Bring Back the Wolf - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 107

water, what might be watching me without my knowledge. It is the
sense that without these animals the ecosystem is lopsided, abridged,
dysfunctional. I can produce reasons scientific, economic, historic and
hygienic, but none of those describe my motivation.
Living in Britain, I am constantly reminded of the scale of our loss.
According to the biologist David Hetherington, who runs the Cairn-
gorms Wildcat Project, the United Kingdom is 'the largest country in
Europe and almost the whole world' which no longer possesses any
of its big carnivores. 33 It has also lost more of its large native species -
both carnivores and herbivores - than any other European country
except the Republic of Ireland. Britain also happens to be the slowest
and most reluctant of any European nation to begin rewilding the
land and reintroducing its missing species.
Perhaps this is connected to the fact that we have one of the highest
concentrations of land ownership in the world. 34 Large landowners,
who are often (though not universally) hostile towards any wild ani-
mals that might compete with or prey upon the animals they hunt,
and often deeply suspicious of proposed changes to the way they
manage their estates, are peculiarly powerful here. Though they and
their views tend to belong to a very small minority, they dominate
rural policy, and little can be done without their agreement.
A group called Rewilding Europe intends to catalyse the restor-
ation of ecological processes across a million hectares of the Continent
by 2020, and to encourage other bodies to take on a further 10 mil-
lion. 35 It appears to be on schedule. In the first phase of restoration, it
is working in the Danube delta, the southern and eastern Carpathians,
the Velebit Mountains of Croatia and the dehesa (or montado ) - the
wooded savannahs - of Spain and Portugal.
The Danube delta contains the world's largest reedbeds and the last
primeval forest in Romania, some of whose trees are 700 years old.
Despite the best efforts of the former dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and
a wildly misconceived project by the World Bank, much of the marsh-
land remains undrained, and many of its rivers still flow freely. Many
of the dykes, agricultural schemes and pumping stations the develop-
ers commissioned have collapsed or ceased to function. Here there are
pelicans, bitterns, eight species of heron, hobbies, red-footed falcons,