AFON
Rewilding Our Baseline: Lessons from Beavers
It shouldn’t be the case that we find ourselves questioning, “how much nature do we want”, or even “what do we want the natural world to look like?” It should be blindingly obvious that we should have as much wildlife as possible, yet even this magical world that remains neutral of politics is as much an end product of the machine as education or the NHS.
Yet in Britain it’s very common to find different camps of people all agreeing they’d like more wildlife, but with fundamentally different ideas of what that means. Shifting baselines have a huge part to play in this, and in my personal view, it is one of the most dangerous aspects nature conservation can face in the 21st century. We are beginning to see more money put into species and habitat restoration programmes, and while this is good to see, I wonder how far the targets go?
The number of people within senior conservation positions, the number of farmers even, are rapidly coming from generations where thick flocks of lapwings and deafening choruses of grasshoppers in the meadows, water voles so numerous in the river bank it came close to collapse, and ‘moth snowstorms’ confronting the car headlights at night, were not a part of everyday life. Increasingly, two pairs of nightingale nesting in that scrubby wood will be seen as an admirable target to achieve. How far does it go before even these birds aren’t seen as worth bothering with?
Much of our rhetoric seems to come from the idea that not much can survive in the intensely managed British landscape, but wildlife as we know is surprisingly resilient, and given a chance can readily prove us wrong. One of the most famous examples of recent years has been the beavers of Devon’s River Otter.
A beaver (Castor fiber) by Peter Cooper
Although they had been paddling gently along the river at night for several years already, it wasn’t until 2013 that their presence was ‘officially’ noticed through camera trapping efforts. The fact such large, former-native mammals had been moving through even the heavily agricultural landscape of East Devon undetected threw a spanner in the arguments of wildlife conservationists who’d stated that the time was not right for these animals to come back, who claimed our available habitat was nowhere near wild enough.
Suddenly, an idea that seemed dangerously eccentric if brought up at a conservation strategy meeting was approved and indeed ‘owned’ by almost the entire local community, so much so that the uproar generated at plans by DEFRA to remove the animals resulted in a change of heart for a five year ‘trial’ to go ahead instead. Since then, and assisted by the grant of ‘official native species’ in Scotland, the number of beaver project proposals has rocketed. Not so much because the beavers alone are a great expansion of our fauna, but what they do ecologically for the environment is likely to increase existing baseline targets for wildlife significantly (at least in wetlands).
This is just one example that suggests we can’t just leave nature conservation efforts to token statements of ‘we’d like to be as sustainable as possible’ without really seeing any tangible change. While we obviously need more done on the policy side (creating a new subsidy that pays farmers extra for wildlife, rather than simply replacing lost income would be a great start), imagination and ambition are equally important. We have the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to know what we had before even our grandparents generation, while having the knowledge and moral impetus to restore it as best we can.
Peter surveys the wilds of Romania, the view is typical of what Britain may once have been like.
From the cutting of the forests and draining of the great fens, to the 1566 Preservation of Grain Act that decreed the destruction of any competing wildlife, to the post-war agricultural intensification, we’ve got a lot of work to do based on these continual batterings. But if we take individual lessons, such as that of the beaver, think long-term, think boldly, talk to others beyond our conservation bubble – and above all act – we really can have a wilder isle once again.
Peter Cooper is studying for an MSc in Biodiversity and Conservation at the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus. He is the Mammal Representative on the AFON Committee, and is working to assist the Cornwall Wildlife Trust and Woodland Valley Farm to bring beavers back to Cornwall. You can play your part and win the chance to be present at the release by donating to the crowdfunder campaign here http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/cornwallbeaver Keep updated with Peter’s blog here https://petecooperwildlife.com/, and follow him on twitter @PeteMRCooper.