The Conservation Prison - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 222

is to move towards 'landscape-scale' conservation: doing the same thing
across a wider area.* But surely the problem is not only size but also
method? That intensive management, sooner or later, will fail? If for no
other reason, this will happen as temperatures rise. Locking in particu-
lar assemblages of animals and plants will become ever less viable as
conditions change. If an ecosystem cannot adapt, its richness, structure
and complexity will decline even faster than they are declining today.
The plan for Glaslyn claims that 'wider knowledge of the Trust's
work and the rationale behind management will create a more sym-
pathetic public'. I suggest that if people better understood its work
and rationale, it would have the opposite effect.
The promise of conservation used to be that by protecting the species you
would protect the habitat. The Bengal tiger needs jungles to survive, so
defending it means defending the rich and fascinating ecosystem that sup-
ports it. But in the United Kingdom, the species we have chosen, historically,
to protect are often those associated with damaged and impoverished
places, and to defend them we must keep the ecosystem in this state.
Armies of conservation volunteers are employed to prevent natural pro-
cesses from occurring. Land is intensively grazed to ensure that the plants
do not recover from intensive grazing. Woods are coppiced (the trees are
felled at ground level, encouraging them to resprout from that point) to
sustain the past impacts of coppicing. In their seminal paper challenging
the conservation movement, the biologists Clive Hambler and Martin
Speight point out that while coppicing might favour butterfly species
which can live in many habitats, it harms woodland beetles and moths
that can live nowhere else. 30 They noted that of the 150 woodland insects
that are listed as threatened in Britain, just three (2 per cent) are threat-
ened by a reduction in coppicing, while 65 per cent are threatened by the
removal of old and dead wood. (This is not to suggest that coppicing has
no ecological role: many woodland species must have evolved to take
advantage of the habitat disturbance caused by elephants.)
Conservationists sometimes resemble gamekeepers: they regard
some of our native species as good and worthy of preservation, others
as bad and in need of control. Unlike gamekeepers, they don't use the
* This roughly speaking, is the approach of the celebrated report by Sir John Lawton.