Rewilding and Conservation

 

I am a little late to the debate stirred up by Alan Titchmarsh’s comments on rewilding. This is in part because I wasn’t fully aware of what he said and secondly, I needed time to collect my thoughts.

I first really encountered rewilding as a conservation technique or at least a progressive form of land management back in 2013 when I read George Monbiot’s book – ‘Feral’. I had been aware of the principle and had heard of interesting results in Yellowstone regarding wolves, but this was the first time I really began to delve deeply.

I am going to assume you know the principles of rewilding in this article as that will make things a little smoother, but to set the stage, rewilding is, in essence, letting ‘mother nature’ assert herself over previously man-controlled habitats.

Now it’s true that in most of the world and indeed Britain there is very little which has not been affected or changed by man. Even in the remote wilds, powerlines and litter can be spotted or planes flying above. Man of course is a part of nature like any other species, that however is a whole other philosophical debate. The question then becomes what are we rewilding to? The consensus is restoring habitats to a prehuman state say Ice Age. For Britain, that means a lot of woodland and previously extinct mammals such as the beaver, aurochs, lynx, wolves, and bears.

Let’s take a pause and look at what the argument was. Alan Titchmarsh was lambasted for stating to a House of Lords committee that rewilding is “catastrophic” for biodiversity and an “ill-considered trend”. What cheek! Alan has long graced our screens and has supported wildlife gardening in many cases. His worst crime however came from his ‘Ground force’ days which paved the way, pun intended, for gardens that did away with lawns and encouraged everyday gardeners to hard landscape.

The issue at hand here is scale, Alan was talking about the idea of rewilding gardens. Letting the grass grow long, leaving some nettles putting in a pond rather than a water feature. These elements are not rewilding they are wildlife gardening. The two have become conflated. Rewilding, natural rewilding in which land is left to regenerate itself needs space and lots of it. Only with a vast amount of space can ecosystems develop into a natural mosaic. For example, allow a meadow full of wildflowers to regenerate and it will first become scrub and then woodland. During this time its biodiversity will change, probably dropping before rising again. The grassland specialists will be replaced by woodland ones. If the area is large enough and there are enough ecosystem engineers then the grassland will regenerate in a new location, perhaps becoming ephemeral. This is the principle of succession, the way in which habitats evolve from bare rock to rainforests.

So, scale is important, gardens are just not big enough to make rewilding possible. I am not saying gardens are beacons of biodiversity. Non-native planting may be pretty, but they are not suitable for our pollinators or insects, but they are better than a concrete wasteland. A bit of wildlife gardening in each garden is a huge wealth of nature.

Part of the problem of rewilding is this concept of scale, there are very few places in the UK where projects of suitable scale are viable, the real problem of nature conservation is the limitations of reserves. I m not saying nature reserves are bad per se just that over the years they have become a limiting factor. We now have a series of isolated reserves across the country that exemplify and protect particular habitats. By their very necessity, they are managed. They are kept at what is termed in successional terms a plagioclimax a stable state of equilibrium that reflects the particular habitat or species that is desired.  This is the antithesis of rewilding; mother nature is put in halters. We have had to do this to protect rare habitats and species, but how is that working out? Reserves are sacrosanct but reflect only a tiny portion of the outdoor space and this reflection is limited. What about the less interesting habitats or less interesting species? Take, for instance, the House Sparrow or Starling, once common and now in severe decline. We are lucky in Warwick with strong numbers of both (though much fewer than in my youth) but where are their reserves and protected spaces?

This is an extreme example, but I think you catch my drift. Scattered reserves are fragile and vulnerable, cursory examination of Ilka Hanski’s metapopulation and habitat fragmentation theories catalogue this. Recent actions have been to connect reserves and work at the landscape scale, but this brings conservation into even more conflict with landowners and planners. Good work is being done by Warwickshire Wildlife Trust with the Princethorpe Woods Project and the networks in the Tame Valley, but we need more. More protection and sympathetic management across the countryside. Even the lowliest patch of scrub or nettle bed holds a level of local importance and by focusing on the special we risk dragging the common down to the lower level rather than raising them up. Rewilding plays a part in this, as with these larger networks and landscape-level approaches there is more opportunity to allow habitats to shift naturally to its successional apex.

In many respects, many reserves are examples of controlled rewilding. Over one-third of the reserves managed by Warwickshire Wildlife Trust are reclaimed industrial land. Mostly quarries, gravel pits, and railway cuttings. These sites are ripe for development and allow a habitat to be chosen and cultivated. They are flagships for renovating old sites and have worked considerably well but often tend to be wetland sites, good for visitors and waterfowl, however what of our farmland birds? Should more farmland not be bought and managed? The trust manages many excellent ancient and semi-natural woodlands and these are great but are part of the landscape, we need to secure the sections in between not just the connecting hedges.

This has turned into somewhat of a ramble but at the root of it is that nature conservation has to evolve. Reserves are a useful start; rewilding is a great tool but neither is good in isolation. Pundits like Alan Titchmarsh are not ecologists, and they have a vested interest in a particular narrative, we can’t blame a gardener for advocating for neat cut lawns and flowery beds, but we need to take direction from those that know not who say they know.

With climate change and the biodiversity crisis, I feel that we are at a crossroads. There is a need, as biodiversity offsetting takes hold and the pressures of house building increases, to start to focus on the strategic and landscape scale to protect all habitats not just the rare ones.