Rewilding the Future: Part One

 How Can I Help?

 I have been a fan of George Monbiot’s since University and I like what he says but I love how he thinks.  He is such a clear critical thinker who also brings passion and scientific understanding.  It was an utter delight to see him in the living room of the Gaia House in London’s Hampstead Heath and to shake his hand once again.  He recognised me from our meeting in Coventry and we quickly got into discussion about my future, his future, and our future.  I asked him what I could do to help with the rewilding projects, where is the best place to go?

“The best thing to do a bit of volunteer work with Trees For Life.  Of all the rewilding initiatives in the country that is the most advance and the most impressive.  A bunch of us are trying to get some new initiatives going we having the first meeting in a week’s time.  Out of that we going to decide what we should do whether we should have membership organisation or whether it’s ad hoc sort of thing. 

   I’ve managed to get together about ten people who are all well place and who really want to see rewilding happening in this country.  It’s a mixture of people in NGOs, professional ecologists, landowners, which is quite useful.  The idea is that we’ll set up a group and the main aim is to simply make it happen, the advocacy work we’re hoping a major NGO I’m talking to at the moment we’ll pick it up as a big campaign and they’ll do the advocacy work, the public outreach campaigning on things like the ridiculous EU rules that force farmers to clear the land.  

That would leave us to do the practicable stuff of getting movements to rewild land my ideal is not for a big landowner to just have a land rewild, I want it to be more democratic than that.  That’s what great about Trees For Life, they’re so brilliant because they first of all raised all the money through public subscription and they bought a ten thousand acre estate through fundraising, amazing, really impressive.  They are still raising money.  Everything they do is through volunteers, they do the whole lot, and they planted a million trees”

I had to ask him to repeat that figure and he did say what I thought he said.  With ideas such as these it’s surprising that he is not more of household name yet he’s not been asked to go on Question Time while people like James Delingpole get regularly invited (“he’s insane” George says).  I wondered why that might be and while it is lovely to sit and chat with George he’s got a talk to give about rewilding, the subject of his new book Feral.  We go across the road to a small hall owned by the Gaia Foundation and I sit with my National Trust t-shirt I am ready to listen.

“How many people here have watched a hedge being laid?  Have you ever wondered how it stands against that level of punishment?  Think about what’s done to them.  You almost serve the living wood.  You take it down to just a slither with a bit of bark attached.  Then you twist and you split and you trample it down, and yet they come bounding back the next spring just as vigorous as before.  Why would tree have evolved to withstand against that degree of damage?  How do they do that?  Deer wouldn’t do that to them, the wind wouldn’t do that to them, what would make them develop in that extraordinary capacity?  Have you ever wondered why it is that so many insidious trees are able to coppice and pollard, to re-sprout from whatever point the trunk is broken.  Have you ever wondered why trees are able to withstand the loss of so much of their bark?  Perhaps most interestingly have you ever wondered why under story trees are so much tougher and harder to break than the big canopy trees even though they carry less weight and are subject to lower sheer forces of the wind?  It all seems a rather odd, but I believe that there is a single explanation for all these phenomena” he pauses as we wait and wonder what his answer is, “elephants”.

 With that he begins his talk saying that we have forgotten that our ecosystem was an elephant adapted one.  But there is no record of elephants in any book that I could find in my three day search in the Bodleian library despite looking at papers of plants and trees in Africa they show to have similar qualities to our own.  It’s not just elephants that we used to have but rhinoceros as well. Megafauna was everywhere but there were moved out by the ice sheets and replaced with other megafauna, which had more grazing habits, like the woolly mammoth.  They were driven into southern Europe before they disappeared.  The distribution with megafaunas today has almost nothing to do with climate but with human population.

  There was an interesting idea when he was a zoology student there was the question of why were large animals lived in the tropics and not in the temperate countries and all sorts of reasons were given but they were unaware that they had lived in temperate countries.  In a way they are still here.  You can see the shadows of these great beasts every time you step out of a building because every tree carries a evolutionary legacy with it’s co-evolution with those animals.  We posses a ghost ecosystem and a ghost psyche but the shadow is still there.

  The ability to forget is the defining characteristic of our relationship with the natural world.  The elephant in the forest is the elephant in the room.  Daniel Pauley says that there is something known as ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ where we think of the world of our youth as the world of normality and to use that as our baseline.   The mass of animals and insects that he grew up with has been depleted and he thinks that is what we should get back to even though those masses had already been depleted by then.  Everyone suffers from it but no one suffers from it more than conservationists.

  The natural world was thought of as being organised from the bottom up, starting with the soil and working its way up to the predators.  But zoologists were studying a world were the trophic layers (the links in the food chain) have been lost.  Since then there has been the discovery of the trophic cascade, organisation from the top down starting with the predators working back down to the soil.  The best example is the wolves in Yellowstone National Park when they were introduced in 1995.  When they were introduced they killed the deer, as expected, but they did something more dramatic.  They created a landscape of fear. 

The behaviour of deer changed affecting the trees, the hillsides and the forest filled up with migratory birds and bison came and bears came, beavers, a keystone species (something that has a wider ecological impact) which then brought the otters, the muskrats, the amphibians, the ducks, the fish, the reptiles, bald eagles and ravens and hawks and weasels and foxes and badgers all re-enforcing the remarkable restoration project the wolves had begun.

  But what is most interesting was the behaviour of the river.  It changed due to the vegetation growing on its banks stabilising the water, which stopped it’s meandering.

  

 More and more evidence is suggesting that trophic cascades are the default position in the natural world.  Whales keep populations of krill and plankton up due to its fecal matter that then photosynthesis occurs when it reaches the surface then changing and dropping back down into the water to nourish the smaller fishes.  Wales even help reduce carbon emissions.  They change the atmosphere of the world.

  More and more evidence is accumulating for James Lovelock’s hypothesis the Gaia theory.  This seems to him a good argument for the re-introducing of missing animals and plants.  This is where rewilding comes in.

  He said that as soon as he saw the word ‘rewilding’ he knew it was going to change his life.  Rewilding means the mass restoration of ecosystems. To take down the fences, to block up the drainage ditches, creating large areas at sea where commercial activates are excluded, bringing back missing species and to leave it alone.  Leaving things alone is one of the hardest things for us to do as if nature would perish without us (one of his friends said “How did nature cope before we started looking after it?”)

  We really need to do very little, we need to allow nature to get on with it and that’s something we cannot contemplate. 

In the uplands a study was produced saying that within twenty years 60% of wildlife had reduced.  Some would say the problem is human population but what has more impact is the agriculture.  Sheep are very good at reducing an ecosystem to almost nothing.  Heather grows on the uplands and ecologists love it but in the tropics if heather grew as much as it does in this country they would say “isn’t this terrible?”

  The Lake District is one of the most depressing places in Europe.  It’s a bowling green with contours.  When I worked in Brazil we protect the ecosystem from the cattle ranchers, but in this country we defend the cattle ranchers from the ecosystem. 

Anywhere in the country can you find more birds in your back garden than in the countryside.  It’s all prescribed to the nearest percentage.  The countryside is meant to be kept in favorable conditions and favorable conditions means completely fucked.  Favorable condition means the condition in which you find the countryside even if it’s in a state of being trashed with the loss of its trophic layer.  In this management plan one of the main tasks is getting rid of undesirable species.  He rang them up and asked them what undesirable species are they trying to keep out?  Trees they said.  What’s the reason? he asks them.  The Countryside Council of Wales has told us to do it, they said.  So he rang the CCW up and asked them the same question.  They told him that it had nothing to do with them but that they were told to do it by a Joint Nature Conservation Committee.  The same question was asked.  They said that it was nothing to do with them but it came from the European Commission, it’s in the habitats derivative.  So he asked them why they were telling the JNCC to tell the CCW to tell the countryside managers to keep the reserves in this condition?  Nothing to do with us, they said, National Agencies tell us what they want put on the habitats derivative.  The circle is complete. 

So going back to the CCW he asked them why do they keep it in such a way.  They said that they have to keep a preserve certain species but not others.  When asked why that was they said that those species show that the habitats are in favorable conditions.  Total madness.  We, due to shifting baseline syndrome, expect the hillside to be bare.

 

If you ask someone in the tropics “Why do floods occur?” they would say “Floods happen because there aren’t any trees in the hills.” In Britain people say, “Floods happen because of the floodplain” is that were rivers start?  We’ve ignored what’s going on in the rest of the catchments.  A friend of his demonstrates, in a clear cylinder, soil from the woodlands and from the sheep farm showing what happens when water is poured through with each.  The soil from the woodlands trickles through gently while the soil from the sheep farm just sits there on top as if it was concrete.

  It’s sacrosanct to slag off hill farmers but that’s not what he’s doing.  He respects them very much but he’s pointing out a problem that people don’t want to hear about.  The standard response is “what about food production?  If people stop using the land people will starve”.  He looked into it.  He found that in Wales 76% of it is under livestock production almost all for meat.  Yet Wales imports seven times more meat than it exports.  It’s even worse than that because the sheepwrecked land causes floods on potential farmland.  Hill farming actually has an overall net loss.

 

He doesn’t want to get rid of the hill farmers, even if he does want to take away the sheep, but he wants to give them a choice they don’t have.  If you want your subsidy than you have to remove unwanted vegetation or wildlife habitat.  Rule twelve buried deep in the Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions has caused an orgy of destruction.  So strict that even the Flag Irises in Western Scotland are disqualified, you can’t get your money if you have them.  All this is done with taxpayer’s money.  What he’s saying is take that rule away and have a cap on the subsidy and then let the farmers do what they want.  The average subsidy for a hill farmer in Wales is £53,000; the average income at the end of the year is £33,000.  You lose £20,000 by keeping sodding sheep in the hills.  He wants the hill farmers to lie on the beach rather than chasing sheep.  Then we can introduce missing animals such as beavers, boars, wolves, lynxes, moose, bison, wolverines…then we start thinking on a slightly grander scale.