THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN LIGHT AND SHADE - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 301

Patrick Whitefield, in the first paragraph of The Earthcare Manual , speaks of 'a wild
woodland, which is the natural vegetation of this country', a remark which might have
passed unnoticed a few years ago, but is now open to challenge.
Whitefield makes no mention of Frans Vera's reappraisal of how the ecology of decidu-
ous woodlands developed in prehistorical times and throughout the Middle Ages (though
he does allude to it in a later book). 33 In the few years since the publication of Grazing
Ecology and Forest History , Vera's thesis has been taken seriously by most ecologists; but
it does not yet seem to have been noticed by many in the permaculture world. 34 This is sur-
prising, because Vera's conclusions lend weight to a permaculture approach.
The traditional view of Europe, after the retreat of the last Ice Age, is of a continent
covered by belts of thick closed forest, which were gradually cleared by humans as they
established agricultural settlements. This was an unchallenged orthodoxy which dominated
in the latter half of the 19th century and persisted throughout the 20th century. Part of the
evidence for this was the observation that if an area of pasture is fenced off from animals
and left to 'do its own thing', scrub begins to appear, then sun-loving trees such as oak and
hazel, until finally these are shaded out by a canopy of trees such as lime or beech which
require less light to regenerate. These shade-tolerant trees are regarded as the climax veget-
ation - the biological equivalent of 'the end of history' - which can only be reversed by a
catastrophe such as fire, hurricane, climate change or the arrival of man.
Vera argues that this climax was not what normally happened in many lowland areas
in Europe. Before farmers arrived with their cows, sheep and pigs, Europe was populated
by large wild herbivores: the aurochs (wild ox), the tarpan (a kind of horse), the European
bison, red deer, beavers and wild boar. These animals, which between them ate grass,
leaves, seedlings and bark, applied constant pressure on the tree population with the result
that, far from being blanketed with a thick mass of closed forest, many areas of Europe con-
sisted of savannah type landscape, more like what can be seen in parts of the New Forest,
in Extremadura in Spain, or in Serengeti National Park, all of which are grazed landscapes.
Much of the evidence cited by earlier ecologists for the existence of closed forest relies
on fossil pollen counts showing a high proportion of tree pollen and comparatively little
grass pollen, which, at first sight, does suggest a predominance of trees in the landscape.
Vera suggests that this is consistent with a savannah type landscape, because much of the
grass gets eaten before it goes to seed. Modern pollen counts taken from grazed or mown
fields next to woodland show a similar spectrum. Moreover, the fossil pollen counts show
very large amounts of hazel pollen, which are inconsistent with closed forest because hazel
has a hard time surviving in heavily shaded woodland, and only flowers and seeds at the
woodland edge.