Rewilding
We talk to three experts on how and why we are returning the Lake District to nature
Birdsong, beaver dams, forests rich in life. Rewilding can lead to all of these but has also become a barbed word, potentially threatening to divorce farmers from a centuries-old stewardship. We look at what this means in one of the nation’s favourite National Parks.
The Lake District is a small parcel of land beloved by millions and home to about 41,100. It is a patchwork of grazed uplands, rocky hilltops, scrubby slopes, fields, forestry, woodland, rivers, grassland, coast and more. Human settlement here began around 5000 years ago and it was reputedly the Vikings who first introduced the tough Herdwick sheep, which still graze the fells today. Along with glaciation, farming has had possibly the most formative impact on the Lake District landscape as we know it.
Rewilding, put simply, means allowing nature to take care of itself. Precisely what that looks like varies from place to place, but usually involves three things. One: restoring ecosystems, for example replacing single-species forestry plantation with mixed broadleaf woodland which can support a huge variety of animals and plants. Two: reinstating natural processes, allowing trees to self-seed, rivers to run where they will and nature to proceed unhindered. And three: where appropriate, reintroducing native missing species.
These are the most well-known parts that most of us imagine when we’re talking about rewilding. But there’s another part too, and this is, according to Rewilding Britain, that it “encourages a balance between people and the rest of nature where each can thrive.” People are not separate, or excluded, from rewilding, but part of it. And in few places is this more obvious or essential than in the Lake District. This is a place where people have worked for generations. It is also under huge pressure from the climate crisis, increased usage of pesticides and fertilisers, and demand for cheap meat and materials. It is a place in which, for many of its stewards and species, the margin between surviving and not is perilously thin. Some of the biggest issues of our time are funnelled into a question over what to do with that land...