Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
blanket rewilding you lose your unwritten history, your sense of self
and your sense of place. It's like topic-burning. Topics aren't written
about people like us. If you eradicate the evidence of our presence on
the land, if you undermine the core economies that support the Welsh-
speaking population in the language's heartland, you write us out of
the story. We've got nothing else.
'Conservation should be about how we can live in nature. When it
deviates from that, you forget that you're still looking at it from a
human perspective. I think rewilding is an oxymoron. As William
Cronon points out, if you argue for wilderness for its own sake, you're
still imposing a human point of view. 10
'People say they want to reintroduce predators. Why? The wolves
don't miss being here. We'd be introducing them for the sake of alle-
viating human guilt about what we have done to the environment.
Which is to meet a human need, not a wild need. It's all based on our
own value judgements. I see rewilding as post-Romantic gardening.
It's like those big rococo mansions with their toy milkmaid parlours.
'I'd much prefer to see trees here than wind turbines. But neither
would keep the school open, support the local shop or reopen the
pub. The average age of farmers in the UK is now sixty-two. It rises
every year. The danger is that we have old people who speak the “old”
language and a place barren of everyone else. That's a chilling thought.'
'It's also the visual impact,' his mother added. 'Without trees you
can see all the lights from the other farmsteads across the valley. You
don't feel so lonely. The forestry shuts us off from each other. It would
bring despair with it if you're not careful.'
I found these arguments compelling, and I left the farm feeling trou-
bled and confused. Two sets of values, both of which I held strongly,
were fighting each other. I was painfully aware of the damage sheep
have done to the upland ecology of Britain, and to the upland ecology
of many other parts of the world. The bird surveys and other evidence
suggest that the impacts are intensifying. The industry that causes this
damage depends upon public subsidies, here and in many other coun-
tries. So we are paying both to sustain its assault on nature and to
prevent the land and its ecosystems from recovering.
Yet the idea that Dafydd and Delyth and people like them should
be pushed aside to make way for wildlife was also intolerable. I did
Search WWH ::




Custom Search