The Conservation Prison - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 220

A study in the Cairngorms, in the Scottish Highlands, found that
wooded habitats are eleven times richer in nationally important spe-
cies than grassland, and thirteen times richer than moorland.* The
figures are even starker when you consider creatures found nowhere
else in Britain. There are 223 such species on the massif. One hundred
of them are associated with woodland or trees. But just one - a fungus
that lives on bilberry leaves - requires moorland for its survival. The
management of upland nature reserves is informed by a profound
misperception: that wildlife is best protected by clearing away the
trees and scrub.
In one of its pamphlets, the Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust warns
that 'in some areas, heather moorland is declining in quality due to
neglect of traditional moorland management techniques such as cutting
and burning'. 25 Imagine how a tropical ecologist would respond if she
saw that. British environmentalists have been campaigning for years to
stop the cutting and burning of habitats in developing countries, yet
here we see this destruction as an essential conservation tool. A conser-
vation movement which believes that the environment is threatened by
a lack of cutting and burning is one that has badly lost its way.
The choice of favoured ecosystems in this country and in some
other parts of Europe appears arbitrary, guided by impulses which
have been neither widely examined nor properly explained. The deci-
sions we have made are historical, cultural and aesthetic, dressed up
in the language of science.†
I would not object to this - the way in which we engage with nature
will always be mediated by culture - were it not for the fact that some
of the upland habitats we have chosen to conserve seem to me to be
almost as dismal, impoverished and lacking in structure or complex-
ity as a parking lot. This is not an entirely subjective view. Without
trees, large predators, wild herbivores, rotting wood or many other
components of a thriving ecosystem, these places retain only a few
* Despite being the main habitat for some 39% of important species, woodlands cover
only about 17% of the land area of the Cairngorms. In contrast, moorland appears to
support only 3% of the Cairngorms' important species, but covers some 42% of its
area. 24
† Some of them arise from Derek Ratcliffe's famous Nature Conservation Review in
1977, which identified semi-natural sites that he considered important for conservation.