Greening the Desert - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 69

nutrients* and their soils so compacted by sheep that they are unlikely
to support continuous forest. For a few centuries after rewilding
began, they would be more likely to host a patchwork of rainforest,
covert, scrub, heath and sward.
The ancient character of the land, the forests that covered it and the
animals that lived in them - which until historical times included
wolves, bears, lynx, wildcats, boar and beavers - have been forgotten
by almost everyone. The open, treeless hills are widely seen as natural.
The chairman of a trade association called Cambria Active describes the
scoured acid grassland it is trying to promote to tourists as 'one of
the largest wildernesses left in the UK'. 6 The Countryside Council for
Wales, the nation's official conservation agency, calls its Claerwen
nature reserve, a bare waste of sheep-scraped misery in the Cambrian
Mountains, 'perhaps the largest area of “wilderness” in Wales today'. 7
Spend two hours sitting in a bushy suburban garden anywhere in
Britain, and you are likely to see more birds, and of a wider range of
species, than you would while walking five miles across almost any
open landscape in the uplands. But to explain that what we have
come to accept as natural is in fact the aftermath of an ecological dis-
aster - the wasteland which has replaced a rainforest - is to demand
an imaginative journey that we are not yet prepared to make. Our
memories have been wiped as clean as the land.
There is a name, coined by the fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly, for
this forgetting: 'Shifting Baseline Syndrome'. 8 The people of every
generation perceive the state of the ecosystems they encountered in
their childhood as normal. When fish or other animals or plants are
depleted, campaigners and scientists might call for them to be restored
to the numbers that existed in their youth: their own ecological base-
line. But they often appear to be unaware that what they considered
normal when they were children was in fact a state of extreme deple-
tion. In the uplands of Britain, naturalists and conservationists
bemoan the conversion of heather into rough grassland, or of rough
grassland into fertilized pasture, and call for the ecosystems they
remember to be restored - but only to the state they knew.
* Nutrients are lost as animals are removed from the land for consumption in other
places, and as soil is leached or stripped by erosion.