‘Let nature be nature!’ is the philosophy of the Bavarian Forest National Park. Nowhere else between the Atlantic Ocean and the Ural Mountains is such a large area of forests and moors allowed to grow and develop without the interference of man.1
Now here’s an interesting thought. We have all the space we need in Britain for nature. We are not a crowded country. With over 82% of the population of Britain living in urban areas,2 there are vast swathes of depopulated empty space. When did you last walk on Dartmoor, Snowdonia or the Cairngorms and find yourself surrounded by road traffic and the looming shapes of buildings? These are large empty areas in which we could rekindle ecosystems, restore our birds and massively enhance our economy. At present, however, they are the largest ecological and financial waste of space in Europe – Britain’s national parks.
In fairness, our national parks were never established as areas for the preservation of nature, nor for their biological or economic riches. They were, instead, established as cultural parks, with some nod to nature, a far larger recognition of landscapes immortalised in poetry (however denuded those landscapes might be), and a lot of nostalgia thrown into the equation to boot. In this, our national parks have partially succeeded. The drystone walls are still standing. The architectural heritage, our cultural museums, have been protected from insensitive development. But no other country, with such enormous areas of depopulated space and a national passion for the natural world, considered this model a good idea in the first place, nor the most economic. And right now, our national parks are not only nature deserts, compared to their potential, but jobs deserts as well.
Whilst Poland’s national parks, with floodplains and bison, profit-making birds and lynx-stalked woodlands, cover just 1% of its land mass, England’s national parks cover 9% of its surface. In Wales, that figure rises to 20%.3 This should mean that rather than having the most degraded wildlife in Europe, we should actually have among the best. Turning to the largest depopulated areas in Britain, therefore, would seem a useful place to start, in the quest to restore our nation’s lost wildlife.
The website of the Northumberland National Park states, twice, as it runs out of wildlife highlights, that it forms an area of ‘dark sky’. The Brecon Beacons National Park website reminds us of the same.4 Dark sky means a lack of street-lights. A lack of streetlights means a lack of settlements. England’s national parks contain just 0.6% of its population, Wales, 2.7%.5 It is truly exciting that our national parks harbour dark skies, because dark skies point to an absence of people and the possibility of an enormous resurgence in nature.
Quite how large our national parks are, quite how sterile and robbed of treasures, only becomes apparent when we compare them to those in other countries. Yellowstone National Park is famous for its mosaic ecosystem. At the time of writing, 95 wolves, in 10 packs, hunt 4,000 bison and 30,000 elk, whilst 500 brown bears and 280 black bears plant trees by defecating seeds and fertilise the land by dropping fish. Canada lynx, bobcats, otters and beavers all shape the ecosystem in smaller ways. Of Yellowstone’s 300 regular resident, wintering and breeding birds, the ‘alpha’ line-up includes eagles, pelicans, cranes and ospreys. Yellowstone is large, for sure – it covers an area of around 8,990 square kilometres.6 Scotland’s Cairngorms National Park is smaller. At over 4,500 square kilometres, however, it’s still half the size of Yellowstone: a huge, depopulated area with national park status. It doesn’t, however, have even a quarter of Yellowstone’s wildlife, natural landscapes or associated job opportunities.
The Lake District National Park, recently awarded UNESCO World Heritage status as a scenic set of farms for sheep,7 comes in at 2,362 square kilometres.8 Snowdonia, as devoid of native ecosystems as of eagles, covers 2,130 square kilometres.9 By contrast, Kenya’s Maasai Mara covers a mere 1,800 square kilometres.10 Now, that’s quite a thought. The Mara, contrary to television depictions, is in fact highly populated. People and wild animals share the landscape, sometimes uncomfortably. But nonetheless, this tiny area of the world’s surface harbours giant grazers, apex predators and over 400 species of bird in its grasslands – all an area smaller than Snowdonia.
The North York Moors National Park, its burned hills managed as grouse farms, its forests as crops of spruce, covers over 1,400 square kilometres. Poland’s Biebrza Marshes National Park, with its freestyling rivers, wolves, elk, white-tailed eagles and almost every vanished or vanishing British lowland bird still thriving, covers just 590 square kilometres.11 The North York Moors has three times the space of Biebrza for wildlife, nature safaris and thriving ecotourism. Yet in its spruce and heather deserts, only the relics of life survive.
Worldwide, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) ranks protected areas on a scale from one to six: one being wilderness, of the kind seen in the world’s most cherished national parks from the Serengeti to Yellowstone, and six being areas where the best that can be said is that resources are responsibly harvested.12 Surprisingly, Britain’s national parks make it as far as a five – culture parks of scenic value. We do not even have one park that achieves a four.
One comment you will often come across is that these rural spaces are where Britain grows its food and feeds its people. This is entirely untrue. Only the South Downs National Park is dominated by arable crops. The rest of our national parks are sparse and unprofitable farms of sheep, and more intensive crops of timber, and entirely optional hunting factories for grouse and deer.
Britain is blessed with space. But why is space in our country so wasted and abused? Why can highly developed countries with thriving economies, such as Germany, enjoy profitable lynx, wolves and national parks left to nature and the bounties that ecotourism provides, yet we cannot?
Our national parks are not national – and they are not parks. On any close inspection, most are designed as timber-growing areas, scenic farms or hunting grounds, with ample space for people to inhale fresh air. Britain’s Big Six crops – cereals, dairy, forestry, sheep, grouse and deer – are as dominant inside our national parks as they are outside them. Most of our national parks are factories. To ring the changes, the output of these factories changes as you move around the country. Several of the most promising areas for nature reconstruction in England and Wales are meeting places between intensive farms of spruce and massive areas of sheep-grazing. The Brecon Beacons, the Lake District and Snowdonia fall into this category.
On the purple heather spines of northern England, the factories change their output. Intensive grouse crops vie with sheep and forestry for space. In this category, you have the Peak District, the North York Moors, the Yorkshire Dales and Northumberland National Parks. Sadly, we have no ‘spare’ English uplands where natural beauty and its economic potential has space to develop. This is all we have.
Look at these national parks on an aerial map, and you can, for yourself, soak in the square scarring of bald purple hills, seen nowhere else on earth. That is the scorched heather of the grouse moor. You can trace the deep greenery of same-age spruce, or the pale green of sheep pasture. Welcome to your northern English national parks. Don’t rush to visit them. Better to feel alive.
Among the moors, the postage stamps of Yorkshire’s industrial valleys teem with far more life. Here you can hear willow tits buzzing away in thickets, watch long-eared owls hunting old grasslands at dusk, and enjoy courting black-necked grebes, flashing their red and gold ear-tufts on ponds that swallowed industry decades before.13 Or you could visit the Farne Islands, with terns diving ferociously onto your head as eiders coo with quilted disapproval. Here you will not need to be sold the idea that these places are rich in nature. You will, instead, be immersed in the fullness of our deafening seabird cities. When you feel the wild, it becomes far easier to realise how you are being robbed of it elsewhere.
Further north in Britain, Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park pushes life to the very margins. In old pines beside the water’s edge, you can find ospreys. The evocative calls of black-throated divers haunt the larger lochs. Little birch woods trill with willow warblers and redstarts. But the wider landscape is desolate. In 2017, I drove for miles past what resembled the result of a bombing raid on a timber factory. Huge areas of the park were being harvested for non-native trees, and these crops are visible, too, on the satellite photos.14 Other areas were extensive sheep farms, taking up vast areas relative to their economic output.
In southern England, some parks are quieter yet. Exmoor’s ancient woodlands are full of charm and mystique, but so small and isolated that birds vanish from them each summer.15 Its uplands are drained of grouse, birds of prey and breeding waders. A survey of Exmoor undertaken in 2011–2012 indicated that ‘half a pair’ of curlews might remain.16 Until recently, Exmoor’s ponies were proven to create diversity for wading birds. Now, large areas simply lie neglected. Sodden bracken and silence are in charge. Without natural stewardship, there is only absence – absence of curlew song, absence of resurgent trees, absence of everything but wildlife decline. Extraordinarily, each year, many of these hillsides are burned in rotation, destroying insect life and the basis of a food chain. Few uplands tantalise more than Exmoor. It appears wild. It is simply empty.
The South Downs National Park apparently celebrates the ‘rolling’ nature of the countryside. The ‘rolling’ effect is produced by the removal of nature. Farming crops is not a cultural tradition for most people, but an industry supporting our diets. Surely a national park might be expected to conserve something more: something rare, wonderful and in need of actual protection.
Some of Britain’s national parks offer more sense of how a future could look. Dartmoor’s ancient woodlands protect wood warblers and willow tits; its wooded moors hold the strongest population of English cuckoos; moths and bats attest to a less intensive landscape, with scruffy areas for the small things to thrive in. You can stumble across many a spotted flycatcher on a woodland edge. The northern section, currently military-owned, offers true rewilding potential.
The New Forest is the only national park where a significant reminder of a rich ecosystem can still be found. Forestry blights a sizeable proportion of the woodland. Unchecked deer herds prevent the nectar layer and bramble from feeding the trees with caterpillar food. Heathlands are burned. But the ‘core’ of the New Forest has survived: a mosaic of rich ancient woodlands – the very best we have – where free-roaming herbivores still shape and maintain the varied landscape.
The Cairngorms, holding almost all of our capercaillies and most of our last wildcats, act as an important refuge. Most of Scotland’s native pine pastures grow here and could expand over time. In the Spey valley, more dominated by woodlands than grouse moors, the prospect of returning predators such as lynx, and woodland-edge species like elk, is far closer to being a reality than elsewhere. Yet much of this vast landscape remains yet another farm for deer and grouse.
The Norfolk Broads juggle interests slightly better. There are cranes, bitterns and many other birds. Otters move along the waterways and there’s scope for beavers here as well. There’s some tolerance of low-lying marshy land, paving the way for possible reintroductions of our long-lost fenland birds: colonies of ruff and hordes of noisy black terns. Wilder landscapes, such as the crane-rich Horsey Mere, exist alongside profitable farms.
The Pembrokeshire Coast is an interesting park because it’s linear. Linear habitats in Britain, like north Norfolk’s coast, tend to fare better against ‘big’ land uses because there isn’t enough space to tame the land. Already choughs, cliff-nesting peregrines and seabirds move unhindered along the coastline, and it’s not impossible to imagine a future in which wild horses have the run of the coastal strip.
If we rewilded our national parks, Britain would see an infinitely richer wildlife, the kind that the citizens of an impoverished dictatorship like Belarus enjoy but we, as a nation of wildlife lovers, currently have no chance to appreciate. Perhaps more surprisingly, our country would also see a far richer jobs market and revival in its dying rural communities – and that is every bit as important. If this seems hard to believe, then read on to the end of the book.
The first obstacle to overcome, however, is entirely down to Britain’s conservationists. Right now, we have no idea what we, the millions of wildlife lovers who fuel an entire sector of the economy – ecotourism – would actually like our national parks to look like.
We believe that the cultural and natural landscape can and should co-exist in harmony ... we are demonstrating this by delivering natural public benefits alongside the sheep-farming operation.
—Wildlife charity press release, supporting World Heritage Status for the Lake District17
The fact that our national parks are factories for spruce production, loss-making sheep lawns, unprofitable dairy ranches and farms for grouse and deer is a national embarrassment and a massive waste of jobs. But this has come about in part because our nature charities are prepared to settle for the 1%, and they, in turn, take their lead from you and me. Are we really happy with that? Or are we too easily conned as to what constitutes success?
Before accepting the state of our national parks as inevitable, travel to see as many others as you reasonably can, or read about them all. Nobody in Spain, where national parks are refuges of the Spanish eagle and Iberian lynx, of cork oak forests and steppes buzzing with bustards, would take you seriously if you walked them around the Brecon Beacons and proclaimed it a national park. The more you and I travel, the more you and I look around at what other countries have, the less easily we will be deceived. We’ll find it increasingly embarrassing that our country has sunk to a place where most of our wildlife is preserved in one or another kind of crop. We’ll wake up to the degradation of it all. Then, we’ll want to settle for more.
In Snowdonia, one day, you could watch the sun turn orange below skies filled with displaying snipe, cattle-grazed meadows with turtle doves, new oakwoods bubbling with wood warblers and broken birch woods with black grouse. Lynx, deer, horses, cattle, elk and eagles could one day, again, be living in those hills.
On what are now the burned hills of northern England, elk safaris could happen within your lifetime – on thriving hunting estates that benefit the wider public too. There would still be curlews, stewarded by wild grazing animals, but also many an eagle in the skies. This is an entirely possible future, an economic one – if we work out how to ask for it, in a way that landowners and government can understand.
Farming and forestry, which National Parks England acknowledges is ‘responsible for managing the vast majority of the National Park area’, contribute 13,500 full-time jobs within England’s national parks, just a tenth of all jobs within the park.18 This is under a third of the parks’ 48,000 jobs in tourism.19 We must think about the jobs potential if these places thronged with wildlife. It is an exciting truth that, with our population for the most part living in urban areas, most of our gross domestic product (GDP) is created in just a small percentage of our land. This opens the possibility that in the years to come, money and investment, in ecotourism and rural job creation, will stay within our country, but be exported out, in part, to ever-growing rural ecotourism economies.
In the following chapters, we’ll envisage future models of extensive hunting, where the owners of grouse moors and deer estates make infinitely more profit, and leave an infinitely better legacy to everyone, by rewilding and diversifying their estates. We’ll discover how we could keep rural traditions alive, without writing off the entirety of Wales to the country’s 1% of taxpayer-funded farmers. We’ll envisage Somerset’s marshes in 2060, expanded to ten times their present size – with enormous rural income, and pelicans. We’ll explore a future where timber and ‘wild’ forests split – so that we grow our timber in some areas, and in others we let wild animals manage truly wild woods. We’ll explore how we can all help bring nature back into our towns and villages. And lastly, how our conservation charities can move from being the most cautious and paralysed to the boldest and most visionary in Europe.
As human beings, we are wonderfully positive creatures. It is easy to ignore anger about the dying natural world around us. Negativity breeds only resentment and complaining has not, for decades, won back our nation’s wildlife. What is harder to ignore, however, is a vision of how our national heritage could one day look. And if our national parks cannot provide all of our spacious wildlife areas, then here’s an even more promising thought. Even without them, we still have all the space we need. Really?