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Home| About the author | Have your say | Links | Site Map REWILDING MIDDLE ENGLAND - Prospects for creating wild nature in Lowland England 22 November 2006, Cropston Visitor Centre, Severn Trent Water, Leics. NOTES FROM THE MEETING: Its taken me a while to buckle down and report on this meeting. The enthusiasm that I usually feel afterwards was mixed, and then it dissipated much more quickly this time, especially when I saw the evaluations. Half of the 70 or so there, who put in an evaluation, thought the speakers highly informative. But their impression of whether they had come away with a better sense of how rewilding middle England could come about was all over the place. There is a reason. WN went to Middle England because it has pitiful woodland coverage, is dominated by farming, and has very few protected areas - some have called it the black hole for nature conservation. So I wonder why the car park out front was packed with more Wildlife Trust logo-ed vehicles that I had ever seen in one place. Anyway, we were there as it would be the first lowland area in which we would look for examples of land undergoing transformation. Michael Jeeves got us off to a good start, his talk following the thread of his article in ECOS (Vol 26, 3/4) where he called for the encouragement of people in the wonder of natural processes, and for "releasing the human grip around the throat of a mostly farmed landscape". The wildest place in the nearby Charnwood Forest, Michael showed, was a rock outcrop with a few patches of heather and bilberry. He made the point that this was in an SSSI and so its wildness was being tamed by the non-negotiable limits put on scrub or bracken incursion. As he said not much room for the dynamism of nature here and thus we would have to develop new wild places outside of SSSI. For contrast, he showed a jumbley willow woodland, some wet but neglected corner of farmland that was doing its own thing, and more wild than most SSSIs. Then a disused quarry, deliberately un-drained and left to regenerate vegetation by itself. Five years on and Wanlip Meadow is a species rich wetland. Another example came from farmland set aside ten years ago at Barber's Rough, which has no management or extractive use other than be shot across, but which is now marvellously wild and home to owls and rodents. Michael also challenged us with a picture of a hide at Watermead. Does the building of a hide detract from wildness? Do there have to be hides on every large wetland reserve, when getting wet and taking your chance at sighting birds would be more of a wild experience? Would larger nature reserves be any wilder than our present small ones? His last picture was of a boy swinging on a homemade rope-swing in woodland. It was deliberately out of focus, allowing Michael to ask us whether it showed danger or excitement - or even both? He wants us to be excited by wild nature, to marvel at the wonder of it, and not to shrink from it or have to control it. Chris Gerrard punctured the reverie that Michael had induced in me, starting his talk on the Great Fen Project by saying in effect that he was going to define limits to rewilding. And it certainly showed in the approach to the project because here was an extension of a planned landscape, albeit developing an extensive linkage between the two existing wetland reserves of Woodwalton and Holme Fens. Transformation indeed, but in a controlled way, and with defined outcomes that still included elements of cultural landscape. The argument goes that this produces a greater diversity in a managed (gardened) reserve landscape. Well, yes, it maintains a variety of farmland habitats that don't exist in wild nature. Even more contentious was Gerrard's comparison in which he regarded his less-wild, planned landscapes as being "more democratic" than wilder landscapes, and which provide "more ecosystem services". By the latter, he probably means things like the butterfly count, a purely utilitarian, target-driven panacea of conservation professionals. And also, since some areas in the enlarged reserve would still be farmed land, then there would be off-product. But what does he mean by "more democratic"? Is this a dig at the supposed elitism that wildland is often criticised for? Because if it is then conservation professionals only have themselves to blame for this elitism since it is they that have kept the general public ignorant in this country to the wonder that truly wild nature can bring. But maybe it is something else - farmers always want to veto any change in the landscape that they consider will impinge on their divine right to wring the maximum return from the land. Thus "more democracy" is the sop to farmers to 'bring them with us' rather than have ambition for the land that wild nature can return. Planned landscapes don't scare the farmers so much. However, I'm not sure why Gerrard has to be so concerned about this as Heritage Lottery funding has given him the where-with-all to buy-up most of the farmland he needs to bridge the two wetland reserves, leaving him only five other landowners to negotiate with over the transformation. Perhaps with that amount of public money, Gerrard should be asking the public what they would like to see happen instead of the farmers? Sam Lattaway got us back on track with the impressive gains of the publicly-funded National Forest (NF) since its inception 10 years ago. From that pitiful tree cover of 6%, a range of schemes (including land acquisition) and partnerships, has ratcheted that up to 17% cover in the NF area, with an eventual target coverage of 33%. Waverley is one of the few other areas in Britain with tree cover that high, considered the point at which a landscape begins to function like a woodland ecology. But it was not just woodland gain as the NF has action plans for a range of non-farmland habitats that it is progressing as spectacularly. Out of the blue, Sam threw up a schematic showing a wildlife corridor over the M1 motorway. The motorway bisects the E end of the NF, splitting off the ecologically valuable Charnwood Forest from the bulk of the NF area. He explained that it arose out of advisory group meetings he has with the engineers planning the widening of the M1 to four lanes each way. Common in North America, and now seen in Holland, these corridors overcome the block to wildlife migration that major transport routes can cause. The engineers were aware that badgers use the cattle bridges over motorways, and so they cooked up a costed design for a crossing over the M1 that looks like a finger of landscape with grass, shrubs and trees. And they are considering putting more than one across the motorway. These wildlife corridors across the motorway say more about our good intention for wildlife than the piecemeal pops at making farmland less excluding of wild nature. If they come off, they offer a high profile opportunity to begin to draw ordinary people in to the notion that our landscapes must be fit for wild nature, as well as us. The Great Fen and National Forest projects draw lines on a map to delineate their scope. Not so with the OnTrent Initiative that takes the course of the River Trent and its tributaries as its sphere of influence. Ruth Needham explained that 92% of the Trent floodplain is managed for agriculture, with the dominant land use being grassland upstream, changing to more arable in lower reaches. The OnTrent Initiative aimed to refocus the use of the floodplain, encouraging changes to farming practice and for the capture of increasing wetland habitat, including wet woodlands and greater flooding catchment area for water storage. Ruth's low key and highly efficient presentation belied the scale and import of the initiative, and the mature approach with which it was being carried out. Unlike some strategic corridor wetland restorations, this one was not species-led but looked at the river as if it were a living entity influencing and shaping the landscape around it, and thus requiring us to relinquish many of our attempts to control it or mar it's intrinsic quality by fouling it. The watercourse and wetland theme was given a countrywide overview by Andrew Heaton of the Environment Agency in the section on agency outlooks on rewilding. He got in a mention of coastal realignment, as has happened at Wallasea Island in Essex, and Freiston and Alkborough on the Humber estuary. John Spencer of the Forestry Commission (FC) said that the FC has no internal policy on rewilding. As an organisation, they had looked at rewilding a few years ago, especially in light of the emergence of Vera's hypothesis of wild herbivores maintaining a much more open landscape than just high forest. Bison were even part of the discussion, so the enthusiasm is there within the FC, but they have no vision or modus operandi other than the policy on ancient woodlands that sees regeneration of native woodland on plantation sites. Spencer portrayed the FC as arch doers, more interested in determining outputs, and judging revenue raising and viability before they commit to anything. He did however suggest that they were poised to make use of the state forest in any way it can deliver, and would do it with some speed. I asked him afterwards whether, in a parallel to National Wilderness Preservation System in America, the publicly owned FC land estate at 4% of land area could become a National Wildland System for Britain? He launched straight into the problems he could foresee in carrying that out, thus showing that there will have to be political direction given to get this particular public agency to commit. Keith Kirby of Natural England looked at naturalistic grazing and rewilding, rehearsing the concerns about the Vera hypothesis, but not hitting it out of sight. Not surprising really as Vera's model of a landscape modelled by herbivores is pretty much what we have today - its called farming, and so it is a safe option that doesn't scare the complacency of nature conservation and, is in fact, the method of choice of conservation professionals for land management. Keith always comes across as being one who also sees limits to rewilding, but where I once thought this to be borne out of rigid belief, I now realise that it has more to do with Keith being confined to the art of the possible under nature conservation legislation as it stands at the moment. As he says, rewilding whether through naturalistic grazing or not, raises some interesting questions in terms of current target-driven approaches to nature conservation. This thought was echoed by many in the room during questions and feedback from the workshops. The clear message is that SSSI and BAPs, while useful in getting us to this point, are no longer satisfactory in the longer term and are a bar on using existing, designated nature reserves for rewilding. Moreover, if we are to give protection to landscapes of the future, where natural processes are given primacy, then current legislation is inadequate. Other messages revolved around scale and terminology: how big is landscape scale, how big do we have to go, and how can we take the big step forward that we need? Some are unhappy calling it rewilding, wanting to dissociate it from a futile return to an unobtainable past by just calling it wilding. As a round-up, Michael put up a last slide, of the Soar Valley, showing the spatial integration of a series of areas of differential land, recreation and nature use progressing along the valley, and which the local wildlife trust were beginning to see as a framework of how they could 'join up' their endeavours. This was recognisable in both green infrastructure terms for spatial planning, but also as the different zones of use level associated with protected area networks seen in many other countries, and which indicates a spectrum or continuum that extends through all levels of attainable wildness. I was immensely pleased to see Michael take this approach, and for some others in the audience to recognise it as well. It should be the catalyst that launches us on to the next step and would, in its further discovery, show the context of how the planned landscape of the Great Fen is but one part of a continuum that stretches out to the wildest places, and where the only limits are in our imagination. There is no point trying to top this meeting by running another, when the variation in message conveyed by different speakers and projects, and the lack of a coherent framework that ties them all together, just causes confusion in peoples minds as to what wilding is. We have to come down off the fence. Mark Fisher 15 December 2006 www.self-willed-land.org.uk mark.fisher@self-willed-land.org.uk |
