I’ve just finished reading ‘
Feral’, by George Monbiot. I
have to admit that I approached it with some trepidation; I’m a big fan of Mr
Monbiot, and I was conscious from reading
his blog that there were aspects of
his latest book that I was going to find uncomfortable.
Monbiot’s thesis is this; that we have lost touch with
nature, and since we evolved within a dynamic and often dangerous natural
environment, its absence affects us at the deepest level; that to remedy this
we need to re-wild the landscape and reconnect with it; and that to achieve
this we need to recreate the processes, generally involving large herbivores
and the predators that preyed on them, which created that wild landscape.
So far so good; nothing there I would argue with. On the
contrary, I’m a strong believer in the need to get young people in particular
out into ‘wild’ places, to get wet and get their hands dirty. Interestingly,
Monbiot suggests that we have a deep need for the excitement and adrenaline
that would have been a regular part of life alongside large predators, which
may explain why video games are so popular. I have to confess I have spent too
many hours myself either pursuing or being pursued by aliens, zombies and other
imaginary foes across virtual landscapes; the modern-day natural world struggles
to supply quite the same rush.
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| You don't see many of those in Sussex... |
But it is on the subject of rewilding where George and I
start to part company, and I’ll attempt to explain why.
The principle makes complete sense; the majority of our
native species evolved in a landscape of woodland interspersed with clearings.
The exact size and origin of these clearings is a subject for debate, but herds
of large mammals, flooding by rivers, disease and natural disasters would all
have created open spaces in what would otherwise have been dense temperate
rainforest. With the arrival of humans, most of those open glade species would
have slotted into the new habitats created by agriculture; meadows, ploughed
fields, hedgerows and the like. Even in the remaining woodlands, cyclical
coppicing would have created a mosaic of temporary glades.
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| A coppiced woodland |
So there is much to be said for Monbiot’s suggestion that we
stop managing our wild places and let woodland return, then allow large mammals
to do their thing, creating the structural diversity that brings species
richness. But there are problems.
We are all, necessarily, influenced by our own experiences.
Much of Monbiot’s thinking on the subject of rewilding seems to be based on his
experiences in the uplands, specifically the part of Wales where he lived,
which he refers to as the Cambrian Desert. Now, it’s pretty widely accepted, at
least in conservation circles, that the uplands are massively overgrazed by
sheep, or ‘sheepwrecked’ as Monbiot calls it. Sheep are one of the few grazing animals
not to have had a wild ancestor in post-glacial Britain; horses and cattle both
had their forebears, but sheep came from much further south. Their effect in
the uplands has been to eradicate almost all of the humid Atlantic-fringe
rainforest, dripping with mosses and lichens, which would have been the natural
vegetation, replacing it with short turf and heather moorland. One effect of
this has been to speed up the movement of water off the hills, resulting in
flooding in the lowlands. The other effect, of course, is a complete change in
the flora and fauna.
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| They look so innocent, too. |
So rewilding in the uplands would be a marvellous thing, for
all kinds of reasons. But to extrapolate and apply this thinking to the whole
of the British Isles is to take things too far. Conventional conservation, as
practiced by the
Wildlife Trusts, gets a particularly vicious kicking from
Monbiot. The Wildlife Trusts, he claims, are perpetuating the problem of loss
of ‘wilderness’ by trying to emulate the agricultural methods of some
historical ‘golden age’. By using grazing animals as a conservation tool, they
are preventing the land from doing what it would otherwise do, which in most
cases means returning to woodland (‘self-willed’ land is a popular buzz-phrase
in the rewilding community). Instead of grazing, mowing and clearing scrub from
the meadows, chalk downs, heaths and fens, Monbiot seems to be saying, the
Wildlife Trusts – and other ‘traditional’ conservation practitioners – should step
back and let the landscape run free.
To me, this seems entirely the wrong way round. Nature reserves,
whoever they are managed by, tend to be sanctuaries for a whole suite of very
habitat-specific species. By definition; if they weren’t habitat-specific,
presumably they would be all over farmland, town and cities. By managing these
reserves using the techniques that created them, these species are allowed to
survive; if all these sites were allowed to return to woodland, only woodland
species would win. On Ashdown Forest, for instance, the Conservators use grazing
animals as a conservation tool. But they aren’t specifically trying to maintain
traditional framing practices, though that may be a by-product. What they are
attempting is to reproduce the disturbance that would have created the mosaic
of woodland and open spaces in which heathland species existed before humans
came along. If they stopped, the Forest would quickly revert to birch and oak
woodland and many species would be lost. Take, for example, the Small red
damselfly. This is a species of acid, boggy pools in open heathland, and
because that habitat is pretty rare, so is the damselfly. If the Forest
reverted to woodland, it would almost certainly disappear.
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| It's small. And red. And it's a damselfly. |
It is my suggestion that nature reserves should, in fact, be
the last places to be rewilded. Britain possesses vast tracts of farmland where
we, as taxpayers, pay an increasingly small number of landowners subsidies to farm.
In total, the government gives out £3.6bn in farm subsidies each year; the
biggest 174 landowners in England take £120m between them. In order to receive their
money, farmers must prevent ‘unwanted vegetation’ – wildlife habitat, in other
words – from growing on their land, even if it is not currently producing food.
Even worse, we pay some of the wealthiest people in the country to manage the moors for grouse, for their own pleasure and profit! Surely, somewhere within this system, it must be possible to find space for
rewilding?
Some people are trying; Sir Charles Burrell has removed all the
gates on his
Knepp Castle estate and allows deer, cattle, ponies and pigs to
roam free. The resulting meat is sold at a premium. If this model could be
extended, then perhaps we would begin to see the return of the processes that
created the dynamic, diverse habitat mosaic of post-glacial Britain. It is
then, I feel, that nature reserves would come into their own. They will have
acted as refuges for all those habitat specialist species, which can then start
to spread out, colonising the new gaps and niches in a rewilded landscape. If
we lose them before then, to an ill-advised lack of management, when the time
is right we may find that Noah’s ark is empty.
So there you have it; I wholeheartedly agree with Mr Monbiot’s
aims and will continue to enjoy his writings, but I think in the case of ‘Feral’,
to criticise traditional conservation is to pick on the wrong target. And until
the day when he can guarantee me a place for the Small red damselfly in his
brave new rewilded world, I will carry on doing what I do.
