I have been thinking a great deal about whether I have the emotional reserves to keep pushing at immovable objects for another 10 years, and if anyone else will pick up some of the "heavy lifting". It’s not a bag of fun when it should be. An original aim of explorations of the magic of wilder locations, and wanting others to have the opportunity for that experience, just keeps turning to dust over the years when faced with a situation of systemic bias against wildness. Should I always be hopeful, when aspirations for wildness are repeatedly dashed? Would there ever be a rallying appeal that would successfully motivate the untapped constituency for wildness that I am sure must exist? What could be the catalyst?
Monbiot had come upon the absurdity of targeting for single species by the conservation industry that meant that wider landscape considerations became victim to achieving favourable conditions just for that species. He noted that the species that were targeted were often associated with severely damaged habitats, and to defend them the landscape must be kept in that state. He felt extreme specialisation and narrowness were the causes, with conservation priorities appearing to have less to do with protecting nature than with reflecting specialist interests, its practitioners creating niches for themselves and their choices. The example he gave was discovering that Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust was seeking to protect bracken-dominated slopes in order to maintain the presence of Climbing corydalis weevil (Procas granulicollis) (2). He ventured that a weevil ecologist would have little interest in lynx, and would respond with hostility to an attempt to expand lynx habitat at the expense of weevil habitat. Could it be that professional ecologists, who are relied on for expert assessments, are now among the greatest obstacles to the restoration of functioning ecosystems?
In return, I gave him an example of the futility of gardening for nature, a cautionary tale that exposed the fallibility of its presumption. Northumberland Wildlife Trust were delighted when two avocet chicks hatched and had been nesting on a sand spit in its Cresswell Pond reserve. Concerned that heavy rain may have swept the nest away, the Trust and Northumberland County Council used a mechanical digger in clearing the pond’s drainage channel to lessen the risk of flooding danger (3). A warden and volunteers were said to be guarding the chicks round the clock. So much for their gardening and guarding, because a heron came along and ate the chicks (4).
This is the characteristic combination of exploit and extract, while covering everywhere in excrement, as well as removing, with extreme prejudice, anything that gets in the way of that. Who encouraged these farmers to think they were “custodians” of the landscape, that their “management” was essential to maintaining “biodiversity” and delivering ecosystem services? Well, it is the conservation industry, of course, by their fetishising of species and habitats in degraded landscapes!
Eventually came a draft of Monbiot’s book. Whereas I thought it would be a long polemic, instead it contained a focussed, devastating and sustained critique of the conservation industry, which of course admires and works to retain a state of degradation. I wrote last June, just after publication of the book, about some of the feedback I had given Monbiot, and of our further correspondence (9). I felt then that there was too much of a temptation to compare versions for the feedback I had given him, and so I left reading the published version of Feral for some months before I would consider reviewing it. Now I think a review is such a small thing when reflections better represent the life the book has had before and after its publication. I am still highly appreciative of Monbiot’s dissection of the absurdity of contemporary “nature conservation”, using the sheepwrecked uplands as his prime example. There is a selfish reason: Monbiot and I have looked at the same evidence and come up with the same conclusions - the only valid conclusions available - that our cultural nature is the emperor with no clothes. We are condemned by a received wisdom to share in a collective ignorance of the obvious facts of its widespread degradation, that if we were to be free from this enforced myopia – with little else for comparison - then we would all recognise the absurdity of it being described otherwise.
He, like me, needs to live in a world where the wildness of nature is restored. In setting a framework for this restoration, Monbiot dismisses authenticity as too much of a tightrope walk back through evolutionary time to past ecologies. Instead, to him, it is about permitting ecological processes freely to resume, while not being above an understanding of what that means by reference to the unrestrained ecologies of past history, because it is only there that we find what is absent, and what must if possible be restored. Monbiot thus powerfully asserts a space for our thinking on wildness, where trophic diversity is the essential characteristic, and trophic cascades are its inherent ecological processes. This is the highly important, breakthrough context of the book.
Where authenticity is important in all this, is in the judgement of others that Monbiot is unqualified in what he writes, that he has no understanding of the achievable, that his proscriptions wholesale would fatally damage the cultural structuring that is the received wisdom, such is the tenor of the conversation he recounts during a visit to a sheep farmer in the Welsh hills; the reaction of the wildlife trusts to his book (11); the faux socio-political analysis in the review by the ubiquitous but tragicomic class warrior Dave Bangs, as lionised by Tony Whitbread, Chief Executive of the Sussex Wildlife (12); and the execrable invocation of “resettlement” and “historic clearances” because “there would be little for the farming community to do”, this from the equally execrable Jim Dixon, Chief Executive of the Peak District National Park Authority, and who hasn’t even read Monbiot’s book (13). As to the first accusation, my walks and correspondence with Monbiot confirm his determined understanding of the biophysical reality of wild land, and his prodigious capacity to research and absorb information. As to the others, I remarked on reading the draft that there is no overall route map but, as I observed then, his book didn’t have to provide finished solutions if it succeeds in putting down markers, and which I think he does, but without being highly proscriptive.
He could have done much more, because what worries me about the reaction to his book, and the constant reaction I get, is one of disproportionality. Thus in the absence of that road map, it is the easy course for the perpetrators of degradation, who habitually pour cosmetic syrup in the portrayal of the outcome of their work as beautiful nature, to fill the vacuum with exaggerated assertions that all “managed” nature everywhere is at threat from this ecological restoration. It’s a straw man argument that brooks no other reality, that there may be gradations along the continuum of wild land. It is the defence of the absolutist, the controlling hand of the gatekeepers whose power rests in keeping us ignorant, and keeping our land at such an unfulfilled and only point on the continuum. If nothing else, Monbiot’s book has exposed the ingrained duplicity and flushed these absolutists out. But it does more than that, as it gives hope to those who sense there is something better, that their instincts were right.
Monbiot hasn't really addressed the degradation of the lowlands. I asked him about this, particularly since he grew up near Peppard Common - a lowland site where the recent “restoration” was driven by agri-environment subsidy (14) - but he doesn’t seem to have had much exposure to the lost opportunities for wildness in marginal lowland sites. I guess he thinks there is greater mileage for renaturing in the uplands, as he can always argue that its agricultural productivity is so low. He is, however, very strong in his critique of maritime conservation, rehearsing arguments for the need for marine reserves, and suggesting that the restoration of marine ecology will be easier than restoring terrestrial ecosystems: firstly because the track record of extinction from human exploitation hasn’t reached the same level of murderous finality as it has with some terrestrial species; and because most sea species are mobile enough to reintroduce themselves to habitats from which they have been removed. Monbiot’s writing on maritime issues really benefits from his own obvious enthusiasm for the sea and its creatures, the tales he recounts, and the sheer physicality of his adventures.
I have given before my concerns about the consequences of Monbiot’s revelation of an elephant-adapted eco-system, that it risked encouragement for contemporary woodland abusers (9) and now I must return to it. It’s been my nightmare for years that there may be elements of truth in the herbivore story, that human-induced extinction of megaherbivores in the Pleistocene (mammoth, elephants) or human-induced extinction of midi-herbivores in the Mesolithic (aurochs, Irish elk) or both, may be the reason for the development of high canopy forest in the Mesolithic. Contrary to what may be thought, I do entertain doubts. However, I would be devastated if high canopy forest was ever shown to be an artefact of the consequences of human exceptionalism, as Frans Vera has maintained (15). I love high forest with a passion. It is where I feel at home. However, I am at least careful to ensure that my passion doesn't cause me to lose objectivity over evidence.
While Monbiot’s elephant story has been great fun, he has yet to indicate what significance it has for the post-glacial landscapes of the Holocene, other than misquote a reference that the extinction of straight tusked elephant was due to human overkill. I am sure Monbiot doesn't really believe that every species that has interacted with trees has to be reinstated. I would note that trees have been around for 196m years, and have thus seen many species come and go, including all bar one of the early hominids (arising only 4-8m years ago) and may yet even see off the destructive forces of Homo sapiens (arising perhaps 200,000 years ago). While I do see some similarities between the conservation industry and dinosaurs (especially with its obsession with heathland and consequent persecution of trees) I’m not sure of its claim of being an adequate substitute for the natural disturbance that was lost with the loss of the herbivores. As it is, the moral obligation to reinstate megaherbivores, even if we could do so, revolves around a need for a clear determination of their extinction – which is contested for some species, whether the extinction was in the Holocene or not (16, 17).
I discount the spurious claim made by Peter Taylor in a recent article in ECOS, that his book Beyond Conservation from 2005 “addressed this head-on” (28). Taylor sought (demanded?) acknowledgement for his megaherbivore guild obsession and the “inimitable grazing and browsing pressure” from lost European megafauna. However, he misses the point of what Monbiot was claiming, because Taylor’s book has nothing about the evolutionary adaptation of trees in response to the impact of elephants. This may seem a picayune distinction, but I think it goes to the heart of what marks Monbiot out from the crowd. He took that relatively non-specific observation of Rackham and tested it against what he could observe today as possible adaptations. Thus he considers the slow growth of common understorey trees like holly, yew and box, leads to a trunk and a root system that is much stronger than canopy trees, even though they carry less weight. Monbiot believes this would have given them resistance to withstand breaking and toppling by elephants. He suggests that the elephant’s habit of snapping deciduous trees, such as oak, ash, beech. lime, field maple, hazel, alder and willow, could explain the regrowth coming below the break. I would add, as the 1987 storm amply demonstrated, the toppling of a deciduous tree does not kill it if up to a third of its roots are still in the ground – the tree just sprouts new branches at right angles to the fallen trunk.
That Monbiot gets out and explores for himself struck me early in the draft when he recounted finding what appeared to be a remnant of Atlantic rainforest in a wooded gorge that has a river flowing down it. The oak woodland owed its existence to the inaccessibility of the gorge to sheep, and its character to a hyper-oceanic influence as evidenced by the trees hanging above the water being festooned with moss and lichen, and with ferns growing along their branches. It’s the kind of place I would dive into (29, 30). He was rewarded by finding a number of small-leaved lime trees, uncommon now in Welsh woodland, and which he took to be an indicator of ancient wildwood. I searched for more details of this woodland, finding it to be a SSSI, the description of which noted the extremely humid conditions that supported an interesting array of Oceanic bryophytes and ferns. The lime trees are not mentioned, although the National Biodiversity Network does register the presence of the tree in this area. Instead, it remarks on the presence of an uncommon Wood stitchwort, as well as the diverse snail fauna that includes three ancient woodland indicator species.
While Monbiot was researching his book, I asked him what he was hoping to achieve with it, and who would be his audience? His simple answer was that through his access to the media, he could push the arguments into places where they haven't been heard before, and try to widen the scope of the debate. Feral has certainly done that, and he continues to develop its themes through his Guardian column, the latest one on flooding attracting considerable approbation (31). His recent appearance, however, on television drew an hysterical response from farmers in Wales. He was on Countryfile, the BBC’s weekly farming program, where in a feature investigating claims that our uplands are in crisis and that farming is partly to blame, Monbiot asserted that sheep in the hills had destroyed vegetation and compacted the soils, such that they were the cause of flooding downstream (32). The by now familiar invective followed, reported in the Daily Post, the Highland Clearances being invoked yet again; that allowing nature to take over the uplands would be “social and cultural genocide”; that the program was too one-sided; and that Monbiot had no evidence to back up his claims (33). Then in the Farmers Guardian, Carl Walters, the sheep farmer from Penrith who was highlighted in the program, said that Monbiot was “living in his own dream world” (34) Walters trotted out the usual vacuous claim that “Environmentalists and farmers alike recognise the role of livestock farming in the uplands and appreciate that this managed landscape needs the animals and the farmers”. More proof, if needed, of how the conservation industry has blighted any real debate about our uplands.
If only I had written that article about floodplain woodland that I had been meaning to for years! At least Monbiot is getting on and doing some of the heavy lifting.