Great whack-a-mole article on farms and wild spaces in the UK:
“For decades, the way we farm has been degrading land and destroying wildlife. Now there’s a revolution coming – but is it going to create more problems than it solves?”
My executive summary of this most excellent (and balanced!) article:
Intensive farming/agriculture eventually ruins the land. Some very rich people have been buying destroyed UK farming land and letting nature take over again—with a push or two here and there. Farmers worry that more land will be required for animals/crops in the future, not less. Big kerfuffle.
When one of those rich dudes decided to cull deer on his land—to help pine martens, mountain hares, and hen harriers make a comeback in their traditional lands, locals—who had deer on their land for commercial hunting—developed a hearty dose of cognitive dissonance:
“By 2013, MacDonell and his team had culled 8,000 deer at Glenfeshie, and his local opponents, among them a neighbouring deerstalking enterprise, had camped on the moral high ground. “When they shoot deer they call it sport,” MacDonell said wryly when I visited him last September, “and when we shoot deer they call it slaughter. Also, they claimed it would take hundreds of years for the woodland to regenerate.”
Spoiler alert: it didn’t.
“We were standing on a track overlooking the River Feshie. On either side, young Scots pines displayed bright green needles against the glowing heather. Among the pines grew rowans hung with scarlet berries, and bilberry bushes whose leaves would be fair game for white moth caterpillars in spring. There were more new trees on the far side of the Feshie, binding the banks and spreading up the hillside. MacDonell smiled”.
This process is called rewilding.
Rewilding is, large-scale conservation aimed at restoring and protecting natural processes and core wilderness areas, providing connectivity between such areas, and protecting or reintroducing apex predators and keystone species.
Rewilding is big. The interwebs is full of it.
I’ve just ordered Isabella Tree’s 2018 book Wilding which deals with her and her husband’s attempt to turn a 3500 acre tract of farming land back to nature from 2001 onwards.
How has it worked out for them?
“…the 3,500 acre project has seen extraordinary increases in wildlife numbers and diversity in little over a decade".
”Once-common species, including turtle doves, nightingales, peregrine falcons, lesser spotted woodpeckers and purple emperor butterflies, are now breeding at Knepp, and populations of other species are rocketing. The Burrells’ degraded agricultural land has become a functioning ecosystem again, heaving with life – all by itself”.
More glorious details:
“In 2001, starting with a small section of the estate and gradually expanding as funding became available, Burrell stopped ploughing the land and spraying it with chemicals. Removing internal fences allowed the wild Exmoor ponies and Tamworth pigs he introduced to browse and rootle over large distances, their disruptions creating habitats for other animals and plants. Dung beetles dived into delicious organic cowpats left by longhorn cattle that hadn’t been fed wormers and parasiticides; voles colonised the roots of a dead oak that under the previous regime would have been felled in the interests of tidiness. The summer of 2002 revealed wildflowers with delightful names such as bird’s-foot trefoil and lady’s bedstraw that hadn’t been seen in such numbers for a generation, along with a profusion of insects, which produced a continuous thrum – “something”, in Tree’s words, “we hadn’t even known we’d been missing”.
Their brilliant website full of photos and videos is well worth a visit if you want to feel joyful for a bit.
Apparently there are even larger and more ambitious rewilding schemes underway in other parts of Europe.
Yay!
The rest of the article swings back in the other direction; basically: We have to eat food and food comes from farms.
Which is mostly true, for the moment.
However, if the UK decided on a policy of zero net population growth from now on, you’d think a slow transition to rewilding would also be manageable.
But: Capitalism.
Also, the UK currently imports half its food, so the bigger picture is a messy one. What happens in a pandemic when food imports stop?
Maybe we’ll find out over the next few months.
Anyway, this real flip-side to rewilding utopias is still worth a read in the second half of the article.
But to finish on a high note, here’s a nice picture of camping at Knepp Wildland to brighten up your day.
[Cover photo from Knepp Wildland’s Instagram feed—Copyright.]