First, congratulations are in order for the birthday of such conservation efforts in Britain.  And thanks to The Guardian for the provocative question and discussion that follows:

This pristine four-mile spit of shingle and sand in Norfolk is, of course, far older, but its purchase by the National Trust 100 years ago marked the beginning of a radical movement in Britain: instead of protecting specific species, the new environmentalists recognised that entire “reserves” must be created to save our wildlife. As the country’s first coastal nature reserve, Blakeney was also the British birthplace of the science of ecology, the urge to understand how species relate to each other.