Feral

by George Monbiot

A quarter of a century ago I was taken by the archaeologists who had just discovered it to a swallowhole in the Mendip Hills which had been used by Bronze Age people as a rubbish dump. Above the ground, the hole was almost invisible, a crack in the rocks screened by bracken and brambles. I squirmed backwards into the cleft. My feet found the wire ladder the archaeologists had hung from the lip. When I reached the bottom and planted my boots among the limestone boulders, I turned and scanned the chamber with my head torch.

  The cavern was high enough to stand in. The walls and floor and everything that lay on it were encrusted with calcite crystals that glittered in the torchlight. Beneath the mineral frost I could make out shapes in the heap of treasure spilling down the ground that sloped away into the darkness: broken pots, skulls, bones of many shapes and sizes. The air was cool and damp, but not musty. It smelt only of rock and water.

  One of the archaeologists bent down and picked something up. He passed it to me. ‘What’s this?’ he asked. It was a flattish, winged bone, about the length of my palm, pierced by a large hole.

  ‘Atlas vertebra.’

  ‘Of course. But what of?’

  ‘Er, red deer?’

  ‘No, it’s a Bronze Age cow. Their cows were smaller than they are today–about the size of Dexters. Now what’s this?’

  He lifted it up and I took it with both hands. It must have been eight inches across and have weighed a couple of pounds. I stared dumbly at it in the light of my torch.

  ‘Atlas vertebra of, of–a mammoth?’

  ‘What, in the Bronze Age?!’

  ‘I–I haven’t the faintest idea.’

  ‘It’s the same species as the first one.’

  He told me that this was the animal from which domestic cattle were first bred. The wild cows were slightly bigger than those of modern cattle, but the bulls were massively greater: vast, heavy-shouldered animals with monstrous horns. As I turned the bone over in my hands, feeling its weight, feeling the years fall away, feeling myself, in that cave of Bronze Age junk, fall with them, I experienced what seemed like an electric jolt. The great weight of the bone, the knowledge of what it was, the sense–so clean and new it seemed–that the beast whose head it bore might have been hunted and slaughtered not 3,000 years ago but so recently that I could almost reach out and place my palm on the sweat and hair of its cooling flank ran through my arms and fulminated in my head, almost with a flash of light. It might have been at this point that the imaginative journey began which, many years later, led to this book.

  The brothers Ludwig and Heinz Heck, respectively the directors of the Berlin and Munich zoos during the period of Nazi rule–a time in which zookeeping was a political activity–were not content with reconstructing the aurochs in their minds. They wanted to create a real one.34 Like the scientists in Jurassic Park, they sought to resurrect this animal, as well as the ancestral horse, from genetic material; but in this case the material carried by the wild animal’s descendants. As Konrad Lorenz hoped to do with human beings, they tried to strip cattle of their domestic traits so that the purified, uncivilized beast within could break, pawing and roaring, out of its degenerate husk.

  As was so often the case with the declarations the Nazis made, the success the Heck brothers claimed for their attempts at genetic reversal was exaggerated. They maintained that, in the space of just twelve years, they had re-created the aurochs. All they did, in reality, was to produce a cow whose coat roughly resembled that of its wild ancestor, but which was a good deal smaller, had different proportions and would not breed true.35 This disappointing creature, which bore as much resemblance to the giant aurochs as Himmler did to the ‘Aryan’ beauty he exalted, would, they proclaimed, help to restore the true German ecosystems degraded by the assaults of civilization. Ludwig Heck released some of these ersatz aurochs into the Białowieża Forest Göring had seized.

  The descendants of these animals are now being used in a rewilding project in the Netherlands, on a large polder at Oostvaardersplassen, which has none of those political connotations. There they range freely within a reserve of 5,000 hectares, without veterinary treatment, shelter or feed, reprising the role the aurochs might once have played (though with the crucial differences that its predators and some of its competitors are missing, and that it cannot migrate).36 The man who founded the project, Frans Vera, chose Heck cattle partly for their hardiness and partly, it seems, because of the public interest their unusual appearance would generate.37

  Simon Schama rightly warns us against making ‘an obscene syllogism: to imply in any way that modern environmentalism has any kind of historical kinship with totalitarianism’. Nevertheless, the forced rewildings which have taken place elsewhere offer a pungent warning of how this project could go badly wrong if we are not mindful of its hazards and antecedents. Rewilding must not be an imposition. If it happens, it should be done with the consent and active engagement of the people who live on and benefit from the land. Governments must not create, as they have done in East Africa and Botswana, a paradise for the rich from the lands of the poor. If a rewilding scheme requires forced dispossession, it should not go ahead.

  There is no need for coercion. Through the proposals I have suggested and the changes that are likely to take place anyway, in the uplands of Britain and Europe, some other parts of North America and some other regions of the world, the large-scale restoration of living systems and natural processes can take place without harming anyone’s interests. This will, I believe, enhance our civilization, enrich and rewild our own lives, introduce us to wonders which, in these bleak lands, now seem scarcely imaginable.

  12

  The Conservation Prison

  What would the world be, once bereft

  Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,

  O let them be left, wildness and wet;

  Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins

  Inversnaid

  I learnt my ecology in the tropics. I studied the subject as part of my degree, then applied it, to a small extent, when I worked for a couple of years at the BBC’s natural history unit. But it was not until I left my own country, first for West Papua, then Brazil, then East Africa, that I began fully to appreciate this marvellous science. Only when I lived among ecosystems which retained many of their trophic levels, their diversity and dynamism, did I begin to understand how the natural world might work.

  In the Amazon I fell in with a group of scientists working at the frontiers of the discipline, and shared the excitement of some of their discoveries. Their work was beginning to transform our comprehension of the living planet. The lesson I learnt repeatedly, in all three regions, was that much of the diversity and complexity of nature could be sustained only if levels of disturbance were low. Major intrusions, such as clearing trees and raising cattle, quickly simplified the ecosystem. This seems so obvious that it should scarcely need stating.

  Coming home, it took me a while to notice something odd. Here, many conservationists appear to believe the opposite: that the diversity, integrity and ‘health’ of the natural world depend upon human intervention, often intense intervention, which they describe as ‘management’ or ‘stewardship’. More often than not, this involves clearing trees and using cattle and sheep to suppress the vegetation. To a lesser extent, the same belief prevails in several other parts of the rich world. Some of our conservation groups appear to be not just zoophobic but also dendrophobic: afraid of trees. They seem afraid of the disorderly, unplanned, unstructured revival of the natural world.

  On a cool, blustery day in June, I travelled up the mountain road between Machynlleth and Llanidloes to visit the nature reserve that is said to exemplify the delights of the Cambrian Mountains. Glaslyn is described by the group that owns it as ‘Really Wild! . . . not only is this the biggest reserve currently managed by the Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust, but it is also the wildest and most regionally important site.’1 I expected to find an oasis, a fecund sanctuar
y in the Desert. Four years living on the edge of the Cambrians had not yet taught me to curb my enthusiasm.

  As I parked the car beside the road, I heard a skylark pouring its song from the sky. Clouds scudded across the sun, catching the cold north-westerly in their sails. I set off down the track towards the lake at the heart of the reserve. I could see it gleaming amid the dark heather, like the water in the bottom of an old copper bowl.

  Before I reached the path that would take me down to the lake, I vaulted a fence and struck out across the heath. Nowhere was the heather more than a foot high. There were a few tufts of bog cotton, like white blusher brushes, mounds of moss and cropped bilberry, some sparse constellations of tiny bedstraw flowers, scrappy little stalks of ling–and tormentil everywhere. That, in this ‘really wild’ reserve, was all. I was astonished, but the clues were not hard to spot: sheep shit, all over the heath. I reached the fence on the far side of the reserve and stared down the dreadful plunge of Glaslyn’s ravine, to the green pastures and woodlands far below. Clinging to the steepest slopes were a few young rowan trees. Otherwise the sides of the gorge were torn by erosion gullies. The bare rock and soil looked like the hills of Afghanistan. No crows or choughs winged the midway air; a solitary gull battled down the updraft towards the mild hedged fields of the South Dulas valley. The bitter, battering wind funnelled up the ravine and over the heath.

  I strode back to the path which led to the lake. I soon found myself among a flock of sheep, grazing the low heather even lower. They stared at me as I passed, chewing, their white faces bland but oddly engaging. I resisted the urge, which always arises when I am watched by these creatures, to address them. I knew the question I wanted to ask: what are you doing here?

  The lake was surrounded by a fine grey gravel that chinked like broken glass as I walked on it. Where the stones had been pressed into the peat by visitors’ feet, powdery sage-coloured lichens crept over them. Wavelets rustled against the shore. There was not a tree or a shrub to be seen, except for the heather, which was nowhere higher than my knee. The reserve looked as brown and blurred as an old sepia photograph. It was a dismal place, almost as grim and almost as empty as the pastures around Llyn Craig-y-pistyll that I had visited the previous autumn.

  There was a single clump of fern amid the heather. I saw one small heath butterfly–ginger and grey, furry, with a little black eyespot on the tip of its wing–pausing briefly on a tormentil flower. It was the only insect I would see on the reserve that day. The bilberry plants had been grazed almost to the roots. They carried no flowers or fruit: everything edible had been bitten off. Sheep’s wool was dragged through the heather. But for two distant skylarks, an occasional pipit swooping away over the heath and the inevitable Canada geese on the lake, there was neither sound nor sight of any bird. The plants and animals of this jewel in the crown of the Cambrian Mountains were almost identical to the miserable remnants–the monotonous, impoverished moonscape left behind after the Atlantic rainforests had been destroyed–clinging to the rest of the wet Desert.

  A small party of white-faced ewes lay on the gravel beside the lake in the sunshine, guarding the kissing-gate halfway along the shore. As I approached they hauled themselves to their feet and shoved their way through the heather to join a larger flock a few yards off. Some of them started rubbing themselves against the fence, rubbing off their scrappy, unshorn fleeces. Little tufts of wool clung to the knots in the wire.

  The notice on the gate told me that ‘Welsh white cattle are grazing this reserve’. I could not see them, but the land was overgrazed and poached: trampled, pitted and compacted. Here there was no heather, just grass eaten almost to the rootstocks, a few pillars of creeping thistle, their purple tips beginning to flower, and short thickets of soft-centred rush. It looked the same as any overgrazed pasture, yet this too was part of ‘the wildest and most regionally important site’ in Montgomeryshire.

  On the leeward side of the lake the water stretched smooth before it shattered, a few yards from the shore, like a broken windscreen, into tiny fissures which extended into ripples then small waves on the far bank. The lake was perfectly clear. Its bed was covered with oddly regular chips of brown stone.

  I crossed the cattle pasture and pushed on through denser thickets of rush, surrounded by brilliant green moss. I stumbled up the slope, which was soft and plumed with cotton grass. Everything in the nature reserve, it seemed, was below knee height, except the sheep and cattle. I jumped the fence, regained the track and followed it south towards Pumlumon. As it wound round a tump, I noticed, emerging from the heath on the far side of the site, two trees. I fixed my binoculars on them then swore out loud: Sitka spruce! The seed must have blown in from the great plantations across the mountains. They were, as far as I could tell, the only trees on the reserve, except for those clinging to the inaccessible slopes of the ravine. The white plague–or so I thought at the time–had destroyed the rest.

  The track took me deeper into the Pumlumon site of special scientific interest, in which the Glaslyn reserve is embedded. When it crested a hill I found myself looking down on Llyn Bugeilyn, a sausage-shaped lake that filled a glacial valley. A distant raven planed into the wind. Above the lake was a ruined farmhouse. And there at last, growing within what would once have been the enclosures around the house, were trees.

  I stepped into the broken-down barn at the back of the house, sat on one of the fallen stones and ate my lunch. Around me, bleached oak rafters were strewn over the ground. Ferns, willowherb and a small rowan rose from the stonework, out of reach of the sheep. Nettles had sprung up among the mossy, wormed beams. Around the base of the walls ground ivy and bittercress grew.

  Overhanging the tumbled barn were a giant ash tree and an ancient mossy rowan, half toppled with age. Beyond them were smaller ashes, a stunted sycamore, then a short row of gnarled and ancient hawthorns, the last fragment of an old hedgerow. The sickly smell of their blossoms came to me on the wind in gusts. The ground beneath them was confettied with petals. Their roots writhed above the rocky turf, as if trying to force their way back into the soil. There was no sound but the wind in the trees.

  I walked back into the moors. In brilliant sunshine I climbed Banc Bugeilyn, the hill overlooking the lake. It gave me an excellent vantage point. To the south massed Pumlumon: stubby, ragged in outline, pale khaki, like the rest of the land. I could see perhaps a quarter of the conservation area. I scanned the whole view carefully with my binoculars. I noted the clump of trees around the old farmhouse; one small cluster of sallow beside the lake; two more Sitka spruce trees and a few rowans clinging to a wall of the ravine too steep for the sheep to reach. Otherwise, the whole landscape, perhaps 2,000 hectares of this celebrated site, was treeless. Around me were signs of peat erosion caused by heavy grazing: little cliffs of black soil from which the surrounding bog had shrunk. Something had gone horribly wrong here.

  I returned to the car, feeling empty and miserable. I turned on the ignition, removed the handbrake and set off down the road. After fifty yards I slammed on the brakes, parked as close to the edge of the narrow road as I could and jumped out again. I could scarcely believe what I had seen.

  The sward on the verge was an exuberance of colours as rich as the Lord Mayor’s Show. Here were drooping red spikes of sorrel, golden bird’s foot trefoil like Quaker bonnets, the delicate umbels of pignut, heath milkwort–some pink, some blue–red campion and cut-leaved cranesbill. Here were little white flowers of eyebright, with egg yolk on their tongues, dark figworts, which released a foxy smell when I ran my hand through them, purple knapweed, pink and white yarrow, foxglove, mouse ear, male fern, deep cushions of bedstraw, wild raspberry, heath speedwell, hogweed and willowherb. Growing through the sward were little saplings of sallow and rowan.

  A few hundred yards further along the road I stopped again. Taller rowans and sallows were growing on the verge, as well as hawthorn and elder. Around them the heather rose above my waist. The bilberries were covered in fat
dark fruit and thick with cuckoospit. Small heath butterflies, little pale moths and chironomid midges swarmed around the plants. A bracken chafer in electric colours–a green iridescent head and thorax, bright copper elytra–crawled over the bilberry flowers, its strange three-fingered antennae sweeping this way and that.

  This, I realized, was what I had seen in other parts of the mountains. The only rich repositories of life were the verges of the roads, partly at least because the sheep could not reach them. (One experienced ecologist tells me that there could also be an effect caused by dust from the road fertilizing the verges. Another says that this would be more likely to reduce diversity than to increase it.) The highways authority, by ensuring that sheep are kept out of the traffic, has done more for nature conservation and biodiversity than the bodies charged with preserving our natural heritage. I thought that what I had seen in the Glaslyn reserve was a disgraceful failure, a shocking lapse of effective management. I soon discovered that it was worse than that.

  Before I go further, I should say that I do not mean to single out the Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust, which is run by devoted and conscientious people. As I will show in a moment, they claim that they do not have much choice over how they maintain their land. I have chosen this example not because it is exceptional but because it is typical: the trust’s treatment of Glaslyn exemplifies the management of many nature reserves in the uplands of the United Kingdom.*1 Our national parks are in an even worse state. Foreigners often express their astonishment when they discover that many of them (ten out of the fifteen) are little more than sheep ranches, whose custody is almost indistinguishable from that of unprotected places. While Britain’s is an extreme case, there are some aspects of this destructive form of conservation at work in other parts of Europe.

  Soon after visiting Glaslyn, I read the trust’s management plan for the reserve. To my amazement, I found that its grazed-out shell of an ecosystem, which can scarcely be distinguished from the rest of the Desert, has been deliberately kept like this. The plan seeks to ensure that the reserve remains in its current state: covered in close-cropped heather.†2 ‘Invasive’ and ‘undesirable’ species, it announced, will be removed. What does this mean? I checked with the trust: invasive and undesirable species are native trees, such as rowan, sallow, birch and hawthorn, returning to their natural habitat. Even in the ravine, the plan insists, no more trees than already exist should be allowed to grow.