The recent hot dry weather and wildfires have reignited (ha!) the war of words between advocates of rewilding and just about everyone else. The battlefield, as always, is social media and while social media probably isn’t the right forum for considered debate it is certainly a prominent and very accessible one. You won’t get a lot of nuance; with the odd exception it is very much ‘I am right and you are wrong’. Amusing to watch, but not very helpful in finding a way forward.
It may surprise you that I am OK with rewilding. Or I would be if it existed. Unfortunately rewilding something only works if there was something in the past that was wild and has been subsequently tamed. And yes, go back far enough in time you’ll find a whole lot of wild. Dinosaurs would have been pretty wild, and Richard Attenborough has already shown us they’re a bugger to domesticate. The beautiful thing about 3.5 billion years of life on earth is you have a lot of time periods to pick from to prove your point.
Humans have been moulding the landscape around us for our own purposes since we transitioned from a hunter gatherer society to an agricultural one around 11,000 years ago. Or I thought this was the case until I double checked that fact and ended up down a human prehistory internet rabbit hole for a few hours. It was a very interesting rabbit hole. I won’t go into detail here because that’s not what this is about, but it is pertinent to the story.
As it happens, the evidence shows that pre-agricultural humans – hunter-gatherers – had been managing the landscape for their own needs for thousands of years, using controlled burning and landscape engineering to shape the environment around them to suit their needs. It is interesting to note that where Europeans colonized the world, particularly in Australia and the Americas, they mistook these landscapes for wilderness. When the Indigenous peoples were displaced the ecosystems collapsed.
I think it’s fair to say that the most recent 20,000+ years is probably a long enough historical period to say that nearly all of the world is not truly wild, certainly not in places where homo sapiens have called home anyway. As it is the most recent period of human history, it is the most logical to use in debate about rewilding. A good time period to prove my point if you will.
The word ‘rewilding’ conjures up an image of land with no human intervention. Rewilders will tell you that it’s a form of land management. It can’t be both can it? It may seem like I’m being pedantic, but words are important. You must remember that the vast majority of the population in this country have little knowledge of how the countryside works but do have an opinion or image of what it should be like. An image shaped by what they see and hear. Put yourselves in the shoes of average Joe for a minute. Rewilding suggests a reset, a return to halcyon days of yore before us humans ruined it all. It plays on an innate guilt buried deep in people that we are somehow to blame, and we must right this wrong. Powerful stuff. Wilding on the other hand, in a time when there is such pride taken in well-manicured surroundings, well that’s just letting things go to shit.
Because the majority of wildfires this summer were on uplands, most of the aforementioned social media debate focused on the management of moorland. That is really not my area of expertise, although I am making an effort to learn, so this is about the rewilding in woodlands.
When it comes to forestry, I have always advocated that where possible it should be multi-functional. That is, it should deliver multiple outcomes from the same piece of land. In essence it should provide timber as well as a mix of recreation, habitat and biodiversity. There is a caveat; it is not possible to have all of these things all of the time. Timber production and good habitat management go well together, but recreation rarely works well with either. If a mountain bike trail is the goal, then it must be accepted that other things will have to be sacrificed. Likewise, landscape – location, soil types, exposure etc – will influence decision making. This is not a problem with good planning.
A few years ago, we restocked a site that had to be felled under an SPHN (special plant health notice) due to disease. It would have been easy to clearfell the whole site, mulch everything and restock it with conifer; it was after all a conifer plantation with a smattering of self-set oak and birch throughout. And in isolation this would have been no bad thing. It would be replacing like for like, so there would be no long-term net reduction in timber income, habitat or recreation. The well-established management regime of thinning followed eventually by clearfell and restock would have worked just fine. But on this site, there was potential for more. A lot more.
If that was the easy thing to do, what was the harder thing? Well truth be told, hard is the wrong adjective to use because it really wasn’t. It just required a little bit of thinking. The objective remained the same – timber – but could the benefits of habitat and biodiversity be enhanced without compromising the supply of timber to a future market? Yes it could.
So how was it done? There were constraints to work with, the main one being that all the diseased trees had to be felled. But that was not all the trees, there were still the broadleaves which were unaffected, so these were left. The chosen method of ground preparation was to brashrake; dragging the brash into rows leaving bare ground in-between to plant into. Brashrakes are essentially rows of deadwood and over time they break down while vegetation grows up through them, providing great habitat for all sorts of invertebrates (there were hornets. They are angry and have no patience whatsoever. That bit was left wild) and nesting opportunities for birds.
On to the restocking. We planted a mix of conifers; Douglas Fir, Norway Spruce, Dawn Redwood and Western Red Cedar. They were planted as an intimate mix (which when I do it, basically means planting the first bag you pick up and sometimes picking two bags and mixing the two) at a density of 2800 stems/ha. I’ll come to why we didn’t plant any broadleaves in a minute. We didn’t plant all of the site, odd corners were left and we didn’t plant underneath the mature trees. I estimate that, including the brashrakes, 15-20% of the site has been left to its own devices and has now been colonized by bramble, gorse and re-gen birch among a host of other annual plant species. Wild.
Maintenance of the site has been critical to its success. As important as getting the trees away has been creating habitat, so the methods used need to work for both these objectives. We did do a spot spray – a herbicide application in the area immediately around each tree – in the first year, and further targeted applications just to knock back some of the vegetation around smaller trees, but most of the maintenance has been hand weeding bracken and brushcutting where the vegetation has started to swamp the trees. Crucially any intervention was only carried out if there would be an impact on the trees. We also used natural re-gen to our advantage (free trees innit?) and have allowed birch to colonise parts of the site and respaced it as appropriate. This is why we didn’t feel the need to plant broadleaves. Alongside the mature trees that were left we knew birch regen would do well.
We now have a site that with continued management will offer all those benefits of productive woodland, habitat and biodiversity. From the floor where the gorse and bramble have been allowed to grow, through to the uneven age structure and species mix, whatever felling regime is chosen it will continue to thrive.
As well as applying this ethos to a single site, it is also critical to consider it over an entire landscape. So often it seems that doesn’t happen. At the risk of incurring wrath, I shall use as an example the humble beaver. Beavers are landscape engineers, and very good ones at that. But human beings are also landscape engineers and frankly when it comes to shaping the landscape we knock beavers into a cocked dam. We have invented interesting machines and very clever technologies and materials to help us change our surroundings. Not always for the best I grant you, but nevertheless we can apply these things to achieve anything we want. From a purely pragmatic point of view, a good man on a digger can achieve the same result, if not better, much faster and more cheaply. So it’s not because beavers are good engineers, it’s because you want beavers.
What we need is balance. Dropping a beaver enclosure randomly into the landscape with no thought to how it is integrated into the wider landscape has no value at all. You can find examples of this, or healthland restoration or a whole load of other things all over the country. There’s one on my doorstep that is definitely beaver enclosure first, landscape second. There has been no mitigation for the loss of timber for example even though we’re meant to be increasing tree cover. You’d think the planning process would account for this and a restocking programme for the equivalent area would be part of it.
The other side of the coin is when good planning works with everything else. I used to live in Argyll not far from the Knapdale beavers. It’s fantastic. Clearly a lot of thought went into finding the right site where the beavers can thrive as well as ensuring minimum impact on other parts of the forests in that area. To be fair it’s a loch surrounded by timber plantations so it’s an easy win and exactly what I mean by integrating everything at a landscape scale. If you’re up that way it’s well worth a visit. You might not see them, but you’ll get a feel for how they go about their business. A great example of how it can work.
The major problem with rewilding is it can only deliver on one outcome. Don’t get me wrong, it is an important one, but on a crowded island with limited tree cover this is not good enough. The world we live in now is far removed from the world of 1000’s of years ago. Populations were much less, culture and technology vastly different. It is unrealistic to attempt to return to that, but it is certainly not unrealistic to attempt a modern version of it.
As it turns out then, I’m not actually ok with rewilding at all. I’m a fan of forestry sites with multiple uses where possible and integrating different types of woodland over an entire region rather than tiny little bits isolated from each other. I’m a fan of good planning; that flat site over there with good soils, lets get it planted with productive, carbon-locking timber species. That rocky horrible bit over there, let’s leave that to go wild and if needed let’s do some work in there to make sure it’s the best it can be. And if a bunch of nutters insist on throwing themselves down a hill on a bike, then lets do that too.
We need wild places, that is indisputable. We need habitats to be restored and some places just left alone to do their thing. But we also need jobs and wood to use and somewhere to play. (Re)Wilding alone won’t work. Using land for multiple outcomes will.
