Return to nature?
Unserer geschundenen Umwelt täte es gut, wenn wir sie in Ruhe ließen. Aber lassen sich Landschaften tatsächlich renaturieren? STEPHEN ARMSTRONG findet es heraus.
ADVANCED
Rewilding has a long, uneven tradition and covers a lot of ground in very different ways. The word was coined by the US environmental movement Earth First! in 1990 during its campaign for protected corridors to enable large carnivores to move around the north-west United States. Today, it’s used to describe anything from the Knepp Estate to reintroducing predators into an ecosystem, to restoring meadows and marshlands and even reducing sheep grazing.
For the experts, however, there’s only one real reason to rewild, and the clue is in the name. “We define it as the large-scale restoration of ecosystems to the point where nature can take care of itself,” explains Richard Bunting, who oversees campaigns and communications for Rewilding Britain. “It’s a long-term process, but we want to see quite a lot of Britain restored. In 100 years, we’re aiming for 30 per cent of land to undergo significant recovery and five per cent — or one million hectares, roughly two-thirds the size of Wales — to be just nature doing its own thing. Everyone can help — even a single pond contributes — but we’re looking at sites of at least 1,000 acres, a scale where you get measurable change in biodiversity and ecosystem services, including soaking up CO2, providing clean water and pollination.”
The UK’S rewilding movement began in the 1990s with a handful of new environmental groups, such as the Scottish-based Trees for Life, and was pushed into the mainstream by the likes of Isabella Tree and George Monbiot, a columnist for The Guardian and author of Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding (2013).
Monbiot wrote the book after moving from London to mid-wales, excited about being surrounded by nature and the opportunity to see wildlife. “Instead, I discovered I was in a wildlife desert,” he says. “I was next to a natural park and an area of outstanding beauty and yet there was less wildlife around me than in the city. The whole area had been reduced to the aftermath of nuclear winter by sheep. The book was initially met with hostility, not least from major conservation organizations, as I was saying the whole system is dysfunctional. All we are conserving are scraps of a once thriving ecosystem. Gradually, there has been a groundswell for change.”
Monbiot’s shock at not finding the wild is understandable: genuine wilderness has all but disappeared from the UK. Only 2.4 per cent of the country is covered in ancient woodland, defined as woods recorded on maps since AD 1600. Even apparently inhospitable areas like the highlands of Scotland are manufactured landscape. The Caledonian forests that covered the hills were removed during the 19th century to create sheep pasture and deer-hunting estates, leaving today’s heather moorland a monoculture.
Curiously, the UK’S departure from the EU seems to offer the possibility of change. “It allows us to break the stranglehold of the EU’S Common Agricultural Policy, which has been a disaster for the environment and shows little sign of changing,” says Monbiot. “I’m a remainer, but if I were asked to vote on agriculture, I’d be a leaver.”
In January 2018, for instance, Michael Gove — then the UK’S environment secretary — announced that, post-brexit, EU farming subsidies would be replaced by a new environmental land management system that would pay farmers “public money for public goods” and include projects to improve soil health, plant trees and mitigate climate change. His announcement became a bill currently passing through Parliament, which means the nation’s air, water, soil and biodiversity will soon be reimagined as an economic resource. Rewilding has, in some form, suddenly become government policy.
Farmers have cautiously welcomed this move, and even some aspects of rewilding. “We have to change the way we think or we’re in trouble. Covid reduced carbon levels by 17 per cent, which took us back to 2006, showing that in 14 years, we’ve increased CO2 by nearly 20 per cent,”
explains Phil Jarvis, a crops and sheep farmer in Leicestershire and chair of the National Farmers’ Union’s environment forum. “If we can use some of the landscape to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it in the soil or woodland, that’s good, but if we entirely rewild the UK’S manicured landscape, we may just be exporting this problem to, say, Brazil and importing food from there. We need a mindset change for farmers across all food areas: more efficient food, better hedges, cleaner water, more biodiversity — but we need to know how this works as a business.
The old sustainability model is onethird people, one-third profit, one-third planet. If you only want to talk about the planet, you’re only in one-third of the conversation.”
Jarvis sees value in industry sponsoring farmers to store carbon for them. Since 2018, for instance, Nestlé has been paying a premium price to farmers it buys milk from if they plant hedges or restore watercourses. The problem, says Tim Lang, pro - fessor of food policy at City University London’s Centre for Food Policy, is that the UK is heading into this new strategy with no coherent strategy for feeding the nation. “The UK has no food plan. We’re walking away from the EU, from where we get at least 30 per cent of our food, without considering how a rich, post-imperialist Britain — which still feeds itself like an imperial power importing 50 per cent or more of its food — will deal with food security, population health and our capacity to cope with shocks,” he explains.
The post-second World War food revolution, says Lang, has been both successful — increasing the global amount of food — and catastrophic, turning food into the single biggest vector of ill health and ecosystem damage. By some estimates, we’ve destroyed so much topsoil that the Earth has only 100 harvests left, and so much nutrition has been lost in our food that we now need to eat 10 tomatoes to get the same level of nutrition contained in one tomato in the 1950s. Lang isn’t sure the new bill — or rewilding — offers enough answers.
“The agriculture bill is a wonderful jamboree for large landowners,” he says. “We should definitely reconnect human health with ecosystem health, land use and jobs — and rewilding is important — but it won’t feed Britain. Without a proper plan, the nightmare scenario is beautiful areas of rewilding with deserts in between.”
For Monbiot, the solution is simple. “Food security is an important argument. It’s unsustainable to expect the world to support the UK,” he agrees. “This is why rewilding should take place on land that is neither fertile nor productive for farming — which includes most of the uplands. In the UK, four million hectares of land are occupied by sheep, land that produces only one per cent of our food. The clearing of land for agriculture took land from the people and gave it to landowners, who have all the power. Rewilding and repeopling must go hand in hand so that the complex societies and the complex ecosystems these monocultures replaced can return.”
Change on this epic scale might seem unlikely from a distance — but there are ambitious rewilding projects either underway or in search of funding that offer a vision of how this level of change might
work. In Dumfries and Galloway, southern Scotland, the Langholm Initiative, a community development charity based in the former mill town of the same name, is raising money to buy 25,000 acres of grouse moor from the Duke of Buccleuch, Scotland’s largest private landowner. Balancing the grouse-shooting business with protecting threatened birds of prey on Langholm Moor has been difficult, and the duke has offered the land to the community for a cool £6.4 million.
“A community-led plan has not been done before,” says Kevin Cummings, who heads the charity. “We’ve lost the textile industry, so the town needs something that will make a living — but what if we make the environment and climate change the foundation for any decision?”
Cummings’s plans include building only on old properties to bring them up to the highest environmental standards and allowing, among other things, the “beautiful ancient woodland along the watercourses to spread and come back”.
It will take time to raise the money and rewild, he admits, and time to restore and create the jobs and businesses the town needs. This creates pressure to speed up the natural processes — and raises the conundrum at the heart of rewilding: how wild can it be if people have helped to create it?
Take the problem of non-intervention. In 2018, an increase in the populations of large herbivores in the Oostvaardersplassen nature reserve saw trees being stripped and a decline in wild bird populations. Finally, animals began to starve. Some environmentalists threw hay into the reserve, while others thought the animals should be allowed to die. The local government eventually stepped in to stop the rewilding principle of allowing “natural processes” to determine herbivore populations and capped numbers at