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Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem - the island of hope, Aug 2008

If you don't believe that the natural state of the UK is to be predominantly covered with grassland, then it begs the question of where is the natural grassland in the UK, and was this where the grassland wildflowers originally came from when they marched out to colonise land stripped of trees by agriculture? The prairies and plains of N. America provide a useful example in understanding what are the natural forces and conditions that favour grassland over trees, before seeking out where the natural forces and conditions may exist in the UK. Contemporary nature conservation cuts across these natural forces and maintains artificial grasslands. The chalklands of Harting Down are a classic example, but local people object to the heavy handed management that is being used to maintain the calcareous grassland there, especially since this management is destroying the wildland character that they have begun to appreciate. A paper from 1976 confirms the artificiality of these calcareous grasslands, and indicates that the trees and shrubs have a greater claim to a natural presence on Harting Down than the chalkland wildflowers. Will conservation professionals admit to this, and become much smarter in considering whole landscapes with mixed habitats rather than concentrating on species?

I read about Cormac Cullinan and his book Wild Law, late last year. It inspired me, and so I jumped at the chance to hear him talk in Leeds. I knew that I wanted to write about his ideas, and I was keen to ask him what legislation he would enact to give wild nature the rights in law that it lacks, especially since UK legislation for species protection is poor and often flouted. At first, he surprised me by sidestepping the question, but his key message is that legislation alone is insufficient - it has to be a bottom-up approach that brings about a radical change in human behaviour and which seeks reconciliation between humans and the natural world.

Repairing a timber frame house opened up a window into the history of the uses that we made of the natural world. Perhaps unwittingly then, the landscape management for those products also brought with it new communities of wildlife. With the decline of that management through lack of demand for the product, so too have of those communities of wildlife declined. In their place, however, has come wild nature, ever present to reclaim what we have lost interest in. Is it right, now, to rewind the landscape clock just for the sake of those artificial communities of wildlife, when we inevitably waste the products of the management and destroy the returning wild nature?

A conference was held in Cambridge that explored passionate responses to nature, and asked the central question - can nature help us think? Three of the speakers had books that had come out or were coming out this year on wildness, and one of the speakers was also linked to a fourth author who also had a book out on wildness. As I see patterns of association in wild nature, so also has it always fascinated me to see the patterns of association between people and the influence they may seek to exert. So what of these books on wildness? And what would be my take on the quality of experience of wildness in Britain?

I got a mild rebuke from Norma in London that I only wrote about wild nature in rural areas, and said little about urban ecology. True enough, but then town planning from the 1930s onwards pretty much created the division by regarding the urban as completely artificial, unleavened by any opportunity for wild nature except in neglected or derelict patches. That is changing as society recognises the health and pyscological benefits of contact with the natural world, especially the natrural or wild play of children. People now defend their green spaces and there is the potential for more arising from the new planning agenda of green infrastructure. What is interesting is that there are a number of standards around that set a spatial value for the provision of publicly available access to greenspace in towns and cities. We should make ourselves familiar with these, and use them to bargain for the greenspace that we undoubtedly need close to our doorstep. ADDENDUM - NeighbourWoods - Good practice in urban woodland planning and design, and Urban Woodland Management Guides – Woodland Trust,  28 October 2007. Links to two resources that exist to support the creation and management of of urban woodland. ADDENDUM - Children’s play in natural environments, 19 November 2007 Link to an excellent factsheet on wild play.

The Government has been building towards a Marine Bill, commissioning background studies and consulting at each stage of its development. I picked up on this process late on, the White Paper to which this consultation response is directed being the point at which I came in. Thus it is a disappointment to me that the poor content of the Marine Bill in relation to marine protection was almost inevitable, given the tenor of the responses to an earlier consultation. Even the Wildlife and Countryside Link response in that earlier consultation, in some areas, fell into line with the overwhelming protection of business interests where they may be jeopardised by new marine conservation designations. How do you now backtrack? What would convince Government when they can turn to the evidence from the previous consultation to say that the bill meets the aspirations of the stakeholder response that they received? ADDENDUM - West Wales Marine Conservation, 28 June Blaise Bullimore of the Pembrokeshire local group of the Marine Conservation Society, who organised the petition for the HPMR at the Skomer MNR office at St Martins Haven. contacted me with information about the website of West Wales Marine Conservation. ADDENDUM - South-east Commonwealth Marine Reserve Network, Australia, 23 July Maddeningly, the Marine Bill that many had called for was omitted from the next Parliamentary legislative session. What made it even worse was that it was preceded only days before by the announcement of an excellent example of a new marine reserve network for SE Australia.

There is still too much compromise between nature conservation, commercial land use and conservation land management, leading often to the observation that wildness is being killed off by the conservation professionals. Sometimes this is hypocrisy - the National Trust for Scotland using public funding for grouse shooting on their Mar Lodge estate when they boast about their conservation efforts for black grouse and capercaillie. Or the National Trust in England relocating feral goats onto one of their conservation heathland sites in Dorset, only to have to cull them when they escaped. This grooming of nature and the killing of wildness reaches a frenzy in heathland restoration, driven by targets in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP) as I explain here. But nature grooming goes on everywhere in nature conservation, and it is a wonder that native species ever existed in wild nature before we came along to kill off all the wildness. ADDENDUM added - Asdown Forest, 14 May Within weeks of writing the article, another example of the tensions that exist between local people and conservation projects came to light, and gave further evidence of the consistency of the drivers that create that tension. ADDENDUM added - Asdown Forest Action Group, 23 July Peter Crane of the Action Group got in touch with me and explained their oppositon to further enclose and grazing of the forest.

Studies show that when given the choice, there are things that we like in a landscape such as topoghraphy, water, scale and extent of view, but our biggest preference is for naturalness. We distinguish naturalness on the basis of a lack of man-made artefacts, but also on the state of the landscape vegetation and whether it has been altered by human management. The more we tutor our preference, the more we are likely to be discriminating over the state of naturalness, and thus disenchantment will result if we see the effects of management - we may be put off and decide not to visit that landcape again. This is happening when nature conservation through fencing and grazing animals is enforced on landscapes where local people have long enjoyed open access, and enjoyed the transfroming wildness that will be lost through this management. At fault is the imposition of a landscape designation - SSSI - the intention of which is to hold the land in stasis so that it delivers on an impossibly tight list of characteristics that will be in direct conflict with wild nature. This is an update on the article about Blacka Moor from Dec, 2005.

Books about British woodland can leave you more confused than informed. It is hard to be too categorical about how natural our woodland is today when it has been modified so much over the millennia. Sometimes, you can pick out clear patterns in nature, but watching a woodland regenerate is another way in. The Duddon valley is packed with ancient woodland, and there is a conifer plantation in the process of being felled that when it regenerates into native broad-leaved woodland will complete a band of woodland that will stretch the whole length of the valley. Its an irresistible opportunity to study woodland into the future.

I was astonished to read in an almost throwaway remark in an article that the RSPB shot foxes in one of their reserves in Scotland. It seemed such a contradictory act from an organisation dedicated to wildlife conservation. It bit harder when RSPB Scotland put out a press release shortly after I read that, condemning the poisoning of red kites from bait put out on game shooting estates. This seemed like hypocrisy, especially when it became clear that the RSPB allowed game shooting on the same reserve in which they shot foxes, and that many wildfowlers get to shoot over RSPB reserves all over the place. At the centre of this story is the capercaillie, a game bird once driven to extinction, re-introduced, and now seriously in decline again. Who gets to choose which animal lives and which animal dies?

The appreciation of wildland may be on the increase, but it still lacks a basic understanding and it has yet to reach out to the general population. Unsurprisingly, I have a pretty poor opinion of most British landscapes and thus their ability to inspire us, or teach us much about wild nature. A workshop in Glen Coe in November on sharing wilderness experience epitomised for me the games of delusion we play. Not so for High School students in California where a 12th grade course on ECOLITERACY requires them to spend at least five days backpacking in a wilderness. As I explain, these students don't have far to travel to get their wilderness experience. And nor do I, now I have settled on what I have found has significant wildland value to me.

I've been collecting varied data sets on woodland in Britain for some time now, as well as I have been searching out some of the best woodland to go walking in. Figures tumble out but they don't always tell you the story that walking the woodland can. We do have some remarkable woodland nature, but we have no way of classifying how much, nor do we have a systematic and effective approach to protecting it. The problem is that we have a tradition of managing woodland, even in protected areas where supposedly "wildlife comes first". We also have one of the lowest woodland coverages in Europe and consume five times more woodland than we produce. Thus woodland is doubly a poor relation in Britain, and we need some inspirational ideas and leadership.

I read a Defra press release in August that mentioned a No Take Zone (NTZ) in the marine nature reserve around Lundy Island. It didn't register with me at the time, but I later saw a TV news piece showing underwater filming of the fabulous marine ecology in the waters off Lundy Island. It dawned on me that here was a maritime rewilding going on. As I found out more, it also became apparent that this NTZ was the first statutory measure in Britain to strictly limit the extractive activity of people in a protected area. Moreover, it was also probably the first example of the use in Britain of a zoning approach to a protected area. The Lundy NTZ sets a principled example that we should extend to terrestrial protected areas.

There were some real wild nature thrills on a late season trip to the Pembrokeshire Coast - a dancing dolphin, a ray breaking the surface, and lots of grey seals and their pups on the rocky shores. The seals attract locals and tourists who delight in seeing new life being born to these cute and amusing mammals. The survival rate for the pupping is high here, probably because the Pembrokeshire Coast is admired and respected for its excellent coastal and marine natural heritage, which has some measure of protection albeit mostly voluntary. I returned home to reports of pregnant grey seals being shot dead in the Western Isles, and calls for seals to be given greater legal protection. We should also consider giving real legal protection within the various layers of designation that cover such as the Pembrokeshire Coast.

Why are there forests marked on maps of Britain that have no trees? Certainly, most of Britain was re-covered in trees after the last ice age, but agriculture in the main, and perhaps climatic conditions in some uplands, led to a loss of almost all that woodland. Is it some racial memory that keeps those forests alive, or does a forest not always imply an area of woodland?

You can see some odd things going in our national nature reserves, many of which are treated like suburban gardens. Is this helpful hand approach an acceptable influence of humans, or should we stand back, accept that it is not ours to make all the choices of what survives and what goes, and instead allow Mother Nature to get on with it?

Defra initiated a consultation on reviewing the Forestry Strategy for England. A good range of documents were given as background for the consultation, and the question format of the consultation itself adequately reflected the contemporary and future issues for forestry. Here is my response to that consultation, and which contains a recommendation for creating new, large scale wildwoods.

We have a stultifying low ambition for protected landscapes in the UK, and the European Landscape Convention that Government recently signed will do nothing to raise the level of that ambition, fixated on cultural landscapes as the Convention is. An advocate for the Convention imputes some advantage of protected cultural landscapes in complementing more strictly protected landscapes, except that we don't have any strictly protected landscapes to speak of and the logic seems faulty. What are our more strictly protected landscapes, and can we do better?

When urban dwellers are under pressure to reduce their ecological footprint, it comes hard that they get little say in what happens to the open countryside around them. Denied its use, there are occasional gains in access rights, but no real say in the money poured in to rural areas. One such trend is the public money being used by conservation charities to buy up farmland. Should those charities be able to manage the land only in the narrow interests of their members, or should they take greater account of wider public views?

Raising the water level in soil is a great selective pressure and driving force for the return of wetland vegetation. Hence many new nature reserves are currently based around wetland restoration. I had the opportunity to see this first hand during recent field visits in Wales. The response of the landscape to rising water content, and our methods of managing it, offers a window of thought into the current issues about wildland restoration, as does the example of Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska where the glacial retreat of the last 250 years has seen the return of a range of habitat mosaics. The return of wild nature to restored wetland may be the nearest contemporary equivalent we have to watching vegetation returning after our last Ice Age.

There are some beautiful examples of wild nature if you look carefully in the British landscape. Sometimes just small, as in a fragment of ancient woodland or a little undisturbed wetland. Our coastal cliffs also offer some spectacular wildflowers. Few of these are represented by our protected areas which, in the main, have other characteristics associated with their management. Looking for wildland will help us make the distinction and can lead on to the development of a value system for wild nature.

It was to be expected that an easy accusation levelled against wildland enthusiasts would be excluding people from the countryside in a new Highland Clearance. Partly this is due to the laziness of accusers in understanding wilding, but it is just as likely to be a simple tactic to raise anxiety amongst land interests to prevent change. The next year will see more literature articulating wildland philosophy and the place of humans in nature. As is so often the case, the recent history of North America, and particularly it's Native American population, offers lessons that bridge the much longer timescale of landscape change that we have had in Britain. We need a new approach to humans in nature, and there are proposals that help us on the way.

Ecology, Buildings and Landscapes: restoring ecological processes, Jan 2006

In my landscaping work, I love it when the groundwork is done and the planting begins: its when the design really gets to be a reality and plants are my thing. Some of the fun is taken out when the ground I am working with is full of the garbage of years of dumping and covering up, whether it is agricultural waste or the detritus of people and their broken buildings. My current project has this blight. What started out as plan to restore the natural plant diversity of the site has turned into a reclamation of the land and then a restoration of its ecological processes. It is restoration ecology and puts the work in amongst a growing international movement who seek the ecological restoration of our damaged and degraded landscapes.

Blacka Moor in Peril from the Conservation Professionals, Dec 2005

Sometimes the evidence stacks up to the point where diplomacy goes out the window and you have to be honest. The biggest problem facing publicly owned land near towns and cities is not the threat of urban expansion, its the land management techniques of the conservation professionals. The issue comes down to access and unhindered public use when the conservation plan demands fencing off and being run with livestock. The ultimate blame lays with English Nature who perversely have established - through their protected area designations - a "farmed" landscape as the universal method for nature conservation. Thus the general public - who are beginning to value the wildness and unmanaged nature of ungrazed public land - are losing out to the industrialisation of nature conservation. Three recent examples illustrate this, but the public are fighting back. ADDENDUM November 2006 - Its happened again, so another example - St Catherine's Hill - is added.

Natural Environment: a response to a draft vision, Nov 2005

A draft vision statement for the Natural Environment was posted for comment on the DEFRA website in mid-October, with a closing date of 18th November. While the limited window of opportunity for comment was a disappointment, far worse was the realisation that wild nature didn't get much of a look-in. The draft is essentially a vision for the human species use of natural resources - resourcism as it is called in America. We are dependent on the natural world for our survival, but that does not mean that the natural world is here solely for the use of the human species. Along with many other respondents, I made that point in my comment, but also went on to make the case for core areas of wildland in which the future of our wild nature is safeguarded.

White Mountain National Forest - lessons in landscape, October 2005

A walking holiday in a New Hampshire forest turned out to be a more profound experience than just the immense joy of seeing the autumnal colours. The White Mountain National Forest has some core wilderness areas and when we hiked into one of them - the Sandwich Ridge Wilderness - we were  impressed with how little difference there was between the woodland either side of the wilderness boundary. We learnt much about the forest management practice as we walked the National Forest and it is clear that natural systems are as important in the managed areas of the National Forest as they are in the non-managed wilderness areas. The wilderness areas, the management of the woodland, and the clearings in the forest, provide a remarkable example in practice of the different intensities or zones of land use that characterize Permaculture Design.

Beavers and boars: a Wild Animal Update, Sept 2005

The bad news at the beginning of September that the application for a trial to reintroduce beaver to Scotland had been turned down again has upset a lot of wildland enthusiasts. It perhaps shouldn't come as a surprise as it is still a tough time out there for wild animals, with not much reason to hope for any change. I last wrote about the difficulties facing wild animals in Feb 2004. Here are some of the things that have happened since then.

KEEPERS OF TIME - is it a National Wildland System for England?, Aug 2005

The new Government policy for England's ancient and native woodland could be interpreted as establishing a National Wildland System for England. The policy makes a commitment to maintain and extend the coverage of ancient and native woodland in England, and it does so by taking a whole landscape approach. By reconnecting ancient woodland and other semi-natural habitats, the policy aims to recreate ecologically functional landscapes. The significance of this policy lies in the fact that a large proportion of the ancient and native woodland resource is publicly owned, and is managed by the Forestry Commission, a Government agency. In this, there is a parallel with the Government agencies in America that manage federally-owned land and which have a role in their National Wilderness Preservation System.

Why We Need Wild Land, July 2005

I believe that arguments over whether the concepts of wilderness, as exemplified in North America, are based on a falsity are missing the point. There was a mistaken assumption by early settlers, and then later chroniclers, that what they were seeing were landscapes untouched by humans, when we now recognise evidence of extensive use by native populations. But the key issue is the lessons we should learn from the patterns and relative intensity of land use that was represented by the native American way of life, and contrasting it with the dominating approach of European human land use that would have been imported with those settlers.

The Rocky Road to Wild Land, April 2005

Enthusiasm is growing amongst the statutory conservation agencies, and in many voluntary organisations, to adopt a whole landscape approach to nature conservation. Britain will become wilder, and there will be a return of wild animals in greater numbers as they take advantage of this new habitat range. Problems will occur when this wild nature butts up against the interests of people. Other issues on the road to more wild land will be the emotive case of windfarms, the need for us as a society to develop a respectful use of this new wildland, and the false hope that the new subsidy regime will allow farming to deliver on this rewilding.

Design, Ethics and Wilderness, Aug 2003

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www.self-willed-land.org.uk  mark.fisher@self-willed-land.org.uk