Raucous Summer - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 9

species but also of their ever-shifting relationships with each other
and with the physical environment. It understands that to keep an
ecosystem in a state of arrested development, to preserve it as if it
were a jar of pickles, is to protect something which bears little rela-
tionship to the natural world. This perspective has been influenced by
some of the most arresting scientific developments of recent times.
Over the past few decades, ecologists have discovered the existence
of widespread trophic cascades. These are processes caused by ani-
mals at the top of the food chain, which tumble all the way to the
bottom. Predators and large herbivores can transform the places in
which they live. In some cases they have changed not only the ecosys-
tem but also the nature of the soil, the behaviour of rivers, the
chemistry of the oceans and even the composition of the atmosphere.
These findings suggest that the natural world is composed of even
more fascinating and complex systems than we had imagined. They
alter our understanding of how ecosystems function and present a
radical challenge to some models of conservation. They make a
powerful case for the reintroduction of large predators and other
missing species.
While researching this topic I have, with the help of the visionary
forester Adam Thorogood, stumbled across an incendiary idea that
seems to have been discussed nowhere but in a throwaway line in one
scientific paper. 5 I hope it might prompt a reassessment of how our
ecosystems function, and of the extent to which they are perceived as
natural. There is, we believe, powerful circumstantial evidence sug-
gesting that many of our familiar European trees and shrubs have
evolved to resist attacks by elephants. The straight-tusked elephant,
related to the species that still lives in Asia today, persisted in Europe
until around 40,000 years ago, 6 a mere tick of evolution's clock. It
was, most likely, hunted to extinction. If the evidence is as compelling
as it seems, it suggests that this species dominated the temperate
regions of Europe. Our ecosystems appear to be elephant-adapted.
Even so, I have no desire to try to re-create the landscapes or eco-
systems that existed in the past, to reconstruct - as if that were
possible - primordial wilderness. Rewilding, to me, is about resisting
the urge to control nature and allowing it to find its own way. It
involves reintroducing absent plants and animals (and in a few cases