Resetting our Natural Baseline
Imagine walking through an English woodland. The gentle breeze rustling through the oak trees above your head. The alarmed squark of a blackbird as it flits across the path ahead of you and the cra-cra-craaawww of a grey squirrel perched on a branch way up. You round the corner of the lane and emerge onto the edge of a field. Flocks of sheep grazing, with the coloured splodges on their backs marked by their farmer. Ah isn’t this peaceful, an escape from the hustle of life into the tranquility of unfiltered nature.
Now imagine I offer you a shimmering portal to that same walk just 500 years ago. You step through and immediately you notice your ears being overwhelmed by the cacophony of bugs and birdsong; It’s like nothing you’ve ever heard, the forest is alive with sound. You walk onwards through a slightly thicker woodland before you once more round the corner to find a smaller field, fenced off not by wire but wicker. A small flock of sheep graze in the middle, yet they seem more on edge. Walking further still you spot something laying in the field; it’s a carcass. Clearly it was a sheep but, it’s been picked over by wolves. The farmer isn’t going to be pleased.
Finally, I offer another portal, this time it’s the same walk but around 100,000 years ago. As you step through the woodland is barely recognisable. It’s like stepping into a rainforest, plants growing off the trunks of the trees, foliage all around you, bird song filling your ears. As you work your way through the undergrowth you hear a brrlllph of a straight-tusked elephant. Yes, this is still England, or what becomes England anyway.
So now I ask, what truly is the natural state of England?
There is a concept in the environmental sphere called the Shifting Baseline Syndrome. In essence it’s the gradual shift of our perception of what “natural” is. Our understanding is based on experience, so many view what should be there based on what they grew up with. As recent generations come and go they are witnessing natural decline at different stages; yet their baseline from youth is already a depleted state. Over time that baseline keeps shifting to a more and more depleted state of nature. So often times even in our search for revitalisation of the natural world, we’re barely beginning to scratch the surface of how teeming with life it really was.
Yes, England really did used to be home to elephants, among many forms of megafauna. It wasn’t tropical like we imagine when we think of elephants either; it was still just a temperate forest. Palaeontologists have found the bones of hippos and lions in trafalgar square from long before we placed stone lions on columns at that very location. They may not have been exactly the same species as those we see in Africa today but, they were of the same genus. These types of megafauna were likely forced further south in Europe (before the channel fully separated the UK and European mainland) by the ice age and never made their way back after being hunted to extinction by our early hunter/gatherer ancestors. Early humans originated from Africa, so it’s little surprise that Africa is one of the few places megafauna still exist — it evolved with our hunting tendencies. As we settled around the world, we disrupted ecosystems not evolved to handle us.
So do we reintroduce megafauna to Britain?
Of course not, there are clearly a lot more factors involved but it raises an interesting concept for less drastic species. The wolf for example was only hunted to extinction in the UK around the 1620s. There has been talk of returning wolves to our isles but obviously it’s a hard sell. People are scared of wolves, and farmers even more so. However, there is plenty of evidence from all around the globe (notably in Europe where wolves have been reintroduced) that they rarely kill livestock and have very few interactions with people, let alone attack. The UK is considerably more densely populated than some of these nations though and reintroduction would have to be done with full support of the people and livelihoods it would affect.
These types of strategies are commonly discussed amongst the ecologists proposing one of newest ideas of conservation — Rewilding.
Rewilding is almost a self-explanatory word; it is allowing the wild to return. Yet it is slightly more complex than that. George Monbiot (Guardian columnist and author of Feral) describes it as “resisting the urge to control nature and allowing it to find its own way”. Ecosystems work in vast cycles and interlink every level of the food chain, affecting the very landscapes it exists within. We have disrupted those systems in dramatic ways by removing key species. By just standing back and letting nature do it’s thing over millennia it may create a new natural order, but that’s not quite the goal. We want to reinvigorate the natural systems we’ve damaged. That may require some removal of invasive, dominant species and the reintroduction of species to fulfil a role we have prevented. Wolves for example, when reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995, impacted the entire landscape. They hunted the over-populous red deer, forcing them out of areas that were unsafe to graze. This allowed young trees and shrubs to flourish and in-turn created knock-on effects to species from beavers and otters to hawks and bears. Rewilding is about providing space for nature to flourish as a whole; but we may need to give it a kickstart if we want to see results within lifetimes.
This brings me back to the Shifting Baseline Syndrome. If we can find a way to think outside of our preconceptions, we can begin to imagine a wilder world. With more awareness of what we’re missing, maybe we will set our aspirations higher than simply what we saw in our youth.
I climbed Mt Snowdon in North Wales with my family around 2.5 years ago now. Descending out of the ever-present Welsh clouds to the slopes below and gazing out over the craggy hills of Snowdonia felt awe-inspiring at the time. However, later that year I began to research into rewilding and suddenly my eyes were opened. Now I look at the pictures I took and see a different story. The sheep grazing the slopes shouldn’t be there. The valleys should be covered in woodland. The Snowdonia National Park we so desperately protect today is a barren shell of what once was there. You see more variety of birds at feeders in town gardens than you do in Snowdonia.
By researching what once was there, I have at least to some degree reset my own baseline.
