I think rewilding has already had its day

OCCASIONALLY I feel a warm glow welling inside me – and it’s not as a result of anything poured out of a bottle. It happens at those occasional moments when an organisation or a group of people finally come round to my way of thinking – and leave me with a certain satisfaction at having been right all along.

The latest glow has been delivered thanks to the South Downs National Park Authority which in a new policy statement has conceded that (a) rewilding alone is not the way to restore biodiversity and encourage more wildlife and (b) that, contrary to prevailing opinions, farmers do have an essential role to play in achieving that goal.

Which rather torpedoes the case for simply halting all farming activities and allowing nature to take its course, as advocated by some of the more extreme (and considerably less well-informed) of the militant ecologists.

So the call is now not for rewilding but for ‘renaturing’ to restore wildlife populations to another 31,000 acres of the Downs across Hampshire and Sussex. With the assistance of a £100 million appeal fund, I might add – whatever happened to public funding of the national parks?

Accompanied by the admissions that the current pleasant environment of the South Downs owes much to traditional farming activities and that in the 65 per cent of the national park managed by six farmthat er-led cluster groups, things are already going rather well.

I feel quite flattered that the authority has now quite willingly expressed its appreciation of all the hard work farmers have devoted to keeping the place looking handsome – possibly the first occasion in the 6,000 years since farming started there that a word of praise has been passed their way.

More to the point I am delighted the new campaign is based on a set of principles which vindicate the opinion I have been voicing for a very long time: that simply abandoning the countryside to nature will invite in scrub, brambles, bracken, foxes and badgers and little else; and that all that is required is the odd, gentle tweak to a management regime which has been in place since before Stonehenge was erected as this country’s first tourist attraction.

Rewilding, in other words, has already had its day before it’s barely learned to crawl.

I find this all very heartening. Because it tells me that somewhere out there besides the armies of antifarmer, pro-wilding, urban knownothings who want to populate the countryside they only visit once a year with wolves, lynx and other species prone to preying on domestic livestock are a few people with not merely letters after their names or a high-profile job in television but real knowledge and understanding of the countryside.

And who acknowledge that cooperation rather than confrontation with farmers is the way – indeed the only way – to restore populations of mammals, birds, reptiles and insects to the desired levels.

I am now looking to the older, more long-established national parks to follow the encouraging example set by the country’s youngest.

So the call is now not for rewilding but for ‘renaturing’ to restore wildlife populations