Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
areas, like the sea shore, where rival ecosystems overlap and throw up high levels of biod-
iversity.
I'm not in a position to judge how accurate Vera's prehistorical analysis is, but his thesis
bears the hallmark of a theory whose time has come. It is almost as though the conserva-
tion establishment has been hoping for something like this for years. Given that it overturns
some entrenched orthodoxies, it has received recognition (though not universal acceptance)
remarkably quickly, and even those who share some of Rackham's and Peterken's misgiv-
ings recognize that Vera raises important questions about how temperate natural ecosys-
tems work. His theory has generated a debate within UK nature conservation circles, aired
in the pages of
Ecos
(the magazine of the British Association of Nature Conservationists)
between advocates of the 'English approach' and the 'Dutch approach', here compared by
James Fenton:
As part of a recent conference at Lancaster University, we went on a field trip to
the Pennines where staff of English Nature proudly showed us an experiment in the
'wilding' of the eastern flanks of Ingleborough. To them being 'wild' meant removing
all grazing and planting some trees. Next day we were back at the University to hear
inspirational thinking from Frans Vera about returning wild nature to Holland - at the
Ostvarrdersplassen - and we heard even grander plans to create large-scale wildlife
corridors from there to Germany and France.
The essence of these Dutch schemes is the reintroduction of wild herbivores. Be-
ing wild in Holland does not mean excluding grazing, but the introduction of a range
of large herbivores, in this case wild cattle, horses and red deer, and seeing what hap-
pens. These animals, of course, have a major impact on the vegetation pattern, the
only constraint on their numbers being the amount of forage available in winter.
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The debate does not just revolve around the preference given to either grazing animals
or trees; a further issue is the extent to which humans should interfere in areas devoted
to wildness. At Ostvarrdersplassen the policy is 'seeing what happens': the population of
grazing animals is not controlled, trees may be killed by bark-stripping and 'the vegetation
the public excluded on the grounds that the animals could be dangerous.
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In situations where wild herbivores are allowed to multiply without human intervention,
it could be that over time most trees will eventually be killed, in which case the resulting
vegetation might not look that different from conventional sheep pasture. This has led some
conservationists to suggest that the heavily grazed uplands of Britain may not be so far re-
moved from their natural wilderness state as formerly thought:
