The Conservation Prison - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 225

hundred years ago, regardless of the point at which they start counting.
This is what they try to preserve or re-create, defending the land from
the intrusions of nature. Reserves are treated like botanic gardens: their
habitats are herbaceous borders of favoured species, weeded and tended
to prevent the wilds from encroaching. As Ritchie Tassell says sardoni-
cally, 'You wonder how nature coped before we came along.'
I do not object to the idea of conserving a few pieces of land as
museums of former farming practices, or of protecting meadows of
peculiar loveliness in their current state, though I would prefer to see
these places labelled culture reserves. I do not object to the continued
existence of reserves in which endangered species which could not
otherwise survive are maintained through intensive management.*
Nor do I believe that rewilding should replace attempts to change the
way farms are managed, to allow more wildlife to live among crops
and livestock: I would like to see that happen too. But if the protec-
tion of nature is to be extended to wider areas, as both conservationists
and rewilders agree that it should be, 39 I believe we should first con-
duct a radical reassessment of what we are trying to achieve and why.
This assessment is likely to show us that rewilding could offer the
best chance of protecting endangered species. According to a paper in
Biological Conservation , around 40 per cent of the creatures that
have become extinct in Britain since 1800 lived in woodlands, and
two-fifths of those needed mature trees and dead timber to survive.
The paper warns that 'extinction rates in Britain will rise this century
without . . . restoration of woodlands and wetlands'. 40
A new assessment might prompt conservationists to focus less on
species and habitats which happen to be there already, and more on
those which could return. Rather than sustaining the sheepwrecked,
open habitats of the uplands, they might begin to reduce the impacts
of human management, to allow trees to return, even to reintroduce
some of the great beasts which once lived among them. That, to me, is
a more inspiring vision than sustaining a slightly modified version of
the farming which is suppressing the natural world almost everywhere.
Everyone should have some self-willed land on their doorstep.
* Hambler and Canney argue that rewilding protects a greater number of threatened
species than any other approach. 38