Feral

by George Monbiot

  The wild horse seems to have disappeared from the British Isles around 9,000 years ago–some 2,000 years after the last ice sheets retreated.32 *12 Though hunting by humans doubtless accelerated its extinction, the horse was deprived of what was likely to have been its favoured habitat–steppe grasslands–by the change in climate, which allowed forests to spread. In other words, the horse died out here soon after the lion33 and the saiga antelope34 and before the reindeer.35 Though both horses and aurochs were intensively hunted, the aurochs survived for much longer: until 3,500 years ago in Britain and into the seventeenth century on the Continent. This is one of several lines of evidence suggesting that climate change, not hunting, was the major reason for the horse’s disappearance.36 Arguably, it no more belongs to our native fauna under the current climate than the woolly mammoth does. The large herbivore which is missing from our ecosystem is the moose or elk (Alces alces), which became extinct here a little under 4,000 years ago, largely as a result of hunting.37 Moose are browsing animals which live in and around forests.

  But even if horses or cattle were replacing native plant eaters, the absence of predators utterly changes the way in which they engage with the ecosystem. The grazing regime imposed by conservationists in upland Britain–whether they are using sheep, cattle, horses, yaks or pushme-pullyous–bears no relationship to anything found in nature.

  What we call nature conservation in some parts of the world is in fact an effort to preserve the farming systems of former centuries. The idealized landscape for many wildlife groups is the one that prevailed a hundred years ago, regardless of the point at which they start counting. This is what they try to preserve or re-create, defending the land from the intrusions of nature. Reserves are treated like botanic gardens: their habitats are herbaceous borders of favoured species, weeded and tended to prevent the wilds from encroaching. As Ritchie Tassell says sardonically, ‘You wonder how nature coped before we came along.’

  I do not object to the idea of conserving a few pieces of land as museums of former farming practices, or of protecting meadows of peculiar loveliness in their current state, though I would prefer to see these places labelled culture reserves. I do not object to the continued existence of reserves in which endangered species which could not otherwise survive are maintained through intensive management.*13 Nor do I believe that rewilding should replace attempts to change the way farms are managed, to allow more wildlife to live among crops and livestock: I would like to see that happen too. But if the protection of nature is to be extended to wider areas, as both conservationists and rewilders agree that it should be,39 I believe we should first conduct a radical reassessment of what we are trying to achieve and why.

  This assessment is likely to show us that rewilding could offer the best chance of protecting endangered species. According to a paper in Biological Conservation, around 40 per cent of the creatures that have become extinct in Britain since 1800 lived in woodlands, and two-fifths of those needed mature trees and dead timber to survive. The paper warns that ‘extinction rates in Britain will rise this century without . . . restoration of woodlands and wetlands’.40

  A new assessment might prompt conservationists to focus less on species and habitats which happen to be there already, and more on those which could return. Rather than sustaining the sheepwrecked, open habitats of the uplands, they might begin to reduce the impacts of human management, to allow trees to return, even to reintroduce some of the great beasts which once lived among them. That, to me, is a more inspiring vision than sustaining a slightly modified version of the farming which is suppressing the natural world almost everywhere. Everyone should have some self-willed land on their doorstep.

  Attitudes are slowly beginning to change. The Countryside Council for Wales talks about allowing ‘a more natural cycle of growth and succession’, and letting plantlife ‘develop to its full potential’.41 When I interviewed its chairman, Morgan Parry, he told me: ‘I would agree that another world is possible and more desirable . . . I would like to think that we can open our minds to the possibility that other landscapes can exist and they don’t necessarily need to exist because of farming.’

  He acknowledged that the idea of keeping the uplands open and treeless ‘does need to be challenged’. So do the rules: ‘I’m very supportive of thinking about how we might move towards a less predetermined outcome.’ But the change, he said, cannot come from governments and their agencies; it is up to campaigners to mobilize public opinion to make it happen.

  In a few places, something resembling rewilding is beginning, slowly and uncertainly, to happen. At Ennerdale in the Lake District, the National Trust, the Forestry Commission and a water company are granting nature a kind of day release from the conservation prison. It’s a good start. But–apparently because they do not want to offend or frighten local farmers42–they cannot quite bring themselves to keep agriculture out of it, and insist on running some cattle on the land.

  In parts of Essex and Suffolk, fields are being allowed to revert to saltmarsh, partly to protect the coast from erosion and storm surges. The transformation happens at great speed: after just a few years of inundation, rewilded barley fields support samphire, mullet and flounder, crabs, clams and flocks of wading birds.

  In the lowlands of eastern England, government bodies and a wildlife trust have started what they call the Great Fen project, allowing some of the old peat fens to flood. It is not quite rewilding and is still informed by the curatorial ethos. It differs from usual conservation practice in that it is trying to re-create the landscape not of 100 years ago but of 400 years ago: a mixture of grazing land, reedbeds, woods and bogs.43 The people running it hope that birds such as spoonbills and cranes will return. There are several dozen similar projects in Britain, many of them hybrids between conservation and rewilding, allowing nature more freedom than before, but in most cases unable to kick the addiction to livestock and management.

  Even by European standards–let alone those of North America and much of the rest of the world–the United Kingdom has a peculiar fear of nature, and its conservationists a peculiar fear of letting go. Germany, France and Slovakia are permitting part or all of their national parks to rewild. Most countries in Europe now have large areas of self-willed land.44 Even the tidy, busy Netherlands is allowing nature to reassert itself. But we remain, as a Francophone woman I know once rudely remarked about British men, ‘constipé et embarrassé’.

  It need not be like this. I am convinced that before long it will cease to be like this. Conservationists will begin to ease their grip on the natural world. Some of them, I have discovered, are almost ready to do so. A change is on the way, which could start to transform places that now seem bleak and almost dead into a rich and complex ferment of life.

  13

  Rewilding the Sea

  The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee

  About his shadowy sides; above him swell

  Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;

  And far away into the sickly light,

  From many a wondrous grot and secret cell

  Unnumbered and enormous polypi

  Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  The Kraken

  They had been spotted two days before, on the edge of the reef at Llansglodion. The migration had begun; these were the scouts. Soon the rest would arrive: in battalions, divisions, armies, so many that you could scarcely put your foot down for fear of treading on one. Then, in a fortnight, they would be gone. Later in the year their ghostly husks would litter the beaches. A day as calm and warm as this could not be wasted.

  The oaks had put out embryo leaves as minutely serrated as mouse paws. The fronds of the horse chestnuts in town, which had hung like empty gloves, began to stiffen and splay. Bracken unrolled leaflet by leaflet like a Mandelbrot set. On Llansglodion beach I glanced at the dismal seafront–the peeling guesthouses in hangover colours, faces shut to the sea, shop
s and houses in one hundred shades of grey and beige, their drabness accentuated by gaudy ice cream signs–then turned to face the other way. It was half an hour before low tide. The sea had retreated far beyond the breakwaters, and the bottom half of the beach shone like a mirror in the hazy sunshine. The bay opened into a long shallow crescent. In the north the dim hulks of Pen Lleyn and Ynys Enlli hunched above the horizon; in the south Pencaer–Strumble Head–sat like a low cloud on the water. The sea gleamed rhenium, embossed with dark bands as the waves rolled in.

  I pulled on my winter wetsuit and a hood, and clambered over the rocks on the edge of the beach, slithering on wrack and gutweed. On the far side of the reef I met a man I knew, up to his waist in a rockpool, netting prawns for bait. Yes, he said, they were here. I clamped my mask and snorkel to my face and slipped into the sea. The water’s cold fingers crawled under my suit and down my back.

  Where the waves had churned up the mud beside the rocks, the sea was opaque, so I struck out into the clearer water beyond. I could hear my breathing resound in my head, loud and hollow. I could just see the bottom and the dim pale flecks of shells on the mud. I pushed out further, enjoying the power that comes from swimming with your head down: it felt as if my arms had grown. When I raised my face, I found that I had started swimming back towards the rocks.

  I set off again, put my head down and saw something that looked like the kind of exotic weapon that might be discovered during a raid on the home of a martial arts fanatic. The water was too cloudy to tell how deep it lay or how large it was. In the olive gloom it could have been a mile down, a benthic monster prowling the fringes of the continental shelf. It was bunched up as if ready to spring, a snarl of spikes and legs and latent power. I was not wholly sure that I wanted to meet it.

  I filled my chest with air and duck-dived to the bottom. I had no flippers, and the seabed, perhaps two and a half fathoms down, was at the limit of my dive. I touched the beast. It raised its long pincers over its back. I ran out of air and corked to the surface. I tried again, too quickly, knowing that I could lose the mark in the soupy water. This time I managed to get one hand beneath it. But its feet were planted in the seafloor and I had to surface before I could lever it up. Over-eager, forgetting myself, I took another great lungful and plunged back down. I grabbed it with both hands then kicked up, using my buoyancy to lift the creature. I was astonished by its weight. I reached the surface and drew a breath so sharp that it pulled down the stop valve. I tried again with the same result, and nearly asphixiated. I spat out the snorkel and took in a mouthful of water. Almost panicking, I put my head back, wheezing, coughing up brine. Yet still I would not let go of what I had caught. I clutched it to my chest with one hand even as I struggled to stay afloat. Evolutionary biologists have identified a rule they call the life/dinner principle. A predator puts less effort into the chase than its prey: if the hunter fails it loses only its dinner, if the hunted fails it loses its life. In this case the equation was reversed.

  Breathing raggedly, lying on my back, I kicked towards the rocks until the water was just shallow enough, with my chin raised, for me to stand. I tiptoed to the reef, slithered over the weed and sat on a boulder, still panting, still pressing the creature against my wetsuit. I lowered it onto the rock and studied it. It looked like the grab used to lift crushed cars in a scrap-metal yard. Its claws were more than two feet from tip to tip, powerfully ridged and bossed, crenallated on the cutting edges. Every leg ended in a long black spike, which it had used to embed itself in the mud when I had tried to lever it out. Now the monstrous spider crab curled up and played dead. The only movements I could see were the bubbles which fizzed and popped from under its carapace.

  Its shell was covered in weed and sponges: it had not yet moulted. It bulged with the suggestion of muscle like a Roman suit of armour. It was guarded with gothic spines and pinnacles, each surrounded by a ring of short bristles, and fringed with spikes like the Statue of Liberty, extending between the eyes into a pair of horns. The underside of the monster was covered in smooth articulated plates. It looked like a rock that had crept into life. Beneath its robot joints, its mineral crust, it scarcely seemed animate. I thought of these heavy creatures trundling out of the depths at the end of winter, slowly converging on the shore, and wondered what, among the disaggregated ganglia that pass for the crustacean brain, they perceived, what spirit moved beneath the expressionless shell. It was a male, which meant that I could keep it.

  I travelled up the coast to look for clear water. Two miles to the north of Llansglodion the dunes billowed onto clean sand. I walked down the beach and into the sea. The water was bright enough to let the sun sparkle on the seabed. There was no chance of losing my way here: the ripples on the seafloor ran north to south, and as the waves rolled in towards the shore they knocked little puffs of sand eastwards. Head down, I could give myself up to that world.

  It belonged to the crabs. Hermit crabs, helmeted in cowls and spires–winkles, turitellas, dogwhelks and topshells–scuttled over the seabed close to the beach, top heavy, almost upended by the passing waves. As I moved into deeper water, they ceded the ground to masked crabs, the size and shape of bantam eggs, whose pincers, like articulated forceps, were twice the length of their bodies. I watched one stuffing a smashed shellfish into its mouth. Shore crabs in pie-crust shells scuttled away as I loomed overhead.

  The tide had been rising for an hour and a half. I swam towards the horizon, feeling the cool green water push past my face. Creeping over the sand in two fathoms of water was a pink grapefruit carapace. I dived and swept it up in one movement, almost piercing my hands on the spines. It was a female–I let her go again. She drifted back to the seabed, paddling a little to keep her balance. I swam on and soon, in deeper water, spotted a much larger beast. I hung above it, feeling like a hawk about to swoop on its prey. When I had gorged on air, I dived. I needed both hands to lever it out of the sand. It was another male, the same size as the monster I had caught in Llansglodion.

  I left it in a beach pool and swam out again, porpoising through the water, thrilled by the cold draught of the sea and the beams of light that searched the green deeps, glittering with motes of sand, drawn from the shore until I could no longer see the seabed, then into the emerald water beyond. I swam until my hands became so cold that I could not close my fingers. Even then I was reluctant to leave. My skin when I stepped out of the sea was white and riven.

  I fished crabs on three more occasions that fortnight, while the weather held, and watched as their numbers rose until they piled against the shore like autumn leaves. As they converged on the beach, I was soon able to pick them up from the undersides of the rocks at the bottom of the tide, without venturing into the water. Just beyond this mark, in the dull yellow light behind the breaking waves, they loomed through the wrack like armoured spaceships. Their flesh was sweet and firm, cleaner than crayfish, more tender than lobster. A large crab would feed three people. At the end of May, they disappeared as suddenly as they had arrived. Later in the summer their cast-off shells washed up in crisp pink drifts sometimes a mile or two long, a last gift to the earthlings as they lumbered back into the deeps.

  Older people I know, who have lived on this coast since they were children, told me that the spider crabs started arriving in large numbers only fifteen or twenty years ago. ‘It’s an invasion,’ said the man who runs the tackle shop in Llansglodion. Some people assumed that they were moving north as the sea warmed. This is possible, as the species is limited by temperature: the hard winter of 1962–3 wiped out the spider crabs from the south-east of England. Others suggested that the disappearance of fish, which eat and compete with crabs, has allowed their population to explode. Something like this happened on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, where crabs and lobsters proliferated after the cod were fished out.

  Whatever the explanation may be, this migration is a reminder of a natural abundance that was once universal. I have seen spider crabs described as ‘the wildebee
st of our waters’,1 but there is, or was, nothing remarkable about their numbers. Almost every ecosystem–whether on land or sea–once resembled the Serengeti: great herds of animals, coming and going in prodigious migrations. The state of nature is a state of almost inconceivable abundance.

  In his magnificent but sadly neglected book The Unnatural History of the Sea, Professor Callum Roberts recalls the herring migrations that once stormed the coasts of Britain.2 Some shoals, he estimates, ‘could block the light from 20 or even 40 square kilometres of seabed’. He quotes Oliver Goldsmith who, in 1776, described the arrival of a typical body of herring ‘divided into distinct columns, of five or six miles in length, and three or four broad; while the water before them curls up, as if forced out of its bed . . . the whole water seems alive; and is seen so black with them to a great distance, that the number seems inexhaustible’.3

  Goldsmith noted how these shoals were harried by swarms of dolphins, sharks, fin and sperm whales, in British waters, within sight of the shore. The herring were followed by bluefin and longfin tuna, blue, porbeagle, thresher, mako and occasional great white sharks, as well as innumerable cod, spurdog, tope and smoothhound. On some parts of the seabed the eggs of the herring lay six feet deep.

  Even within the past century such monsters as pursued those shoals were still circumnavigating our coasts. Bluefin tuna, sometimes described by fishermen hunting pilchard and herring as ‘blue mackerel’ or ‘king mackerel’, roamed through all the seas around Britain. As the angling expert Mike Thrussell records, in the late 1920s big-game hunters heard tales of vast fish appearing among shoals of herring in the North Sea. In 1930, fishing off Scarborough on the Yorkshire coast, they landed their first five fish, all between 400 and 700 pounds.4 By 1932, in the same waters, they had beaten the world record for bluefin tuna. They did it again in 1933, with a monster of 850 pounds. Some remarkable footage of these early expeditions exists. Tweedy men and women, angling from a tiny launch, used split-cane rods and gearless reels to catch this king of fish. One shot shows nine monstrous tuna lying on the deck of the steam-trawler the anglers used as their mother ship.5