Lives in our Death: Rewilding for a Post-Human World.

Apocalyptic visions are getting harder and harder to ignore in the 21^st century; they’re embedded densely in popular culture, the media frequently leans towards intense catastrophic fear-mongering, and many experts are espousing troubling theories about the nearing end-times, including the man who conceived of the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis, James Lovelock.

            Instead of spurring a drive towards correction, this kind of embedded fear has all too often led to frantic action and bizarre offsetting of fear; Slavoj Žižek observes that in the face of impending sea level rises and the loss of both ice caps, people are instead attracted to (and fed by the media) stories about possible carbon-saving boat travel across the newly created Arctic sea, or the possiblility of Antarctica as an entirely new plain to colonise. This impedes the kind of radical environmental action massively; people are either happy to continue with business as usual or are too pessimistic to do anything proactive.

            Rewilding is definitely proactive and radical; it suggests a drastic change in our approach to natural landscapes to just leave them be, or to reinstate vital aspects of ecosystems that we have helped eradicate (such as large predators) to enable them to be self-sufficient. Many, including George Monbiot in his seminal book on rewilding in Britain, entitled Feral, espouse human-oriented arguments that delve into the spiritual and the economic. I believe that, especially in the case of humans becoming extinct, rewilding is essential simply for the planet.

            As the global landscape stands, especially in Europe, where there are animals, there are fences. We alone can permeate these fences; we bring the animals their feed, we rake away their droppings. The space animals, especially livestock, are allowed to occupy is a liminal space, often without natural function. The same can be observed in some ‘wild’ and natural spaces; conservation organisations created ‘natural disturbance’ to manage the lives of the animals therein, also most likely fenced in. What happens to these animals when we die?

            Presumably, they also die. Without a supply of food, surrounded by their own muck and often separated from breeding partners, these animals will die, and rot, and provide food for the scavenging few that can even make it past the fence such as birds or insects. If this was a rewilded or truly wild space, it would be self-sufficient and naturally functioning. Animal carcasses would of course be present in the landscape, but they would be integrated into the natural processes present just as should occur in the wilderness. Species can roam, breed, interact, spread, just as animals and plants naturally do; they are fluid.

Although the lifetime of a fence is far greater than their own lives, the chance we would give them to be able to live and breed for generations yet to come before the fence finally falls is still a whole lot better than the meagre chance afforded to our pets, zoo occupants, livestock, pitiful nature reserves. To not think of the lives of those we implicate in our own past our species’ extinction is as absurd as assuming that when you die, everyone else dies. Besides, through proactive rewilding, we might even solve some of the apocalyptic issues currently plaguing our planet such as carbon emissions, deforestation, and the terrifying loss of biodiversity the world over.

Reintroducing predators or emulating them; the missing ecological relationship in Britain.

            Near Horsham in West Sussex is a castle estate called ‘Knepp Estate,’ which, alongside farming, has let a great deal of the estate return to the wild. Medium-sized herbivores such as longhorn cattle, roe and fallow deer, Exmoor ponies and pigs roam freely on the estate. So far, these rewilding techniques have regenerated the soil’s nutrient quality, making farming once again viable near the site, whereas traditional intensive farming had rendered the soil unworkable without large quantities of chemical fertiliser; farming is finally profitable once again in the area.

            The benefits of rewilding are numerous; vastly increased biodiversity and carbon sequestration, as well as social benefits such as those George Monbiot wrote about in Feral; the sense of adventure and wonder that is lost without true, unadultered wilderness. The cause of this article is not to reiterate these benefits. I am simply looking at a common cause for human intervention in rewilding projects; fencing out or culling herbivores.

Knepp estate has had to fence off certain areas of land to guarantee that young trees and other vegetation will survive undamaged by the grazing and browsing habits of the herbivores present. It is the intensive grazing of the ‘white plague’ of sheep and other large herbivores such as deer and cattle, kept for commercial use, that has helped transform the British Isles into monolithic and expansive grassland. As a natural process in a pre-human past, grazing and other herbivorous habits helped create mosaic-like environments of grassland, scrub and woodland believed to have existed in the Pleistocene era. In the Pleistocene, however, there were predators to maintain herbivore population and also their behaviours and approaches to their environment. The herbivores that existed were also diverse in species and especially size, with even Britain hosting megafauna; the skeletons of ancient hippopotami have been found underneath central London. Interestingly enough, Knepp Estate’s aims are to add more species of herbivore, to include elk and bison.

            Dundreggan, an area that rewilding organisation Trees For Life have been working on in the Scottish Highlands, has had success by fencing out the red deer that are endemic to the area. The result has been a surge in young tree growth and inception, sometimes species that one wouldn’t expect to find, all without much human planting necessary. The biodiversity in the area is vibrant, with more than 3,000 new species recorded in Dundreggan alone. The area is lacking a natural predator, specifically the wolf; were a wolf present, the organisation would no longer need to fence out the deer, as the wolves would maintain their population by preying on the weak and sickly deer, altering the deer behaviour by scaring them away from open spaces, such as open land on the fringes of forests, and also stretches of open water where a deer may be more at risk. This has a chain reaction, that has been highlighted with the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in America; as the deer left open water alone, trees were allowed to grow along the waters edge, shading and cooling down the water, making it habitable for fish and other animals which helped filter the water of impurities. Knepp estate fenced off an area of newly-planted trees along the Adur river, to eventually grow to cover the water and cool it down, in a venture the Ouze & Adure River Trust termed ‘trees for trout,’ and effect which  Yellowstone has achieved through the reintroduction of natural predators.

 Tree Planting Along the River Adur at Knepp Estate. Author’s own image.

Trees for life currently run a volunteering programme called ‘project wolf’ wherein volunteers emulate wolf behaviour to scare deer away from the vulnerable rewilded areas. Many concerned with reintroducing a natural predator to the British Isles have claimed that the Eurasian lynx would be the least problematic predator to reintroduce to the British wild lands. With a Pleistocene rewilding project such as Knepp Estate, what predator should be present? If one could be decided upon, in this present day with many stakeholders in rural areas so set against the reintroduction of predators, could it be emulated, such as the project wolf campaign? The estate already cull their animals to maintain a natural population, and so the need for a natural predator has not gone unobserved. Species are being reintroduced in Britain, albeit at a slow pace, and the predator question is enshrouded in cultural myths of fear, which forces rewilding organisations to sadly intervene where another ecological relationship has been persecuted and removed over time.

Referenced:

http://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/rewilding/rewilding-projects/knepp-estate

http://www.knepp.co.uk/

http://treesforlife.org.uk/volunteer/long-term-volunteering/project-wolf/

http://www.yellowstonepark.com/wolf-reintroduction-changes-ecosystem/

http://treesforlife.org.uk/work/dundreggan/

http://treesforlife.org.uk/work/dundreggan/biodiversity/

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/hippos-thames-dung-beetle-fossils-reveal-elephants-rhinoceroses-roamed-prehistoric-europe-1438715