Spring 2015 Volume 13 Number 1
◆ An introduction
to rewilding
◆ Wild in the eye of
the beholder
◆ Case study:
Carrifan Wildwood
EDITORIAL
T
he landscape-scale approach to conservation is becoming
increasingly popular, and recent CLM articles have
demonstrated how restoration is being implemented
across entire river catchments to achieve sustainable solutions
to flooding and erosion.
But many are now looking towards something even more
ambitious – decreasing human influence and reintroducing
keystone species to restore ecosystem processes and achieve
something akin to ‘wilderness’. In some quarters this is known
as ‘rewilding’, although whether it is possible to revert a landscape
to a former state is hotly contested.
However we term it, until recently the UK has seen rather more
talk than action where this approach is concerned. But, things are
beginning to change. Natural England has just approved a licence
to allow a family of beavers in Devon to remain in the wild; 3,700ha
of fen is being restored in East Anglia; and a number of extensive
native-tree-planting projects are now under way.
In this special ‘wilding’ issue, various perspectives on the possible
benefits, likely challenges, and the range of implications for land
managers are discussed.We finish with the first of a series of articles
that will focus on examples of where wilder environments are
developing across substantial areas – this time an ambitious project to
re-create a forested wilderness in the Southern Uplands of Scotland.
Do please get in touch with your reactions.
Katy Roper, Editor
CONTENTS
Volume 13 Number 1
4 Guest editorial
Keith Kirby
5 Rewilding: a short introduction, and some
questions for land managers
An overview of rewilding: what it entails, potential benefits,
associated challenges, and likely implications for decisions
concerning land management.
Tony Robinson
12 Viewpoint: Wild in the eye of the beholder
Ian Rotherham
13 Carrifran Wildwood: from vision to revived
ecosystem
An ambitious woodland restoration project in Dumfriesshire
acts as a useful case study demonstrating how factors that
have prevented normal ecosystem function might be removed
and human intervention progressively stepped back once
natural processes are ready to take over.
Philip Ashmole
19 Briefing
Events, new publications and notice board
22 On the ground
Product updates and advice
Editor: Katy Roper
Commissioning Editor: Tony Robinson
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Above: Getting sessile oaks ready for autumn planting at Carrifran
Wildwood. John Savory
Cover: Carrifran Glen, Dumfriesshire, January 2015, where the Wildwood
project is aiming to re-create an extensive tract of mainly forested
wilderness with most of the rich diversity of native species that would
have been present in the area before human activities became dominant.
Philip Ashmole
Cover inset: Some people argue that reintroduction of top predators, such
as the Eurasian lynx, is the defining element of ‘rewilding’. Bob Gibbons
Viewpoint
Wild in the eye
of the beholder
 A large grazing herbivore now
established in the Peak District
Eastern Moors and a wildlife
spectacular for local people –
self‑willed nature or management
by culling? Peter Wolstenholme
R
enewed interest in conservation
through radical new approaches has
been instigated by the publication of
the seminal texts Grazing Ecology and Forest
History (2000), Future Nature (2003), and
Beyond conservation (2005). ‘Wilding’ and
‘wilder’ landscapes, applied effectively and
sensitively, offer huge benefits for biodiversity,
heritage, and amenity. However, there can be
significant pitfalls if implementation lacks careful
planning and design. The ‘eco-cultural nature’
of landscape, resulting from long-term, intimate
interactions between people and ecologies, is
important, but across Europe and elsewhere,
twenty-first-century depopulation means
rural landscapes ‘abandoned’ – not ‘wilded’.
Ecology, communities and economies are
potentially devastated.
Alongside urbanisation of rural landscapes,
socio-economic and demographic changes cause
‘cultural severance’, with long-term, often rapid,
declines in biodiversity and landscape quality.
Furthermore, from urban to remote rural areas,
attitudes to, and perceptions of, ‘alien’ invasive
species challenge attempts to ‘wild’ the landscape.
Feral species, exotic plants and animals, and
12 Conservation Land Management Spring 2015
invasive natives, form recombinant biodiversity,
but ‘rewilding’ discussions rarely mention feral
and exotic.
Perception and politics
Ideas and perceptions of ‘wild’, ‘wildness’,
‘wilderness’, and the essence of ‘nature’ and
‘natural’ are the key. Ecology, and nature freed
of people, are suggested panaceas for widespread
environmental declines, but reality is different.
Indeed, many approaches are interventionist,
rather than wild. Furthermore, cultural severance
rapidly triggers massive ecological changes and
species loss.
Failing nature
Today, we struggle to manage and conserve
rapidly diminishing ecological resources. With
human dominance over nature so complete,
we have altered almost everything inherited
from previous generations; nature is no longer
‘natural’, but ‘eco-cultural’. In massively
disturbed and eutrophic environments, globalised
and increasingly populated by exotic species,
feral nature frees successions that are different
from anything before.
Viewpoint
Free, feral or hostage to fortune?
Many desire wilder landscapes and freer nature;
maybe feral nature with processes considered
more natural, such as large-herbivore grazing.
Yet balancing domesticated, and wild or feral,
herbivores generates fierce discussion. Some favour
ending grazing and farming to release ecological
successions. Interestingly, woodland is regarded
as somehow ‘natural’ and other communities not;
a fallacy when species-rich elements of heaths,
commons, bogs, fens, and unimproved grasslands
are cultural-landscape elements derived from
genuinely ‘more natural’, ancient ecology. To deliver
truly rich and sustainable ‘futurescapes’, wilding
must recognise and conserve these hotspots for
biodiverse ecology.
Decisions and interventions
What happens if freed ecology means dominant
bracken or birch? Do you control feral red deer,
or let nature take its course (animal starvation
and little tree regeneration)? Will land managers,
conservationists, and the public accept exotic
rhododendron, sycamore, larch, spruce, Japanese
knotweed, Himalayan balsam and giant hogweed
feral across the landscape? This is free, feral nature
with mink, rabbit, grey squirrel, Canada goose,
ruddy duck, ring-necked parakeet, signal crayfish,
and deer. We already have recombinant ecology
through ecological fusion, though many refuse to
accept the inevitable.
Looking forwards to futurescapes
How do conservation bodies respond to remnant
biodiversity and priority species lost when a site is
‘freed’? Even if ‘the loss of a few species is a price
worth paying for a wilder nature’, who decides? If
we intervene, then who does it, why do they do it,
what do they do, where do
they do it, and when do they
do it, and who decides and
pays? Over centuries, people
have shifted environmental
baselines so significantly
that whether we choose
to intervene or not, the
outcomes are culturally
determined. Even not
intervening is a positive
intervention; both people
and nature trapped within
our humanity, which, like
it or not, is part of nature.
The central paradigms
are therefore concerned:
1) with the type of human
interventions in nature and
the responses that follow
the changed parameters;
and 2) how these might
be managed and manipulated to free nature for a
wilder landscape. History and science will guide us
through likely trajectories for future, wilder nature,
but expect a rocky ride.
This article addresses issues raised at the 2014
Wilder By Design PART 1 workshop, and continuing
at the major Wilder By Design Part 2 conference 9–11
September 2015.
More on http://ianswalkonthewildside.wordpress.
com and www.ukeconet.org
Ian D. Rotherham
Professor of Environmental Geography and Reader in
Tourism & Environmental Change in the Department
of the Natural & Built Environment, Sheffield
Hallam University
Suggested readings
Adams, W 2003 Future Nature: a vision for conservation.
Earthscan, London
Grime, J P, Hodgson, J G & Hunt, R 2007 Comparative plant
ecology: a functional approach to common British species.
2nd ed. Castlepoint Press, Dalbeattie
Monbiot, G 2013a Feral: searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding. Allen Lane, London
Monbiot, G 2013b The Lake District is a wildlife desert.
Blame Wordsworth. The Guardian, Monday 2 September.
Available at: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/
sep/02/lake-district-wildlife-desert-blame-wordsworth
Rotherham, I D 2008 The importance of cultural severance
in landscape ecology research. In Dupont, A & Jacobs, H,
(eds.) Landscape Ecology Research Trends, Nova Science
Publishers Inc., USA, pp. 71–87
Rotherham, I D (ed.) 2013 Cultural severance and the environment: the ending of traditional and customary practice on
commons and landscapes managed in common. Springer,
Dordrecht
Rotherham, I D (ed.) 2013 Trees, forested landscapes and
grazing animals: a European perspective on woodlands and
grazed treescapes. Earthscan, London
Rotherham, I D 2014 The call of the wild: perceptions, history,
people and ecology in the emerging paradigms of wilding.
ECOS 35(1): 35–43
Rotherham, I D 2014 Eco-history: an introduction to biodiversity
and conservation. The White Horse Press, Cambridge
Taylor, P 2005 Beyond conservation: a wildland strategy.
Earthscan, London
Vera, F W M 2000 Grazing ecology and forest history. CABI
Publishing, Wallingford
Vidal J 2005 Wild herds may stampede across Britain under
plan for huge reserves. The Guardian, Thursday October
27. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/oct/27/frontpagenews.ruralaffairs
Spring 2015 Conservation Land Management 13