The Hushings - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 183

particular ecological importance, there is no need for anyone to
specify where those places would be.
The farmers' freedom would create the space for other people's.
Where they decide to stop cutting or grazing or burning their land,
change could happen very quickly. Land which now supports the
barest remnants of life, which is silent but for the wind and the sheep,
would (with a little help at the beginning) soon become recolonized
by trees and birds and insects, as Ritchie had discovered in one of the
least auspicious corners of the Cambrian Desert. As the returning eco-
system developed, some places would revert to deep forest, others, at
first, to gorse and heath, others to carr: bog forest dominated by
alders or willows or aspens. If we could then begin to reintroduce
missing species - the large mammals absent for so long from these
hills - places which nurture almost nothing but crows and tormentil
could become as rich in life as some of the world's most famous
national parks.
People as well as wildlife could regain a footing on the land. Tracts
which have been reduced to a repellent bleakness, where there is no
living structure, no natural shelter, could again exhilarate and
entrance. Where there was little but brown grass before, where the
exploration and discovery of nature end almost as soon as they begin,
ecosystems could flourish which again beguile both children and
adults, which offer endless adventures of revelation and surprise. I
hope that at least some of these rewilded places will be big enough to
prove uncrossable in one day's walk. A sense of boundlessness is
something whose absence afflicts many rich nations. When, after half
an hour walking across a wood, I reach the fence that separates it
from the surrounding fields, I feel that something which was just
beginning - a deep abstraction - is prematurely truncated. The dis-
covery and wonder, the freedom from structured thought which had
begun to open my mind come to an abrupt end.
In some parts of the world tumultuous nature is already returning
to places from which it had been banished. One estimate suggests that
two-thirds of those parts of the United States which were once for-
ested, then cleared, have become forested again, as farming and
logging have retreated, especially from the eastern half of the coun-
try. 15 Another proposes that by 2030, even without any change in the