Beyond Conservation

A Wildland Strategy

Peter Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136571343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Ecología

After decades of operating off-the-backfoot and protecting and conserving nature perceived as under threat, conservationists are becoming proactive and creative in the face of habitat loss, agricultural intensification and climate change. Beyond Conservation offers a revolutionary agenda for both managing existing wildlands in Britain and for expanding and connecting such lands. Central to this strategy is the imperative to 'rewild' or restore and repair damaged habitat and ecosystems, promote existing biodiversity and reintroduce vanished plant and animal species, while working to reconcile human needs and livelihoods and the needs of nature.

1

The Wild Side of Natural

Wild areas in which natural processes are left to reign supreme are commonly called ‘wilderness’, and in the US there exist designated ‘wilderness areas’ under the Wilderness Act, where no economic exploitation is allowed. The term is often used loosely in Britain, in which very few such areas are devoid of the present impact of agriculture and forestry, let alone past impacts. There has been much debate over definitions of wilderness and what is natural, and no conference on the subject of wilderness management has been complete without some academic discourse on its parameters and meaning.¹ However, ‘wilderness’ as a term, whilst useful to many, especially in America, is fraught with misunderstanding for the situation in Britain. This is perhaps because wilderness has both an ecological and spiritual dimension. For some, wildernesses are desolate places outside of the humanized realm, either to be avoided or brought under some kind of human dominion, and for others, they are places to practice humility, experience a certain vulnerability and acknowledge the creative and even destructive powers of the natural world.

I can see two dimensions of our being that are reflected in this polarity of meaning. As animals we are subject to nature's laws and natural processes, but as humans we have striven with apparent success to cheat those laws. Through technology, the human side of us has achieved control (perhaps only temporarily) of the natural cycles of abundance in food, the seasonal stresses of temperature and water supply, and, crucially, the exigencies of disease and childhood mortality. Nature seems to threaten these achievements, and much of the language of farming and resource use is couched in terms of a battle for dominance.

I will not here attempt to chart a course through these polarities, but will instead interject a hitherto oft-omitted ecological fact, lest we be tempted to build a practical philosophy of ecological restoration upon concepts of a pristine past. Historically, all the present wilderness areas outside Antarctica held populations of hunter–gatherers, hitherto assumed to have had minimal impact upon natural processes. Recent work has shown, however, that during the last glacial period (60,000–10,000 BP) huge changes were wrought throughout the Americas, Eurasia, Australasia and Oceania by the hunting to extinction of the mega-fauna (mastodons, mammoths, ground sloth, giant marsupials and large predators).² Once these animals were removed, further human hunting of medium-sized game and the use of fire continued to transform landscapes, particularly in the creation of open park-like forests and grasslands.³

Even the apparently pristine Antarctic ecosystem is today affected by chemical pollutants, which in the Arctic have already proven capable of altering the fertility of its major animal components, and in the recent past, whaling brought large-scale changes to the marine ecosystems upon which the landward ecology in polar regions is based. Commercial whaling removed over 90 per cent of the ‘great’ whales and with them virtually a whole trophic layer. There is so little data from that period that it would be difficult to say how much of any species’ present abundance on that continent was not the result of the demise of those great competitors for the ‘krill’ and huge shoals of fish that underpin the ecosystem. Studies of the apparently pristine North Pacific coastal ecosystems of the Aleutians and Alaska have shown that the more recent whaling operation of 1949–1969, when half-a-million great whales, mostly sperm, were removed, caused major domino effects as orcas, the main predator of the whales, shifted predation to seals, sea lions and otters, causing rapid declines.⁴

In Britain and Europe, there are few areas to match North American wilderness. Most national parks support some present-day economic activity, such as farming and forestry, especially in Britain, and all receive large numbers of visitors and sustain significant tourist industries. A few have ‘core areas’ that would correspond to American ‘wilderness areas’, though there are none in Britain, and they also share a common prehistory of mega-faunal extinction.⁵

This ‘hand of man’ factor (noting the generally articulated gender bias) plays an important role in conservation management and the debates over minimal intervention. There has arisen a philosophy of ‘natural’ versus ‘artificial’ in which being human has been relegated to the latter. Thus, some have placed special value on the ‘purely natural’, whereas others value the artifices of human intervention in landscapes, such as open moorland, heaths, reed marshes and estuaries. James Fenton has argued that even these landscapes, though consequent upon deforestation and grazing, still present an array of perfectly natural processes, and that even domestic stock are adequate replacements for former herbivores that would have kept the land open.⁶

Until recently, the deep time perspective of palaeo-ecology has been missing from much of the debate. At what point do we decide that humans ceased to be ‘natural’? We could choose the invention of stone tools, or the spear and bow, or fire, or place the point much later with the domestication of animals and the clearance of forest. We could categorize the mega-faunal extinctions as natural and similar to other major prehistoric shifts in the balance of species. But I am not sure that much is to be gained by the separation of artificial and natural. If we add our modern knowledge of the impact of human activity on inter-linked elements of the global ecosystem – such as the impact of carbon dioxide on the global climate; of the global distribution of toxins on immuno-competence, gender and reproduction of mammals, amphibians and birds; of the flux of basic chemicals such as sulphur dioxide, nitrogen and ozone upon vegetation on land and also upon marine life; as well as the more recent removal of mega-fauna from the oceans in the industrial whaling decades of 1949–1969 – then we must conclude, as did Bill McKibben in The End of Nature, that there are no purely ‘natural’ environments left.

Yet, if we abandon the concept of ‘nature’, so the argument goes, what then is the point of ‘nature conservation’? Naturalness has been our yardstick and the main defensive weapon against competing demands on land use. Only since the mid-1990s have we really begun to take these factors on board and begun a necessary paradigm shift in values and perceptions. Firstly, it should now be clear that we cannot recreate the past, an oft-articulated aim of restoration ecology. For example, the Caledonian Forest of 6000 years ago was not just a matter of trees and National Vegetation Classification eco-type mosaics of habitat – it was a dynamic interactive process involving many species in a large herbivore guild with carnivores feeding upon them; as well as the hunting ground of extremely efficient human omnivores. The ‘forest’ was this entity and had evolved over millions of years of continuous interaction, but even this Mesolithic forest with its herds of wild cattle, forest pony, elk, wolf, bear, boar and lynx had already lost its mega-herbivores, the European temperate-forest elephants and rhinos as well as the very large carnivores, the sabre-toothed cats, that fed upon them.

It follows, therefore, that if we now seek to recreate or restore anything in nature, we do so as an act of co-creation, as an active agent in the future process of the forest. In a sense, we shall be restoring a relationship that has existed for tens of thousands of years, in which humans have altered habitats to suit both themselves and certain of their fellow creatures. Some would dress this up in the clothes of science – to set aside areas for the study of natural processes – or of politics, whereby we seek to influence the development agenda of a planet heading for ecological destruction, with humans included; others might argue that all species have a right to exist, and that we should set land aside for their needs. What I see under the surface of reasons is an act of love, or gratitude – in essence, a making sacred – something that shines out from all the initiatives that are reported in this book. It is a love that generally dares not speak its name, yet in acting out of love, at some risk to our own short-term interests, we can set the strongest example to others in a world that needs such leadership.

We are, after all, world citizens in a global process of development and loss of wildland, particularly forests, that now threatens the stability of our supporting ecosystems. It has so far not been enough to argue a case for wildland based upon this ecological or economic self-interest. After all, respected groups of UN scientists have been doing that for decades to minimal effect. We have to affect the development ethos itself, and to do that, I believe we have to reclaim the deeper spiritual sense that once connected us to the land, to nature and to a wilder heart.

The wild heart places death and comfort in a different perspective to that of the civil heart. Death is not something feared and avoided at all costs; rather, the heart is rooted in a spiritual sense of belonging that engenders an honouring. Only a wild heart is capable of living with the dangers of nature, of accepting the risks, and taking death or loss in its stride.⁷ The wild heart thus honours the wolf, the bear and the panther. It does not seek to eradicate, because in acceptance there is no revenge.

In this, we need not look to Americans for guidance. They are essentially escaped Europeans, and they escaped from an overcrowded garden into what at first appeared to them a wilderness of plenty. North America, after a little more than 300 years of mass immigration, still has large areas of land with little or no economic exploitation, landscapes still essentially dominated by natural processes, even if somewhat depleted of their original mammalian inhabitants, humans included. We could add that even after the national parks were set up, an irrational predator ‘control’ policy all-but eradicated wolf, brown bear, lynx and puma from vast areas of wild country – there were limits to how wild wilderness could be.

When John Muir effectively gave birth to the modern ‘national park’ ethos, he was still a European awed by the beauty and majesty of wild nature, and disturbed at the prospect of its ultimate despoliation. Back home in Britain, the Victorians had just finished their massive onslaught on anything with claws or talons – from the diminutive polecat and weasel, to the buzzard, kite and eagle. England was finally a tame landscape, with nothing to challenge the supremacy of man as the main killer in the land. Whereas the founding fathers of New England sought refuge for their Puritan faith, old England set about turning the world into a market of commodities. The bucolic landscapes that inspired the Romantic poets were soon to be possessed by the demons of production – a process not yet ended. Wilderness became that which was non-productive and useless, the abode of biblical isolation and disturbance of the spirit. Where John Muir found spiritual solace, others were still infected by a spiritual dread of where the ‘wasteland’ begins.

There were other, darker elements at play in that early creation of wilderness sanctuary. The ‘national park’ movement has created wilderness by evicting or excluding people more often than it has preserved wilderness that was unused. The movement is essentially a product of civil society and of the expressed need for jaded industrialized souls to find solace in the purity of nature. We now have categories of wildness essentially defined by the degree of human absence. At its outset the concept was fallacious and imperial. Almost all wild areas, certainly in North America, supported nomadic hunters and gatherers, or in some cases were reserved by them as a sacred place for ceremony and vision.

The earliest European settlers appreciated this. A mixed-blood Native American storyteller I know has a repertoire not only of Chippewa myths, but also of Gaelic and Breton myths from the earliest nomadic trappers who intermarried with the indigenous peoples. However, European ideologies of dominion, custodianship, commodity, exploitation, markets and wealth rapidly followed upon the heels of the awe-inspired adventurer. As did that myopic superiority that saw no tribal culture worthy of the name human, and thus the slaughter and slavery began. Introduced diseases outstripped the guns and chains. By the time of the national parks movement many wild places were empty, and for the first time in 30,000 years.⁸

Our immediate forebears in the wilderness movement that birthed the national parks looked through eyes of ignorance at these empty or almost empty lands. They were not aware of the long histories of ecological change brought about by the thinly distributed hunters and gatherers. It was easy for them to mistake the depleted populations of Indians or Aborigines as peripheral in their impact, and perhaps as recent and marginal additions to the landscape. When Europeans arrived to define them, the teeming middle-fauna and park-like forests appeared as an apparition of Arcadia, or Paradise, a mythical past or a heavenly promise. Considering the overcrowded cities of Holland, Britain, France, Portugal and Spain, from which they had set sail, with their diseases, stench of excrement, and confined and enclosed lands, all owned, the people enslaved and caught in rigid hierarchies, small wonder the new lands seemed paradisiacal. But paradise had to be empty – as if Adam and Eve must find the mythic garden as they had left it. All over the world, indigenous peoples, settled and otherwise, have been moved out, traditional practices curtailed, and pristine people-free zones created for recreation or in the case of total exclusion zones, scientific study (noting that scientists can usually get access!).

Nature as Mother

Just as modern day Native Americans hold no concept of wilderness, it is unlikely that our ancestral Celts felt anything other than the presence of the great nurturing power that so many tribal peoples call Mother, that which has given them birth and sustenance. It is a curious and perhaps unfortunate evolution of language that English has chosen the Latin Natura to represent the concept of ‘nature’ – that which we came to see as separate from ourselves; natural in opposition to artificial or man-made. For the Latin simply means ‘to give birth’. The word birth comes from our Angle or Scandinavian roots. How different things might have been had we called the natural world about us, Birther! Wild ‘nature’ might then have felt less ‘other’ and our connection to its processes more fundamental and reverent.

We are a long way down the road that has led to the current despoliation and exploitation of our ‘mother’ earth. The poster with the wolf's eyes reads, ‘in wilderness is the salvation of the world’. It is a plea for the survival of the greater ecosystem upon which we all depend and the plea is then defended by ecological truths. But in truth is this not a plea to the unfeeling and mindlessly destructive would-be controllers of the world? Most scientific ecologists think that the human species would survive without wilderness, but do not believe that an insensitive humanity would respond to their pleas to protect what they also love, unless humanity's own survival was at stake. The poster would be truer if it read ‘in wilderness is the salvation of the heart’, but the dominant ideology has yet to realize that there is a problem in the heart.

It should be obvious now that the pleas of ecological science to conserve biodiversity and wild places are failing to get through at the global level. They have become based upon a ‘self-interest’ argument: that if we lose some species from a complex structure of which our general understanding is limited, then the whole edifice that supports human life could crumble. Or we make claims for the future discovery of drugs that could save humanity from debilitating and potentially catastrophic diseases. I doubt these claims are treated with credence by the business-oriented minds that purport to run the global economy. If the new drugs can turn a profit, then tropical forests have a future; the same is true for elephant and ivory, and lions and eco-tourist potential.

We might have expected to get further with arguments relating to process, of the functionality of forests for carbon sequestration and climate control, and of the potential disasters for the global economy if the planetary ecosystem is destabilized. There is a mentality in the industrialized world that would see each and every component of our supporting ecosystems managed and engineered for our global benefit as expressed in a market of commodities and services. For those with this mentality, the Amazon constitutes a planetary climate control service.

Imagine we were to celebrate the fact that ‘every component of our birth-mother is now managed and engineered’. Some eco-technicians have emerged with plans for global forest cover to be managed for optimum carbon efficiency – first, cut down inefficient old growth, store the carbon, and plant new and better forest genetically engineered for the task. In the face of climate change, agriculture could be made more robust and sustainable, but with modified genes, and housing and transport made less energy demanding with new technology. And there would be wind turbines, tidal barrages, hydro-schemes, and vast biomass fuel plantations. Deserts could be plastered with photovoltaic solar collectors to power the emerging hydrogen economy. And the wild? Little pockets of eco-tourism – service providers for the remnant sensitives.

If we are to avoid this soul-less future, I believe we have to move now and go beyond the utilitarian arguments of ecosystem dynamics. Few of the nature reserves of today, even the larger national parks of Africa and America, will provide robustness against climate change, let alone genetic drift for the isolated populations they hold. If we are to conserve the beautiful diversity of life, we will have to redress the balance in those areas outside the reserves – the vast areas of agriculture and industrial forestry, and even the cities themselves. And, most crucially, our energy, water and materials demands in the urban environment will determine the extent to which we can allow the wildlands to coexist. This balance is ultimately related to risk, loss, comfort and security rather than survival. These are issues of the heart. Perhaps that is the ultimate power of the wild: it forces a discourse. It will force us to marry the emotional with the scientific, the spiritual with the rational.

In Britain an ethos of ‘wildland’ is emerging in which human intervention is minimal and natural processes are respected. At times, as if caught between paradigms, these natural processes and even some re-introduced species (such as the beavers penned in a Kent nature reserve) are still viewed as ‘management tools’ in relation to some set of desired targets. Above all, any government-mediated change must meet socio-economic goals in the definition of sustainability. Any landscape-scale evolution of wilder land will set challenges with respect to economic losses and gains. But with the growing consciousness of respect for nature as teacher and healer, there is every prospect that such evolution will generate as much economic gain as loss, and perhaps more so where lands marginal to agriculture and forestry are concerned. On a world scale, the rich nations will have to develop more effective ways of funding protection and ecological restoration in nations that would otherwise face economic penalties in the non-exploitation of wildland. In this endeavour the world desperately needs a change of heart, and we in Britain have an opportunity to develop a working model.

2

Coed Eryri

The emblem of the Snowdonia National Park is the arctic-alpine Snowdon lily Lloydia serotina, and this refugee from the arctic is found nowhere else in Britain. But the Welsh name for these hills is Eryr...