Feral
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Another document published by the wildlife trust stated that cattle were to be kept on the grassy part of the reserve ‘until there is an average sward height of 10cm’.3 The trust revealed that ‘to maximize the impact of the cattle, the grassland was strip-grazed’. This apparently, is how nature should best be protected in what this organization calls its ‘flagship’ reserve.4 It is by these means that, at great expense, it sustains the ambience of a nuclear winter.
So why is this happening? The answer is like the Ouroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail. When you have followed it all the way round you find yourself back where you started.
The stated purpose of this brutal management regime is to maintain the heath and bare bog it contains ‘in favourable conservation status’ (it is failing dismally, but let us put that to one side for now). The plan points out that ‘the site is artificial, having been created as the result of human activity following the removal of trees during the manufacture of lead’. It was kept treeless, before it became a nature reserve, by the farmers who burnt and grazed it. It must, the management plan insists, remain this way, fixed in time like the old sepia photograph it resembles. But nowhere is the obvious question asked or answered: why?
I had lunch in Welshpool with three people from the Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust. I found to my surprise that they were in sympathy with much of what I said. So why were they managing the reserve like this? It was simple, they told me: that was the law.*3
‘We are given these targets and sites are designated for them. We’re seriously in trouble if we don’t abide by them. We wanted woodland to succeed naturally up the gulley [the great ravine at Glaslyn]. We want to fence it off and let it happen. But God have we had trouble.’
When I spoke to the chairman of the Countryside Council for Wales, which enforces the rules for managing the site, he disputed some of what the trust says,*4 but he agreed that some of the rules should be re-examined.
The owner of the land must keep its ‘interest features’–particular plants and animals, habitats or geology–in ‘favourable condition’.5 The guidelines defining this are quite strict. In places like Glaslyn, for example, whose interest features include blanket bog and upland heath, they insist that scattered trees or scrub should cover less than a tenth of the bog and less than a fifth of the heath.6
These standards reflect European rules, which list the kind of places that countries must protect.7†5 Among them are wet heaths, moorgrass, blanket bogs and other such sheepwrecks, of the kind represented at Glaslyn.8 One of the official reasons for choosing such places is that they are internationally important, because they possess ‘assemblages of key species’.9
We have an international duty to preserve blasted heaths, bare bogs, acid grasslands and other such sheep-scorched places because they support a particular community of plants or animals or fungi or lichens. But every habitat–whether a rainforest or a railway track–supports a particular assemblage of species, a combination found nowhere else. The assemblage is a product of the physical habitat. By managing the land to protect one combination of species, we prevent other combinations from developing there.
For example, the display board at the entrance to the Glaslyn reserve explains that the species being protected there are red grouse, wheatear, skylark and ring ouzel. The land is managed partly to maximize their populations. But why? All four are close to the bottom of the list of species considered to be ‘of European conservation concern’.10 It is true that most are declining in the United Kingdom (the ring ouzel in particular), but that applies to many birds, plenty of which are in far greater trouble than these. In fact their relatively high numbers in Britain and Europe are an artefact of grazing; they are all species which can survive in the scoured, open habitats humans have created and that some conservationists now seek to preserve, in order–with dizzying circularity–to protect the species which can survive here.
Of the four, the red grouse is the animal whose conservation best encapsulates the madness of current policy. It has no European conservation listing, because Europe contains so many of them. They are sufficiently abundant in Britain for thousands to be shot here every year and served, almost raw, in gentlemen’s clubs and smart restaurants.
The number of red grouse in this country is sustained through the ruthless persecution of far rarer animals: the predatory birds and mammals that might reduce their numbers. So valuable is grouse shooting that even when this persecution is illegal and invokes (in theory, though seldom in practice) stiff penalties, it persists. Tests conducted by the Scottish government found that golden eagles, red kites, peregrines and a white-tailed sea eagle whose corpses were found on grouse-shooting estates had been poisoned.11 Enough golden eagles were being killed to prevent Scotland’s population (the only breeding population in Britain) from recovering. The white-tailed eagle was one of those reintroduced to Scotland at great expense and trouble, which have begun to establish a fragile clawhold on parts of the coast. One gamekeeper, on the Skibo estate in Sutherland, was caught in possession of enough carbofuran–a banned pesticide–to kill all the birds of prey in Scotland six times over. Three dead golden eagles were found on the estate; so was a dead grouse, pinned to a metal stake and saturated with carbofuram, which had evidently been laid out as bait. He was fined just £3,300.12
Red grouse are also maintained by a programme of cutting and burning which keeps the heather moorlands free from most other plants and ensures that there are plenty of young shoots for the birds to eat. This programme shuts out many of the other bird species which might have lived on the uplands.
So it is puzzling and disturbing to discover that the wildlife trust which manages the Glaslyn reserve describes red grouse as ‘one of our key indicator species’.13 An indicator of what? Its answer is ‘the health of an upland landscape’. But what, in this context, does health mean? The red grouse is to the uplands what the magpie is to the lowlands: it benefits from changes caused by humans. What is healthy for red grouse tends to be unhealthy for other species, even for other species of grouse, such as the black grouse, the capercaillie and the hazel grouse (which might have lived in Britain before we lost most of our forests). Sustaining the kind of habitat required to support artificially high numbers of red grouse destroys the habitat required by rarer species. So why are red grouse a ‘key indicator’? Because they show the trust that the ‘interest feature’–the treeless, blasted upland heath–has been maintained. We return to the head of the snake.
It is true that, unlike the red grouse, some of the species chosen as members of the favoured assemblages are rare. But some of those not chosen are even rarer: they no longer exist in many regions, because the habitats in which they lived have been replaced by the ‘interest features’ conservationists are trying to preserve. Both the wildlife groups and the official bodies are advised by ecologists. They defend the animals and plants they study as much for professional reasons as for environmental ones. Moorland weevil specialists become moorland weevil champions. A weevil ecologist tends to have little interest in capercaillie, and would respond with hostility to an attempt to expand capercaillie–or wildcat or lynx–habitat at the expense of weevil habitat. But because there are no longer any capercaillie, wildcat or lynx in Wales, and therefore no one studying them there, there is no competing group of local scientists arguing for capercaillie forests instead of weevil moor. Conservation policy is self-reinforcing.
There are two other official reasons for protecting particular places: ‘high risk’ and ‘rapid decline’. These were the justifications the Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust gave me for the way it manages its reserve. Heather, it said, ‘is now a rare habitat with its distribution limited to Europe’.14 This is questionable: there are between 2 and 3 million hectares of upland heath in the UK alone.15 But why should the decline of a man-made habitat make it worthy of preservation? The contaminated land associated with active industry, fresh slag heaps and the tailings from deep coal mines are all in p
recipitous decline in Europe. If the criteria were to be applied even-handedly, these–and the sparse life they harbour–would be our conservation priorities.
Would it not be better to stop suppressing natural processes and allow the land to find its own way? Somewhere like Glaslyn is likely to revert to a mixture of rainforest, bog forest, scrub and heather. This would surely be a richer and more interesting place than the nineteenth-century ecological disaster being preserved there at the moment.
Some conservation groups claim that open habitats, with only scattered trees, represent the ‘natural’ state of the hills. They often call upon the work of Frans Vera, the man who founded the rewilding project in the Netherlands using Heck cattle. He has argued that the natural condition of most of the land in the warm, wet climate that has prevailed for the past 5,000 years is pasture with groves of trees. Grazing pressure by wild animals, he maintains, kept the forest open, much as sheep and cattle do today.16 It is an interesting idea, but, overwhelmingly, the evidence does not support it.*6
Others claim that the sheep or cattle or horses they keep on the land help to maximize the diversity of life. What they tend to mean is the diversity of certain kinds of life, such as butterflies or wild flowers: species which favour open, sunny places. But when you count species of all kinds–beetles, spiders, fungi, birds and everything else–native woodland turns out to be much more biodiverse than even the richest flowering meadows.†7 Most animals need places in which they can hide from predators, or which do not dry out quickly, or are protected from wind and sudden changes in temperature. Open landscapes tend to offer none of these defences.
A study in the Cairngorms, in the Scottish Highlands, found that wooded habitats are eleven times richer in nationally important species than grassland, and thirteen times richer than moorland.*8 The figures are even starker when you consider creatures found nowhere else in Britain. There are 223 such species on the massif. One hundred of them are associated with woodland or trees. But just one–a fungus that lives on bilberry leaves–requires moorland for its survival. The management of upland nature reserves is informed by a profound misperception: that wildlife is best protected by clearing away the trees and scrub.
In one of its pamphlets, the Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust warns that ‘in some areas, heather moorland is declining in quality due to neglect of traditional moorland management techniques such as cutting and burning’.25 Imagine how a tropical ecologist would respond if she saw that. British environmentalists have been campaigning for years to stop the cutting and burning of habitats in developing countries, yet here we see this destruction as an essential conservation tool. A conservation movement which believes that the environment is threatened by a lack of cutting and burning is one that has badly lost its way.
The choice of favoured ecosystems in this country and in some other parts of Europe appears arbitrary, guided by impulses which have been neither widely examined nor properly explained. The decisions we have made are historical, cultural and aesthetic, dressed up in the language of science.†9
I would not object to this–the way in which we engage with nature will always be mediated by culture–were it not for the fact that some of the upland habitats we have chosen to conserve seem to me to be almost as dismal, impoverished and lacking in structure or complexity as a parking lot. This is not an entirely subjective view. Without trees, large predators, wild herbivores, rotting wood or many other components of a thriving ecosystem, these places retain only a few worn strands of the complex web of life. The lively ecological processes I find so fascinating, the trophic cascades and unexpected interactions, the constant surprises that in an untrained ecosystem delight and enthral, are all prohibited.
These issues become still more pressing when you discover that, even on its own terms, across much of the uplands this approach is failing dismally. A survey of the birds in the Pumlumon site of special scientific interest, of which the Glaslyn reserve is part, found that there had been a catastrophic decline in the species the severe regime is supposed to protect.*10 Their numbers, the survey found, have been falling at greater rates inside the conservation area than in Wales as a whole. Extreme management is not working, even by the standards it sets for itself.
Ecologists profess themselves mystified by this failure. It could be that the management programme simply cannot sustain the species it is designed to protect, as the sheep it relies on gradually degrade the habitat: the longer they stay there, the more damage they do. Their compaction and poaching of the land, for example, could reduce the number of larval insects on which many birds depend. Or it could be that trying to preserve the ecosystem as if it were static prevents it from adapting to changing conditions such as global warming and acid rain (which is still an issue in these very wet places). All we can say at this stage is that the current conservation model appears to have failed. In its management plan the wildlife trust remarks that the habitats it has been trying to preserve since 1982 at Glaslyn remain in ‘unfavourable condition’.28 The same certificate of failure has now been issued to 60 per cent of the most important wildlife sites (the special areas of conservation) in Wales.29
Some people have responded to such failures by blaming the fact that the habitats they have been saving are too small. The answer, they say, is to move towards ‘landscape-scale’ conservation: doing the same thing across a wider area.*11 But surely the problem is not only size but also method? That intensive management, sooner or later, will fail? If for no other reason, this will happen as temperatures rise. Locking in particular assemblages of animals and plants will become ever less viable as conditions change. If an ecosystem cannot adapt, its richness, structure and complexity will decline even faster than they are declining today.
The plan for Glaslyn claims that ‘wider knowledge of the Trust’s work and the rationale behind management will create a more sympathetic public’. I suggest that if people better understood its work and rationale, it would have the opposite effect.
The promise of conservation used to be that by protecting the species you would protect the habitat. The Bengal tiger needs jungles to survive, so defending it means defending the rich and fascinating ecosystem that supports it. But in the United Kingdom, the species we have chosen, historically, to protect are often those associated with damaged and impoverished places, and to defend them we must keep the ecosystem in this state. Armies of conservation volunteers are employed to prevent natural processes from occurring. Land is intensively grazed to ensure that the plants do not recover from intensive grazing. Woods are coppiced (the trees are felled at ground level, encouraging them to resprout from that point) to sustain the past impacts of coppicing. In their seminal paper challenging the conservation movement, the biologists Clive Hambler and Martin Speight point out that while coppicing might favour butterfly species which can live in many habitats, it harms woodland beetles and moths that can live nowhere else.30 They noted that of the 150 woodland insects that are listed as threatened in Britain, just three (2 per cent) are threatened by a reduction in coppicing, while 65 per cent are threatened by the removal of old and dead wood. (This is not to suggest that coppicing has no ecological role: many woodland species must have evolved to take advantage of the habitat disturbance caused by elephants.)
Conservationists sometimes resemble gamekeepers: they regard some of our native species as good and worthy of preservation, others as bad and in need of control. Unlike gamekeepers, they don’t use the word ‘vermin’ to describe our native wildlife. Instead they say ‘unwanted, invasive species’. They seek to suppress nature, to prevent successional processes from occurring, to keep ecosystems in a state of arrested development. Nothing is allowed to change: nature must do as it is told, to the nearest percentage point. They have retained an Old Testament view of the natural world: it must be disciplined and trained, for fear that its wild instincts might otherwise surface.
The result is back-to-front conservation. Wildlife groups seek to protect the anima
ls and plants that live in the farmed habitats of the previous century, rather than imagine what could live there if they stepped back. They take a species like the red grouse, or a club moss or a micromoth, which happens to thrive in a place that has been greatly altered by humans, and they build their management plans around it, seeking to keep the land in the state which best secures its survival. In doing so, they shut down the opportunities for other species to establish themselves, either naturally or by reintroduction.
Sustaining the open, degraded habitats of the uplands means keeping sheep. It does not seem to matter whom you talk to in the hilly parts of Britain: farmers, government officials and wildlife groups will all tell you that the answer is sheep–what was the question? If you challenge their management of the land they invariably invoke the horror of ‘undergrazing’. But how can a native ecosystem be undergrazed by a ruminant from Mesopotamia? Is our wildlife under-hunted by American mink? Are our streamsides under-colonized by Himalayan balsam, our rivers under-infested by red signal crayfish, our verges under-occupied by Japanese knotweed? It is a nonsensical concept.
Even the grazing of cattle or horses in the uplands, which some conservation groups characterize as the benign alternative to sheep, means maintaining habitats that would not exist without us. During the Boreal and Atlantic periods, when warm, wet weather returned to northern Europe, the giant aurochs, or wild cow, appears to have been a forest animal. Analysis of the carbon and nitrogen isotopes in its bones shows that it lived on woodland plants. Domestic cattle, by contrast, from their first appearance in northern Europe, largely ate grass, growing in clearings created by people. The chemical differences are so discrete that they can be used to distinguish the bones of wild cattle from the bones of domestic cattle.31