CHAPTER NINE

Humans

Golden by dusk, white by night, a barn owl floats across Salisbury Plain, her disc-orbed face turning as she drifts, listening – acute. She can discern the shuffle of a field vole, but the line of sight is far from clear. She works her way along the tarmac path that splits the firing range in two. Here, she has been successful many times. Voles have friends. And when friends decide to meet up, the owl may be in luck. She continues her familiar, linear journey, waiting for that one impatient moment when a vole puts itself on display. She quarters relentlessly. The whole grassland is squeaking – this is a lottery of numbers. At last, a huddled brown form appears on the tarmac path. The owl flutters, pauses, drops like a pillow in free fall. Seizes supper. She has three hungry mouths to feed and heads home; effortlessly cutting the miles on taut, elastic glides. An ancient oak looms ahead.

As the owl approaches, she does not pause to reflect on the extraordinary nature of her nest. Her home might best be described as a tree within a tree. Hard-edged, the pale wood has been hewn by a creature who presumably spent some time up here, hard at work, but has since vanished from sight. The dark, square hole is now lined with three pink and white mottled faces, midnight eyes expectant and demanding. The wooden cave appears to have sprouted from the limb of the oak, yet is much younger than the tree. The owl barely pauses on arrival. Gifting the perfectly preserved vole to her scrum of chicks, she has barely alighted before she takes off again, leaving the owlets to scrap it out within their neat, square home. On closer inspection, the owl’s house becomes stranger again. Its wooden flanks incorporate a second door, but that door has been sealed shut. The roof is resinous and the freshly fallen afternoon rain has beaded on the top. And studding this lofty tree cave together are serried ranks of bright, steel screws.

Millennia before, as early settlers arrived in numbers to hunt the wild horses, cattle and deer of Salisbury Plain, barn owls may have been far scarcer even than today. Sixty per cent of Britain is estimated, prior to the Bronze Age, to have been covered in various forms of scrubland, wood pasture and dense-canopy woodland, where the tawny owl and perhaps the eagle owl would have reigned supreme. Our fenlands would often have provided feeding grounds for barn owls, but seldom a safe, cavernous home: on a natural floodplain, giant veteran trees like willows would have been not only uncommon but also hugely contested. The barn owl is a gentle bird. Many others, even jackdaws, can muscle it from its home. But tawny owls, and eagle owls, especially, will kill barn owls outright. So too will that red-eyed woodland fury, the goshawk. Barn owls may always have been uncommon in the onetime natural world here. Now, though they have been endangered by modern farmland practices, there is another keystone species shaping their fortunes, their hunting patterns. A species that now crafts the nesting sites of most barn owls in Britain. Ourselves.

The barn owl nest box is one of the endless inventions that we, the world’s dominant ape, have invented to not only mitigate the effects of our occupation here, in Britain, but to actively provide homes for the creatures around us. Our ingenuity in this regard, especially here at home, has been profound. In the UK alone, we can house more than 50 of our regular 200 breeding bird species in nest boxes, and many of our bats. We are the only species on Earth to have consciously created hedgehog dens and newt ponds, false banks for sand martins, fake nests for swallows, scrapes for avocets, gardens for butterflies, green roofs for insects and perhaps, most wonderfully of all, patrols and crossings for the common toad. There is nothing that, if we put our mind to it, we cannot invent to help the natural world – and, in some cases, to better nature in doing so.

There is also no doubt that whilst beavers and whales, bees and boar, free-roaming herbivores and their predators and the wild wonder of regenerating trees can rebuild our shattered land, there is only one truly dominant species on our island – and that is us. We must be the guiding hand, the steward of stewards. Whether with firmer touch on the lands where we live, or farm, or lighter touch in those lands we leave to self-generate, self-govern and grow ever wilder and more self-sustaining over time – we remain in charge. Beavers cannot release themselves, wolves cannot swim the channel, and no species can recover to govern ecosystems, even the great whales, unless we allow them to do so. In this regard, all cornerstone species answer to us. We have become, and remain, the greatest cornerstone species of them all. We can reshape landscapes, and wild lives, on a scale that even the vast elephants of times past could never do. We are, collectively, the most powerful of megafauna ever to have grazed and hunted the Earth.

Until the past thousand years, it might be argued that we have played this role with at least some kind of balance. Whilst the giant animals fell to our need to eat, many of the smaller ones survived. Whilst we felled large areas of woodland (indeed, most British woodlands were gone before Roman times), we did not erase the woodland ecosystem. Whilst we farmed widely, we also created rich grasslands: we reformed the land and reshaped the fortunes of its species, but we did not erase. Whilst we hunted our marshes, and most probably ate some species, such as pelicans, out of existence entirely, we had not mastered the art of draining land. Water, and rivers, were a harvested resource – but not imprisoned, or removed entirely from the landscape, by human activity. From the land, we hunted whales at first in small numbers, harvesting close to our shores. We were a pre-industrial species; one growing in numbers but not, as yet, entirely dominant. But as we grew ever more so, our wish to shape and control the land around us grew.

Quite why Britain’s apes exterminated so much life, so early on in our history, and so completely, is a question we may never fully unlock the answer to, but the first and most obvious fact is that we were island colonists. When hunter–gatherers followed the herds across Doggerland into what is now Britain, they had no idea we would soon be cut off from our neighbours – but cut off we were. Whatever wild animals, unable to fly (or make boats), were here, were here to stay and, once removed, would be gone forever. Horses went first, then aurochs and elks. Bears followed, then lynx, beavers, wolves and boar – and others, like the great whales, were eroded away, first around our coasts and then further out to sea. Trees and soil, essential for our own survival, were treated more gently in places – reformed to suit our needs. Grazing animals, too, became reformed to our will. But our island nature increasingly left little room for wilder contenders to the throne.

In spite of this, we became systematic, methodical and determined in our eradication of some cornerstone species very early on – though rarely for one, cohesive set of reasons. Beavers were hunted for their fur and castoreum, whereas wolves were hunted as competitors (and for fur) with a ferocity that outmatched our European neighbours.

By the Middle Ages, our desire to tame the natural world around us grew in intensity and purpose. Those creatures, such as wildcats and eagles, which had until now shared the food-rich environment we had stewarded, at times quite well, would be hunted down under Tudor vermin laws. In each parish, bounties placed on our wild creatures proved devastatingly effective in their eradication, often, like the chough, included within the Vermin Lists and eradicated from huge swathes of our coastline entirely. And so, our role, even 600 years ago, became ever more geared towards outcompeting all other animals and destroying the remaining wilderness around us. As we began to industrialise, the Great Fens would be drained and our conquest of the land-at-scale, beginning with our deforestation in the Bronze Age, grew almost complete, as we mastered at last those areas of land once dominated by the power of flood.

Even centuries later, we would still prove useful stewards of a tamer version of the natural world. Prior to 1800, the countryside still held a teeming aspect that none alive can now remember. Hay meadows, orchards, small fallows and woods, unchecked streams and brooks and lightly grazed farmlands still recalled many aspects of habitats created by the original stewards. Osier beds became accidental nods to the coppicing actions of a now forgotten rodent, thorn-studded farmlands recalled a time where cattle shaped large tracts of land, before hedgerows, confinement and fields. As we heavily hunted the deer in our woodlands, we would have effected change in woodland flora, recalling, to some extent, the long-forgotten influence of lynx and wolves. And whole families of fauna, from bats to insects, were yet to feel our wrath. Cockchafers were so abundant that upon dying en masse, they could clog the wheels of riverside mills. Walls of white butterflies from France moved in visible waves across the Channel each summer. The air would have been black with swallows and the bees loud. Life itself remained – with us, beside us, and in extraordinary abundance. Abundance of this kind is, in fact, something that most of us alive today have never witnessed in Britain, outside of a few refugia, like our seabird cities, where it still remains: preserved only on the very edges of the land.

By the early nineteenth century, we had become the first truly industrialised people in the world. Everything would change; our role as stewards would transform forever. As the countryside became a means of yield, feeding ever more hungry mouths, the small, coppiced, messy and varied world of our farms would grow ever simpler, ever more homogenised and ever more silent. Pastures, once untilled and anthill-rich, would give way to croplands; rivers would be locked into straight courses by feats of brilliant Victorian engineering; as destructive to the natural world as they were, and are, impressive feats of human ingenuity. Railroads and canals allowed resources to travel swiftly across our lands and overseas. And the air itself transformed, as factories blackened our lungs and the sky. The Industrial Ape was born – and our role as a beneficial steward, even some of the time, was coming ever closer to an end. Whales were hunted as an industry; entire species, as large as the blue whale, consigned to history in our waters.

By the early twentieth century, we had for the first time the ability to create total order in the world around us; order that often made way for just one species’ progress and stability: ourselves. Chemicals, the perfected outcome of a century’s industrialised progress, would allow us to reset the soil each year, and eradicate the tiny competitors, like the cockchafers, that we had overlooked for so long or, indeed, had been unable to remove even had we wished. The farm became, or had already become, an industrial unit. Old shepherding ways, whereby animals were moved constantly through landscapes, effecting variety in the farmed landscape, gave way to ever larger, static and industrial herds, or flocks, who mowed everything to the ground. Sameness replaced variety in the tilled landscape as much as the herded one. And over time, the need for urban conformity, as well, would turn our ivy-clad villages into ever tidier affairs. Everywhere, as sameness grew, our capacity to allow life, or even ignore it, was vanishing at an alarming rate.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s came a critical moment in human awareness. We began to notice, at last, the growing silence around us. By this stage, the environmental movement was nascent – but the industrial movement to rid our lands of all but food, order and us was rampant. It would take further decades before, at last, the Ape Aware would emerge.

In the past 50 years, in Britain more than in most European or indeed global countries, our divorce from the natural world, and our role as its steward, has continued apace. Disastrous policies paid farmers to cleanse those last habitats, such as orchards, hay meadows or fallows, which had acted as refugia for centuries. Commercial forestry blackened the land, but no agency funded the recovery of our relict ancient woods. Wading birds, prime indicators of our relationship with the soil, vanished as farms were drained, wet corners made dry, soils compacted and the insects within them hammered remorselessly. Marginal species, whether hedgehogs or whinchats, became history as margins, too, became a thing of the past. The countryside had become a factory at last, and each decade, that factory was perfected. The effects are still being seen every year. Cuckoos, once common in farmland, have become starved refugees, clinging on in those landscapes where the small things, like hairy caterpillars of large moths, survive in abundance.

If our relationship with the natural world is, for the most part, fundamentally broken, then we have at our disposal, albeit not always in one place, or one person’s mind, all of the tools to fix it. We are an industrious and inventive people, and whether in the farmed environment, the wilderness, the urban world or the infinite blurred margins in between, we have all the tools needed to become the greatest steward of them all. The greatest tool, however, is human ingenuity. Right now, as the great Sir David Attenborough once said, ‘We are the cleverest species on our planet. Now, it is time to be wise.’

Whilst elephants, beavers, boar, cattle, bees and many other species that did, do or could again govern areas of our land, are possessed of sophistication and intelligence, no species is quite so capable as ourselves of using intelligence to good effect. We alone can design cities of a complexity to beat termites, or create musical scores so complex yet absolute that symphonies such as Mozart’s can endure for hundreds of years. We alone can translocate other species around the world, design large-scale environments to the finesse of a millimetre, invent global travel, standardise global language and communicate remotely. Restoring the natural world around us should, on paper, be far easier than the vast majority of our species’ other achievements.

To date, the greatest problem worldwide has been that, as we have grown, the natural world has shrunk. As such a new species, we have failed to realise that our own survival is dependent not upon ourselves, but upon the natural world around us. That we are not an observer of nature but yet another species – one gifted, perhaps not for longer than a few thousand years more, to govern and control the planet and its resources. We are a species within nature: the cornerstone of cornerstones. As we begin to realise this role, a whole range of possibilities emerge.

In this book so far, we’ve examined how much certain animals can do to help us repair the natural world. Whilst every species in Britain has its place, the importance of some, their role, significance and effect, is undeniably greater than that of others. The whale creates worlds: the puffin lives within them. The beaver creates ponds: the otter, fishing in those ponds, does not. The more cornerstone species we have, the richer our world will become. But to give them space, and concede them power, brings us to that most fundamental of human flaws – ego.

Having tamed the natural world so early on in Britain, we have, in the past few decades, fallen well behind the efforts of many neighbouring countries when it comes to protecting and restoring it. Creating as much space for natural self-governance does not come easily to a country, or its people, so accustomed to near-total control of the landscape. But the more room we allow for other stewards to flourish, the more they will reward us in turn.

Fishermen and the fishing industry cannot create fish shoals from scratch, to be responsibly harvested by ourselves, seabirds and other fish – but whales can. It is in all our interests that whales proliferate, singing once more around our coasts, visiting our harbours and enriching our waters. It is in the interests of small upland farmers, especially in the ever drier summers to come, to keep water on the land at all costs. If the heritage of Lakeland farmers is to survive, they would be wise to call on the beaver. Given just 10m of space either side of a small river, beavers will give our upland farmers the aquifers needed to defy climate change – and carry on farming against all the odds. It is within the interests of arable farmers for bees to proliferate within our fields; only agribusiness, and short-term gain, now shout for the chemicals that destroy wild bee populations and dismember their minds. Indeed, almost all of the wild forces in this book, except, it must be said, the wolf, enrich most communities in which they are allowed to flourish and survive. And even wolves, through protecting new woodlands from deer browsing pressure, may in the centuries to come become allies of our foresters as, beaten by technology, wolf packs can no longer reach our cities or our farms. Others, like soil and trees, are simply essential for our own survival.

In other countries, especially in eastern and central Europe, some cornerstone species, from beavers to wolves, have simply crept back in. Over time, most have been accepted, and only a few, predominantly the wolf, remain a polarising force. Reactions to wild boar in France, or beavers in most of Europe, even in countries as crowded as the Netherlands, never reach the levels of fear and distrust we see amongst certain countryside lobby groups here in the UK. Our fear of other species remains greater than in most other parts of the world, and at times even a water-retaining rodent can become the subject of sustained and intense persecution. We have a lot of ego to let go, if we are to accept that other animals, beside ourselves, can shape and enhance our shared natural world.

One problem in this regard is that those deeply ingrained within our present countryside, whether farmers or gamekeepers, are invested entirely in a world that they know. For centuries, the landscape around them has been tamed, the green fields incrementally more silent but the general processes of managing the countryside for maximum yield – unchanged. The roles played by many land managers, farmers or keepers are time-intensive, and as such, do not allow for the travel needed to see that in many other parts of the world, from Scandinavia to Germany and the Netherlands, activities such as farming are simply integral parts of a thriving, wilder, wider environment, not a force to which all other wild animals must bow – or bow out.

Another part of regaining our role as stewards is to see ourselves as the Master Delegator of the animal kingdom. Why intensively coppice trees if a beaver can do it for us? Why carefully plant a meadow if a small harem of wild horses or herd of cattle can, over time, achieve the same effect, over a greater area of land, free of charge, using mechanisms for doing so that have evolved over millions of years? We must not feel so threatened, perhaps, by those who help us. Indeed, it is continually surprising how many British conservationists distrust or dislike wild boar, given that pond-digging, soil rotavation and fruit-tree dispersal are all activities that we, as human conservationists or farmers, cherish, respect and have come to perfect ourselves over time. Perhaps it is time to reframe a part of our role as the master steward. Rather than stepping out entirely, we are simply delegating; assigning to other species the job description to which they are best suited. Perhaps this, too, allows a little more dignity for us – and a little more room for our egos.

But becoming better stewards does not simply mean allowing cornerstone species more of a role in our environment – we are eminently able to create environments ourselves, as surely as the great apes of the Congo shape its clearings, plant its forests and aid its species. We are not merely a steward of others – we can create habitats in our own right. And if we can begin to create the right ones, in the right places, then we will once again honour our role as the greatest steward of them all.

Let's start small – with the very ground below our feet, with each square metre put before us. Let’s look down to the soil as a magical entity – that in itself is how every farmer once thought, in the age before fertiliser, before nitrates, before rigging the odds, before planting crops like maize that would, over time, leach the soil itself from the land. By looking to the soil, we appreciate there is a world beyond our feet. If each square metre becomes special, that engenders, over time, a very different mindset about how we use, or misuse, larger areas of our land – and so we must look to the soil as we seek to restore our relationship with the other species around us.

We do not owe our lives to crops, our settlements to stable food or our futures to plants; all of these depend upon the entity that has allowed us to farm, grow, develop and rule – the soil beneath our feet. In the past few hundred years, that soil has changed immeasurably, in its quality, composition – even in how much of it remains within our fields. We have forgotten how the soil should feed not only us, but also the wild creatures around us; what soil should sound like, look like and the dizzying array of wildlife it once sustained.

After centuries of de-wilding the land, British soils, until the invention of agricultural industry, appear to have stood the test of time better than many of the other environments that we had either degraded or removed. The soils of 100 years ago were still home to an extraordinary diversity – and abundance – of beetles. Cockchafers blackened the air; in 1911, more than 20 million individuals were collected in just 18km² of forest. We know that our pasture farmlands, until even the last four or so decades, reverberated to the tingling electric calls of lapwings, tail-drumming of snipe and the haunting melody of curlews; species intrinsically tied to the damp soil, and the rich, accessible pickings of invertebrates found beneath.

But, as early as the agrarian revolution, things began to change. Perhaps most significantly, for Victorian times, we began to convert huge areas of low-intensity pasture to cropland. And as we did, we began to disrupt something we would not understand for almost a century to come; the sheer complexity of fungal networks below the soil. This came to pass as we began to till – and to plough, with new intensity and new technology.

From the advent of the Rotherham Plough, invented in the late 1600s, we had been ploughing the soil, but we had, no pun intended, barely scratched the surface. Early forms of ploughing may have turned over the soil, but did not fundamentally rip it apart. Also, until the widespread growth of arable farming in the mid-nineteenth century, huge areas of pasture land, used for extensive and commons grazing, may never have been ploughed at all, containing, like the traditional orchards or pastures of today, or areas like the New Forest, an undisturbed subterranean world of fungi, beetles, moles and larvae, all working away busily below our feet. But over time, the plough would change.

By the mid 1800s, horse-drawn ploughs would become gradually redundant, as steam-powered ploughs were more effective. Then, by the 1920s, our relationship with the soil would change forever as the Ferguson tractor was born. We could now cut ever deeper, and faster, through ever larger areas of soil. Over the past 100 years, especially the past four decades, deep ploughing has begun to endanger the very soil itself. Mycorrhizal fungal networks, circuit boards of immense complexity, which even allow plants and trees to communicate below the ground, are ripped from the ground if soil is deep-ploughed. This can dramatically affect the health of trees such as oaks, whose deep-seated root systems reach out into farmland fields. Fragile invertebrate communities, too, are repeatedly reset from scratch, whilst invaluable networks of rodent burrows, some of which, like vole holes, become the home of bumblebees, are dismembered time and again. Deep-ploughing, creating oblivion of the soil biome itself, fosters desert more effectively than most other methods of farming. But this is not the only war we have waged against our soils and the myriad of creatures within. Indeed, it is only by looking to the farmland of other countries, less intensively managed than our own, that we see what we have lost.

If you drive along a roadside in eastern Poland, Hungary, Romania or many countries that were formerly in the Eastern Bloc, and whose agricultural practises mimic many of ours from more than 100 years ago, you may notice something unusual to the British eye. Not only will those roadside verges be invariably richer than our own, alive with flowers, butterflies and bees, but they will be shorter, too, with large areas of rich, open soil. The soil itself is replete and intact. Invasive chemicals – nitrates and phosphates – have yet to soak into every inch of the landscape through which you drive. Over-trampling, which can compact soil and render it useless to foraging ground-feeding birds, is rarely an issue when smaller herds of animals are herded through the landscape, and rarely kept, in large numbers, in one place for long. Anthills and beetles abound – pull over your car beside the road and you will see industrious dung beetles, or many other kinds, crossing the road, all bent on little journeys of their own. Watercourses often sparkle with clarity; in the absence of phosphates and nitrates, a fine array of plants interweave in an ecosystem unbroken by the rampant, dominant growth of just a few species. In much of eastern Europe, the soil itself is still intact – and alive.

What eastern European farmland reminds us of is that in Britain, if you once left soil alone, in a time before fertilisers washed through the land, and put just a few animals to graze, or rotated your crops every year, affording valuable protection to the earth itself, the soil would become an organism of fantastic richness and complexity. Indeed, the German conservationist Werner Kunz, in his book Species Conservation in Managed Habitats: The Myth of a Pristine Nature, explores how eastern Europe’s farmland now contains one of the most precious and vanishing habitats in Europe: soil. He makes the point that whereas nitrate fertilisers dominate western Europe – promoting the growth of rank grasses – the light-touch farmland of eastern Europe keeps the soil itself alive. Earth is nature’s starting culture, in which anthills, dung beetles and many other invertebrates come to thrive. In Britain, however, since the 1930s, fertiliser has become the signature word of our farming. This has affected our landscape in a way that now shocks nobody alive.

If you look more carefully next time you drive through the southern English countryside, the rampant growth of vegetation is striking. Our roadsides grow dense with rye grasses – the agricultural triffids of our time. Our communal parks, which in eastern Europe are often filled with bare, muddy areas and nest-building swallows, are lush lawns thick with just a few species of dominant rye grass. We completely take this for granted, but the pre-fertiliser state of the British countryside was not like this at all.

In an organic landscape, untouched by nitrates or phosphates, which now permeate our water supplies and rain from our shared skies, a huge variety of flowering plants, such as yellow rattle, contest the growth of grasses. Fertilisers have, however, transformed the British landscape – our farmland fields, fallows, watercourses and even our wilder areas – incrementally, but beyond recognition to any farmer who lived a century before.

Both nitrate and phosphate fertilisers act, in effect, to rig the productivity of the soil. They create pulses of sudden growth by providing fast-growing species (such as many crops) with the nutrients needed to thrive; often in the same place, year after year. Prior to the widespread use of fertilisers, crop rotation was required if arable farming was to stay viable. Under this older system, each crop planted would deplete certain nutrients from the soil. The next year, that field would be rested, allowing the nutrients to recover, or planted with a different crop – one which put the missing nutrients back in. Rotation is still practised more widely in areas of eastern Europe, and elsewhere, where the large-scale use of fertilisers has not been adopted. The result is a soil that is naturally rejuvenated, rather than artificially injected with the arable equivalent of growth hormones. Like most chemicals designed to promote monocultural crop growth, both nitrate and phosphate fertilisers have profound abilities to create sameness within both our soils and the life that grows within them.

From the centre of our fields to our roadside verges, what was once a chaotic jumble of poppies, cornflowers and many other arable ‘weeds’ has been removed, not only by targeted herbicides in recent decades, but also by decades of our rigging the soil itself. Nitrates and phosphates favour and create intensive growth of the few, over the slower, more-rambling growth of the many. As a result, dominant grasses now choke many of our landscapes; our watercourses, field margins and fallows, in place of a more varied fauna of plants. This sameness of vegetation also greatly reduces the heterogeneity of breeding sites for birds, and the nectar sources for a whole array of invertebrates. But fertilisers also achieve something else. In triggering sudden pulses of intensive growth, they effectively create grasslands where the soil is shaded, and its invertebrate treasures hidden from view, and this apparently subtle effect of fertiliser use has had profound changes upon our ecosystem.

Back in the time of John Clare and his local breeding wrynecks, and until the start of the twentieth century, farmland Britain was home to a wide diversity, and great abundance of species whose existence was predicated upon varied, open soils. Red-backed shrikes, beetle specialists, are visual hunters; targeting ground-dwelling dung beetles visible to them in pasture on the ground. Yellow wagtails may nest in dense grass cover, but they probe in open soils for food. Nightjars, still farmland birds in the early twentieth century, hawk for longhorn beetles over open soils, and on the ground. Starlings are heavily dependent upon leatherjackets.

Our fauna contains a wide array of species, from small invertebrates up the trophic cascade to their predators, who require short, diverse swards in order to survive. Whilst grazing herbivores can provide these conditions, fertilisers rapidly take them away, promoting a sudden jungle of overly dense vegetation, which immediately prevents the feeding of many other species. Anthills, for example, struggle to form in nitrate-sodden fields, and those that do are rarely discernible to species that feed upon them. By allowing a few dominant species of cultivated grassland to feast, fertilisers like nitrates and phosphates effectively prevent the functioning of an entire ecosystem of soil-feeders, evolved over millions of years in ecosystems where grasses and flowers grow surely – but slowly.

Today, you have only to drive through the eerily deep-green fields that cover much of lowland England to see the ultimate result. Here, at a landscape scale, nitrates are in charge of our soils – and the single-species green we see is not life, but its absence. By contrast, a diverse grassland, seen from a distance, or perhaps discerned amid a sea of fertilised farmland, is a more yellowed, chaotic affair; a place whose subtly shifting colours bely a wide array of plants and grasses, still intact, and competing, as they should be. But as more and more of our fields turn a deep pure green, that is a sign not of verdure but the slow extinction of the soil, as just a few minerals now dictate the few plants, crops or grasses that can thrive. Today, nitrates are so prevalent that they are carried in our clouds, as rain, falling, even in areas like the New Forest, where arable farming has never taken place. Fertilisers have changed our soils forever, even beyond those areas where they are applied.

Just as we no longer trip over anthills by the dozen, or pause to watch a small army of dung beetles exit a local cattle field, we are now beginning to forget the vast hatches of craneflies in our farmland fields; begotten of leatherjacket larvae below the ground – or, indeed, the hordes of nesting starlings that feed on those leatherjackets, too. Starlings, like wrynecks, are creatures of the soil – and they, too, are becoming increasingly imperilled within our agricultural system. And this comes down not only to the dense jungle of grasses that hide their feeding areas, or the compacted soils that inhibit their feeding, but also to the use of chemicals so effective that they are transforming our countryside entirely.

Of the many herbicides that have effectively weeded species such as turtle doves from Britain, alongside the vast majority of our grey partridges and other species dependent upon arable weeds, glyphosate stands out as the extinction king. In the past few decades, it has transformed the ease with which we can weed our soils of life, but it also sinks far deeper than we may care to think. Above the soil, glyphosate is startlingly effective at the job that intensive farming requires it to do; removing ‘weed’ species prior to crop planting, and therefore allowing the target crop to flourish unhindered by cornflowers, poppies or indeed almost any other plant. But glyphosate doesn’t only starve our wild species on the surface by removing food-plants and their associated insects – indeed, much of its devastation is far harder to see, and happens below the soil. Here, glyphosate reduces the activity and reproduction of earthworms. It is well known that earthworms act as the miniature ecosystem engineers of our soils; cycling nutrients and moving organic residues through the soil, and greatly enhancing soil decomposition. Now, even they are not beyond our reach.

If the war against our soils has been well documented when it comes to herbicides, our war against dung – and the rich world that dung once created – is an altogether stranger and less familiar story. In short, once upon a time, as animals moved, they passed rich dung into the soil. This happened for millions of years, and it happened well into the twentieth century, when cattle and horses were still followed by hosts of swallows, and red-backed shrikes still gleaned beetles from around cowpats. Then, something happened: we began to medicate our animals, and developed worming chemicals such as avermectins. This has transformed our pastures and grazing areas, and the fortunes of those species that depend upon them, not only in Britain but also across much of the developed world.

From the beetle-feeding little owl to cuckoos and nightjars, a whole range of avian invertebrate hunters, not to mention terrestrial mammalian snufflers like the hedgehog, depend upon animals like dung beetles to survive. Prior to the 1970s, analysis of the stomach contents of curlew – then a common bird and today endangered – showed that dung beetles formed a particularly vital food source; perhaps little surprise for an open-grassland and pasture species adapted, for millions of years, to feed beside and around grazing animals and the habitats they create.

Organic pasture systems, like those seen in some parts of our uplands, such as the cuckoo-rich, extensively grazed pastures of some Dartmoor valleys, still retain the conditions for dung, and beetles, to thrive. So too do some areas of northern England, where free-roaming cattle vector dung – and the varied life that dung created – across landscapes rich in the curlews and lapwings that thrive around beetle-filled pastures. But now, all too often, our pastures have fallen silent – devoid of little owls, curlews or lapwings – and that is in part because the very soil, and the very dung within that soil, has been chemically silenced. Across Britain, much cattle and horse dung is now bereft of life. The basis of a food chain, an ancient trophic cascade that once involved elephants and aurochs, and continued until recent times in our farmed environment, has been ripped out. Dung is often now mere dirt.

By worming our cattle, we ensure that in place of grass-rich compost passing through the animal and into the soil, where armies of dung beetles await (as can still be seen in the bird-loud wood pastures of Spain), instead, toxic chemicals are passed, in great quantities, into the soil. Dung beetle larvae, and many other beetle species heavily dependent upon dung, founder or die when they come into contact with the chemicals, passed by livestock, into the soil. Incrementally, over time, this apparently unassuming process can lead to devastation, wrought silently, across entire landscapes. One of the most extreme, documented examples of this has been seen in Australia. Here, vast herds of medicated cattle were leaving behind huge quantities of medicated dung. With scarcely any dung beetles left in the ecosystem to break the dung down, more beetles had to be reintroduced in order to break down the dung and sequester it back into the soil. Dung beetles are a vital component of the way our soils work. Not only do they provide food for a host of Britain’s vanishing species, they also move dung, and its power to create and enrich floral life, deep into the soil. Without dung beetles, the very means by which free-roaming animals vector nutrients across the landscape is removed. The ancient Egyptians rendered the dung beetle a god – and we ignore its importance at our peril.

Dosed with chemicals, with the pharmaceutical drugs passed in cattle dung, and filled with waves of phosphates and nitrates, Britain’s soil is not only washing away into the sea, and from farmland fields into our rivers – but also being sterilised within an inch of its life. But by looking to the rich life it once held, to the more-traditional farmland systems that endure in parts of Europe, and to the future we want for our own crops, our food, and ourselves – the soil too can be rewilded and restored.

Within just a few years of turning cattle back to grass, and removing the chemicals used to worm them, soils have begun to regain their dung beetles. Grazing those cattle extensively, across soils unsprayed and uncropped, has seen a return of anthills. As arable farmers have turned away from deep-ploughing the soil and towards a policy of ‘no-till’, so the mycorrhizal fungi that communicate between the roots of plants and trees, promoting their health and allowing them to network underground, have returned. And as rotating crops has become, once again, more normal practice on many British regenerative farms, so nutrients depleted in the previous year have been returned by the next crop planted, and the soil held in place for future generations to farm it. Given any chance, the soil remains the most robust of all wild forces in Britain. Now that most of the great whales and all of the wolves have gone, it will take great effort, expertise and cost to put them back. The soil, however, is a far more forgiving entity – if we allow it to recover, in time.

Soil is the substrate upon which many other keystone species depend. Grazing animals pass dung into it, fertilising it, vector seeds around a landscape – which fall into it – and create wallows, which, in flooding, become ponds for new generations of aquatic invertebrates and amphibians. Boar, in rotavating worm-rich soils in a growing number of our woodlands, can reset and transform soil into a chaos of new floral life – but only if drawn to the rich contents within. New plants and pioneering trees will colonise soil without human help, but their diversity, complexity and balance will founder if the soil has been rigged with nitrates or phosphates. Beavers, in flooding areas, and leaving damper soils in their wake, create the conditions for willows, aspen and rarer trees, like black poplar, to colonise – but only if the soil itself retains the ability to feed – and anchor – these species. Without healthy unfertilised soils, the zealous action of even a billion healthy honeybees will come to nothing, as the rich array of nectar-bearing plants they require are replaced by ever poorer monocultures.

Soil is self-evidently vital to the natural world and human life. As we begin to safeguard it once more, we will begin to rekindle the conditions to rebuild the world around us. Then, both we, and our fellow farmers and engineers, can once again get to work – creating a richer world for us to feed and thrive within.

In the past few years, we have seen many inspiring movements towards restoring our soil. Regenerative farming, a phenomenon barely heard of at the turn of the century here in Britain, is now a growing force in the countryside. Many farmers, who do not wish to sacrifice yield or turn back the clock and resign the land to nature, are nonetheless moving towards preserving the soil. ‘No-till’ farming, with protective cover crops, free from inputs such as fertilisers, has become gradually more commonplace, and the soil itself, sustained and better protected, has been able to better nourish a wider range of crops. Healing the soil takes time, but Gabe Brown, one of the leading lights in America’s regenerative farming movement, believes that it comes in five key stages. First, we must protect our topsoils at all costs, avoiding tilling unless we must. Bare soils must be protected, and the armour of leaf litter that covers them given shelter. We must vary what we grow, and not leach the soil of its integrity by planting the same, short-term crops in the same place, over and again. And we must avoid intensively grazing just single species of livestock, which trample and compact the soil. This, in turn, leads us to the question of how we might better deploy grazing animals in the future – animals, in the case of the cattle and horses, that once stewarded a far healthier landscape than what we have in Britain today.

Whilst some of the species in this book, such as whales or wolves, or even beavers and boar, are still unfamiliar to much of the British public, cattle and horses are familiar to us all – but the manner in which we, their guardians, have used them, has transformed in the past few hundred years. Since the time of enclosure, animals that once roamed shared landscapes have become confined in fields, and since the 1970s, the number of cattle in those fields has risen exponentially. Penned sheep effect an even greater degree of landscape sterility, razing huge tracts of our countryside to biologically unprofitable lawn. But we need not always graze animals this way.

Grazing animals once roamed continuously through their range, generally in social groups. They would have lingered longer, in greatest numbers, where forage, such as lush coastal saltmarsh or lowland meadowlands, were most to their liking. And on our larger farms, not only in our rewilded areas, we might replicate some of this. By breaking down field boundaries within farms, or communally grazing animals across small networks of upland farms, we can give more choice back to our grazing cattle; instead of confronting them with single fields of grass, by moving them through the farmland landscape we can effect a different set of outcomes. It is fascinating how, given any choice, many older breeds of cattle will browse hedgerows and trees within their fields; woodland, as much as grassland, is their preferred choice of forage. Even now, their aurochs’ instincts remain intact. By moving cattle continuously, we allow them to replicate some of their ancestral, free-roaming actions – instead of mowing habitats to the ground, they allow a future grassland to take hold after they have moved on. Of course, such decision-making by us requires farms with the space to do so. In many parts of eastern Europe, and indeed the oldest farmed parts of the UK, a field just abandoned by cattle, or horses, can, within a few weeks, transform into a rich grassland in its own right, provided the herd sizes have not been so large, or concentrated, as to raze plant-life to the ground. On our smaller farms, fences or dry-stone walls might not always be seen as a hindrance to replicating some of the actions of free-roaming animals. Indeed, if continuously moved, and kept in one place for just days at a time, cattle can still participate in ‘gardening’ a field without mowing it to the ground. It is indeed in these regrowing fields that lapwings and curlews, until recently so at home in the farmed environment, can still find food – and safe haven.

Free-roaming pigs, too, if continuously moved through the farmed landscape, not only have happier lives but can also effect some of the actions of wild boar in our wilder landscapes; disrupting the soil and creating, after they have moved on, rich and varied grasslands in their wake, freshly colonised by flowers. And by exercising our own intelligence in how we move animals, and as our farmers begin to understand more and more about how to replicate wild processes, both small farms and large-scale producers can contribute, once again, to protecting our soils, and putting grazing animals to better use in creating a diverse environment. This is not ecosystem restoration, but it is a viable solution for farmed, productive land – a solution that, by not erasing the soil, plant-life and dependent insect life in farmland, will once again allow the small things to thrive.

That said, we, as the keystone species, have become all too accepting of a country that is, most often, denuded and overgrazed; a country where grazing animals have, through our own mismanagement, run riot. If we are to reprise our role as stewards, we will need fewer, healthier, wilder animals. We will need to stop worming our cattle and rely instead on their feeding naturally, and moving, so as to reduce the risk of parasite infections from their own dung. We will need to reduce our reliance on large flocks of sheep, which denude huge areas of upland Wales, and western England, for few jobs and just a small percentage of our diet. We will need to eat less meat, and better meat, less often – fuelling the conditions in which our farmers can survive, by grazing fewer animals, less intensively, across larger areas of land. And herein lies another challenge for us all. We have become, over time, an intricately complex species. Decisions made in supermarkets percolate down into the denuded countryside in which we live, and the damaging policies we pay many of our farmers to implement on our behalf. Even finding where responsibility lies in such a situation is difficult and complex. The more we demand from the land, and the more factory farming we call for, the more those acting on our behalf will overgraze the land. The less we ask for, the more discerning we become, the more space, money and time we allow for regenerative farming to become, over time, the norm. This, in turn, leads us towards how we might better steward our wilder places too.

Trees and scrublands have often, in the UK, been seen to compete with the farmed environment, consisting, often, of enclosed pasture or croplands. But in many European countries, this conflict has already been solved. Silviculture, the practice of grazing animals like cattle and pigs within woodland, is widespread in areas like the hillsides of northern Spain, where wood pastures, replete with vanished British birds, like the wryneck, are a far commoner form of agriculture than they are here in the UK.

By moving cattle and pigs towards a more wooded diet, we not only create healthier meat, but we also farm animals in habitats closer to those their ancestors remember: woodland and scrubland. Over time, we may, in some areas, be able to make the field structure obsolete once again, creating farms of far greater landscape variety, where animals graze within a myriad of habitats – all of which are biodiverse and varied, but also feed the animal in question, contributing towards the quality of its meat and the gut biome of the grazing animals in question. Indeed, it is most readily apparent on visiting the more biodiverse farmlands of traditionally farmed Europe, that the integration of farmland animals into a wilder landscape is the greatest contrast with farming here in the UK.

With ingenuity, and open-mindedness, we could begin, like the Norwegians, to move our animals into woodlands, and scrublands. And then, over time, to plant more woodlands, and scrublands, across our farmlands too. In this regard, it is often laziness that prevents such readily achievable outcomes from entering the mainstream. Mechanisation has lost us our connection with the land. Herding animals through habitats takes more time, and more labour – but already, that tide is turning.

When it comes to producing our cereals, and other crops, we might also make more space for scrubland and trees within the farmed environment. The vast tractors and combines we now use predicate a landscape free from nuance, one where scrubland islands, fallows, linear rows of riverside trees and hedgerows must all bow out before the mass ploughing operation. But it need not be this way. In the past few decades, we have seen extraordinary miniaturisation of technology, from computers to phones and cameras. Might we not, if we put our minds to it, develop new forms of micro-farming, whereby far smaller fields are productively harvested by far smaller machines – or even large arrays of drones? Our ingenuity often comes to the fore during war, or indeed, pandemics, it would seem, but we are in a constant war to save the natural world around us. With the application of technology, the vast, silent monocultures of modern arable Britain could still cede to diverse, small fields, each growing varied outputs and, in aggregate, supplying the market with just a little less food than at present. Which, given that we waste a third of all our food, would create no net loss to our diets here at home.

The more we apply our intelligence to the soil below our feet, consider what could grow in it, graze it to maximum advantage and understand what varied grasslands, scrublands and woodlands could grow from it, the more varied solutions, for even small areas of land, become apparent. Not all of these solutions are new: indeed, one of the very best mixed land uses – the traditional orchard – has been around for centuries, but quietly ignored in recent times. Orchards provide powerful sharing arrangements between farming and nature. By default, their structure, of fruit trees, protective hedgerow scrub and pasture, provides myriad habitats in one place, and the oldest, rich in deadwood and nesting nooks, can replicate many of the best aspects of wilder woodlands. But orchards can also be eminently practical landscapes within which to work with nature. Apples, pears, cherries, plums, timber, charcoal and cider may be the more obvious products an orchard provides, but its sheltered network of branches shields pasture for cattle, and traditionally, orchards have been ideal environments in which to keep free-roaming pigs, like the Gloucester Old Spot. For one relatively small area of land to yield so many outcomes is perfectly possible, and at scale, the economics and output would add up. Right now, we all pay heavily for homogeny and silence – but we could, over time, begin to pay, as consumers and taxpayers, for local produce, variety and life.

As the only policy-makers in the animal kingdom, we have it within our grasp, all the time, and whenever we want, to put those policies to good use. If just one policy, the Common Agricultural Policy, has in recent times sponsored the homogenised oblivion of the natural world here in Britain, it is just as realistic that new policies, designed to sponsor farming with and within nature, could reverse that trend in a matter of decades alone. We need new policies, which pay generously for native fruit, and for orchards to be put back in. And this is just one of many policies we might create to help us live off the land, yet alongside our fellow species too.

Keeping grounded, we might also devise policies that help the wildlife sharing the urban world around us. Indeed, whilst personal freedoms are important, so too are rules, or human society would, as it has done in the past, descend into chaos. The rules we set in our cities are often quite rigid; they must accommodate, and yet also restrain, the needs and urges of tens or hundreds of thousands of people. Right now, many urban rules exist that wipe out the life around us. Street care and local council regulations enforce the mowing of verges, the incessant tidying of urban hedgerows, the bizarre leaf-blowing of parks, the removal of bramble, nettle and all kinds of other little havens for wild things, and the toxic deployment of glyphosate around us all. But what if we created a new set of rules – ones easy to follow for us, until such a time that we all, once again, attach innate value to the natural world around us? We could, for example, design our lawn parklands to be meadows, not the other way around. We could cordon off scrublands around our rivers and streams, and create allotment corridors in our cities, affording linear safe passage to species from bullfinches to hedgehogs. If we can master the planning of traffic lights and roundabouts, and urban plan to within centimetres, the skills already exist in our minds, and our laws, to achieve the same for the natural world.

At the same time, we might look with closer attention at where we, the Disturbing Ape, can actively benefit wildlife in the human and farmed environment. After all, since the disappearance of the mega-herbivores, the great habitat openers, we are the closest thing left. Even a golf course, grazed by humans for the striking of a ball into a hole, can become a riot of skylarks if its grass is left to grow just a few inches tall. To see ourselves as lost giant herbivores is not only fun, but ecologically useful as well. At the time of writing, farmer James Rebanks, in the Lake District, has begun seeking to replicate the lost effect of ‘elephant and rhino’ grazing on his upland farm, using the animals still very much available to us today. But there are already other farming systems that remind us how well we can play this role.

Large hay-meadow systems, as can be seen on the Outer Hebrides or islands like Tiree, off the west coast of Scotland, have a unique aspect perhaps never quite seen in nature, but perhaps never bettered by any wild species. Here, hay meadows achieve a density and diversity of flora rarely seen in wild habitats where, even in the old days, nomadic grazing pressure would have thinned out flowers, butterflies and bees. These little havens are our unique creations – we must cherish them, and learn from what we did right, even if those original actions were agricultural accidents. Now, we cultivate and protect hay meadows, redshanks and corncrakes by design. And as a reflective species, when we wish to be, we can now study and replicate our actions. Wherever we have become truly beneficial as a species in our own right, we must upscale those actions, one field at a time.

We have gone so far astray as stewards that even our tolerance of nettles, brambles, scruffy hedgerows and fallows has, in the past century, been lost, so there are many small steps to be taken before some of the big ones can. But as we begin to settle back into our role as decent stewards, the gradual move towards rewilding larger areas, especially our depopulated peatlands, and failing deer or grouse estates – becomes a more viable possibility. With our minds already attuned to playing our own role in the ecosystem with a sense of responsibility, it may, over time, became far easier to accept the skill with which beavers, boar or lynx play their roles, too. And so, from an incremental acceptance of nature, we can begin to super-size the scale and ambition of our actions, in restoring the natural world in all its unfettered diversity, strangeness and abundance.

As we begin to steward more lightly, and relinquish such an iron hold on the landscape, the normality of fallows and their bees, deafening songbirds in our villages, bats hawking moths around our streetlights, and even storks nesting on Sussex chimneypots are likely to become, over time, more and more normal. In central Europe, many villages exist within nature to such a degree that they can be barely perceived from a distance through a mass of trees and bushes. These kinds of small compromises we can readily aspire to, but when we get there, they will begin to add up – not only in terms of a growing abundance of life, but also in terms of a shifting cultural mindset towards the natural world. If we can all accept the small mess left by a colony of house martins, the greater chaos of a local beaver pond – with its frogs, fish and kingfishers – increasingly becomes something that, if not celebrated by all, is feared by only a strange few.

In the past year alone, attitudes in the UK towards one of our most important keystone species – the beaver – have indeed begun to shift this way, for the first time in perhaps almost a thousand years. A modest rodent already quietly doing its thing for decades in Estonia, Germany and even the Netherlands has, finally, been granted governmental safe passage to work its magic, albeit in a constrained fashion, along several British rivers. The beaver is almost back – but it still faces much fear, resentment and, at times, Medieval levels of misinformation. Whilst beavers actively promote the spawning grounds of fish, small lobbies still peddle the myth that salmon cannot jump beaver dams, forgetting, perhaps, that they did just this, or simply swam around them, for more than two million years before beavers were eradicated from Britain. Until recently, other small but voluble groups claimed that beavers ate fish. Yet, over time, like the belief that swallows hibernated at the bottom of ponds, future generations will laugh at our ignorance. Our now ever more detailed knowledge of the natural world is only a recent phenomenon – and as each generation develops and grows, such myths will slowly fade into the past. Provided, of course, that we can keep species like the beaver with us, enterprising, chewing, and healthy, until that time comes.

In this tidiest and neatest of nations, the positive response to beavers seen by most of the public, and most conservationists, represents another step forwards for us as responsible stewards of the landscape; stewards who are now, increasingly, making room for another beside ourselves. Yet it is not only landowners and farmers who fear a loss of control when an animal as powerful in the landscape raises its orange-toothed head into view. Ecologists, too, appear to regard the beaver, at times, with a distrust and fear that is unusual for those who study the natural world. For some time now, the orderly and well-documented world of British conservation has been built around the entirely erroneous idea that only we can create habitats for the other animals around us. Whilst there has been some nod to the ancestral role of cattle through conservation grazing, the idea that beavers and boar can create habitats for bees, butterflies, moths, lichens, fungi and many other orders without direct human intervention has been very difficult for the Conservation Ego to accept. Here, once again, we have struggled to let go. Boar, in particular, appear to incense some ecologists with their unpredictable behaviour. Those studying amphibians express particular concern that boar can, and do, eat tadpoles and newts: they do. Boar also, however, create thousands of new habitats for amphibians as their wallows flood, and whilst they will go back and eat some of a new pond’s colonists, being opportunistic and not scheduled in their eating habits, they do not eat them all. Such activities, however, are difficult to quantify – like much that is wild in the natural world. And this terrifies a certain breed of ecologist who, in Britain, has evolved, over time, to study the natural world as if it is a zoo, or each butterfly, moth and habitat a static exhibit frozen out of time.

Boar and beavers introduce chaos in place of order, and cyclicity in place of linear results, just as elephants do in the river valleys of Zambia. The difference is that we have become, in their absence, accustomed to a carefully documented and monitored natural world, where each precise conservation action yields a precise result. In turn, the degree of specificity amongst our ecologists is unusual. In the USA, a far more holistic approach to ecosystems is normal; observing not only the aspen, and the beaver, but also the wolf’s effect upon the aspen, the beaver and the wapiti. In short, conservation, too, can become myopic – expecting the natural world to confirm to hypotheses, present itself for perfect comparisons and interrogation, or be seen through the eye of a single invertebrate or lichen alone. Yet because the natural world, in its full interlocking chaos, does not function in this way, many ecologists have struggled, and will continue to struggle, with species such as beavers and boar. They introduce something terrifying to the orderly mind – the prospect of unknown outcomes. By and large, the action of ecosystem engineers tends to greatly enhance biodiversity and abundance, but not everywhere, or all the time. Beavers will sometimes flood the habitat of rare moths, boar will trample vegetation, dig things up, and eat a wide range of sometimes threatened species. As native fauna, however, they seldom, if ever, wipe them out, unless that species has already been driven to the brink by a far more destructive force: ourselves.

Rather than pitting animals as powerful, glorious and necessary as beavers against the interests of other single species, of lesser influence in the landscape, the solution surely lies in presenting these ecosystem architects with a playground big enough that all parties can flourish. Given landscapes large enough and rich enough, beavers and boar will finally attain their full influence in the landscape, and those few species who struggle with their presence will, given sufficient scale, be able to move, avoid or adapt to their presence. This brings us in turn to another type of acceptance we, as the dominant steward, need to make here in Britain: the acceptance of scale as a vital component of any natural system designed to stand the test of time. Scale is everything.

As we master the ability to steward small areas around us, our gardens and parklands, our regenerating farms and our relationship with the soil, trees and insects around us, it will become ever easier, over time, to confer on other areas – like the vast deer estates of Scotland, or those areas where farming will, inevitably, cease over time – the possibility of reversion to wilderness. Even here, we will not step out of the picture. A wilderness created by us is one that will require our continual involvement. Indeed, even in the most remote parks of southern Africa, elephants are collared, watering holes monitored, rhino patrols sent out, tourism exploited and some commercial resources harvested. Wilderness is not a world without us – it is a place we can create, and then manage in the very lightest of ways. And in those areas of enormous, unpopulated space – even now supporting few and dwindling livelihoods and jobs – the possibilities of scale become exciting indeed.

Areas like the Cairngorms, half the size of Yellowstone National Park, or the collective deer estates of the Highlands, almost twice Yellowstone’s size, have been seen for many years as the perfect area for the most ambitious nature restoration projects in Britain. This is not without good reason. There are few roads here. Huge areas of the Highlands, from Altnaharra to Lochinver, and the vast north-western spine of montane Scotland, from Ullapool to Torridon, Lochcarron to Mallaig and Glenfinnan, are, as seen from above, simply empty. Crofts line some of the outer fringes, but the heart of the north-western Highlands comprises deep forestry plantations, which show as the eye is drawn inwards on the map, and, for the vast majority of the area, heather, grass – and deer. This is not a wilderness, nor is it wild – nor is that emptiness good for a species who once lived here in far greater numbers: ourselves. In all, the Highlands of Scotland, most of all the north-west uplands, all the way to the vast Cairngorms National Park, are sitting, waiting, quietly, for the emptiness to turn into a glorious riot of life.

When it comes to creating a Yellowstone in our own country, there is no precedent for having done so. We slowly eroded our wildlife over millennia – but whilst rapacious in our quest to take it away, albeit often by accident, we have, as a species, been paralytically cautious about bringing it back on purpose. One thing you often hear is that the landscape has changed. In southern England, or the road-crossed moorlands of Yorkshire, this is, to a greater or lesser degree, true. In northern Scotland, forests have been cleared, Highlanders moved in, and moved out, but the space and possibility remains. You can stand in many vistas, from Forsinard to Cape Wrath, and south, for hundreds of kilometres, and in many places not perceive a single human artefact discernible in the landscape. But it takes more than space to bring wilderness back – it will take courage, togetherness and ingenuity.

In France, and especially in northern Spain and Portugal, a great deal of ecological restoration has happened by accident. As farmers have moved to the city, bereft of the generous subsidies that support otherwise unviable farms here in the UK, villages have fallen quiet – and wolves have moved back in. Whilst it might be easy to celebrate such recolonisations from a purely ecological point of view, it would be better, perhaps, to imagine futures where people do not need to give way to the scrub that will swallow former villages over time; where people do not need to cede to animals, nor the other way around. This future is possible, but it will require above all two things. If we are to live beside Yellowstones, with wolves, lynx and elk in the heart of Scotland, we must develop that ingrained respect for sharing the land with other, larger species. But to make that a reality for most people, we must use technology.

On the face of it, ecologically speaking, wolves could be released tomorrow to hunt the Highlands of Scotland. Studies have shown that where the wild prey-base of deer is robust, as it most certainly is in the Highlands, wolves prefer not to venture close to human habitation. At a national level, social or economic, their impact would be negligible for most people, most of the time. Indeed, anyone who has sought wolves in Europe, even where they are relatively common, will have some idea of how extremely shy and elusive these animals are. But, every now and then, lambs, occasionally whole groups of sheep, would be killed. The outcry would be enormous. And an animal demonised for centuries would, almost certainly, be removed once again from the landscape. Furthermore, whilst wolf attacks on people in western Europe, including where the species is present in good numbers, such as Italy, are incredibly rare, the few attacks documented in recent years tend to involve rabid wolves, which lose their fear of people. Whilst, on the face of it, 85 dog-related deaths a year in the UK would prepare us for one wolf attack every year, perhaps less, such a rational approach is highly unlikely to be taken. And after just one attack, wolves would, once again, be removed from the landscape or become, at the least, far less viable as a species capable of living beside us.

This, perhaps, is where technology might, one day, offer a solution. In other words, we might again have wolves, and safely – but if we are, it’s going to be expensive. Already, in the USA, wolves have been successfully fitted with collars that not only locate every individual after being fitted (shortly after birth), but also deliver a short sharp shock should they come within distance of a ranch where attacks on livestock may take place. If livestock is not fenced, it would be expensive, but by no means impossible, to collar each livestock animal in turn to achieve the same effect, allowing animals to roam safely, further from farms or fields. In theory, the technology also exists to apply this to towns, houses and thoroughfares – safeguarding both wolves and ourselves. The question is not whether, in this age of space-age technology and phones that can predict and read our shopping habits, whether we can have wolves safely – the question is whether society wishes to afford it. And that, in turn, is where we can look to other countries for how they balance the needs of ourselves against the inherent value of the wild.

Wolves, being charismatic predators, are generally highly lucrative in areas where ecotourism operations can be organised to see them. In some countries, like Canada, some areas with wolves are actually too remote for this to be a reality, but in areas like Spain, or indeed, Scotland, this is unlikely to be an issue. Indeed, the economic revenue generated by wolves would percolate through many sectors of the rural Scottish economy – accommodation, transport, education, guiding and safaris, habitat enhancement, forestry and even deer-stalking, as wolves increasingly weed out unhealthy animals, leaving, over time, ever fitter and larger males for hunters to bag. Most of all, the massive regeneration of trees accelerated by wolf presence, played out across huge tracts of Scotland or, one day, even England and Wales, would protect communities against flooding and potentially save hundreds of millions of pounds every year.

Against this, the impact upon small farms would be significant at a local level, but less so at a national one. In short, therefore, some species that we might currently consider entirely unviable in Britain, are perhaps also those most likely to pay for themselves. The income generated by charismatic species such as wolves, as well as other long-lost herbivores, such as elk, would thus form part of a loop economy, wherein a sizeable proportion of that income was invested back into collaring, fencing and other means necessary to keep all parties safe. This has already happened in many countries around the world.

In order for us to return large areas of the land to nature, albeit with us heavily invested in that model, and communities profiting from it, it is important to remember that we are a species driven by dreams, outcomes and things to look forward to. In this regard, we perhaps never stop being children. Therefore, whilst visions of Scotland returning to trees and scrub is ecologically viable and sensible, restoring landscapes without the enchanting creatures that once roamed them is, to many people, tedious – and unlikely to lead to the tourism investment needed to make such operations worthwhile. In this regard, when it comes to the ecological restoration of large areas in our country, it is important we do not simply create habitats, without the animals that once made them complete. That said, everything comes in stages, and whilst peaceful and well-disciplined coexistence with wolves may be possible in time, another species, like the lynx – shady and shy, silent and furtive, and far less likely to impact widely on farms – is widely regarded as a predator more able to return to our shores. Indeed, areas like the Spey Valley, with its interconnected, deer-rich woodlands of Rothiemurchus, Abernethy and many others all intertwining and inter-joining, in the one part of Britain where wild woodlands and giant capercaillies meet, is, even now, eminently suitable for the return of the lynx.

At present, however, the one keystone species capable of assigning a future to all others is distracted. We have reacted with swiftness to a global pandemic, producing several effective vaccines in just a year, an extraordinary feat. This is because Covid-19 has threatened us, our loved ones, our jobs and our lives. It is understandable that we have reacted more decisively to cut off a pandemic, investing billions, our best minds and best technology, than we have in restoring our natural environment. Yet as more and more droughts and floods wreak ever more devastation on our Atlantic island, paying handsomely for beavers should become imperative for any forward-looking government, as it has been in other countries now for some decades.

As we begin to see the natural world, and the problems it faces, at scale, a range of other policies, far too bold to conceive being implemented at present, may also come to pass. We know now that Europe’s catastrophically dwindling invertebrates, whilst small in themselves, require huge areas if they are to survive in the long term. Nature reserves have little chance of holding onto invertebrate abundance and diversity, if those reserves are hostage to a hostile wider landscape. Given that bees, in particular, are essential for many of the crops we grow, protecting them at a national or at least, ultra-regional level, is going to be essential. If we are to protect insects and the soil, we are, sooner or later, going to need chemical bans that extend not across tiny nature reserves but entire counties. Insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, glyphosate, nitrates and phosphates all fundamentally disorder and deplete the basic building blocks of life: plants, including ‘weeds’, wildflowers, insect abundance and the balanced nature of the very soil itself. The lobbies behind those who sell these are powerful and well-entrenched, but like those who sell crude oil, they are flogging produce that is already approaching history. If we wait for all our farmers to embrace regenerative methods, the natural world may wait too long – longer than it is able. Chemical bans at the 100km level would bring about more rapid change.

Just as no-fishing zones exist to allow continued exploitation of fisheries elsewhere, so chemical bans in some areas would concede the need for some, continued use of chemicals in others. Over time, if more and more subsidies were created for regenerative farming, the need for such bans would grow increasingly obsolete. Furthermore, bans could, like fishing zones, shift over time, allowing, in each area, a large-scale recovery of insect life, making it more robust against any future onslaught. Once again, these outcomes are entirely possible – but only if a national mindset is applied to the protection of the natural world, and that species currently living amongst its relics – us.

Over time, it is likely, however, that technology will create far more uncontested space for the natural world that we have at present – and in two specific ways: the synthesis of meat, and new ways of growing crops. Already, lab-grown meat is on the rise. And rather than rant against it, we might see in this opportunities for all. Right now, many of us pay low prices, through our supermarkets, for what is in effect, already, factory-grown meat. We pay for the wild boar’s descendants to be kept in conditions that should never be allowed, and for cattle and sheep, medicated, fed an unnatural diet, and often kept in barns through some of the year, to be driven huge distances in cramped trucks to abattoirs in order to be killed. If we are prepared to settle for meat of such low quality and provenance, over time, it is inevitable that lab-grown meat will eventually eclipse such demand. Our cheap sausages, and bacon, may eventually, and perhaps rightly, be grown in a lab. Pigs, best adapted, in the farmed life, to moving widely through the landscape, may, as farmed animals, become rarer and more prized. Conversely, the quest for high-quality meat such as beef, as something special and worth paying for, is likely not to decrease but increase.

Those seeking authenticity are likely to pay far more attention to the farming methods and wider story behind those animals still being farmed on the land. We will pay more, less often, for wilder, better meat, the more so if we know that lab meat can cater to the smaller purse. This, in turn, will benefit those farmers, many of whom exist already, who have removed inputs from their meat and are grazing their animals in greater harmony with the environment. In short, true factory-grown meat may, thankfully, spell the end of factory-farming real animals. And over time, this may liberate huge tracts of the British landscape, either to be extensively farmed, or turned back to nature. Finally, in the farmed world, the balance may swing back to the ‘traditional’ farm and its values of grass-fed, free-roaming meat, a good life, and a good death. This would be significant indeed.

It may seem hard to imagine now, but hobbies invented mere centuries ago, such as driven grouse shooting, will naturally fizzle out over time. Already, we are seeing Scottish landowners moving away from the intensive management of landscapes for just one quarry – the red grouse – towards more holistic models of land management, whilst each year, more and more grouse moors are being bought up for more progressive purposes, such as mixed use forestry. As it becomes increasingly untenable, socially or politically, to burn land just in order to increase heather shoots, so that red grouse can be farmed in unnatural densities, so more extensive, wilder forms of hunting – like those practised in Scandinavia – are likely to come to the fore. Often, these decisions may not even be imposed on landowners by law, but, increasingly, come from within estates and communities. Such a decision would free up huge areas of our uplands for natural regeneration, and the restoration of lost natural treasures. Hunting per se has never been the problem in our uplands; indeed, it has protected huge areas against development – an impressive feat in a relatively small country. However, the time of canned grouse-hunting is nearing its natural end.

Inventiveness, a human quality used surprisingly rarely when it comes to the British landscape, will most certainly be required to fill the void left when unsustainable sheep farming, factory dairy or intensive grouse rearing eventually fade as core land uses in our country, as slowly but surely, they will. Many raised in the UK, and who have remained tied to areas where they were born, struggle to imagine what could be there instead. Indeed, we have so few wild or near-original landscapes left, it is often said that if we don’t have sheep, we must have forestry, or, if we don’t have forestry, we must have moorland. In truth, no such binary choices exist. We can create new, mosaic landscapes, where native trees are harvested, cattle are grazed extensively and a proportion of them culled, wild animals can live freely, under legal protection, and ecotourism, hunting, walking and many other pursuits can flourish side by side. In many ways, this description could be applied to most of the national parks in Europe. It is not a fantasy – it is already, in most places, happening.

And as we go onwards with more and more courage, restoring ever larger tracts of land, and larger species, sealing off large areas of countryside for the recovery of insects, it is very important to remember one thing. This is not altruism at work – because the greatest beneficiary will be us. It is not only about helping other species to survive. It is also about helping ourselves. When we can once again harvest the soil and hand it down to the next thousand generations, enjoy natural pollination and self-regulating insect pest control through the hordes of insectivorous birds on our farms, and enjoy meat from both the sustainably farmed and wild environment – our own health, physical and mental, will, as a country, be dramatically improved. When beaver populations attain the density needed to prevent villages from flooding – as they can, and they will – the rants of a few that a day’s angling has been spoiled will either be ridiculed or, most probably, ignored. In truth, society will be the ultimate winner if our other cornerstone stewards return.

Looking outwards from our own island home, we might turn our attention to the oceans, too, and apply vision and imagination to how we reconstruct them, and protect and enhance the life within. The return of great whales is already happening – but it is happening very slowly. Perhaps too slowly. Whilst the more and more regular appearance of humpbacks, fin whales and magnificent pods of orca in our waters is a cause for celebration, we have all forgotten the veritable whale armies that spouted off our coasts just three centuries ago. We may, over time, invest technology, thought and sensitivity into how we might accelerate their return, too.

In this regard, there is little doubt that the single most powerful ecosystem engineer missing in all of Britain, is one that may now never return by itself – the grey whale. Immense, coast-dwelling and capable of utterly transforming the marine environment, grey whales, being coastal, are likely to have far more dramatic effects upon our seabirds, through the proliferation of plankton and sand eels, and upon the trophic cascade as a whole, than any other single species of marine mammal. Grey whales, however, have been lost entirely from the Atlantic – and those in the Pacific, like so many animals born with migratory instincts, are extremely unlikely to recolonise a new migratory route. So we may need to bring grey whales to our shores – and this will be a challenge.

Airlifting whales is technically possible, but these are amongst the most emotionally sensitive creatures of all; grieving mothers will sometimes keep close to their dead calves for days at a time. We may not yet have the technology to move whales ethically, but we might begin to invest, now, in solving such a problem. To imagine a future where grey whales once again grace our coasts, feed our seabirds and swim placidly beside us from the Hebrides to the Gower, is something almost painfully beautiful to contemplate. Actively restoring whales will be at the hard end of what is achievable, but in recent years, rhinos have been lifted by helicopter for hundreds of miles – and successfully reintroduced into different countries. Stranger things, perhaps, have happened.

Protecting our fisheries will not only enhance our own chances of longer-term survival as a species, but it will also accelerate the return of the giants. If the land is fairly resilient, the sea is extraordinarily so. In 2008, when the Arran Community Trust, in Scotland, sealed off just two square kilometres of Lamlash Bay, developing a ‘no-take zone’, scallop numbers not only increased six times but they also grew dramatically in size. Just like the giant hake of the seventeenth century, marine creatures not only proliferate, but also grow larger, when human predation pressure upon them decreases to a sustainable level, and often, for just a short period of time. Elsewhere, oysters, the intestines of the sea, cleaning our waters and cycling nutrients, are being restored to places like the Humber. The oceans, of course, do not suffer the limits of the land. Whilst wolves will never arrive in Britain without active human consent, many species, from bluefin tuna to dolphins, can colonise our shores from distant waters, provided we afford them safe haven. And in some ways, this makes ocean conservation as much about creating areas where we simply do nothing, as always stepping in proactively.

Birds of prey, returning already to British skies, can rapidly recolonise if their numbers are not suppressed by illegal hunting, and provided sufficiently robust populations exist in adjacent areas. Already, there should be golden eagles gracing the Pennines, Bowland and the Yorkshire Dales, as well as far greater numbers of hen harriers. The financial and inevitable decline of intensive grouse moor management will accelerate their return, both naturally, in time, and, ideally, with reintroduction schemes to help. We simply cannot afford to live in a world where golden eagles – a true keystone species – do not hunt our hills and larger woodlands. White-tailed eagles, for the first time in living memory, now grace the Isle of Wight, and satellite-tagged birds have been shown to be travelling widely. Adaptable and long-lived, they should recolonise large wetlands, such as the Somerset Levels, within a generation, but the spread of birds of prey has always been aided, never hindered, by further reintroductions, especially, for this species, in areas like the East Anglian coastline. Many other species are naturally increasing, especially goshawks, and others, such as peregrines, have even moved into and thrived within our cities. For many birds of prey, however, we forget the impacts further down the trophic cascade. Rodenticides damage vital populations of mice and voles eaten by kestrels; in time, we must accept that these smaller aerial predators are the best means of controlling both. But with most of the public charmed and invested in the return of birds of prey, it is likely that eagles will once again begin to dominate our skies in the decades to come. The real question is, whether we, as a species, can thrive too.

We have the knowledge, the capacity, and at times the wisdom, to become the ultimate steward of stewards: to mend our own actions as the ecosystem engineer in chief, whilst ceding power, deliberately, to others. In some parts of the world, such as Canada, this balance has already been well struck. On our denuded island, tightly ordered and controlled, there is no denying that we have a very long way to go. Yet if we look at our own track record in the past 200 years, much has been achieved that was far more improbable than rebuilding the natural world around us – and returning our island’s rightful fellow stewards. We have all the ingenuity within us, the technology and, increasingly, the appreciation of the necessity, to make this happen.

There will be little room for error in the ever-harder years to come. As our climate grows ever more unpredictable, and with it our food security, as sea levels rise and extreme weather becomes increasingly the norm, we must look to our fellow species, as much as to ourselves, to solve the problems we’ve created. And in having the humility to share, to cede power and to allow other wild forces to work with us and beside us, we will, once again, become – for us and for others – a cornerstone species to stand the test of time: a rightful steward of the land.