Europe

by Tim Flannery

  Even if the aspirations of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change are realised, Europe’s coastline will alter, and some cities will be lost to rising seas. If the nations of the world fail to honour the pledges they made in Paris, the climate could return to Pliocene conditions, when okapi-like creatures and giant vipers thrived in Europe. It’s a fair bet that Europe’s agricultural productivity and political stability would then be imperilled. Ernst Haeckel’s name for our Neanderthal ancestors, Homo stupidus, may yet have some validity—for us.

  CHAPTER 43

  Rewilding

  What might Europe be? A new concept in the human management of natural systems is now emerging. Rewilding—restoring wild creatures and lost ecological processes—is becoming popular globally, but its origins are European, and it is there that the most substantial efforts at its realisation are being made. The independent organisation Rewilding Europe is carrying out extensive programs. Its objective is to restore natural process to ecosystems, to create wilderness areas where the human presence is minimal, and to introduce large herbivores and top predators to regions where they have been extirpated. The program intends to focus on ten areas, each one of at least 100,000 hectares, from western Iberia to Romania, Italy and Lapland.*

  What do the Europeans imagine as they think of rewilding their continent? Some projects quote descriptions by the ancient Roman Tacitus, suggesting that once again Europeans are reaching into their dreamtime for inspiration. Others, however, think in geological time scales of tens of thousands or millions of years. It is to be expected that everyone’s idea of what a wild Europe should look like will be a little different, but some agreement on baselines must be reached.

  Should rewilders work to create the Europe of the Roman era, or 20,000, or (in light of climate change) two million years ago? Each would result in a wildly different outcome. Having set a baseline, rewilders could then work out which of the relevant species still exist, what their ecological requirements are, and what current species might be able to stand in as ecological substitutes for extinct kinds. They could also work out the minimum area required for such species, set about isolating and removing any species that should not be there, and reintroduce the species selected. Rewilding Europe, as it is currently being practised, is not quite that methodical. Some rewilders just let nature take its course with minimal intervention, while others focus largely on establishing three species of megafauna—the wisent, the wild horse, and the aurochs—which are, incidentally, the species most abundantly represented in European ice-age art, and which the ancient writers Tacitus, Herodotus and others saw in Europe, often in great herds.

  Rewilding is not entirely new, nor is its history entirely honourable, for the first efforts were made by the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s. The brothers Lutz and Heinz Heck were German zoo directors, in Berlin and Munich respectively. Lutz joined the SS in 1933. He became a close friend of Hermann Göring and was obsessed with his own, perverted version of the great European dreamtime—a wilderness where Aryans could hunt dangerous wild animals of the sort he imagined the Teutonic tribes pursued in Roman and pre-Roman times.

  An integral part of Lutz’s program was the reconstitution of the aurochs, so that the master race could have its own special beast to hunt, one strong and dangerous, as befitting the ideal Aryan man. Starting with ‘primitive breeds’ of domestic cattle, Lutz and his brother Heinz selected not only for size and shape, but aggressiveness, which is why all but a few of Heck’s cattle were later killed. They do not closely resemble the aurochs genetically. Attempts to re-create the aurochs have started up again. The Tauros Program, supported by a Dutch foundation and a group of universities, is experimenting with eight ancient European breeds using recently available DNA technologies, to identify and selectively breed for animals with a high proportion of European aurochs DNA. At the end of 2015 the project had yielded more than 300 crossbred animals, fifteen of which are fourth-generation crosses. Ultimately, the program leaders hope to release ‘re-created’ aurochs into wild lands, where they can roam relatively freely.1

  Lutz Heck decided that the Białowieża Forest was the perfect location to create his great wilderness. The Nazis killed or chased out thousands of people, destroying more than 300 villages. Among their victims were the many Jews who had taken refuge in the dense woods. Today Białowieża is prized as a World Heritage Site, testament of the supposedly primitive, untouched plains forest of old Europe. We forget the role the Nazis had in creating it, and the fact that the area had previously been heavily inhabited and utilised for farms and forest products for centuries. With the people gone, Heck released wisent, bear and Heck cattle into the area, though it is doubtful that the Nazis got much time to hunt. By May 1945 the Russians were in Berlin, and Heck was busy defending his zoo, which acted as one of the last Nazi redoubts in the city. At the end of the war the Russians tried to charge Heck with war crimes, but he never faced the courts. He died on 6 April 1983 in Wiesbaden.

  Lutz Heck’s imagining that Europe was once covered with a great, primeval forest was inspired in part by Germania, written about 98 CE. In it the Roman historian Tacitus describes Germany as being covered with sylvum horridum. Both Adolf Hitler and Heimlich Himmler, incidentally, tried unsuccessfully to obtain the only surviving medieval copy of the work—the Codex Aesinas—from its owners, the Counts of Jesi in Ancona. But what did Tacitus mean by sylvum horridum? Was Germany one great primeval forest, or was it covered in groves and thickets of spiny plants, that could have been created by great herds of herbivores?2

  Elsewhere, Tacitus leaves no doubt that parts of Germany were heavily modified landscapes, supporting crops, herds and villages. But he also says that each tribal area was surrounded by a sort of extensive no-man’s-land. It’s easy to imagine that these areas acted as hunting reserves, wherein wildlife was protected, to some extent, by one tribe’s fear of being ambushed by another. Perhaps broken woodland interspersed with swamps and thorny thickets did characterise these areas. Europe’s great diversity of light-requiring plants—the hazelnut, hawthorn and oak included—further supports the existence of an interrupted forest canopy in Europe. To mourn the loss of European sylvan virginity, as represented by those supposedly umbrageous Teutonic forests of Tacitus’ sylvum horridum, is almost certainly a mistake.

  The one good thing that seems to have come from Lutz Heck’s obsessions was the survival of Warsaw Zoo’s Przewalski’s horses. He moved them to safety in his brother Heinz’s zoo in Munich. By 1945 there were just 13 Przewalski’s horses left on Earth, so Lutz’s role was crucial to the species’ survival—as has been recognised by at least one Holocaust museum.3 Heck’s attempted rewilding serves to reinforce a very important fact: Europeans are now the mind over their land. What they desire, the land will become. And if their desires are toxic and dangerous, then that will manifest itself in nature. Europeans cannot escape responsibility for shaping their environment; as even withdrawal from management will have profound consequences.

  The idea that ancient Europe was a great primal forest is being challenged by one of its greatest rewilding projects—at Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands. In April 2017, I travelled there to meet Frans Vera, an ecologist who has had a huge hand in its development. The nearly 60 square kilometres that Frans and his colleagues have helped shape is less than 70 years old. Before that, it was under the sea. I found this extraordinary, but the Dutch are so used to creating their own land that it was barely commented on during my tour. Looking out on the vast tract through the misty morning air, with nothing but ghostly silhouettes of modern windmills and industrial buildings on the horizon, I felt that I had travelled back in time, the scene being reminiscent of untouched Africa, or the remote Arctic.

  Being on the ground in the Oostvaardersplassen is a sensuous experience. The spoor and turds of birds and beasts lay so dense on the short-cropped sward that it was impossible to step between them. And the sward was so thin in early spring that there appeared to be more ba
re soil than grass. I could hardly believe that it supported such a mass of wildlife. As I watched, tens of thousands of barnacle geese lifted from it, as an enormous sea eagle soared overhead, then settled back like a mantle on the land once the danger passed. The smell, the sounds, and the sights might have been those of a Pleistocene European richness so long lost that it has vanished from our imaginations.

  But the pride of the Oostvaardersplassen is its large mammals. Konik ponies cantered past us in small harems or family groups, their beautiful dun-coloured coats creating the illusion that I was looking at an animated panel of ice-age art. To an untrained eye, Koniks look almost like wild horses, and they were once thought to be descended from the tarpan—Europe’s last wild horse.4 Britain’s Exmoor ponies, with their white muzzles—a feature so clearly seen in depictions of European ice-age horses in cave art—provide a further simulacrum. But this is really an aesthetic matter, for no living breed of horse is genetically closer to the wild ancestor than another.

  A herd of red deer, led by a magnificently antlered stag, looked up as we passed, then sprang off. Their bones littered the ground. As a non-domesticated species, their carcasses are the only ones allowed to lie in the sward to feed scavengers. In the distance were great beasts, their heads bearing eerily familiar lyre-shaped horns. They are aurochs substitutes, bred from various races of domestic cattle. Some lack the uniform, dark coat of the aurochs, breaking, to my eye at least, the illusion of an ice-age megafauna.

  The Oostvaardersplassen has exceptionally rich alkaline soil—it’s the sort of place coveted by agriculturalists. There are no boulders behind which saplings might be sheltered, and the grasses of the rich soil support so many large mammals, which in turn determine what grows there. The result is a great sweetgrass sward, broken only in its lowest parts by waterlogged reedbeds. The things that are very obviously missing are trees. The few trees that are there are in terrible shape. Having been ring-barked by deer, their skeletal frames dot the land over vast areas, lending a funereal aspect. Beyond the odd blackthorn or hawthorn bush that a thousand pairs of lips had bonsaied to within an inch of its life, little living vegetable matter was taller than my ankle. Could that thorny bonsai, I wondered, be Tacitus’s famed sylvum horridum?

  In terms of its ecology, the Oostvaardersplassen, with its 4000-odd cattle, horses and deer, is reminiscent of the mammoth steppe or the short grass sward of the Masai Mara. Many see it as a failed experiment. Others simply hate the dead trees. I beg them to compare the Oostvaardersplassen not with their dreamtime Europe of the classical age, but with a long-vanished continent where large mammals, rather than agricultural practices, shaped landscapes.

  In the creation of the Oostvaardersplassen some things have been lost, including 37 per cent of the bird species that existed there in 1989; most were adapted to an agricultural or partially forested Europe.5 But in my view much more has been gained. The Oostvaardersplassen evokes a grand and wild Europe, a mini-version of the wildebeest migration on the Serengeti; but there is one big difference. The Oostvaardersplassen lacks large predators, foxes being the largest canid in the reserve. The exclusion of carnivores has had several implications, including what may be an unnatural density of herbivores. Another is that people have had to take the place of wolves and big cats. For humane reasons rangers stalk the area, especially in winter, and shoot animals judged to be too weak to survive until spring.

  Nature continues to lead in the Oostvaardersplassen. An Egyptian vulture discovered the place and flourished until it was killed when it perched on a railway line. Will wolves or golden jackals also find their way in? Three wolves have been seen in the Netherlands already, so it seems possible. Even a moose—a zoo escapee—briefly made a home there. She had two young, but like the vulture she wandered onto the railway track and was killed, and then one of her young was shot. Perhaps wild boar will be the first large mammals to get to the Oostvaardersplassen under their own steam, for they are already at Nobelhorst, just a few kilometres away. If they do, they will discover a feast of bird eggs and other delicacies. And so the great experiment goes on. If it were up to me, I’d deal with that killer railway line first—either by inclosing it or rerouting it.

  There were once plans to join this great plain up with other nature reserves in the Netherlands, and with wild areas in Germany, allowing natural migration, The Dutch government had acquired much of the land needed, but then a right-wing government was elected. Farmers cried that the rich soils were being wasted, and some were allowed to buy back land they had sold, at lower prices than they were paid for it. The political negativity confused the public, and so a grand vision was destroyed. I hope that the vast experiment that is the Oostvaardersplassen continues. We learn more every year as it provokes imaginative responses that help guide the mind over the land in the most innovative ways.

  At the other end of Europe, in Romania, a very different kind of experiment in rewilding is taking place. At its heart lies the Carpathians, which form a curved mountainous and well-forested spine that provides habitat for one-third of Europe’s bears, along with many other wild species. In Romania, even in farmed areas, wildlife abounds, and magnificent wildflower meadows bloom in spring. This is in part because older, less destructive agricultural practices persist, with shepherds still tending flocks, and horse power remaining common on farms and roads. Because of Romania’s abundant carnivores, roe deer, rabbits and red deer are hard to find.

  The Conservation Carpathia Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation that has a small holding of about 400 hectares of pastureland near the village of Cobor in Transylvania. I stayed there in April 2017 to learn how the organisation acts as a model for environmental farming in the region. Christoph Promberger, the executive director, told me about the organisation’s really big project, which is located in the Fǎgǎraş Mountains, arguably the wildest region in Europe.

  The Fǎgǎraş region is extraordinarily rugged and beautiful, combining a Swiss-like landscape with substantial populations of bears, wolves, lynx, roe deer and red deer. With the nearest village 40 or more kilometres away from the project site, the forests are as remote as anywhere can be in Europe. Yet they came under severe threat after Nicolae Ceauşescu was deposed. Romania’s forests had been nationalised, but in the early years of the post-communist era, the previous owners were each given back a hectare of their estate. A few years later that was expanded to 10 hectares, and in 2005 their entire holdings were restored. Uncertain whether their lands would be taken again, most owners proceeded to clear-cut the trees to make a quick profit. In order to avoid a total catastrophe, Conservation Carpathia began to buy up the reprivatised forest lands.

  Already, Conservation Carpathia owns 15,000 hectares of forest or recently logged land, and it has plans to purchase 45,000 hectares more. There are proposals to create a national park of nearly 200,000 hectares in the Fǎgǎraş. If this were to be realised, combined with the lands purchased by Conservation Carpathia, the area would become the largest wilderness in Europe. Rewilding Europe has already released wisent into the Carpathians, and Conservation Carpathia also plans, in 2018, to re-introduce wisent. Because there are no plans to reintroduce other species, the Fǎgǎraş ecosystem will lack some vultures and eagles, wild horses and aurochs (or their equivalent), not to mention the great beasts of ice-age Europe. But like Oostvaardersplassen, it promises to be a most interesting experiment.

  The Oostvaardersplassen and Fǎgǎraş are bookends in a great, pan-European project to rediscover the continent’s nature. Both are worth refining and amplifying. We should be in no rush to rewild Europe; neither should we ignore some important challenges, one of the greatest being the scavenging role. Despite the hyena’s long history in Europe, nobody seems to want to return it to the continent, and vultures are extinct over much of the landmass, with attempts to reintroduce them falling foul of many obstacles, from bureaucracy to powerlines, railway tracks, poisoned baits and pesticides. The only vulture seen in Romania in recent
years died after drinking water contaminated with pesticides.

  Not all rewilding results from sanctioned actions. In 2006 a small population of beavers mysteriously appeared on the River Otter, in Devon. Someone must have released them without permits or public discussion. The authorities wanted them removed, but the locals liked having beavers around and kicked up a fuss, so the proposed eradication was dropped. The British have a reputation for resenting rules, so perhaps we should anticipate further unplanned introductions. But surely the potential also exists in eastern Europe, in places like Russia, where regulation is looser, and where great wealth resides in the hands of a few.

  ______________________

  * The Rewilding Europe organisations are WWF-Netherlands, ARK Nature, Wild Wonders of Europe and Conservation Capital.

  CHAPTER 44

  Re-creating Giants

  Much of Europe’s megafauna has, like the fabled trolls and goblins of mythology, retreated long ago to distant or invisible realms: so it is that relatives of Europe’s extinct elephants roam unrecognised in the forests of the Congo, while the genes of aurochs, cave bears and Neanderthals lie hidden in the genomes of cattle, brown bears and humans. And in the far north, the DNA of woolly mammoth and woolly rhinos lie in perpetual sleep, rocked in the bosom of the permafrost. Clever goblins, working in idea-factories, have stumbled across the magic required to return these vanished giants to their ancestral homes—whether by introduction, selective breeding or genetic manipulation. If the Europeans think small, Europe will remain a diminished place—one shorn of its greatest natural glories. But, if they think big, anything is possible.