THE POPULARLY perceived meaning behind the word ‘rewild’ is a kind of muddled-up, querulous, polarised and politicised soup of ideas: beavers, lynx, bears, wolves and George Monbiot all served up with a confusion of tabloid headlines where beavers eat fish, bloodthirsty lynx will consume all the sheep and elephants will restore the balance of nature (well, actually, there is some truth in the latter).
But what, exactly, is rewilding? There’s a lot of talk about this word right now and to those who don’t speak the language it can seem rather confusing. There seem to be many different kinds of rewilding too: there is cultural rewilding, landscape rewilding, personal rewilding, even Pleistocene rewilding! It’s clearly a word that has many different definitions. It is the more exciting, controversial and sensational forms that dominate popular culture and these seem to touch some deep-set cultural nerves as well as some long-suppressed inveterate guilt and embarrassing truths. It’s often an emotive, contentious word laced with prejudice and opinion.
The verb ‘to rewild’ most often refers to an argument that posits that large predators and other keystone species are integral to maintaining the integrity of the ecosystems in which they would naturally exist. Such species have an influence on many other species below them in the trophic food chain – this is something called an ecological cascade effect, a top-down stimulation of what ecologists call trophic diversity. In short, this is the number of opportunities for different species to eat each other and therefore support their own. A good example would be the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. After being absent for over seventy years, wolves were introduced in the mid-1990s to a land that clearly desperately missed them.
When the wolves come back, they started an ecological cascade, influencing not only the populations of those creatures that they hunted, but also their movements and distribution which, in turn, had all manner of knock-on influences on many other species as an indirect consequence. Deer numbers were reduced and the deer stopped becoming lazy creatures of habit – a predictable deer is easy prey for a predator. A wild deer in an intact environment is always looking over its shoulder, is always on the move, a nomad driven by the need to feed but equally to not become food.
Prior to this, the deer in Yellowstone lingered in favourite spots and annihilated the vegetation. Trees, bushes, plants and herbs were nibbled down and plucked to nubs by the teeth of herbivores.
However, when the wolves arrived, they stirred up the trophic layers that had settled into a dysfunctional version of their pre-human existence. The plant life, for example, relieved of the constant barrage of cloven-hoofed beasts, started to recover – the trees grew, the grass grew; there was plenty for the insects to feed on; then, suddenly, the warblers had caterpillars to catch and trees to nest in; the shading of the water in the rivers meant that invertebrate life flourished here, too, and therefore fish numbers and diversity went up. Put the wolf back and the birdsong gets louder and the angling opportunities improve – it’s actually way more complicated than this, and raw stirring is still happening, but you get the idea.
‘Rewilding’ is all about protecting what is left of natural and semi-natural systems and improving lost functions. Reintroducing those species that are missing is key to this. As is giving them the space they need, or, rather, giving back the space they need. It is about extending and linking together core wild areas in a landscape scale process which allows larger animals the extensive space and the connectivity they require to flourish and be ecologically resolute, especially in the face of change. This seems to be something we’ve got wrong.
In short, for the most part, the definition of the modern rewilding movement is an admission that the existing model of nature conservation hasn’t worked particularly well as a complete solution.
Adding nature or subtracting culture
Picture a scene: a blood-red rhamphotheca pops up against the verdant-green sward; the two-tone sanguine eye watches all. Other than the barely perceptible flicker of an eyelid, and the wind-blown ruffle of feather, she’s motionless.
Turn the sound off, and there seems nothing very much wrong with this scene, it’s a colour-wheel lesson in complementary pigments. The oystercatcher is on her nest, sitting on four ovoids of granite grey, blotched and blotted with brown. These eggs are her everything, her polestar; they may be her only contribution to the next generation. Not that you can see them, she’s stuck down tight, hunkered on a simple nest cup, protecting and nurturing the seeds of life within, keeping the herring gull’s gaze and the chill Scottish breeze from their matt surface.
Pull back from this microcosm of spring tranquillity, past the bobbing thrift above the rock-rose, past the rabbits keeping the sward tight and bouncy, past the white-painted line, the crisp packet and crushed can, the tarmac, the splintered bone, brain and fur of a baby rabbit, then turn the sound on: an unremitting din, the dissonance of motorbike, bus, lorry and car, 24–7 noise and grunge.
This is modern wild. A wilderness in the round, a fragment of the Highlands on a traffic island in Inverness.
It works for now, for the thousands of us who drive around it and for those with their feet placed on its soil. It’s a fragment of something that feels right to the oystercatcher and rabbit, and countless other wild species which undoubtedly share this atoll on the A9, but for now remain unseen. They’re safe from predators with all the facilities a nesting oystercatcher or rabbit could possibly require, until they need to leave, as someday they must.
Initially, this scene struck me as nature fighting back, life finding a way. But not far away, in the glens and straths, oystercatchers just like this were going through the same life cycle. This was not a case of birds having moved in; rather, it was that we had moved in on top of them, our lives superimposed on theirs without any consideration for their needs. Obliviously, we had carried on, laying down the tarmac, expanding and spreading, covering over the landscape.
It seemed incongruous and uncomfortable: a beast of the wild wind-swept places, being buffeted by the draught of trucks, dust and diesel fumes. But while this situation slapped me in the face because of the extreme juxtaposition of its elements, it is what it reminded me of that was most poignant: nature next to, but separated from, culture.
A similar scenario is unfolding all over our countryside and, for that matter, all over the world.
While the oystercatcher and the rabbits were happy in their moment, safe in their albeit noisy sanctuary, it bothered me to think of what might happen when the doddering chicks hatched and started tottering around, or when the rabbits, having bred like they’re supposed to, needed to disperse. What was happening on this roundabout was a microcosm for how most nature reserves work (or don’t work). A compartmentalised idyll, a fenced, walled-off
fragment of how things once were all around it. The word ‘conserve’ means to keep something the same, to preserve the stuff you want, like jam in a jar. But while a sugary mush of fruit can sit on a shelf, preserved indefinitely, in nature, things don’t work in the same way.
The main conceptualization of conservation since its birth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been all about compartmentalising the landscape, a desperate land grab to hold on to rapidly disappearing habitats and the species they contain.
For 99 per cent of our existence as a species, humans have been hunter-gatherers, a nomadic ape with a big head. A big head on a body that, ultimately, wanted to sit down and do a little less running around in pursuit of dinner.
Then about ten thousand years ago, someone started this thing we call agriculture – a process by which we could stop the exhausting necessity of chasing things around.
Since that time, as a species we have been on a tip. We have made finding food more predictable, easier. We’ve fenced in the creatures we want to eat, and stopped them running off and thereby eliminating the need for energetic pursuit and, similarly, we’ve worked out ways of growing and culturing the plants we like to put on a plate next to them.
This ambition to make life easier for ourselves has become a bit of an obsession, one in which we control and manipulate, mould and shape the natural world to feed our needs. To distance ourselves from the wild and our natural ecological state has become the human model of progress. The process of agriculture, first experimented with in the Fertile Crescent of ancient Mesopotamia, has allowed us to settle down and ultimately create our cities and civilisations. This, in turn, has given us plenty of time to think and design things, new stuff to make our lives even easier and to enable us to overcome other problems we have inevitably caused for ourselves. The channelling of water, trade networks, roads and boats all quickly followed. This process of control and exploitation for our own needs ran uninterrupted right into the early part of the nineteenth century. We’ve spread out like a plague. Where before we slipped between the trees and moved through the grass, now we seek dominion; we’ve moved and removed them, trod on and crushed whole ecosystems as we’ve reshaped the world to our own needs and requirements to the detriment of nearly all other species and the habitats that support them.
However, there were some who wisely questioned this consumption of the land and a counterculture was born. In 1821, the English eccentric Charles Waterton built a three-mile-long, nine-foot-tall wall around his estate Walton Hall in Yorkshire at a cost of £9,000 in order to protect the wild birds and other wildlife that were dear to him from the proclivities of poachers. In doing so he unwittingly created the first nature reserve (this forward thinker is also cited as the originator of the concept of a bird box). Shortly afterwards, across the Atlantic in 1872, President Grant signed an order for the first national park and Yellowstone was founded in order to protect its unique geological, geothermal and landscape features from being exploited and spoilt. The conservation movement had started moving.
Traditionally, the nature reserve, national park and wildlife preserve have all been about sanctuary for nature, fencing it off and protecting it, excluding the species which has been having deleterious effects on it – namely us.
However, what started as a desperate measure to save places in the face of almost certain anthropogenic devastation, while working in the short term, has fallen short in the long term; quite literally, in some instances. While in some cases nature reserves have been useful repositories for vulnerable species and habitats, sanctuaries born out of desperation, the reality is that they are rarely big enough to work in the long term.
Yellowstone, with its 3,500 square miles of wilderness, might seem big enough to function naturally, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. While it seems big to a human who might wander a few miles a day, or to one who grew up in a world with critical bits missing, for an individual of a species such as a wolf, bear or wolverine it’s an island.
Sure, it’s one that works for a while, but just like a machine with countless working parts, without mechanical maintenance the thing eventually grinds to a halt, all those intricate mechanisms that we are only just beginning to understand need looking after. Wolves or beavers or any other keystone species are the ecological engineers; they have their basic requirements and if they are not met and are lost from the system, sooner or later that system fails to function properly, leaving nothing but a disparate collection of species, all out of whack with each other. It’s what is often termed, rather over-simply, as the balance of nature, unbalanced.
If wolves or beavers can’t meet others from neighbouring populations, something which is as necessary to the long-term sustainability of their species’ population as enough habitat and food is to their short-term sustenance, then it’s game over. When a wolf, bear or bison leaves Yellowstone, it inevitably meets a human and is shot. Think back to the fate of the fledgling oystercatcher chicks tottering on the edge of the roundabout: it’s different in scale, and there is a human motivation in the latter, but the reason for moving and the outcome are exactly the same.
This bigger picture is something that until relatively recently has escaped us. A pot-plant or Noah’s Ark philosophy has reigned in our relationship with animals and plants; it’s a kind of two-by-two mentality, one species at a time. The traditional zoological or botanical park is how we’ve frequently seen conservation – some of these establishments call themselves conservation organisations. But even these captive populations can’t exist in isolation – that’s what breed registries are all about, maintaining, as best we can, some kind of genetic integrity, as far as our somewhat arrogant understanding of such things goes. Not all that long ago, we thought the 3,500 square miles of Yellowstone was plenty, but in the meantime technologies have allowed us a greater understanding of the dynamic nature and the extensive spatial requirements of many large-animal populations.
Pluie was a famous example of wolf kind. She was five years old when she was captured and tagged. In just nine months, this radio-collared animal covered an area over ten times that of Yellowstone, some 38,000 square miles, and crossed three state lines before she was killed by a hunter. M65, a similarly radio-collared young male wolverine, travelled over 500 miles and through at least four states before he, too, met his demise at the hands of a man who thought he posed a threat to his livestock. These are large and obvious creatures, and as long as they don’t end up in the crosshairs of a rifle or meet the grille of a truck, they will find a way. They’ll seek out spaces that work for them, they have a natural predisposal to disperse, to roam until they find a vacant territory, new potential mates and, of course, the food resources to sustain them. Thanks to radio telemetry and GPS systems, we’re beginning to realise the failings of our previous understanding. Many of these large animals – bears, wolves, cougars, wolverine, elk and moose – are capable of clocking up the miles in search of dinner and a date.
Like a bad joke, or a repetitive nightmare, this exact same situation is repeated almost anywhere you decide to look on the planet’s surface. Large-space, hungry animals are confined to increasingly fragmented habitats. They are fenced in, sometimes literally, sometimes by boundaries invisible to us such as green deserts of arable land, open pastures, roads and developments. Tigers, jaguars, elephants, lions, polar bears, maned wolves, giant armadillos, take your pick. Look hard enough and you’ll find conflict. There is no space for these ecological giants.
However, at least many of these animals have fans, defenders of their rights. It’s easy to stick an ape on a poster or in a magazine advert and generate sympathy for their plight. The power of wet, watery eyes is not to be underestimated. That’s why we are culturally aware of them – but what about other, smaller species that are just as important in their own way? They may not be keystone species but they score the same when it comes to counting the diversity of life, the very thing that makes our world interesting.
Have you heard of Desmoulin’s whorl snail? Unless you remember the headlines surrounding the ‘Battle of Newbury’ in 1996 and the construction of the Newbury bypass, the chances are that you haven’t.
This little three-millimetre-long brown twist of mollusc life halted development of a major road and was literally picked up out of the way and moved elsewhere. Conditions for its survival were not quite right, however, and it died out: sad but sadly familiar.
In the UK, despite the fact that we have 15 national parks, 224 national nature reserves and thousands of others owned or maintained by non-governmental conservation organisations, and protective legislation, there is an overall depressing failing in the initial intent. We are still haemorrhaging biodiversity at a dismal rate and failing to reach any of the targets we set ourselves, so our current model is clearly not working.
Nature reserves, in whatever form, are not doing their fundamental job and, just as in North America and other parts of the world, the growth in human population and the continuous roll-out of our civilisation and its trappings, such as habitat fragmentation, building and developing cultural infrastructure with no mind for nature, are responsible.
Life, whether in the form of wolf, wolverine, beetle or butterfly, aconite or aspen, struggles to exist when its populations are distanced from each other. It may limp on for a while, but ultimately it loses its genetic diversity and also its robustness to environmental change. And, boy, is it changing – climate change has been identified by some as being the single most important challenge humans, and by default the rest of life on Earth, has ever had to face.
Many animals and plant species exist as part of much bigger meta-populations, which, while appearing to exist in isolation from each other, still depend on flux – some degree of emigration and immigration between populations in order to keep them robust and healthy. Our cities, houses, roads, highways and other developments, our bricks, mortar, tarmac and monoculture, come between these fragmenting populations. They lose and so do we. In short, they don’t work, they’re too small to be sustainable. In situations where the key species have gone missing, for whatever reason, the biospheric loss and ecological fallout constitute a slow demise of the entire system, species by species, as the ecosystem breaks down, falls apart and senesces.
But bear with me. While this may seem a little heavy and make you want to give up on me, this book, the human race, even the world, please don’t; there are plenty of reasons to be cheerful and that’s what I’m leading up to. One of these is something called Y2Y, a catchy acronym for the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative.
This brilliant partnership of some three hundred individuals and organisations from both sides of the US/Canadian border was started way back in 1993, in recognition of the very things we’ve been talking about.
Y2Y stretches some two thousand miles from the Yukon territory on the edge of the Beaufort Sea and well within the Arctic Circle down through the Rocky Mountains to its southern outpost, Yellowstone National Park. The zone takes in some of the last remaining regions of American wilderness. It was set up in recognition of the fact that as well as being as close to bio-intact as anywhere, with a full suite of large herbivores and carnivores and all the ecological minions that prop them up on their shoulders, it was also well endowed with protected areas – some forty-four national parks in total. These parks, while acting as useful cores, were simply not big enough for the sorts of natural peregrinations of the wildlife.
To witness first-hand the dynamism of nature is something difficult to put into words. When I saw tens of thousands of caribou of the porcupine herd from a distance, they looked as numerous as the mosquitoes attempting to drill into my clothes. Yet each of them, weighing some 200 kg, was supported by this seemingly barren tundra. As I got closer, I realised they were moving for the same reason as I was flapping my arms around and clawing at my face. Mosquitoes were hounding them too – and feeding on the mosquitoes were many birds of different kinds from perky little waders, nipping between their feet, to wagtails and dashing jaegers.
I had been hanging out with Karsten Heuer (a wildlife biologist) and Leanne Allison (environmentalist), who, in order to draw attention to the importance of Y2Y and as a bit-part protest against potential development of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – the core calving ground for the herd – had lived with and followed 120,000 of these animals on foot for a year. They had travelled over some of the most testing terrain in the world for some 900 miles, sleeping when they slept, moving when they moved. They had seen and lived it all; they were twelve-month honorary caribou.
They told me that their main realisation was that it wasn’t just the mosquitoes and the birds that relied on this moving maelstrom of deer flesh and blood. It was like an ecological procession. The caribou ‘sucked an entire ecosystem along with them’. If it wasn’t bears it was wolves, continuously harrying the herd, plucking the weak from the strong, the chaff from the wheat. This 900-mile journey made by around 197,000 animals is the longest migration of any land mammal and is the intact northern equivalent of what I was to see at the end of my journey south.
In Yellowstone, all those that remain of the great bison herds of the Midwest stand around in clusters. I had wriggled my torso out of the sunroof of my rental car to watch these gargantuan cows, stoically resisting the biting winds, snowflakes catching in their hair and eyelashes, both adamantine and delicate at the same time. Having paid my fee, nature felt like a commodity. It was necessary, of course; the ecology and the economy, and keeping both human and environment as healthy as possible, had meant that the two had become inextricably intertwined. Here nature had a value, while up in the north, other than to a few populations of indigenous people, the caribou were more of an irritation to the petrochemical companies wanting to exploit the fossil fuels beneath the calving caribous’ cloven feet. Two extremes of the same relationship. It was while making this five-thousand-mile road trip (the irony of the fact that I was driving didn’t escape me) from north to south that, effectively, I travelled in time, from the near-pristine wilderness, with a single Dempster highway, to one in which the oppressive influence of strip malls and convenience stores and fast-food franchises represented the way we live today. On the way I met indigenous people, modern wildlife managers, hunters, artists and conservationists, all of whom sang with hope about the ambitious Y2Y conservation initiative.
There is hope on both sides of the fence, quite literally. The Trans-Canada highway is busy. It’s the main route between Calgary and Alberta and over fifteen thousand vehicles travel the four lanes every day. Near Banff a twenty-eight-mile stretch of it is fenced on both sides with a 2.4-metre-high fence, to reduce the high numbers of road-traffic accidents involving large wildlife. While this is of benefit to humans and to wildlife in the short term, the problem again is one of fragmentation. Although the road was always a barrier of sorts to wildlife ever since the highway was built in the 1950s, some animals did manage to cross. The fence, however, made it a barrier impermeable to even the most determined moose.
But what encapsulates the Y2Y model is that a forward-thinking blend of integrated science and education has been employed to build a network of underpasses and overpasses with the aim of restoring the population connectivity on either side of this busy and critical transport corridor.
As I stood amidst the head-high conifers, dense scrub and the tangle of knee-high grasses and herbs, it was hard to believe that I was here. According to my GPS, I was slap bang in the middle of the highway; there should be four lanes to the north and another four to the south, but here there was the occasional scratchy birdsong and the singing of the wind in the pines. It was as if the landscape had slid down off the hills like a loose stair runner and engulfed the Trans-Canada highway in its lush, verdant shagpile – a naturalist’s eco-fantasy in reality.
My map reading was fine and my GPS was fully functional – it didn’t lie. I was exactly where it said I was, only above it.
If I concentrated when the wind died down briefly and the bird stopped its somewhat tuneless vocalisation, I could make out the gentle purr of the traffic. This is exactly the point. I was right in the middle of the fifty-metre-wide wildlife overpass – a short corridor connecting wild habitat on either side of the deadly black top. This was one of two like it on this stretch of highway; the fact that I couldn’t see any edges, hedges, walls or fences was so that even the most timid species would make the journey.
The Banff Bow valley overpasses are exemplary wildlife corridors, and spectacularly visual at that, but they are just one tiny example of the ethos behind the Y2Y vision. It’s not about segregating wildlife and people, it’s about integrating and connecting so that both can live and thrive side by side.
This, for me, was touching the future and, while there is still need for rangers, wranglers and intervention when wildlife gets cornered, overall there is an awareness and sympathy for the wild, and the flavour it brings to everyday life is appreciated. Even a victim of a near-fatal bear attack rather nonchalantly told me, ‘I was on his turf, right; he was just doing what bears do.’
While this isn’t so much rewilding as reconnecting, it does resonate with what this book is about: it is our relationship with nature and how we must re-evaluate our place next to it that is so important.