The Conservation Prison - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 219

to revert to a mixture of rainforest, bog forest, scrub and heather.
This would surely be a richer and more interesting place than the
nineteenth-century ecological disaster being preserved there at the
moment.
Some conservation groups claim that open habitats, with only scat-
tered trees, represent the 'natural' state of the hills. They often call
upon the work of Frans Vera, the man who founded the rewilding
project in the Netherlands using Heck cattle. He has argued that the
natural condition of most of the land in the warm, wet climate that
has prevailed for the past 5,000 years is pasture with groves of trees.
Grazing pressure by wild animals, he maintains, kept the forest open,
much as sheep and cattle do today. 16 It is an interesting idea, but,
overwhelmingly, the evidence does not support it.*
Others claim that the sheep or cattle or horses they keep on the
land help to maximize the diversity of life. What they tend to mean is
the diversity of certain kinds of life, such as butterflies or wild flowers:
species which favour open, sunny places. But when you count species
of all kinds - beetles, spiders, fungi, birds and everything else - native
woodland turns out to be much more biodiverse than even the richest
flowering meadows.† Most animals need places in which they can
hide from predators, or which do not dry out quickly, or are protected
from wind and sudden changes in temperature. Open landscapes tend
to offer none of these defences.
* Tree pollen dominated the fossil record until people and their livestock began clearing
the forests, suggesting that the land was mostly covered by deep forest. 17 Tree trunks
found buried in bogs tend to be straight and unbranched, which suggests that they
were competing for light with their neighbours. 18 Parkland trees, by contrast, branch
close to the ground. The beetles which were abundant before the human population
rose are the species associated with dense forest. 19 Even in previous interglacial periods,
before massive or disruptive herbivores such as the mammoth, the straight-tusked ele-
phant, the Merck's and narrow-nosed rhinoceroses, the hippopotamus and the water
buffalo became extinct in northern Europe, the most widespread vegetation was
closed- canopy forest. 20 Wild herbivores appear not to have been capable of creating
the open landscapes Vera proposes. 21 While he argues that oak and hazel cannot grow
in deep forest, there is plenty of evidence suggesting that they can and did. 22
† Clive Hambler and Susan Canney note that 'Plagioclimax grasslands are often
described as “species-rich”, when in fact they are rich in flowering plants and are
otherwise species- poor.' 23