Feral

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by George Monbiot


  The same evolutionary history could explain why traditional hedging, which relies on twisting, splintering and almost severing the living wood, is possible: the trees we use to make hedges would have had to survive similar attacks by elephants. Blackthorn, which possesses very long spines, seems over-engineered to deter browsing by deer; but not, perhaps, to deter browsing by rhinoceros.

  These animals,*3 with the trees they ate, were driven south by the last advance of the ice. By the time the ice retreated, they had been hunted to extinction. The trees returned to northern Europe, without the creatures they had evolved to resist. Our ecosystems are the spectral relics of another age, which, on evolution’s timescale, is still close. The trees continue to arm themselves against threats which no longer exist, just as we still possess the psychological armoury required to live among monsters.

  Even if these speculations do not lead to the reintroduction of elephants and rhinos, do they not render the commonplace astonishing? The notion that our most familiar trees are elephant-adapted, that we can see in their shadows the great beasts with which humans evolved, that the mark of these animals can be found in every park and avenue and leafy street, infuses the world with new wonders. Palaeoecology–the study of past ecosystems, crucial to an understanding of our own–feels like a portal through which we may pass into an enchanted kingdom.

  They heard us coming long before I saw them, and the woods were now filled with strange sounds–yelping, roaring, whickering and a noise so deep that I heard it not only with my ears but also with my chest: a sustained, resonant drone, like the lowest note of a church organ. As we came within sight of the enclosure, the sounds intensified. The animals clustered around the gate. Thick-thighed, with small pert ankles and hooves, they looked like fat ladies in high heels. The rectangular blocky bodies were covered in dense bristles; their winter coats were almost blond. The delicate snouts were so long that they looked like little trunks. As the smell of the bucket reached her nostrils, the dominant female, crested and humped, a deep-bodied battering ram, barged the other beasts out of the way.

  When the pellets were scattered on the ground, the boar purred and growled, occasionally exploding into shrieks and squeals as the big sow drove the others off the food. They ploughed up the soft soil, using not their little bleary eyes to find the food, but the sharper organs in their snouts. Close to the fence the earth was churned and gouged; throughout the twelve hectares of the enclosure there were ruffles and furrows in the ground. This was why the boar had been brought here: to grub out the rhizomes of the bracken, which prevent tree seedlings from reaching the light, and to disturb the soil so that seeds could germinate. Though the remaining trees, now ancient, rained seed upon the ground here, none survived, because the bracken, released by heavy grazing from competition, had swarmed the bared land beneath them, creating an impenetrable barrier.

  I would struggle to describe these boar as wild: the Dangerous Wild Animals Act forces their owners to act as zookeepers. The boar, like the beavers I saw in Wales, live behind high fences and electric charges. But elsewhere in Britain, they are starting to re-establish themselves, without permission from the authorities. The first major escape from boar farms here took place during the great gales of 1987, when trees crashed down on the fences. Since then they have continued to escape from farms and collections, and they have now founded at least four small colonies in southern England and possibly a fifth in western Scotland. They breed quickly. The government says that unless determined efforts are made to exterminate them, they will become established through much of England within twenty or thirty years.11 It is a prospect that delights me, though I accept that not everyone shares this view.

  Their reputation for ferocity has, like that of many large wild animals, been greatly exaggerated. It is true that they will attack dogs that chase them or people who corner them, but researchers who investigated this question concluded that, though they live throughout continental Europe, ‘we have been unable to find any confirmed reports in the literature of wild boar making unprovoked attacks on humans’.12 The government believes that the chances that they could transmit exotic diseases such as swine fever or foot and mouth to livestock are low, but they will cause damage to crops. This, it says, ‘is likely to be small in comparison to agricultural damage from more common wildlife such as rabbits’.13 They can also break into pig pens, kill the domestic boars and impregnate the sows.

  On the other hand, the boar will catalyse some of the dynamic processes missing from our ecosystem. They are another keystone species, shaking up the places in which they live. The British woodland floor is peculiar in that it is often dominated by a single species, such as dog’s mercury, wild garlic, bluebells, bracken, hart’s tongue, male fern or brambles. These monocultures, like fields of wheat or rapeseed, may in some cases be the result of human intervention, such as the extirpation of the boar. To visit the Białowieża Forest in eastern Poland, which is as close to being an undisturbed ecosystem as any remaining in Europe, in May, when dozens of flower species jostle each other in an explosion of colour, is to see how much Britain is missing, and the extent to which boar transform their environment.

  I understand people’s concerns about the loss of those uninterrupted carpets of bluebells that have made some British woods famous. They are, I agree, stunning, just as fields of lavender or flax are stunning, but to me they are an indication not of the wealth of the ecosystem but of its poverty. One of the reasons why bluebells have been able to crowd out other species in the woods in which they grow is because the animal which previously kept them in check no longer roams there. Wild boar and bluebells live happily together, but perhaps not wild boar and only bluebells. By rooting and grubbing in the forest floor, by creating little ponds and miniature wetlands in their wallows, boar create habitats for a host of different plants and animals, a shifting mosaic of tiny ecological niches, opening and closing as the sounders pass through.14 Boar are the untidiest animals to have lived in this country since the Ice Age. This should commend them to anyone with an interest in the natural world.

  As the boar I watched were demonstrating, they allow trees to grow in places currently hostile to them. Another experiment, more advanced than this one, had revealed that where boar are allowed to root, both pine and birch seedlings establish themselves freely, whereas in the brakes without boar there is scarcely any regeneration.15 In the enclosure I visited, the researchers had noticed that robins and dunnocks follow the boar around, feeding where they have overturned the ground. It could be that the robin evolved alongside the boar, rather as the oxpecker has evolved alongside large mammals in Africa, and that in the absence of boar it has now adopted human gardeners, who provide the same service.

  The British government has washed its hands of the decision for which it should be responsible: what, if anything, to do about the returning boar. It has given landowners, both public and private, the task of deciding whether they should live or die.16 This is a cop-out. The boar belong to everyone and no one, and we should be allowed to make a collective decision about what happens to them. It also ensures that, in most cases, the boar will be culled, without consultation, deliberation or research, because landlords are the group typically most hostile to the existence of any wild animals, except those they wish to hunt for sport. Already, boar are being killed here by the Forestry Commission and other owners at rates that could wipe them out. Among the commission’s justifications is that they cause ‘substantial damage’ to woodlands.17 What does this mean? The notion of damage to native ecosystems by a native species at numbers well below its natural population is nonsensical. What the Forestry Commission calls damage a biologist calls natural processes.

  There might be a means of allaying the hostility even of the most resistant owners: allowing boar to become the one kind of animal they value–game. In Sweden, France, Germany, Poland and Italy, a powerful lobby now defends the boar out of self-interest. These are the hunters who stalk them in the woods
and shoot them with high-powered rifles. Their licence fees are used to compensate the farmers whose crops the boars damage.18 Licensed hunting in France appears to have transformed the public perception of this species, from agricultural pest to treasured native wildlife. And there are other, less destructive means of making money from them. Jenny Farrant, a farmer in East Sussex, first became aware of the wild boar on her land when they rooted up her hop bines.19 Instead of waging war on them, however, she decided to make use of them, and now sells boar-watching holidays.20 If the landowners now killing them indiscriminately give us the chance, we will soon come to value and cherish wild boar, just as we might come to value and cherish most of our once and future wildlife.

  The boar I had come to see are one component of the most ambitious rewilding project in Britain. They live on an estate of 10,000 acres in the Scottish Highlands, purchased a few years ago from the family of a deceased Italian big-game hunter by an organization called Trees for Life. This estate, it hopes, will become the core of a great tract of rewilded land. The project is driven by one of the most singular men I have met.

  Had someone described Alan Watson Featherstone to me and some of the beliefs he holds, I might never have written to him. Over the years, perhaps because I have spent too long in protest camps, I have developed a number of prejudices, which until now appeared to be rational: against people who believe in the significance of coincidences; against people who maintain that plants grow better if you love them; against people who live at the Findhorn Foundation (the spiritual community on the Moray Firth founded in the 1960s which, when I first visited it many years ago, seemed to be a permanent festival of fuzzy thinking and mumbo-jumbo); against men with ponytails. Alan belongs to all of these categories, yet he resembles none of the stereotypes I have, perhaps unfairly, constructed around such traits.

  In the days that I spent with him roaming the glens and bens, and the nights staying in his tiny, beautiful eco-house in Findhorn, the moments accidentally eavesdropping on his video conferences and planning meetings, watching him organize, despite his opposing views, the talk I gave to the Foundation on the benefits of nuclear power, my prejudices fell apart. Efficient, entrepreneurial, focused, driven–this was a man who could have succeeded in any field. Without ever raising his voice or asserting himself, he transacted a vast amount of business, handling everyone he spoke to firmly and fluently. Fund-raising, recruitment, restructuring, redundancies, logistics, science, fieldwork–he appeared, without ever breaking sweat, to be on top of it all, yet he delegated tasks with no sign of territorialism or the other pathologies of ‘Founder’s Syndrome’.

  I am used to being disappointed by visionaries, who often turn out to be lunatics or frauds, or to be afflicted with ossifying pride. But in this case, the more I listened, the more my respect grew. Never did I hear him hesitate or stumble. Every word was well chosen, every idea he expressed intelligible. He spoke softly and thoughtfully, engaging with the issues I raised, receptive to challenge or contradiction. He had a remarkable ability both to grasp the complexity and to keep his explanations simple, as if he had already condensed and summarized every subject I introduced. His is one of the most engaging minds I have come across.

  Alan is a small man with delicate features and huge milky-blue eyes. He has a broad white beard and white hair which he wears, yes, in a ponytail. His movements are quick and busy; he springs over the hillsides like a goat. He was born in Airdrie, a small industrial town close to Glasgow. When his family moved to Stirling, he began to take an interest in the woods and water that surrounded his house. When he left university, he travelled to North America, where he worked for four years as a tobacco farm labourer, a housepainter and a mining surveyor. The surveying work took him to remote places, where bears and moose were common sights.

  ‘It was a transformative experience. It kicked off such a lot of wonder in me, and a desire to know those things. But I was working for the destruction of the earth. It was contrary to what my heart was saying was important.’

  When he returned to Scotland, he went to live at Findhorn, where he worked in the foundation’s gardens, coming to believe something I find hard to accept: that ‘plants flourish in an atmosphere of love’. He visited Glen Affric, where some of the last remnants of the ancient Caledonian Forest grow, and was astonished by what he saw.

  ‘I had never known that anything like this existed in Scotland. It looks like Canada or the western US. I had thought heather-covered hills and empty glens were natural. But I also realized that the Caledonian Forest remnants there were dying on their feet. I had a feeling in my gut: this land is calling out for help. Calling out to us. The feeling was there with me for years.’

  In 1986, he organized an environmental conference in Findhorn, at the end of which people were asked ‘to stand up and make a commitment to the earth’. He announced that he would launch a project to restore the Caledonian Forest. ‘There was no going back then. I had no background, no experience, no qualifications. My degree is in electronics. But my passion was there. That’s where the drive came from. The commitment to make it happen.’

  At first he worked through the Findhorn Foundation; in 1989 he set up Trees for Life. He began by persuading some of the owners of estates on the north side of the Great Glen, the neat diagonal slash almost cutting Scotland in two, to let him plant or protect young trees on their land. He also began to recruit scientists to work alongside the project and to mobilize a volunteer army of mappers and planters. He started to form an astonishing plan.

  Alan intends to reforest an area of some 1,000 square miles (roughly 10 per cent of the Highlands21) to the west of Inverness, encompassing glens Shiel, Moriston, Affric, Cannich, Strathfarrar, Orrin, Strathconon and Carron.22 This area, which is mostly uninhabited, contains three of the largest remnants of the Caledonian Forest. His aim was to allow the existing forests to regenerate, to fill in the gaps through planting and to remove the exotic trees–Sitka spruce, lodgepole pine, Douglas fir, western hemlock–introduced for commercial forestry. The region would become a contiguous native forest, in which missing animal species could be reinstated and through which they could freely move, creating what he called ‘the wild heart of the Highlands’. Within this area the trees would not be cut. The land, once they had become established, would not be managed. When I visited him, the volunteers working with Trees for Life were soon to plant their millionth tree.

  To accelerate the project, Alan had set out to raise the money to buy an estate which could be solely devoted to rewilding. There are, in the Highlands, plenty of opportunities. The tragic history of this region–the Clearances that followed the Battle of Culloden (which took place not far from Findhorn)–has left most of the north of Scotland in the hands of a tiny number of landowners, few of whom live on their estates, and most of whom are not Scottish. In some places, making use of the right-to-buy laws passed by the Scottish parliament,23 communities of smallholders have begun to regain a footing on the land. Some of these communities are rewilding parts of the land they have bought.

  But in the rocky mountain core of the Highlands, where the soil is poor, the facilities sparse and most of the estates too large for communities to handle, human beings are an endangered species. It is one of the least-habited places in Europe, and people are unlikely ever to return in large numbers. Rewilding here, by contrast to some other promising places, conflicts with few people’s aspirations.

  As the new millennium began, Alan applied for grants, badgered philanthropists, boosted the membership, sold diaries and calendars and charged tourists and students to plant trees. He managed, by 2006, to raise £1.65 million, enough to buy the 10,000-acre Dundreggan estate in Glenmoriston.

  The Italian owner had died intestate, and the sale of his property was tortuous. As so many of the absentee landlords of Scotland do, he had channelled his assets through holding companies in a tax haven: in this case Liechtenstein. The legal knots took two years to untie. But, as Alan says, �
�when you have a 250-year vision, you have to learn to relax a bit’.

  Like most of the land in this region, the estate (with the exception of two small corners under forestry and sheep) was used for deer stalking. For a few weeks a year, a handful of people dressed in tweeds and brogues, steeped in Balmorality (see p. 149), travelled to Dundreggan to shoot stags. Otherwise, with the exception of the stalker (the deer manager), it was almost unvisited. But like the high sheep pastures in Wales the land had been scoured, and the last scraps of native forest were slowly succumbing to senescence. Without predators, fed by the estates in the winter, culled only lightly, the population of red deer had exploded. It has more than doubled in the Highlands since 1965.

  The great Caledonian Forest, which once covered much of the Highlands, has been reduced, by people, sheep and deer, to around 1 per cent of its greatest extent. In some of the places where trees still exist, the youngest are 150 years old. The oldest were growing before the Battle of Culloden, when the political changes that destroyed much of Scotland’s remaining forest began.

  I arrived at Dundreggan–Dul Dreagain, Dragon’s Hollow–on a day of fleeting sunlight and black clouds. Successive fronts were rolling up the Great Glen, driving the classic mixed weather of early April into the surrounding braes. Alan led me through a forest of ancient juniper bushes, twisting and bulging into fantastic shapes like zoophytes in The Garden of Earthly Delights.

  After we had seen the boar, we walked through the old birches to the rocky ridge on which the last pines of the estate grew. Reduced–first by the shipwrights who logged the forests here, then by old age to a few hooked crones hunched over the hillside–these trees, which had clung to the rocks for a quarter of a millennium, were reaching the end of their lives. Great ginger branches had begun to shear off the trunks, tearing holes in their wide crowns. Young rowans grew high in the forks, sown there by birds. They too were among the last of their kind, as only those out of reach of the deer survived. On the track Alan found a pine marten scat, glittering with the iridescent wingcases of beetles.

 

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