Bridges and D. R. Rosevear; the bird people – J. H. Elgood, C. H. Fry,
W. Serle, Marchant and Robert Sharland.

One governor of Nigeria, Bernard Bourdillon found time to study and publish a paper on the birds of the Lagos coast in 1947.

Biology, the discourse of life, is not a popular subject in Nigeria
anymore. The younger “Gucci-on-my-wrist” generation of Nigerians find
it difficult to comprehend the country’s extreme vulnerability to the
impacts of climate change, because of a fractured knowledge base.