Rewilding (1 Viewer)

[Sangahyando]

How about we keep landscape in a shape that is both pleasant for the human eye and as close to optimal for bio-diversity as possible? We just need to agree on the best way to achieve this. And before anyone proposes it again, genocide is not an option.

More like whatever state it was in at the point to which their sentimental and rose-tinted imagination can extend back to, which is usually about 1940 or 1950.
[...]

So what's your own solution then? You raise some interesting points but what I'm missing is the "constructive" part in your constructive criticism.

 

[AlfArbuthnot]

So what's your own solution then? You raise some interesting points but what I'm missing is the "constructive" part in your constructive criticism.

I offer no solutions. Except that 'rewilding' is treated for what it is - naive and sentimental and hypocritical. There is no 'year zero' that we can rewind to, and we cannot hold habitats and biodiversity in stasis. It has never been in stasis. This idea that we need to backpeddle should be left to the fringe eco-luddites and yoghurt-knitters, not treated as a serious branch of ecology. It's childish fantasy, and without any ecological basis. It's the simple product of a guilty western conscience ("if only we'd never been here!"), and reminds me of those people who dress up to live as Roman centurions on their spare weekends, or recreate the Battle of Hastings - how else can one choose which particular year we should recreate, and what 'should' be here? Ice Age? Before the channel formed? Bronze Age? 1939?

One glaring omission they always forget is Homo sapiens. I haven't yet heard mention of importing any hunter-gatherers to live in Yellowstone or deepest Highlands.

 

[Robin Edwards]

One glaring omission they always forget is Homo sapiens. I haven't yet heard mention of importing any hunter-gatherers to live in Yellowstone or deepest Highlands.

I haven't long started reading Feral but I believe Monbiot places homo sapiens within his wilding solution although for now in my rose-tinted utopia world, I would want to keep them out!

 

[King Edward]

I offer no solutions. Except that 'rewilding' is treated for what it is - naive and sentimental and hypocritical. There is no 'year zero' that we can rewind to, and we cannot hold habitats and biodiversity in stasis. It has never been in stasis. This idea that we need to backpeddle should be left to the fringe eco-luddites and yoghurt-knitters, not treated as a serious branch of ecology. It's childish fantasy, and without any ecological basis. It's the simple product of a guilty western conscience ("if only we'd never been here!"), and reminds me of those people who dress up to live as Roman centurions on their spare weekends, or recreate the Battle of Hastings - how else can one choose which particular year we should recreate, and what 'should' be here? Ice Age? Before the channel formed? Bronze Age? 1939?

One glaring omission they always forget is Homo sapiens. I haven't yet heard mention of importing any hunter-gatherers to live in Yellowstone or deepest Highlands.

Your comment applies much more closely to conventional conservation than it does to rewilding. The former is aimed largely at recreating habitats from a pre-1939 rural idyll of hay meadows, coppiced woods, small mixed farms and weeds in the cornfields. These habitats were products of an outdated economic model, and can only be recreated through the efforts of unpaid volunteer labour or foregone agricultural productivity (encouraged by subsidies). What I find hypocritical is the efforts of mainstream conservation organisations to portray this endeavour as 'nature conservation', when in fact it's profoundly anti-nature.

Rewilding is not about seeking to recreate some particular past ecosystem, but about allowing areas to develop towards a more natural state determined by the interactions between wild species and their environment, rather than as actively managed by man. Keeping ecosystems in 'stasis' doesn't come into it - this is a concept central to conventional conservation, in which heathlands should always be heathlands, meadows should always be meadows, and populations of key species should be maintained within predetermined limits. As for sentimentality, how else would you define all the propaganda from e.g. Plantlife and The Wildlife Trusts urging that we need to protect pretty flowers, butterflies and cute dormice? 'Ugly' species such as flies barely get a mention, despite there being over 100x more species of fly than butterfly in the UK. You could argue these are just the charismatic poster species chosen for fundraising, except that these species really do get high priority on the conservation agenda. Even the House Sparrow keeps being promoted by the RSPB, despite being one of the world's most abundant birds.

In countries that still have remaining areas of ~natural habitat then conservation is quite rightly focused on protecting these against development in the form of logging, agriculture, overhunting, mineral extraction etc. In the UK, where most of our wild areas have long since been lost or severely degraded, what's wrong with trying to help and allow areas to develop into a more natural state? Yes, of course we're not going to turn the clock back X thousand years, but that's no reason why we can't have areas of the country devoted to fairly wild, self-sustaining ecosystems.

 

[AlfArbuthnot]

Your comment applies much more closely to conventional conservation than it does to rewilding. The former is aimed largely at recreating habitats from a pre-1939 rural idyll of hay meadows, coppiced woods, small mixed farms and weeds in the cornfields. These habitats were products of an outdated economic model, and can only be recreated through the efforts of unpaid volunteer labour or foregone agricultural productivity (encouraged by subsidies).

I accept that, but rewilding is just an extension of the same idea. It is still about 'recreating' - name a single 'rewilding' effort that does not involve a reintroduction (i.e. an intervention), or includes a full complement of species. Come to think of it, name a single 'rewilding' that has been successful. Yellowstone does not work within the context of its surroundings (the wolves are managed), the Dutch example involves managed livestock and non-native species, and neither example has the full complement of species, because some of them are extinct (Aurochs etc).

Rewilding is not about seeking to recreate some particular past ecosystem, but about allowing areas to develop towards a more natural state determined by the interactions between wild species and their environment, rather than as actively managed by man.

I have highlighted the key words here. Not only are they extremely vague, but they also represent a 'target' to reach, i.e. a state to achieve through action (not inaction). To recognise this, all we have to do is ask ourselves when a project has succeeded. How would we know? When would we stop intervening? When do we stop introducing species, or managing them? Probably never (even the 'wild' Bison of Europe are managed, culled, fed, treated by vets, never mind the domestic horses in the Dutch 'rewilding' experiment).

A Britain without active conservation management would be covered by woodland, and ultimately this would lead to a decrease in biodiversity - we would gain lots more Nuthatches and Great Spotted Woodpeckers but no additional species, yet would lose numerous upland waders, Stone Curlew etc as their habittas became wooded. These have not 'always been here' - they probably colonised after neolithic man did some habitat creation and maintenance, like an unwitting stone age RSPB.

In the UK, where most of our wild areas have long since been lost or severely degraded, what's wrong with trying to help and allow areas to develop into a more natural state? Yes, of course we're not going to turn the clock back X thousand years, but that's no reason why we can't have areas of the country devoted to fairly wild, self-sustaining ecosystems.

By 'natural state' all you mean is unmanaged. There can never be 'natural' because we will never have the full range of species and processes going on. It will be a 'new natural' created by us. I see no logical difference at all between this kind of half-cocked 'natural' and a brand new RSPB wetland reserve. They are all gardening, and 'rewilders' are kidding nthemselves if they think theirs is a somehow more 'pure' and 'natural' approach. It's fantasy - you'll never have the Aurochs back and you'll always need to manage whatever hodge-podge of species you do have.

 

[Sangahyando]

So? As human control over the planet has increased, so has our responsibility for wildlife and biodiversity. We'll have to manage wildlife to some extent now, unless we want numerous species to disappear. Who are we to decide that x species has "outlived its usefulness?" Conservation is much less extreme than just letting "nature" (although it isn't nature of course, it's nature trying to adapt to extreme human-created environments) "run its course".

What needs to be done is to exclude the extremists on all sides, i.e. the Hitler wannabes who either want humanity to disappear, or (on the other side) are using pseudo-Darwinism to justify extinction of other species, from the decisions that'll affect conservation.

 

[King Edward]

I accept that, but rewilding is just an extension of the same idea. It is still about 'recreating' - name a single 'rewilding' effort that does not involve a reintroduction (i.e. an intervention), or includes a full complement of species. Come to think of it, name a single 'rewilding' that has been successful. Yellowstone does not work within the context of its surroundings (the wolves are managed).

On what basis do you see Yellowstone as a failure? I haven't been there myself, but by most accounts the wolf reintroduction had been pretty successful. Wolf management seems to be minimal, and is mainly killing of animals outside the park. Inside the park, numbers are self-regulating. The culling is regrettable, but hardly invalidates the reintroduction. The key thing here is that culling is aimed at reducing direct wildlife/human conflict outside the protected area, rather than at micro-managing the ecology within the park - this is not at all comparable to active habitat management (e.g. tree/scrub clearance) on nature reserves.

Similarly, the Scottish and Welsh beaver reintroduction projects are likely to result in some management of animals/dams being required in particular problem areas, but this is quite different to saying that the population 'needs' to be managed to benefit the ecology (in the way that a meadow 'needs' to be managed).

I have highlighted the key words here. Not only are they extremely vague, but they also represent a 'target' to reach, i.e. a state to achieve through action (not inaction). To recognise this, all we have to do is ask ourselves when a project has succeeded. How would we know? When would we stop intervening? When do we stop introducing species, or managing them? Probably never (even the 'wild' Bison of Europe are managed, culled, fed, treated by vets, never mind the domestic horses in the Dutch 'rewilding' experiment).

Personally, I see the main requirements for intervening as being (1) to reintroduce (locally) extinct species, especially the keystone ones such as wolves and beavers which are unable to recolonise naturally (unlike on the continent), and (2) to control non-native invasives (e.g. rhododendron) which have not co-evolved with native species, and hence have a particularly damaging effect. Eradication of rats etc. on oceanic islands is a particularly successful example of (2), although for many species full eradication is unlikely to be successful. Since the same control would have to be carried out anyway (e.g. rhododendron control in non-wild woodlands), I hardly see this as an argument against rewilding.

A Britain without active conservation management would be covered by woodland, and ultimately this would lead to a decrease in biodiversity - we would gain lots more Nuthatches and Great Spotted Woodpeckers but no additional species, yet would lose numerous upland waders, Stone Curlew etc as their habittas became wooded. These have not 'always been here' - they probably colonised after neolithic man did some habitat creation and maintenance, like an unwitting stone age RSPB.

This is ridiculous extrapolation. No-one is suggesting that the whole of Britain be rewilded, and with a native woodland cover of just a few percent (and virtually zero that could really be called 'wild', this just isn't a realistic prospect. Tree cover in the uplands (i.e. the most likely areas for rewilding) could be increased massively while still leaving vast acreages of open habitats for waders and the like. Even within a rewilded forest-type environment, it's very likely that a lot of the moorland species would persist either in the understorey, in gaps, on cliffs and in wetter areas. Besides which, upland (rain)forest is inherently a much more species-rich habitat than the current vegetation it would replace.

Also, there is no reason why current conservation practices on small local nature reserves have to be abandoned - rewilding is obviously going to work better over large areas, so there's little to be gained by allowing isolated reserves to succeed to isolated patches of woodland.

By 'natural state' all you mean is unmanaged. There can never be 'natural' because we will never have the full range of species and processes going on. It will be a 'new natural' created by us. I see no logical difference at all between this kind of half-cocked 'natural' and a brand new RSPB wetland reserve. They are all gardening, and 'rewilders' are kidding nthemselves if they think theirs is a somehow more 'pure' and 'natural' approach. It's fantasy - you'll never have the Aurochs back and you'll always need to manage whatever hodge-podge of species you do have.

Actually no, unless you only use natural in a binary fashion (all/nothing). It is more useful to see degrees of naturalness, from a highly modified habitat (e.g. a wheat field) through e.g. a managed woodland, to a completely natural forest. See, for example, 'Natural Woodland' by Peterken, pp 14-15. The last is somewhat theoretical, in that nowhere on earth is now unaffected by humans, but is still a useful concept not only in rewilding but also in active management as something to aim for.

 

[AlfArbuthnot]

You have moved your goalposts form 'minimal intervention, self-regulating' to 'degrees of naturalness', but I still find the whole concept completely vague when you disregard the all/nothing binary - either rewilding is about 'leaving it to nature' as the goal, or it isn't. 'Managed rewilding' (any degree of management) seems hypocritical. It's no different from any other nature reserve.

Also, the lack of definitions seems very woolly. What does 'rewilding' actually mean in terms of what is trying to achieved? It is an arbitrary term, based upon what people consider to be 'wild' and what they consider to be 'keystone species' - the criticism of mainstream conservation being obsessed with the pretty, furry and fanged is just as applicable to rewilding. Virtually all of the introductions are the obvious mammals. The more difficult or uncertain birds, plants and insects are largely ignored. And this raises a further point - they are ignored because the data is almost totally lacking (mammals preserve better and were recorded better in history). So nobody would even know what 'wild' would look like. Again, it seems an arbitrary exercise in fantasy gardening.

The other main issue is scale. You write as if a big patch of upland woodland would somehow attain a 'natural' state and that somewhere like Yellowstone is self-regulating. It isn't. Yellowstone has zero natural wolf immigration, and high pressure on individuals not to emigrate (therefore favouring sedentary behaviour and eventually a genetic kettlepot). All rewilded landscapes are constrained within relatively tiny patches within hostile landscapes. That is not the natural state. The ability of species and individuals to immigrate/emigrate is either massively constrained or nil. Home-ranges are limited, density increases (because they can't spread out once they get to the borders), and that has various knock-on effects. All of this is especially acute for the bigger species, but smaller species (like birds) can also be affected.

So to be meaningful, true rewilding has to be on a massive regional or national scale. A few thousand hectares here and there in Scotland cannot ever be anything other than managed reserves, where the big animals are shipped around and effectively farmed to maintain an optimum density. Then you may get stochastic effects that wipe out some of the smaller species, with no hope for recolonisation outside of the landscape without human assistance.

To sum up, rewilding is always going to result in a human-modified landscape, never a totally wild one, because it is always constrained by the borders we define for it, and the species we have decided we need in it, how those species behave at the borders, and what happens inside (if the Yellowstone wolves died out from a disease epidemic, I assume they'd bring in some more - they'd have to). Putting aside romantic notions of what nature looks like, how is that fundamentally different from Minsmere?

 

[King Edward]

You have moved your goalposts form 'minimal intervention, self-regulating' to 'degrees of naturalness'...

Hardly - in post #24 I referred to "more natural" twice, and to "fairly wild, self-sustaining ecosystems". We agree that 100% natural (non-human) isn't possible, but I see a lot of value in something that's 95%, or 90%, rather than e.g. 50% (these are conceptual figures).

I take it that you see the whole idea of nature reserves, and nature conservation, as pretty pointless? Essentially, the criticisms you make of 'rewilded areas' in terms of scale, non-naturalness, human intervention etc. apply just the same to intensively managed reserves, but much more so. Sure, even somewhere as large as Yellowstone isn't pristine, but it's pretty good. And, with the wolf reintroduction, better than without in terms of a more balanced ecology. OK, so edge effects might be a problem even for a giant park like Yellowstone - but how much more severe are they likely to be in the UK's network of tiny, fragmented reserves?

You seem to see rewilding as having the potential to do more harm than good, with species not being carefully managed to avoid local extinctions, while glossing over the fact that conventional land management practices (over centuries) have led to the loss of huge numbers of species from the landscape.

One of the reasons for reintroducing large mammals rather than e.g. insects is that the cause of their extinction was often direct human persecution, rather than habitat changes. For many of these species the habitat is still suitable, and the issue is more one of accommodating conflict with humans/livestock. They are also less mobile than other species, with no way of returning to Britain unaided (unlike many birds, insects, fungi etc.). Yes of course all those other species are important in the ecosystem, and could well be reintroduced in future, but there's no point in releasing, say, forest interior beetles without appropriate habitat to support them.

Virtually all of the introductions are the obvious mammals. The more difficult or uncertain birds, plants and insects are largely ignored. And this raises a further point - they are ignored because the data is almost totally lacking (mammals preserve better and were recorded better in history). So nobody would even know what 'wild' would look like. Again, it seems an arbitrary exercise in fantasy gardening.

Actually, there's quite decent data for plants from the pollen record, and I think a certain amount on fossil beetle communities. So not a complete species list, but you can get a reasonable idea of the general habitat. And as I said before, the idea isn't to recreate a facsimile of some prehistoric ecosystem - obviously that's impossible. But I think we can do a lot better than we are at the moment. From both a practical and a theoretical point of view, surely it's desirable to have nature reserves which are largely self-managing rather than ones in which every square metre has to be looked after (the cynical view here is that people whose income depends on managing land aren't going to be in favour of policies aimed at reducing the intensity and cost of land management).

 

[AlfArbuthnot]

I take it that you see the whole idea of nature reserves, and nature conservation, as pretty pointless?

Not at all, I am fully supportive of the current model, more or less. My criticism of rewilding is that it pretends to be something different. it is a sentimental ideological fantasy, not a practical viable reality, that has a serious flaw. A 'rewilded' area of 90% or 95% is conceptually no different from a 50% natural current reserve. If it isn't 100% then it isn't 'rewilded', it's just another reserve, and we already have a wide spectrum in the current model that encompasses the 'semi-rewilded' end.

So it basically boils down to abandoning management and introducing some big herbivores and a few carnivores, which doesn't work without management for the reasons I have given. In which case, it's still just another reserve.

The downside to all this is that if we adopt the 'rewilding' principle on a large number of British reserves then biodiversity will decline as various habitats all converge towards woodland. There is simply not enough room to allow landscape processes without management.

Essentially, the criticisms you make of 'rewilded areas' in terms of scale, non-naturalness, human intervention etc. apply just the same to intensively managed reserves, but much more so. Sure, even somewhere as large as Yellowstone isn't pristine, but it's pretty good.

Which all makes the concept of 'rewilding' rather redundant. It's impossible. Everything needs some management, nothing can be pristine, so we are back to where we are now. We already have that. But if we let the George Monbiots take charge then we'll end up with a general shunning of active management on ideological grounds, not practical grounds of biodiversity conservation. We need management, sometimes intensive, if we want to maintain biodiversity. After all, intensive management (grazing, burning, felling) has been around for about 6000 years.

And, with the wolf reintroduction, better than without in terms of a more balanced ecology. OK

Again, woolly terms. Define 'balanced'. What does it actually mean? It sounds a little like 'stasis' to me. Either way, it's an arbitrary product of a human imagination. Who is to say what it actually means, and what it looks like? It's an unproveable opinion.

From both a practical and a theoretical point of view, surely it's desirable to have nature reserves which are largely self-managing rather than ones in which every square metre has to be looked after (the cynical view here is that people whose income depends on managing land aren't going to be in favour of policies aimed at reducing the intensity and cost of land management).

Sounds wonderful, but totally unrealistic in the western world. We'll just end up with scrub woodland for a few hundred years, and lose a few hundred species in the meantime while gaining none.

 

[Wildmoreway]

This "rewilding" sounds like what was really advocated in the inspired speech made by Iolo Williams a few weeks back, he harked back to the his idyllic childhood days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, just one trouble .. most of the "damage" had already been done long before then, all very well but not practical.

One of the problems with even fairly "large" reserves is that some species refuse to locate or relocate themselves onto the reserve itself, Bovey Heathfield in Devon has got many seemingly ideal spots for Silver-studded Blue butterflies but, the ones that are there seem to only be able to exist on a small area of land (perhaps little more than one acre) that is behind some industrial units and adjacent to the main road, and is in effect detached from the main reserve.

To "rewild" in a way that allows unrestricted movement of even the species that we still have would mean us stepping back in time by several hundred years to when the UK population was perhaps just three million people, in simple truth we need to cull the most troublesome species Homo sapiens, doubtless there are a few who would be prepared to do the culling but very few people who would be prepared to be culled.

 

[Robin Edwards]

This "rewilding" sounds like what was really advocated in the inspired speech made by Iolo Williams a few weeks back, he harked back to the his idyllic childhood days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, just one trouble .. most of the "damage" had already been done long before then, all very well but not practical.

Not a period that is all good although I too have memories that farm birds seemed abundant and the sun always shone in summer. Sparrowhawks and Peregrines or Buzzards too, were still suffering though so I would'nt want to reintroduce persecution although I thinks there's some that would

I believe Monbiot quotes that before farming started in Britain, the country held a population of around 5000 humans and yet many large mammels had already been rendered extinct from unsustainable hunting. He says that our current flora has evolved to cope with Elephant grazing - now that would make a great reintroduction programme given some futuristic genetic de-extinction of straight tusked species.

 

[Amarillo]

Can see Alfs argument here, all habitat is realistically going to have to be managed to an extent so re-wilding is probably the wrong term. What I think is key is that we work towards larger reserves rather than the patchwork of small ones that we have today. And crucially, link them via corridors. Then species like maybe lynx could be considered realistically.

 

[AlfArbuthnot]

This "rewilding" sounds like what was really advocated in the inspired speech made by Iolo Williams a few weeks back, he harked back to the his idyllic childhood days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, just one trouble .. most of the "damage" had already been done long before then, all very well but not practical.

Are these the idyllic days of DDT/Dieldrin and almost total loss of raptors and otters? When most people had to go on holiday to see Buzzards? When Otters, Deer and Foxes were still being legally chased around on horses? The glory days before the Wildlife & Countryside Act, before SSSI's, when hedgerows were being grubbed out and pesticides sloshed around (many since banned) as agriculture intensified at a rate previously unthinkable, and the road and house-building boom sucked up millions of hectares, while the oil that powered it all was shipped around in flimsy tankers that had an apparently magnetic attraction for our coastal rocks?

I wouldn't swap the 2010s for the 1960s, they definitely weren't glory days. Just goes to underline the point about the preferred era to hark back to for your average conservationist-in-the-street is predictably around the era of their childhood or a little before (which is one that their parents/grandparents/teachers/lecturers pass on in their own version of the 'golden era' myth). Conservationists seem quite prone to the 'when I were a lad' pitfall.

 

[AlfArbuthnot]

I believe Monbiot quotes that before farming started in Britain, the country held a population of around 5000 humans and yet many large mammels had already been rendered extinct from unsustainable hunting. He says that our current flora has evolved to cope with Elephant grazing - now that would make a great reintroduction programme given some futuristic genetic de-extinction of straight tusked species.

He's getting his timescales confused by an order of magnitude or two. By the time that Britain was Britain (i.e. when the channel formed) the elephants had been extinct for many thousands of years and an ice age had come and gone.

Our current climax flora, since the ice age, has been temperate woodland. That is not a vegetation noted for its relationship with elephants.

Farming reached Britain around 5000 years ago, but varying estimates put the British population at 5000 to 100,000 at this time.

It's possible that the large mammals also became extinct because of simple island effects - once the channel formed they were cut off from immigration and their space (and therefore population) was limited, rendering them vulnerable to the familiar consequences of island effects. Although I think the only really large mammals we had that went extinct in prehistory was Aurochs and elk anyway? Didn't bears, wolves, boars etc last until at least the Roman period?

 

[King Edward]

Not at all, I am fully supportive of the current model, more or less.

The major flaw in the current model is that it seriously undervalues (the species of) late successional habitats, and prioritises the early successional species which were best able to survive under traditional management. Conservation is aimed largely at addressing declines in the latter group, which have been declined quite recently, while ignoring the former which underwent serious declines or went (locally) extinct much earlier. It is also profoundly anti-ecological, in that species are seen only in the context of traditional ‘semi-natural’ habitats, rather than in the context of the natural ecological niche in which they evolved.

A 'rewilded' area of 90% or 95% is conceptually no different from a 50% natural current reserve. If it isn't 100% then it isn't 'rewilded', it's just another reserve, and we already have a wide spectrum in the current model that encompasses the 'semi-rewilded' end.

All habitats on earth are somewhat affected by humans now, even very remote ones. So 100% natural isn’t possible, anywhere. That still leaves a world of difference between somewhere dominated by natural processes, albeit with some human influence, and one in which the whole structure of the ecosystem is predetermined by management.

The downside to all this is that if we adopt the 'rewilding' principle on a large number of British reserves then biodiversity will decline as various habitats all converge towards woodland. There is simply not enough room to allow landscape processes without management.

I have been explicitly arguing in favour of rewilding on a large scale, not on piecemeal little reserves dominated by edge effects. I am not suggesting a wholesale abandonment of nature reserve management, although I do take issue with many traditional management practices. Fundamentally, the need for active management is a sign that conservation has failed. It might be necessary, but it’s hardly something to be celebrated.

Where management is necessary, I think there’s a lot of scope for moving away from the sort of ‘wildlife-friendly farming’ (on reserves), and towards more ecologically-informed practices, to compensate for the lack of the sort of landscape scale processes (and species) which are lacking (rather than trying to maintain habitats in stasis). For example, woodland coppicing is often done on the basis of conserving open habitat species, but without sufficient consideration of the negative effects on closed habitat species (especially given that open ground can be created in an instant, and is quicker to create from scratch, whereas old growth takes centuries to develop). Also, coppicing tends to create rather large bare areas, quite different to the smaller gaps with abundant deadwood which would dominate in natural forest. With greater emphasis on expanding/connecting reserves, there is the potential to cater for both early and late successional species while maintaining diversity. Essentially, effort could be directed at expanding high quality habitat, rather than simply micro-managing to favour one set of species over another.

Sounds wonderful, but totally unrealistic in the western world. We'll just end up with scrub woodland for a few hundred years, and lose a few hundred species in the meantime while gaining none.

The upland areas which are the most suitable for rewilding are actually quite poor in species, with large areas covered by pretty similar, low diversity habitat. As I pointed out before, it would take a massive amount of rewilding before you ‘lost’ even a fraction of this. Vegetation dominated by heather, bilberries, Molinia, Nardus, bracken and the like is hardly in short supply. I don’t see any justification for maintaining it in this state, when the natural highly diverse vegetation (Atlantic (rain)forest) has been reduced to isolated fragments. What are all these species that are likely to be lost, and how did they ever manage to survive before widespread deforestation?

 

[Ian Woosey]

Is this man Monbiot living on the same (God-forsaken) Planet as I am ??

The population of England alone (NOT GB) is 53 million. The land area of England is 130,000 km2.

The population of Australia (for eg) is 23 million. The land area of Australia is 7,692,000 km2.

Shocking ! Back to the drawing board Mr Monbiot.....

 

[King Edward]

He's getting his timescales confused by an order of magnitude or two. By the time that Britain was Britain (i.e. when the channel formed) the elephants had been extinct for many thousands of years and an ice age had come and gone.

Our current climax flora, since the ice age, has been temperate woodland. That is not a vegetation noted for its relationship with elephants.

Actually, you're wrong here in your criticism of Monbiot (as would be evident if you'd read the book). The point is that the UK flora & fauna evolved over a long period (millions of years), through successive ice ages, in association with elephants and other large mammals which became extinct (in Europe generally) due to hunting, and hence failed to recolonise Britain (and the rest of Europe) after the last ice age. The species we have now haven't evolved that much since, so are still going to retain features associated with the megafauna (e.g. the strong wood of box, holly and yew are suggested as adaptations to elephant damage in the woodland understorey, and the strong coppice regrowth of most broadleaves likewise).

 

[Robin Edwards]

of the more recent extirpations from Britain quoting Monbiot :-

Lynx - last known fossil remains from sixth century AD
Beaver - mid-eighteenth century
Wolf - last clear record is 1621
Bear - considered 2000 years ago
Wild Boar - last ones killed on the orders of Henry 111 in 1260 AD
Elk/Moose - youngest bones 3900 years old
White Stork - nesting in Edinburgh in 1416 AD
Dalmation Peilican - A single medieval bone found in Somerset levels

From what I've read so far - I would definitely recommend it to others

 

[Sangahyando]

of the more recent extirpations from Britain quoting Monbiot :-

Lynx - last known fossil remains from sixth century AD
Beaver - mid-eighteenth century
Wolf - last clear record is 1621
Bear - considered 2000 years ago
Wild Boar - last ones killed on the orders of Henry 111 in 1260 AD
Elk/Moose - youngest bones 3900 years old
White Stork - nesting in Edinburgh in 1416 AD
Dalmatian Pelican - A single medieval bone found in Somerset levels

Of these, at least the Beaver, Boar, and White Stork should be possible to re-introduce without much further ado. Can't see a bear introduction scheme going anywhere, and wolf and lynx might be difficult as well. Maybe Pelican, if there's a sufficient food source available.

By the way, did you guys ever have Black Storks, or is that a continental thing?