RECONNECTING THE WILD

RICHARD MABEY RECONNECTING THE WILD

31

RECONNECTING THE WILD RICHARD MABEY Connectivity can come in very small parcels. I had a wonderful day in August on the Natural Trust’s Estate at Blickling looking at what they were doing to the River Bure. The head ranger there was getting worried about the inanimation of the river. The trout were declining, there were no new species of birds coming in. The river looked dreadful. It wasn’t actually canalised, but it was a dull place. He asked himself, ‘What was missing from the river?’

‘What would the river like to have?’ and found an answer swimming up in his consciousness. ‘What it needs, what it wants, is fallen trees in the water’. The kind of thing that most land managers abominate, the muddling of habitats – water contaminated by trees when it should just be free flowing. So he began a programme of felling trees into the River Bure along nearly a kilometre stretch of the river. Just to see what would happen. It was a limited area, and if the whole thing went wrong, they could yank the trees out again. But it had the most dramatic and invigorating effect on the river. Where trees fell, the river had to find new routes. It dug deep channels down into the riverbed, or went sideways onto the land. The trees themselves began to be habitats. At the very first felling, three alders came down together and formed a kind of bridge, half in and half out of the water, and on this an entire new woodland was starting to grow. Gradually the edges of the river began to be indeterminate. New areas of sweet grass took root at the edges. New habitats appeared all along the river.

The scientist from Queen Mary College who was monitoring the effects on the invertebrate populations was also a diver and he had been into the water at the moments when new trees were being felled into it. He went down underneath and he said ‘you could actually see the scouring of the bottom by the new course which the river had to take in real time’. It was happening at something like half an inch a minute, so even the underwater effects of that tree felling were dramatic. Since then, the trout have begun to return to that stretch of the river because they have new spawning grounds created by the variegation of the river bottom. Otters have comer for the first time and the whole place has begun to look like a wild place. But of course, its definition has changed. It is no longer a simple river with tidy banks and a neat apartheid between wood and water.

Let me give you another experience ten years before of a different character, which I am sorry to say happened to be on a Suffolk Wildlife Trust reserve. This was my one and only visit to the Framsden meadows, Fox Fritillary Meadows as they are known, which many of you may have visited. I have to say that I will never go again. I think it was the most depressing experience at a nature reserve in my life. For those of you who don’t know the story; there was a healthy population of fritillaries with all their companion plants of meadowland growing down at Framsden until the 1960s. Then the site was sprayed with herbicide one mid-summer, so everything except the fritillaries, which grow from underground corms and were vegetative at that point, was killed. What survived during succeeding

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 48 (2012)

32

Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 48

seasons was a residual population of rather desperate looking fritillaries coming up amidst a sea of rank grasses and thistles. The day that I went, the whole area had been roped off. So what you did was shuffle into this arena, walk round a circuit where a fence and a rope stopped you getting close to the fritillaries and walked out again. It was like being in a kind of Eastern European zoo in which fritillaries had replaced the hapless animals.

What both these stories are about is the issue of boundaries. Boundaries aren’t natural in the wild. In wild rivers, you don’t have anything which is absolutely consolidated as a permanent bank. It is constantly shifting and, in areas of North America for example, where there are very big rivers, trees are the things that actually recreate the landscape by shifting, pulling the banks down when they fall into the river, changing the patterns of flow. Boundaries round little colonies of flowers are unnatural as well. What I want to stress is that these aren’t just issues that impact upon the natural inhabitants of these places. They affect the way we perceive them as well. We have got into the habit of thinking of habitats as being strictly defined, and fulfilling the criteria that we have drawn up for them. We expect to be able to maintain their species lists, when ecology teaches us that vegetation systems are not stable and certainly not whole ecological ones. We tend to think, in short, of a landscape which is defined, not by nature, but by the criteria by which we analyse it and by the fences that we put round it, both literally and metaphorically, to exclude all other elements.

We have already heard why such attitudes towards nature reserves are simply no longer viable, if they ever were. Fenced areas, particularly when they are surrounded by areas of agricultural land, can’t maintain their species. The long history of island biogeographical studies has shown that unequivocally. Species begin to die out in small enclosures and in small reserves (perhaps we should call them reservations, because the sense of rather patronising protection toward their inhabitants is similar to that in the classic Western version of native American societies). Species are more vulnerable to disease in small areas; they are more vulnerable to change of every sort. I think that the ecological imperative against continuing to try and think in terms of small pocket reserves is overwhelming.

Again I return to the harm that this has done to our perceptions of nature. I get regular news of the iniquities that result from conservation bodies being forced (they do it very willingly sometimes) into thinking about single species reserves. Most recently, in East Anglia I have heard about Westleton Common - which arguably has the best and most spectacular population of nightingales in East Anglia. There is pressure at Westleton Common to clear away the scrub on which the nightingales nest for the sake of heather and silver-studded blue butterflies. Up in Norfolk recently, I was witness to Nightjar habitats being trashed for the sake of Natterjack toads.

There are good arguments for taking special action on behalf of endangered species, but we should not be in a position where species have to be traded off against each other in this way. We are in that position because we have come to accept, think and behave towards landscape in terms of these little enclosures that we call reserves, which we define according to our own

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 48 (2012)

RICHARD MABEY RECONNECTING THE WILD

33

principles. It is not just single species, sometimes it is single habitats. We have come to believe that the coppiced woodland is the archetype for woodland in East Anglia. Coppice is a rich and exciting habitat, but as woodland it is emasculated, lacking all the microhabitats and species, related to shade, and to trees of greater height and age. We could avoid all these compromises of principle if only we had much bigger joined-up wild landscapes.

I first came across the idea of connected landscapes in the United States in the early 1980s where the Wildlands project was launched (it is still persisting and flourishing). Significantly, it started when a group of execosaboteurs called the Monkey Wrench gang decided to go legal. They created a manifesto with a spectacularly ambitious – and wildly unrealistic – plan for regreening America, back to its pre-Columbian state. I have seen some of the maps of what they hope to do, with wide corridors of rewilded land going over, and in some cases actually replacing, freeways. Their motto, that came to this country maybe a decade or so later, was ‘reconnect, restore, rewild’. Their aims are to provide unimpeded progress across aboriginal forest for wolves and moose and bison, across areas that had been broken up in a ways that echo our UK landscape fragmentation. Their plans are utopian, impractical and some might even say selfish, in that they have a vision for a kind of America that is a long way from being a democratically achieved consensus. But it has begun to work; they have eschewed management talk and the kind of insistence on seeing nature as a kind of business service which we have fallen into in this country. They see it as the opposite of that, something that would lift people out of their daily transactions in a consumer world. They have of course hit big governmental and corporate obstacles, but have had support from local communities, and significantly, from some very rich people – radical film directors and record producers and the like. The Wildlands project has begun to acquire very big areas of land linking up National Parks – millions of hectares, not tens of thousands. Their idea of a corridor along which migrating animals could move, would be 10 km wide, not 10 m of field-edge wide as we tend to think of in this country. That’s America you’ll say, it’s a bigger country, it has more passion than us and that kind of thinking would be against our tradition of gradualism and timidity. The point about Wildlands, and the reason they have been able to progress, is that they think big, with passion and vision.

Over here, we think small. We are still deferential and conservative. Almost all conservation organisations, and I make a notable exception here for the National Trust in the last few years, are reluctant to get involved in political squabbles, to speak out and stand up against developers. We have ‘reality checks’ in our heads before we even start and I think we need to get up on the offensive again.

My second experience, before I get to this country, of connected land, was in Holland just at the very beginning of the Oostvaardersplassen Nature Reserve out on the coast on the reclaimed polders. I was there a few years after the American experience in the mid 1980s. I saw an extraordinary area of reclaimed sea which again had been connected up and rewilded. It was full

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 48 (2012)

34

Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 48

of astonishing wildlife; wild greylag and barnacle geese in their thousands, enormous flocks of godwit and nesting avocets. They had just begun the introduction of big herds of what they called de-domesticated animals: 400 konik ponies and as many ‘ heck’ cattle, which were beginning to variegate the wetlands, creating areas of open water, areas where scrub became established and then wet woodland. Soon the place evolved into many tens of square miles of mixed wetland habitat, all virtually unmanaged except by the cattle and animals that had been introduced. The directors took a chance, not listening to the bureaucrats from the EU, and left the carcasses of dead cattle and deer out on the reserve. They began to get sea eagles visiting the carcasses, which were encouraged (the birds now breed there). In the UK the situation couldn’t be more different. The orchestrated attack upon the proposed sea eagle introduction programme here was a disgrace to East Anglia. In Holland, the sea eagles have become a great public attraction and hides have been set up so that people can watch them feeding on the carcasses. So sea eagles, white-tailed eagles, or fen eagles, as they used to be called when they were allowed to live in East Anglia, are breeding only a hundred miles from the Suffolk coast.

We have some tradition of joined up thinking and joined up reserves in this country. Wordsworth wrote some splendid vituperative prose about the desolation of the bare and degraded fells of the Lake District, and how good it would be if the oak woodland was allowed to regenerate naturally up the hills and join up the existing woodlands there. We have one down in Hampshire, the New Forest, which is the single best example of landscapescale conservation, and has been for a thousand years. The shifting boundaries between wood, heath and bog are a vision of how ecosystems in the real world actually work without respect for the artificial boundaries that we have imposed. It has only been in the last decade that this kind of thinking has become more widespread in this country. We are beginning to have some projects of the kind I have just described. Even though they are best when they are big, I think that the conceptual surrender to nature’s ability to sort out landscapes by itself can also work in small areas, just as on the River Bure. Having said a nasty thing about one Suffolk Wildlife Trust reserve, I must balance things up by saying something good about another, which is Arger Fen where the Trust is joining up existing areas of woodland with an abandoned ploughed field. Contrary to the reflex action that the only way to get woodland is to go round drilling little holes in the soil and planting seedlings, the Suffolk Wildlife Trust simply let the field go. Within a few years it has turned into a quite spectacular mixed woodland - chiefly ash, but with many other species coming in as well. That is wonderfully exciting. When I was there last spring, just before the nightingales, which are maybe its star inhabitants, it was magnificent to see buzzards circling above the wood.

My own patch of joined up habitat, again has some Suffolk Wildlife Trust reserves at its heart, and that is the Little Ouse Headwaters Project. By a process of laborious pressurisation on landowners, buying up snippets of land here and there, leasing others; the headwaters of both the Ouse and the Waveney, which are on the same catchment area, are being turned into wild

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 48 (2012)

RICHARD MABEY RECONNECTING THE WILD

35

fenland. It hasn’t happened without obstacles and opposition. Some of the local farmers have that ancient East Anglian terror of inundation, and a nervousness that a more tolerant attitude towards water will increase the likelihood of flooding on their land. I think this is short-sighted of them, because one of the bonuses of these big landscape-scale projects, particularly when they involve wetlands, is that they reduce the chances of flooding in areas surrounding them. They become reservoirs; they become sinks, like the Ouse washes, which were created precisely to take water out of flooded land.

So this is a message that needs to be stressed. Whether it can overcome those ancient local beliefs in the horror of water is another matter.

What we need is a vision, the vision that is going to win the public over, not just headcounts of stakeholders and statistics about biodiversity targets.

It will be a vision of a wild place that satisfies our aesthetic needs and desires to live in richer surroundings. But we will have to decide where this puts management. I have strong feelings about this and think that if landscapescale initiatives give us the chance to relax management, to relax the idea that we have to create nature in our own image, then that will be good both for our budgets and for our sense of humility. One of the things that we have lost is our respect for what I would call nature’s inherited intelligence. It has been around on the planet for very much longer than us and has evolved many clever ways of producing resilient, adaptable landscapes, and I think we should give it more opportunities to do so. The naturally sprung wood at Arger Fen is one example. I had a similar experience on a much smaller scale when I had my wood in the Chilterns. Again, people thought that the only creative work that we could do would be to plant trees. I said it would be more creative to cut them down, because that kindles natural cycles that have been stopped in their tracks by over-regimented planting. It was a revelation to people to witness the natural regeneration that happened as a result. There has been a cultural forgetting of the fact that trees have reproductive systems. We have come to see trees as a kind of pet. We can breed them at will, look after them, and conveniently ignore their own selfcreation programmes and agendas. But showing otherwise takes demonstration before people grasp the energy that natural systems have.

I think that if we are going to be linking landscapes, we are going to have to decide what to do if the stuff that comes down those links is not what we expected. Do we return to our default position as dominators, saying for instance, that we insist on this habitat continuing to be a bit of heathland, we don’t want it turning into birch scrub? Or are we going to allow ourselves a bit of leeway now that we have the largeness of these bigger areas to provide the possibility of more varied habitats occurring spontaneously inside them.

The three great natural drivers of the character of landscapes, the forces, as it were, that are going to come down the links, are: water, regenerating deciduous woodland (and that includes scrub), and grazing animals. The fortunate thing is that any two of those will pretty much balance each other out. So if you just leave things alone and have two of those three elements, you will get a system which is dynamic – in which you don’t get continuous forest or continuous open water. By the contrary forces of browsing,

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 48 (2012)

36

Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 48

ground-churning animals, and the invasion of trees, you get a matrix of different habitats, constantly in the process of change. The more kinds of grazing animals (and let us say hurray for the beaver here) to jiggle the vegetation, the more variety you are going to have.

So where does that leave us as ordinary people? We have heard something about the government’s proposals to change the planning system.

The consultation period ended last week so it remains to be seen whether the strong protests against it are listened to. This isn’t the place to go into deep politics, but we have to go into some. The idea that planning should be a servant of development, that its principal purpose should be to lubricate development, makes a complete nonsense of planning, which is meant to be an impartial arbitration between different interests.

When you look at the small print of the 50-page consultation paper that the government have put out, you begin to see what they are actually wanting. This ties in with the twelve ‘landscape initiative’ areas that we have heard about today. Very good things when you think about them in isolation, but when you put them together with what the government is saying in these new guidelines, you suspect they want to return to what all of us hoped was an out-moded model. That is the idea of conserving landscape and nature in special areas. To be fair, though whether one can believe the government on this I don’t know, they say that this presumption in favour of development won’t apply in special areas, in AONBs, greenbelts, SSSIs etc. We will have to see. It also says that communities will be given much greater power in the planning process - but again, when you look at this more closely, you can see it is rather hollow promise. Communities can put forward their own development plans, but they can’t oppose other developers’ plans. But there is a small section which suggests that communities can get into their local structure plan suggestions for special areas which are important to them. But again, it is talking in terms of special areas, and I need to say a little bit about how I’d hoped we had moved away from that. This was the route that nature conservation took from the late 1940s, when the founding fathers first set up the National Parks and the Nature Conservancy. It was felt that the only practicable way that nature conservation could be done in Britain was via protected reserves, sanctuaries if you like. Create these little oases, natural ‘ghettos’ if you like, and the white heat of technology in farming and development could be given its head elsewhere. This was why they were important; because proper ecological standards, for the sake of humans and for the sake of all the other beings, had no chance of being preserved in the wider world in the face of development and agriculture.

By the turn of the millennium, I think we were beginning to think differently, that high ecological standards ought to apply over the whole landscape, not just in these little arks and islands that were designated as special areas. But I sense that the government is now bent on taking us back to a ‘special areas’ approach to conservation where the bulk of the land is sacrificed to development, but we the public will be allowed these little pieces in which to enjoy ourselves and our pretty creatures. This is insulting to human beings and non-viable for all other creatures, which, as I explained at the beginning, cannot survive in those fragmented oases.

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 48 (2012)

RICHARD MABEY RECONNECTING THE WILD

37

The one loophole - and this is where I would urge everyone who is involved in conservation to take this document at its word - is where it says that these suggestions for green spaces that can be made by local communities, except where they interfere with housing, job creation or other essential services. A little while ago, it looked as if the government thought that biodiversity and the human enjoyment of it were essential services. This may be a point worth fighting. We need a political platform at a local level over the next years (assuming this document does actually get through) to fight for new, enlarged special places that join up the existing special places, on the grounds that this is an essential service. That housing for other organisms is as important as housing for ourselves. Otherwise we are all sunk.

Richard Mabey Mazzard Snow Street Roydon Diss Norfolk IP22 5SB Dr Richard Mabey is one of our greatest nature writers. He is the author of some thirty books, including the best-selling Flora Britannica. Nature Cure was shortlisted for the Whitbread, Ondaatje and Ackerley Awards. His most recent is Weeds: How vagabond plants gatecrashed civilisation and changed the way we think about nature. His biography, Gilbert White, won the Whitbread Biography Award. A regular essayist and commentator on radio and in the national press, he is also a Director of the arts and conservation charity Common Ground, Patron of the John Clare Society and Vice-President of the Spaces Society. He lives in Norfolk, and in 2011 was awarded an Hon D Litt by the University of East Anglia for services to literature.

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 48 (2012)

38

Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 48

Figure 1. Melton Riverside.

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 48 (2012)