The environmental movement up to now has necessarily been reactive. We have been clear about what we don’t like. But we also need to say what we would like. We need to show where hope lies. Ecological restoration is a work of hope.
—Alan Watson Featherstone1
The sun strikes a wooded river valley; orange and blue. It stretches away from you as far as the eye can see. The hawthorns beside you blast with nightingales. A cuckoo bubbles away, darting between bushes in search of an unwary bird’s nest into which to pop her imposter’s egg. Far out on the green lawns of the river’s winter wake, brick-red godwits, green-suited lapwings and dozens of ruff glow, luminous, below the early-morning sun. The electric shiver of pirouetting snipe and the rising kettle sound of curlews fill the morning air.
As the sun heats the marsh, turtle doves start purring from a stand of bushes. An elk, hiding in the beaver-coppiced willows, bursts away from you with a disgruntled yell. A family of ravens croak at something in the woodland far beyond. It could be the local lynx, with a freshly caught roe deer, but you will not see it this morning. You’ve not seen it in ten years.
The air is layered thick with skylark song. Red-backed shrikes pop up on bush tops. High on their menu, a dung beetle saunters past, looking for a place to dig a tunnel, in which to hide his precious cargo. A wild cattle bull, quietly browsing the hawthorn, gazes at you with placid lack of interest.
Beyond the valley, a wavy world of birches, apples and the iron frame of English oaks shed their mist. Something is complaining; it sounds as if someone’s put a pillow over an angry kestrel. It’s a wryneck, calling harshly for its mate. In an open stand of trees, you pick out the boomerang circuit of a bird on an invisible string. Spotted flycatchers are seeking the first of the morning’s butterfly clouds.
Giants take to the skies. Bugling cranes fan out from the valley’s reedy heart, nudging one another as they float over your head. The lumbering rectangle of a white-tailed eagle rises from its willow nest. Soon there are several in the air, circling the marshes to fish. Then, something of the past: something too large and extraordinary to still exist. A Dalmatian pelican. On three-metre wings, the curly-headed giant crosses the valley without a single flap.
How wonderful to have all this in Britain. How amazing that against all the odds, we have places where our natural heritage runs free, creating tens of thousands of jobs for rural economies – bringing new enjoyment to the lives of millions. Who would have thought, fifty years ago, that such things would be possible? How proud we must be of these, our own wild places, how pleased that we do not need a passport to enjoy exceptional nature.
Except – as things stand, there is little prospect of such a future. In 2019, Britain has no such places. And, as the current consensus stands, it never will. Your grandchildren will not hear the purr of a turtle dove or the drone of a hundred bees. They will never learn the song of a nightingale or understand the meaning of ‘like moths to a flame’, let alone smile at the prospect of a pelican. They will walk in factory landscapes even more silent than those of today.
We are now approaching what some scientists term the sixth mass extinction. Since 1970, there has been a 58% decline in the number of fish, mammals, reptiles and birds worldwide.2 With many British wildlife species accelerating in their decline, who is to say quite how much poorer our grandchildren’s world will become?
In Britain, we have been removing fauna from our island for many millennia. Now, as the insect food chain collapses around us and the populations of many fragile birds become isolated and vanish, turtle doves are set to be extinct in under ten years’ time. Wood warblers, nightingales, cuckoos, curlews, willow tits and many others free-fall to extinction. Forty-four million individual British birds have vanished since 1966.3 Wildlife bleeds from our countryside and from our daily lives.
We might blame climate change, or migration patterns, but such declines cannot be seen in the older countryside of Hungary, Romania or eastern Poland. In the last two hundred years, Britain has driven more species to the brink than any other European country. With models of conservation management having reached their limits, unable to save landscapes or rebuild our broken food chain, it’s time for a new plan.
We need to restore the huge areas in our country where nature can look after itself, and many of the native mammals that once took care of our wildlife and our birds. Britain has all the space it needs for nature. Over 82% of British people live in urban areas.4 Just 6% of our island is built upon.5 Snowdonia is larger than Kenya’s famous Maasai Mara.6 The Cairngorms is still half the size of Yellowstone.7
Birds are not dying out beside us, swallowed by new housing, but vanishing from our rural deserts – places where we have all the space needed to save them. Such areas, with failing or damaged economies, await the return not just of our wild heritage, but of thousands of new jobs – and billions in income.
With everything to play for, let’s take the initiative. Let’s be the first generation since we colonised Britain to leave our children better off for wildlife – the first to restore the landscapes that rightfully belong to our country. It’s time, at last, for conservationists not just to complain about what they dislike, but to say what they would like.
This book takes you back to when our species first set foot on these islands, revealing the fantastic wildlife that we once had and how this has changed over time. It explains why British birds are vanishing – and how they can be saved by restoring ecosystems and rebuilding the food chain. Then it sets out ideas for what we could have again – how that is possible – and how doing so would benefit not only our wildlife but our economy, leaving our country better off in many more ways than one. In the words of the great conservationist Alan Watson Featherstone, ecological restoration is a work of hope. This book aims to show where that hope lies.