Ecos 35 1 entire ecos

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Spring 2014 issue 35(1)

Soggy Somerset politics Agricultural futures – what room for wildlife?

Your word or mine? – Nature’s language problems

ECOS

A REVIEW OF CONSERVATION ECOS is the journal of the British Association of Nature Conservationists

www.banc.org.uk

ECOS 35(1) 2014

ecos@easynet.co.uk Editorial

Managing Editor: Rick Minter 07768 748301 ecos@easynet.co.uk

Hedging our bets

Assistant Editor: Martin Spray Hillside, Aston Bridge Road, Pludds, Ruardean, Glos. GL17 9TZ 01594-861404 Acknowledgements This issue was edited by Rick Minter and Martin Spray Cover photo: Somerset Levels winter 2014 The opinions expressed in ECOS are not necessarily those of BANC Council or of the Editors.

ECOS may not be reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, in whole or in part, in English or other languages, without the prior written consent of the publisher, BANC.

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There is a fertile sense of both decay and new growth in this issue of ECOS. Decay of old assumptions. Struggling shoots of new thinking. As the negotiations over CAP reform plough on, the roots of a quarter century of agri-environment thinking are being turned over and reassessed. What has all that effort – the lobbying, the thousands of discussions around farm kitchen tables – actually achieved? And with all that experience behind us, what do conservationists really want now from environmental incentives in farming?

Without ESAs, Countryside Stewardship, Entry and Higher Level Stewardship, many of our most precious wildlife-rich landscapes would have been impoverished much more severely – of that there can be little doubt. Lisa Schneidau supports the environmental measures focused on farming, but John Bowers suggests that agri-environment schemes have not succeeded, in the round, in their objective of halting farmland biodiversity decline. He argues that the reason for this failure is inherent in a European agricultural policy that has created the conditions where intensification is profitable, while at the same time trying to prevent that intensification by paying farmers not to pursue it.

Logically, the only way out of this crazy conflict is to remove the subsidy on land and on output prices – to expose farming more to market risk.

Robert Deane reminds us that we rely on a particular snap-shot in the history of agriculture as our template for what ‘good’ traditional, mixed farming should look like. Yet we know that back then, when farmed landscapes were rich and varied, farmers did not manage the land out of selfless regard for wildlife. They took decisions based on viability for their enterprise, just as they do now. But those economics were riskier, so they hedged their bets – and hedges, meadows, and all the rest was the natural consequence.

President: John Bowers

Chair: Gavin Saunders

Vice-Presidents: Marion Shoard Adrian Phillips

Secretary: Ruth Boogert Treasurer: Jeremy Owen

BANC is a non profit making company limited by guarantee, registered in England No. 2136042. Registered charity No.327595

ECOS is printed by Severnprint using Cocoon Silk 300gsm cover and Cocoon uncoated 100gsm text paper. Both papers have a 100% recycled content and are FSC certified. The electricity used during printing is generated from renewable sources. The magazine is printed under the SylvaPack environmental print route using no alcohol and processless plates. Severnprint donates to Tree Aid to support tree planting in sub-Saharan Africa.

Meanwhile the debacle over the flooding of the Somerset Levels this past winter highlighted how short-termism and political opportunism continue to dominate, offering no guaranteed support either to wildlife or to flooded home owners. Yet the personal hardship, political reaction and environmentalist frustration have offered us a huge opportunity to raise public understanding of the links between land, nature, farming and the harsh consequences of climatic extremes. Can we grasp that opportunity?

Only – as Mark Robins tells us – if we can summon a different kind of leadership, which builds connections and consensus rather than letting timidity masquerade as strength.

Where is real land ‘husbandry’ in this picture? And what voice for the soil itself?

In truth, the deep, earthy, tactile emotion which motivates many – perhaps most farmers parallels the elemental link to nature felt by most of us who still call ourselves conservationists. That ineffable feeling is the gravitational pull of the Land – earth, soil, life. We should celebrate what connects us, rather than what divides us.

Gavin Saunders

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Why don’t environmental payments work?

The origins of agri-environment schemes (AES) lie with safeguarding SSSIs in the late 1960s and there have been comprehensive schemes since the late 1980s. Despite this the quality of the agricultural environment and the diversity of its wildlife have continued to decline. The reason is that all systems of agricultural subsidy and protection reduce risk, thereby increasing the return on investment in intensification and specialisation.

AES will not work in the broad unless and until agricultural support is removed. The latest proposed modifications of AES recognise this.

JOHN BOWERS The genesis of the UK’s system of payments to farmers for environmentally friendly farming was the system of payments for Scheduled Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) under the 1968 Countryside Act and consolidated in the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. To trigger these payments a farmer occupying an SSSI had simply to notify an intention of undertaking agricultural activity that would damage the scientific interest of the site. The level of payments was supposed to provide exact compensation for the income foregone.

Cosy deals As a way of protecting wildlife and its habitats from agricultural change this system was of limited value since it applied only to (usually very small) pockets of land in an intensively farmed countryside. Extension of the idea to the wider countryside has sometimes been attributed to the Broads Authority in the mid 1980s with payments to farmers on Halvergate Marshes in Norfolk. This bizarre scheme really serves only to demonstrate the power of the farming lobby. Water levels on the marshes were controlled by a series of ancient obsolete pumps operated by an Internal Drainage Board. Public money was only available to replace these pumps if the work satisfied a cost-benefit test. The public benefit alleged was the higher returns from switching from grazing to cropping. This was far from adequate to justify the costs and in fact no economic case for pump replacement existed.1 Despite this, a deal was reached between The Ministry of Agriculture (MAFF), the IDB and the Broads Authority whereby MAFF grant-aided the IDB to replace the pumps, and the Broads Authority made annual hectarage payments to the farmers in return for an undertaking that they would not exploit the opportunity afforded by pump replacement to convert to arable!

Under the Halvergate Scheme the payments per hectare were uniform across the marshes and unrelated to the (unknown) opportunity costs of foregoing conversion, which presumably would have varied both between holdings and probably between fields, or at least between benefit areas of the several pumps. In this regard the payments would have been deemed economically inefficient; the same result could 2

ECOS 35(1) 2014 have been achieved at lower cost to the tax-payer by a discriminating monopolist.

But of course the tax-payer would have been a lot better off had the pumps had not been replaced at all.

The mid-1980s saw another scheme of interest to environmentalists, but this time coming from Brussels. Set-Aside was a device for reducing the politically embarrassing surpluses generated by the CAP by leaving some land fallow each year.

There was some thought that this measure might have a spin-off of environmental benefits but the evidence if anything points the other way.2 Initially farmers could volunteer land into set-aside reserve; thereafter set-aside became a requirement.

Either way, it was recognised that the least productive land would be set aside and that farmers would respond by intensifying use of the remaining land. Since setaside was intended to be temporary and ideally, rotational, there was not enough time for any environmental benefits to develop. In addition the requirement to keep the fallow land in `good heart’ meant it was sprayed with chemicals to ensure that it didn’t become a haven for agricultural pests. Few conservationists mourned when CAP politics brought about its demise.

Stewardship of wildlife deserts The first proper Agri-Environment scheme (AES) was the Environmentally Sensitive Areas Scheme (ESA) introduced in 1987. This was targeted on designated ESAs which, by the time the scheme was closed, numbered 22. The Countryside Stewardship scheme, introduced in 1991 offered similar payments in return for environmentally sensitive farming in the wider countryside. These two schemes and other smaller and more specialised ones were subsequently merged into the Environmental Stewardship (ES) scheme based on plans to manage farms in the interest of the environment to achieve a range of wildlife and landscape objectives.

ES introduced the idea of different levels of environmental farming with an entry level requiring no more than the retention of a few environmental features and a higher level option entailing greater modifications to perceived commercial practice compensated by a higher level of payment.

From 1987 AES has been part funded by the CAP. Environmental Stewardship is administered through the 7-year Rural Development Programme for which funding of £3.1 billion was provided 2007-13. In August 2009 there were over 58,000 agreements covering over 6 million Ha of agricultural land in England, about 66% of the total, a little short of the target agreed between Defra and Natural England of 70% coverage. Two thirds of this land is subject only to Entry Level ES (45% of English farmland) with only a small area (7%) at the Higher Level ES. 10% continues to be subject to the older schemes, ASL and CS which were only closed to new entrants.3 Despite this impressive coverage the farmland wildlife continues an inexorable decline towards what the Nature Conservancy in 1972 described as an ecological desert.

The principal indicator of wildlife on agricultural land, the Farmland Bird Index, is still falling. Between 2006 and 2011 the smoothed index of farmland generalists declined significantly by 5% and that of farmland specialists by 7%.4 Despite evidence that 3

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ECOS 35(1) 2014 on a focussed problem, success can be achieved. Equally, if enough money were spent it should be possible to grow bananas on an arable farm! None-the-less taken in the round agri-environment schemes have not achieved one of their primary objectives of halting, still less reversing, the loss of wildlife on agricultural land. Why have they failed?

Subsidising farm intensification and wildlife decline The destruction of farmland wildlife is a consequence of agricultural change, particularly specialisation and intensification of production, these processes typically going together in what is known as the modernisation of agriculture. As I have pointed out on numerous occasions going back to the 1960s, modernisation of agriculture is not a response to market forces but rather is an intended consequence of agricultural policy achieved through the payment of agricultural subsidies which have been the principal source of farm income since the 1940s.7 Prior to UK entry into the CAP, shifts on the intensive and extensive margin were achieved partly by the deliberate distortion of input prices in the mistaken belief that a more capital intensive agriculture would be more competitive in world markets.8 Under the CAP the focus for many years was on increasing output prices. Subsequently, in response to the `landscape’ effects of the policy - the beef mountains and the milk lakes - as well its impacts on wildlife habitats, recent reform has shifted to directly subsidising agricultural land rather than its output, the Single Payment Scheme. This shift in focus however is only partial. An EU cereals intervention scheme still remains, together with subsidies for growing what are called combinable crops and grants for processed fodder and biofuels including maize.9

Culm grassland at Dunsdon National Nature Reserve, north Devon.

Photo: Peter Burgess/Devon Wildlife Trust

2013 was a good year for butterflies, there is no reason to think that the FBI is not a reliable indicator of trends in other taxa. In the face of this over-whelming evidence of failure Natural England (2009) has been reduced to putting double emphasis on the few positives.3 Central to these is the Cirl bunting (Emberiza cirlus) whose population in its residual South Devon stronghold more than doubled between 1992 and 2003.

In the late 1960s Cirl buntings were found all along the South coast from Cornwall to the borders of Kent and inland throughout Hampshire, Wiltshire, Berkshire, along the Hog’s Back in Surrey and into Oxfordshire.5 The decline started earlier than this survey.

Thus in Hampshire: “The decline accelerated in the 1950s and 1960s until very few remained by the late 1970s”.6 Similar comments can be made about the other targeted successes of the Agrienvironment schemes. If resources are concentrated in a sufficiently small area 4

To a farming population accustomed to cradle to grave support from consumers and tax-payers, agri-environment schemes constitute just another set of income opportunities. Furthermore AES are not among the big players in the subsidy scene.

AES is financed from one of the two budgetary funds, the Pillar 2 of the CAP budget that, even after the maximum permitted transfers (modulations) between the two pillars, has amounted typically to only about 25% of total expenditure on agricultural support which is dominated by the Single Payment Scheme. SPS is of course subject to cross-compliant environmental conditions but these amount to very little: buffer strips on the edges of intensive arable fields and the odd hedge or other landscape features.

The standard explanation for the failure of AES is two-fold: the level of support is too low, c.f. SPS; and the majority of AES expenditure is on entry-level schemes that place few demands on farmers and in consequence confer few benefits to the environment.

The framework for reform of the CAP agreed in 2013 has been presented as an attempt to correct these faults. First there is to be a greening of direct payments in the form of an obligation on arable farmers to manage 5% of their land as Ecological Focus Areas. This is roughly equivalent to entry level conditions under Environmental Stewardship so that entry-level ES is to be de facto an obligation on all farmers. But it is already clear that entry level ES does nothing to stop wildlife losses. Furthermore, for England at least, the Government intends to do the least possible in terms of greening of direct payments.

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ECOS 35(1) 2014 Not much environmental gain can be expected on the typical intensive arable farm, particularly since short-term rotation coppice and nitrogen fixing crops are to count towards the 5%. EFA will probably be entry-level minus.

Second, under the reforms member states have the power to transfer up to an extra 15% of support money from Pillar 1 to Pillar 2 uses. The British Government is proposing to transfer the full amount allowable. The support money transferred from Pillar 1 will fund a new scheme from 2016 to be called the New Environmental Land Management Scheme (NELMS). This will be a single tiered scheme to replace ES. The objectives of the scheme are to enhance biodiversity and water quality.

NELMS will be more focussed than ES and will recognise current thinking about landscape scale conservation. The 70% target will be dropped. The thinking behind this proposal appears to be that wildlife in the broader countryside cannot be saved and resources should be focussed on protecting those areas which are not yet part of British agriculture’s ecological desert.

Moral hazard consequences Perhaps this is no more than realism. At any politically feasible level of funding AES is unable to protect wildlife for a simple reason. All systems of agricultural support or subsidy, by placing a floor on financial returns, reduce the level of financial risk facing farmers, and it is this reduction of risk, rather than the level of producer prices, that results in intensification and specialisation. Mixed farming is the classic strategy for risk management in agriculture; it is also a necessary condition for maintaining farmland biodiversity. SFS raises the rate of return on investment in increasing specialisation and intensive production, the very investment that AES is trying to prevent. Thus all agrienvironment schemes suffer from what we could call the Halvergate folly; creating the conditions where a certain course of action is profitable and then trying to prevent that action by paying the actors not to pursue it. The folly was partially successful at Halvergate, at least for a period of time, because the action, draining and ploughing the marshes, was easily monitored. However the moral hazard is obvious. These conditions don’t hold for agricultural subsidies. Unless and until we can dispense with them and the safety net they provide, we will continue to pay the price of wildlife losses.

References 1. Bowers, J K (1989) Halvergate Marshes Drainage Schemes: Economic Appraisals, Public Policy Unit, School of Economic Studies, University of Leeds 2. Bowers J K (1987) `Set-Aside and other stories’ in Baldock D and Conder D eds Removing Land from Agriculture, London, CPRE and Institute for European Environmental Policy pp.5-18.

3. Natural England (2009) Agri-environment schemes in England 2009: a review of results and effectiveness.

Peterborough 4. Defra (2013) `Wild Bird Populations in England, 1970 to 2012’, Statistical Release 17 October 5. Gibbons, D W, J B Reid and R A Chapman (1993) New Atlas of Breeding Birds in Britain and Ireland: 1988 – 1991, London, British Trust for Ornithology 6. Clark, J M and J A Eyre (1993) Birds of Hampshire, Hampshire Ornithological Society.

7. Bowers, J and P Cheshire (1969) `Agriculture, conservation and amenity’, New Scientist, April pp. 24-26.

8. Bowers J K (1985) `British agricultural policy since the Second World War’, Agricultural History Review, 33, pp. 66-76.

9. Defra (2014) Cereals, oilseeds and fodder: getting funding www.gov.uk/combinable-crops

John Bowers is President of BANC. J.k.bowers@o2.co.uk

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Does traditional farming still meet nature conservation needs?

Are traditional farming and conservation aims really as compatible as we suppose, or is there now such a divergence between farming opportunity and environmental need that we require a different approach to delivering conservation objectives across the wider countryside?

ROBERT DEANE For over 40 years, mainstream UK conservation policy has assumed that traditional farming systems provide a sound, and usually the most practical and economic, basis for managing most sites and landscapes of high nature value. We talk about the value of mixed farming in lowland landscapes to retain a matrix of cropped and grassland habitats, or about the continuation of extensive beef production in the uplands to conserve dwarf heath and mire. Our view of optimal environmental management regimes has usually been designed around a continuation of the practices that were prevalent before the agricultural revolution that took place in the second half of the last century and we have relied on ‘profit foregone’ payments to farmers to discourage the adoption of more modern and technologically advanced practices. Many farmers have been willing or even enthusiastic participants in this process and in doing so, the consensus has it, these traditional farming systems (a term defined below) have provided significant social and economic benefits to rural communities.

But does this accepted wisdom still hold true? Are traditional farming and environmental management really as compatible as we supposed, or is there now such a divergence between farming opportunity and environmental need that we require a different model to underpin the delivery of conservation objectives in the countryside? Have demographic and economic change so undermined some traditional farming systems as to make them impractical and unrealisable? Does our focus on the ecosystems approach and the variety of outcomes that the natural environment can provide society require a more ‘designed’ and outcome-related approach to the management of conservation sites and high value landscapes?

The answers to these questions are unlikely to be equivocal and this article is certainly not arguing that conservationists should turn their back on tried and tested farming methods, nor that we should disengage with the farmers who manage the large majority of rural Britain. On the contrary, a better understanding of how land management decisions combine to provide the benefits that conservationists seek should produce more resolute and collaborative engagement.

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What do we mean by traditional farming systems?

It is coherent systems of agricultural production, not just a collection of individual management practices, that conservation policy has promoted and relied upon.

So for example, on low-lying wetlands such as the Somerset Levels, conservation management policy has involved the continuation of seasonally wet and low input permanent pasture grazed dairy and beef cattle and sheep. This has been pursued through the designation of Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), voluntary management agreements in Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESA) and the purchase of nature reserves by environmental charities. In upland landscapes such as the Lake District or Snowdonia, similar policy interventions have supported the hefting1 of hardy breeds of cattle and sheep on open moorland commons and the use of in-bye fields for summer hay production. Across high value landscapes in rolling lowland hills, in areas such as the Cotswolds and Lincolnshire Wolds, the continuation of mixed farming has been encouraged, including winter stubbles, spring cropping and patches of permanent grassland.

NEIL BENNETT

These systems represent a point in time in the evolving methods of agricultural land use and management. In most cases, they were the prevalent means of farming during the late 1940s and 1950s, after the process of mechanisation had started but before the agro-chemical revolution and agricultural policy changes of the 1960s and 70s.

Typical practices of earlier periods, such as the stooking of hay or the threshing and binding of cereals, are not now considered relevant to ongoing ‘traditional’ systems.

There are few demands for the reestablishment of the open strip field system that dominated the English Midlands until the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, nor do we (generally) wish to see the return of wood pasturing systems that were common before the invention of barbed wire in the 19th century.

Why are these systems considered important for conservation?

There are several reasons why mid-20th century farming systems have come to be relied upon for conservation management. First, the battle to stem the loss of habitats and impoverishment of landscapes that took place during the 1970s, 80s and 90s (and continues today, though with different causes), was perceived as a struggle between the benign stewardship of ‘traditional’ farming and the remorseless march of ‘industrial’ farming aided by the forces of agricultural policy, market prices and technology. Seminal moments were the production of the Porchester Report on Exmoor in 1977 (following which profit-foregone management agreements were used to discourage agricultural improvement), and the launch of the Halvergate Marshes Scheme in Norfolk in 1984, from which agri-environment schemes were developed.2 Both sought to hold back the intensification of agricultural management and support the continuation of the practices which had sustained the habitats and landscapes which were at threat.

Second, the social values of traditional farming and the expertise of farmers practicing them continue to be held in high regard, perhaps reflecting a deep-seated cultural yearning for the nation’s pre-industrial past. To many people, traditional farming systems have a cultural integrity that contrasts with the mistrusted and discredited methods of the modern agri-food sectors.3 8

Finally, traditional farming has been supported because it is simply more convenient to maintain tried and tested systems of management than to design alternatives that are not. This perhaps explains why there has not been more vocal support by nature conservationists for organic farming or permaculture as means of delivering environmental objectives.4 The primary purpose of traditional farming systems, the production of food and drink, has received relatively little attention and support by nature conservation policy. The distinctive products of extensive farming systems, such as single suckled slow-reared beef, salt marsh lamb, and craft cider, have been neglected while the management systems that produced them have been supported. Initiatives that have sought to quality assure and promote these products, as a means of giving an economic advantage to their production systems (such as Limestone Country Beef in the Yorkshire Dales and the Peak District Environmental Quality Mark) have struggled to gain a critical mass and thus remain small.

Time for new thinking?

During the last decade, the UK farming sector has been growing in confidence and self-belief. Buoyed by rising prices for agricultural commodities, new markets in the 9

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energy sector, more market-oriented and less environmentally distorting agricultural policy and concern about future food security, farming now has a stronger sense of direction than it has had for several decades. While higher prices of commodities like cereals, beef and milk are increasing competition for land, so high prices of farming inputs like fuel, pesticides and fertiliser are encouraging farmers to look carefully at how they maximise their margins by increasing efficiency and reducing wastage.

Techniques like precision farming, which uses GPS and other new technologies to optimise agricultural inputs and outputs, and policy approaches such as sustainable intensification (borrowed from the developing world as a solution to increasing output without increasing negative impacts) are gaining momentum.

asset, each potentially requiring different types of protection or active conservation.

Even when there are strong synergies between the delivery of different services, as there often are, achieving multiple objectives usually requires more complex management regimes than the pursuit of a narrower choice of objectives. Under these circumstances bespoke and outcome-led, rather than standard and inputdriven, management is likely to be required.

There may also be a generational change taking place in the farming and conservation communities which are consigning to recent history the antipathy of issues such as the ploughing of moorland and meadows and the grubbing up of hedgerows. Today’s farmers also probably have greater personal expectations than their predecessors, being less willing to accept long hours and low financial returns and more inclined to question the validity of approaches that were accepted by their predecessors.

1. Provision of food and fibre. This is the primary economic driver of land management and focusses on the agricultural and forestry use of the most productive and accessible soils.

The effectiveness of traditional approaches to delivering environmental objectives is also being challenged by evaluations of evidence. Twenty five years after the introduction of Environmentally Sensitive Areas, and ten years after the start of the Entry Level Scheme in England,5 there is a consensus that the lowest tiers of these agri-environment schemes, that seek to sustain the basic elements of the desirable farming system (such as low input permanent pasture), have usually delivered little environmental enhancement and often not maintained the status quo.6 We are told that the replacement for Environmental Stewardship in England will focus on higher value more ambitious prescriptions that are targeted to specific sites and environmental objectives, a move which has already taken place in Wales and Scotland. The ‘broad and shallow’ approach, with its emphasis on simple prescriptions to raise best farming practice, is being discredited in favour of more targeted and challenging approaches. There is also a move away from prescriptiondriven to outcome-led management, involving interesting trials of this approach in areas such as Dartmoor. In the Dartmoor Farming Futures pilot, farmers are being encouraged to take more responsibility for the design and delivery of their agrienvironment agreements, letting them decide how they produce the public benefits that have been agreed through an earlier spatial planning process, The Dartmoor Vision.7 This change of thinking is an important one, not least because of the greater discretion it gives to the farmer to try novel practices to achieve the required outcomes, rather than specifying the means, which are frequently the continuation of traditional practices.

The ecosystems approach and outcome-driven management The ecosystems approach is giving us a more nuanced appreciation of the many different services that the natural environment offers to society. One implication of this approach is that there may be many different objectives for managing individual sites, with each service being derived from a different environmental 10

An example of how the ecosystems approach influences decisions about land management can be illustrated by considering the objectives and likely implications for managing a lowland agricultural landscape for seven different services:

2. Conservation of genetic diversity. For this service, priority is likely to be given to the protection of the ecological network of core semi-natural habitats (such as ancient woodland, unimproved grassland and wetland), buffer zones, connecting corridors and the permeability to species of areas between them.

3. Reduction of flood risk. Within flood plains, priority is likely to be given to allocating suitable space for flood storage, ideally within wetland habitats. In other areas, the objective is likely to involve reducing flood run-off by increasing soil permeability and vegetation roughness.

4. Storage of organic carbon. The focus is likely to be on protecting and enhancing stores of soil carbon in organic and organo-mineral soils, with a secondary emphasis on plant biomass such as timber and root matter.

5. Provision of public recreation. Here the emphasis is likely to be on maintaining and publicising linear routes to and from suitable access points, with surfaces capable of supporting the types of uses involved.

6. Conservation of landscape character. This should involve identification, protection and enhancement of the key and distinctive characteristics of the local landscape.

7. Support of cultural identity and social capital. This service is less easy to connect to specific forms of land management and is vested in the skills and experience of people.

The need for coherent systems of management Achieving these objectives in practice involves a process of identifying the environmental assets, such as habitats, soil types, or landscape features, required for each service and the threats to, and management needs of, these assets. Some kind of spatial prioritising between services may also be required, for instance where there are conflicting management requirements. This process may not result 11

ECOS 35(1) 2014 in a coherent or viable system of management and the problem with focussing on the desired outcomes is that is doesn’t specify what the requirement management inputs are and how these relate to each other. Assuming agricultural management is required (which will normally be the case in agricultural landscapes), decisions are therefore needed on what types of cropping and/or animal husbandry will lead to the desired outcomes. These decisions will need to take account of the willingness, resources and skills of the landowners and farmers involved. It will be essential to consider the economic costs and benefits involved. This process is a good deal more complicated than the one which starts with the assumption that a continuation of previous management regimes will deliver the goods.

A few additional comments about the economic and cultural benefits of farming are relevant here. Not only do these influence land-use planning policies, which set an important wider context for conservation management, but both are dependent on coherent systems of management rather than a menu of individual actions. The primary purpose of farming is the production of food and drink (and other marketable outputs such as fibre and energy) and these, of course, have national strategic importance. Decades of declining self-sufficiency in the food we consume have left the UK dependent on less reliable and less wholesome imports and exposed to high inflation in world food and energy prices. The economic value that is generated from activities both ‘upstream’ (such as through input suppliers and agricultural colleges) and ‘downstream’ (such as through livestock hauliers, food processors and retailers) of farming are also relevant to integrated land-use planning.

In a similar way, the contribution that farming makes to cultural identity also relies on our understanding of the ‘way of life’ it represents rather than simply a selection of distinct practices. It must be acknowledged that traditional systems, such as crofting in Scotland or commoning in England and Wales, have their own intrinsic value which have been recognised and supported in environmental management regimes such as the upland ESAs. ‘Family farming’ (where farms are run and handed down by generations of owner-occupiers or tenants) might be said to occupy a similar position in contributing to the social fabric of many small villages and hamlets (although there might be disagreement over whether this is a social good deserving support in its own right). A focus on coherent systems of management is therefore necessary to ensure economic sustainability and traditional systems may deliver valued cultural benefits.

Designing purposeful management Farmers have often criticised conservationists for looking backwards to the past and not forward to the future. We need to be aware that the success that land management regimes have previously had in resisting unwanted change and maintaining environmental and social values is no guarantee to the future. And we should be wary of assuming that prescribing a particular set of management inputs will automatically provide the outcomes we want. Furthermore, the social and economic infrastructure that supports land management is changing so that regimes that were considered viable and effective in the past may not be in the future.

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ECOS 35(1) 2014 Radical alternatives to the continuation of traditional farming systems are being considered. Policies of coastal realignment along parts of the North Sea and in areas of the Bristol channel are enabling the sea to reclaim farmland. In other lowlying areas, frequent flooding from rivers and groundwater may make even wet grassland farming unviable, prompting the creation of reedmarsh flood storage areas. Ambitious rewilding projects, such as on the Knepp Castle Estate in the Weald, are pushing the ecological timeline back by thousands of years to create a matrix of wood pasture and wild grazing. Around towns and cities such as Todmorden and Brighton, community supported agriculture initiatives are experimenting with permaculture and other relatively intensive forms of food production. New plant diseases are leading to radical changes in forestry management, and similar issues may yet be faced by farmers.

Despite these new approaches and pressures, it would be foolish to argue that tried and tested forms of agricultural management led by experienced farmers will not have the primary role in delivering the many goods and services that society values from the countryside. However, the way in which this is achieved will need to evolve, requiring greater attention to the specific objectives and outcomes deemed most important in each area. Past practices will be no guarantee of future success, and more innovative and bespoke approaches will need to be tried. A more purposeful approach which better understands which components of agricultural land use and management will give the best environmental outcomes, should help us meet society’s expectations and also forge more productive relationships with farmers.

References and notes 1. Hefting refers to the shepherding of livestock to specific areas within large unenclosed blocks of land, usually commons.

2. Cherry I.G and Rogers A.W. (1996). Rural Change and Planning: England and Wales in the Twentieth Century. Routledge 3. Carruthers, S.P., Winter, D.M., Evans, N.J. (2013). Farming’s Value to Society – Realising the Opportunity.

Report to the Oxford Farming Conference 2013. http://www.ofc.org.uk/files/ofc/papers/ofcreportfulllow.pdf 4. The impact of organic farming on environmental quality has been contested territory. A recent meta-review of published research makes the positive conclusion that, on average, organic farming increased species richness by about 30%. Tuck, S.L. et al (2014). Land-use intensity and the effects of organic farming on biodiversity: a hierarchical meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Ecology, February 2014. doi: 10.1111/1365-2664.12219 5. Natural England (2012). Evolution of Agri-environment Schemes in England. http://publications. naturalengland.org.uk/publication/3567470 6. A summary of monitoring evidence of agri-environment schemes is provided by Natural England (2009), Agri-environment schemes in England 2009. A review of results and effectiveness. http:// publications.naturalengland.org.uk/publication/46002?category=35001. A technical review of the impacts of the ESA scheme is provided by Ecoscope et al (2003). Review of Agri-environment Schemes – Monitoring information and R&D Results. Report to Defra. http://www.naturalengland.org.uk/ Images/monitoringapril03a_tcm6-6026.pdf . Concerns about the benefits of the Entry Level tier of Environmental Stewardship are voiced by the RSPB, reflecting the views of many others in the charitable nature conservation sector, at http://www.rspb.org.uk/ourwork/policy/agriculture/schemes/england/ entrylevelstewardship.aspx 7. http://www.dartmoor-npa.gov.uk/lookingafter/laf-landmanagement/dartmoor-farming-futures

Robert Dean is Principal Landscape Manager, LUC, Bristol. robert.deane@landuse.co.uk

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Agricultural reform in England – Towards a greener farm policy?

The current round of farm policy negotiations will shape the next seven years. Why is positive change in this crucial area so agonisingly slow? This article looks at the context for greening agricultural reform measures and considers what progress we should be looking for.

LISA SCHNEIDAU A significant proportion of England’s remaining wildlife depends on farmers and the way they manage their land. And despite all of the conservation sector’s efforts, we are still losing habitats and species through unsympathetic land management. That is driven by national and European policy.

The giant beast of the CAP The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is so opaque and lost in jargon that many conservationists, let alone farmers, don’t understand it. Whatever market support and lofty ambitions the original CAP was based on when it began in 1962, a lot of taxpayer’s money flows to farmers as subsidy. The CAP represents over 40% of the entire annual budget of the European Union.

Effectively CAP payments to farmers, through individual member states, are of two kinds. The first, ‘Pillar 1’ or the Single Farm Payment, makes up the bulk of the subsidy to farmers – well over 80% of the total. In 2005 Pillar 1 subsidy was ‘decoupled’ from production expectations and linked instead to a series of regulatory conditions (‘cross-compliance’, including ‘good agricultural and environmental condition’, food safety and welfare standards).

‘Pillar 2’ was introduced in 2000 as the CAP’s Rural Development Policy, intended to support environmental, social and economic benefits delivered by farming. Funding for this combines an allocation from Europe plus an optional contribution from the member state itself through the ability to shift funds from Pillar 1 to Pillar 2. This is called modulation.

The next period of the CAP runs from 2014 to 2020, with significant delays in decision-making and implementation of the new regulations. As ever, once Europe has agreed its central policy, each member state, and devolved country within the UK, has to translate the policy into its own implementation plan.

Putting some figures on all this jargon helps to focus the mind. For 2014-20, England has been allocated £13.84bn for Pillar 1 of the Cap and £1.2bn for Pillar 2, with the 14

ECOS 35(1) 2014 option of moving 15% of funding from Pillar 1 to Pillar 2. Pillar 2 is implemented through the Rural Development Plan for England (RDPE): for the next six years it will pay for all the environmental grants familiar to conservationists, covering the successors to Environmental Stewardship, Woodland Grant Scheme, Catchment Sensitive Farming, LEADER, and other measures such as farm competitiveness. The importance of Pillar 2 for protecting and enhancing England’s wildlife cannot be underestimated.

Direct subsidy - public money for what?

Back to Pillar 1. From an environmental perspective, direct payments to farmers have long been criticised for delivering minimal benefit for a huge amount of public money.

However, the farming sector has evolved to be heavily dependent on these payments, to the point where they make up a significant proportion of the average farm income.

Any attempt to attach stronger environmental conditions to Pillar 1, or to transfer this funding to Pillar 2, is met with strong opposition from the farming unions. This is the case even when an environmental measure may even be cost-saving, in the short or longer term: and under the current political administration, regulation is a dirty word, and environmental benefits have little political purchase. It is difficult to argue common sense, let alone public value for money, in these circumstances.

One example is hedgerows. Under the current Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions (GAEC) regulation 15 of the Single Farm Payment, hedges must not be cut or trimmed between 1 March and 31 July each year.

The proposals for the new GAEC in 2014-20 extend this by a month to the end of August, in response to a change in wording in the European regulation. Yet this could be extended still further at significant benefit to wildlife and no cost to farmers. Up to 2014, farmers could be paid through Entry Level Stewardship to leave hedgerows or parts of hedgerows uncut for longer periods. Although this has made a significant difference to the wildlife quality of hedges in many parts of England, it would be entirely reasonable to query whether this measure is a good use of public money.

Perhaps in response to these criticisms, Europe has specified that from 2015-20, in addition to cross-compliance, 30% of direct payments should be ‘greened’ – that is, they should only be awarded in return for delivery of basic environmental measures: they are crop diversification, the maintenance of permanent grassland and the need to establish Ecological Focus Areas (EFA) on 5 per cent of arable land. There is no doubt that Europe’s measures are incredibly general, designed to be applicable to all member states; but they give each State the option to develop something positive for the environment in return for these huge payments. Disappointingly, and despite intensive lobbying from the environmental sector, our government has turned down the option of a more comprehensive approach to greening through a ‘National Certification Scheme’, and the details of England’s new basic greening measures are yet to be agreed.

So, there may yet be some small potential for direct farming payments to be a little greener than last time, for the next seven year cycle, but the gains are likely to be relatively small.

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Agri-environment payments: nature conservation’s lifeline Whenever you hear someone saying “we should abolish agricultural subsidy…..

Europe does no good….” please challenge them. Do query how much environmental public good is achieved for the money involved; and by all means ask whether environmental schemes could be improved. But without agricultural subsidy, there would be precious little mechanism for any environmental regulation or incentive of British farming at all: we would have no carrot or stick available to us, and England’s wildlife would suffer a catastrophic decline.

As long as we have a subsidy system, incentives are an essential part of the toolkit, not least because habitat restoration work costs landowners money, and de-intensifying management means foregoing the profit that would come from farming that land more intensively. England’s grant incentives are mainly contained within the Rural Development Plan for England, funded by Pillar 2 of the CAP and modulation from Pillar 1. This is the key mechanism available to us for enhancement and creation of habitat, and improvement of environmental quality, on farmed land.

So do the schemes work? Over 70% of England’s farmland is currently in some type of agri-environment scheme, the vast majority of which are in Entry Level Stewardship (ELS) which pays £30 per hectare for a limited set of environmental measures. A much smaller number of landowners have been able to enter Higher Level Stewardship agreements, and the lack of availability of this scheme outside SSSIs and protected areas has been a significant frustration to many people who promote landscapescale conservation. However, where it has been available, HLS has been a lifeline in protecting existing grasslands and wetlands. The England Woodland Grant Scheme (in its many variants) and Catchment Sensitive Farming (where it is available) also fall within the RDPE. It is difficult to assess how effective these schemes have been towards their aims, and even more difficult to establish the amount of habitat and species loss that would have occurred had they and their predecessors, Countryside Stewardship and Environmentally Sensitive Areas, not existed.

From January 2015, a new environmental land management scheme (NELMS) will be introduced, containing elements of all of the current RDPE schemes – farmland, woodland and water quality. Together with other measures in the CAP, this will offer a basic capital grant scheme, a ‘middle tier’ of landscape-scale approach and farmer collaboration in selected areas, and a ‘higher tier’ for biodiversity and Water Framework Directive priority sites. Agreements will be for five years and they are expected to cover around 35-40 per cent of eligible farmland at best, targeted to where the most benefits may be achieved – and meaning that a lot of land currently in ELS may suffer environmental losses, depending on the effectiveness of greening measures.

Farming sector viewpoints and relationships All these complications of decision-making and slow-moving policy machines may go some way to explaining the slow pace of change towards more environmentallyfriendly farming in England. However, there are further factors to take into consideration: the antipathy of the farming sector towards the environment is a major barrier.

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ECOS 35(1) 2014 As a conservationist committed to exploring the full meaning of ‘ecosystem services’, I am surprised at how little discussion there is of food as an ecosystem service. Food is perhaps the ultimate ecosystem service in its own right. In addition, modern agriculture, for all its artificial inputs and industrialisation, still relies on environmental conditions for its success, and farming methods often determine the level of ecosystem services that may be possible. The recent stories of flooding, soil erosion and loss of pollinators have demonstrated how intensive agriculture can have a detrimental impact on the environment, to the point where the ecosystem services delivered or made possible through farming are eroded and the taxpayer is adversely affected. It’s a two-way relationship: the farmer needs the environment, and the environment needs the farmer. And the taxpayer and local communities need them both.

Curiously, you will hear very little about this relationship from farming organisations.

At a talk I attended recently by a local NFU rep, the environment got scant mention, but food security and increasing productivity got a lot of airplay, and ‘sustainable intensification’ was defined (without a hint of irony) with no reference to the environment. The tragedy of the badger cull wasn’t mentioned, and the speaker was proud of lobbying against a European ban on neonicotinoids. The audience left the talk no more informed or empowered about the role that farming can play in delivering a positive environmental outcome for England, or how much of their own money was currently spent in not delivering it.

Flicking through the most recent edition of the NFU magazine, there is virtually no mention of the environment, other than in negative terms. The comment on the Government’s decision to modulate 12% of Pillar 1 funds to Pillar 2, not 15% as the Minister originally intended, infers that the money has been ‘won back’ for NFU members. Even a one-page summary update on the new Rural Development Plan for England gives scant mention of agri-environment schemes and goes straight to grants available for improving farm infrastructure and business. Reading this publication, one could be forgiven for thinking that positive environmental land management – a key role for farmers – is taboo within the industry, to be swept under the carpet and minimised at every opportunity, and considered irrelevant to ‘real business’.

Anyone working in land management knows that not all farmers are like this. In my work I come across many farmers who really care about their land and who are keen to act positively for the environment, within the constraints of their business. I was heartened to attend an event at Westminster last autumn where farmers from across the country put their case to the Minister that they wanted an increase in availability of environmental payments, they wanted to do the right thing for the environment through their work, and they wanted the support to enable them to do this as part of their farm business. They expressed significant frustration that, within the industry, the environment was often pitched as a threat to farming. Their view was that they were not represented by the NFU. Working with these farmers, and with the right incentives available, we can achieve real change at the landscape scale, and from the environmental sector we will do 17

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all we can to help, with free advice, grants, expertise, workshops, and the rest.

However, few big commercial farmers tend to get involved with this kind of work; our asks are less relevant to their way of farming.

So, there are barriers other than policy that we need to overcome. As environmentalists, we need to develop the well established model of 1:1 advice and grants for farmers to the next level, and start to work in different ways with the farming sector. We need to explore more environmentally sustainable farming systems as a whole, start to understand and articulate the ecosystem services they deliver compared to ‘conventional’ intensive farming. Organic agriculture has gone some way down this road; but it may require more exploration and acceptance of a middle way, somewhere between pristine habitat and industrial monoculture, for large areas of land; and it will certainly need advocates from within the sector itself.

With poor environmental leadership from their own farming organisations, and a government which seems lukewarm at best about any positive action on the environment (and who many criticise for being too close to the NFU voice), real environmental progress from the farming ‘establishment’ is inevitably going to be slow. But we need to keep working towards a vision on behalf of the taxpayer: to support a farming industry that consistently and proudly looks after England’s wildlife, environment and landscape for future generations. That is a vision that I would like to buy into.

Lisa Schneidau has worked in the conservation sector since 1994, with farmers, landowners, advisors and policymakers. The views expressed here are her own. lschneidau@devonwildlifetrust.org Beef stock on the south Cornwall coast.

Photo: LUC

Scratching the surface let’s love our soils Acknowledging the importance of soils and threats to their quality are vital in land-use policy for food production, flood protection, water quality, nature conservation and carbon storage. This article promotes a greater understanding of soils in the conservation sector and looks at some key examples of wise soil management.

DAVID HOGAN In ECOS 34 3/4 (pages 38-45), Saunders and Brenman identify “the conservation of soil biology and structure, and the building and securing of organic matter rather than depleting it” as components of ‘good agriculture’, and highlight “the lack of acknowledgment of the soil as a conservation issue” as a blind spot affecting some parts of British conservation.

A strategy developed by Defra1 for the protection of England’s soils, contains the following vision statement: “By 2030, all England’s soils will be managed sustainably and degradation threats tackled successfully. This will improve the quality of England’s soils and safeguard their ability to provide essential services for future generations”.

What are these things called soils?

A teaspoonful of soil contains more organisms than there are people on earth.

At the simplest level, soil forms by weathering processes breaking down mineral material, together with additions of organic matter from dead plants and animals.

The eventual soil type depends also on landform, climate and time – some soils are evidently much older than others – together with the impacts of land use and management. Soil provides a home for living things (and is frequently termed living soil) and supports the growth of both natural vegetation and specific crops, while delivering many other ecosystem services. Most are called mineral soils because they are derived predominantly from the broken-down remains of rock with surface additions in some places of wind-blown dust (loess). Organic matter in the soil derives from the remains of plants and animals; organic soils are mostly developed in deposits of peat, formed under wet conditions. For those who wish to delve deeper into the subject, a comprehensive introduction to soil science is given by White.2

How do soils form?

Soil-forming processes begin to take place as soon as suitable materials become available on the surface of the earth. The rate and degree of development depend on the properties of that substrate and environmental conditions, including temperature, moisture and consequent biological activity, landform and vegetation.

The annual rate of soil formation in Europe is probably in the range 0.03-1.4 tonnes 18

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per hectare. Compare this with losses from erosion, and one immediately sees the serious need for soil protection.

Peat soils form in organic material accumulated where the rate of decomposition is slower than that of accumulation. Where conditions remain permanently waterlogged, decomposition is largely precluded by anoxic conditions limiting the activity of organisms responsible for decay. Peat can accumulate at varying rates: Walker3 gives a range of 21-60 cm per 1,000 years for the British Isles. On the other hand, peat loss or wastage can be much more rapid: measurements at Holme Fen, Cambridgeshire in the period 1850 to 1860 recorded an average annual loss of 18 cm.4

How are soils described and classified?

In the field, soils can be described in-situ in a section or a purpose-dug pit, or from samples taken using a spade, hand auger or mechanized corer. A vertical section through a soil is called the profile, comprising individual layers, broadly referred to as topsoil, subsoil and substrate, and which can be coded by a system of letters and numbers. Manuals are available to guide the description of key properties.5 Important soil characteristics are: Texture: the relative proportions of sand, silt and clay giving the particle-size class, eg sandy loam, silty clay; loam is a general term for soil material of mixed particle sizes.

Colour: Standard soil colour charts are used to describe the matrix and subsidiary colours including mottles, mineral deposits, infilling of pores and channels.

Stoniness: in particular the content, size, shape and rock type of stones Structure: the shape and size of units of aggregation (peds) and the degree to which they have developed. Soil structure forms from the action of weather (wetting and drying, shrinking and swelling) and of soil biota (roots, earthworm activity, microbes).

Organic matter: this plays an important role in nutrient cycling and fertility, and in the development of soil structure.

Two of the most important soil classification schemes, used on a global basis, are those developed by the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations) and in the USA.6,7 The FAO system subdivides 30 Groups successively down to over 200 Sub-units, while the US Soil Taxonomy has 10 Orders and over 10,000 Series. Small countries have proportionately fewer categories; for example in England and Wales, 10 Major Groups subdivide down into 1,080 Soil Series.8 Among many classification systems, and certainly within the UK there are a number of commonly used general terms to describe important types: rankers are thin soils with bedrock at shallow depth; brown earths are well drained loams, brownish or reddish in colour; podzols are acid soils in which materials have been leached 20

Compaction at harvesting can cause standing water even on sandy soils.

Photo: David Hogan

from upper layers and re-deposited deeper down, giving profiles a characteristically striking banded appearance; gleys are frequently wet, or artificially-drained mineral soils, greyish in colour often with ochreous or rusty mottles; organic soils are predominantly peaty.

Finding out more about soils In England and Wales, soil and related environmental information is available through the Land Information System (LandIS), hosted at Cranfield University. 9,10 Of particular interest here is the Soilscapes application, a map depiction of soil landscapes for non-specialists, based on a simplified soils dataset derived from the 1:250,000 National Soil Map. The map units shown explain variations among soil types at specific locations by providing information on soil characteristics such as texture, drainage and fertility, together with associated habitats and land cover.

For more detailed soil information, the application Soils Guide is provided, while educational materials are available from Soil-Net. In Scotland, a new soils website is now available.11 The British Society of Soil Science is for those who are interested in the study and profession of soil science. Its local soils discussion groups organize meetings on a wide range of soil-related topics.12

What soils occur where and why The 1980s saw the completion of a series of national soil maps at 1:250,000 (quarter inch to the mile) scale. At this time, a little less than 25% of the land in England and Wales had been surveyed in more detail at scales suitable for individual 21

ECOS 35(1) 2014 site management, mainly at 1:63,360 (one inch to the mile) or 1:25,000 (two and a half inches to the mile). Soils of most of the arable land of Scotland have now been mapped at 1:63,360 scale. In Northern Ireland, soil mapping did not begin until 1988, but since then complete coverage of the province at 1:50,000 scale has been achieved from which a map at 1:250,000 has been derived to ensure that the whole of the UK now has soil information mapped at that scale. The results of these soil investigations in Northern Ireland have been reported in Cruickshank.13 The Soil Atlas of Europe was produced to raise public awareness of the importance and role of soils for many human activities and for the survival of ecosystems.14 The Atlas provides not only soil maps for the whole of Europe at a scale of 1: 1,000,000, but a comprehensive introduction to soils for non-specialists, attractively illustrated with photographs and charts.

Soils and catchment management In the past, the main issues relating to soils were concerned with their capabilities for agricultural cropping and requirements for maximizing fertility and yields. These included land drainage to extend the period suitable for land work or grazing, optimizing fertility, and maintaining organic matter levels. Soil testing for agricultural purposes has long been available for farmers to optimize crop yields, while advice on farm management and developing appropriate plans addresses issues such as waste management and reduction of pollution risk to water courses and groundwater, for example in Nitrate Vulnerable Areas.

More recently key issues of soil erosion, compaction and consequent runoff generation have been recognized more widely in flood risk management. The silver bullet of dredging in the Somerset Levels has missed a number of important factors including persistently large amounts of rainfall and run-off from the wider catchment. Soils in the headwaters of the River Parrett are known to be unstable and prone to capping, and susceptible to generating runoff and erosion under only modest amounts of rainfall. A timely recent paper summarises studies of soil compaction carried out in 31 catchments (including the Tone and Parrett, mentioned by the Prime Minister) in South West England over the period 2002-2011.15 Results indicated that 38% of sites (55% of cultivated sites) had high or severe levels of structural degradation where enhanced surface runoff occurred across whole fields.

A further 50% of fields showed moderate degradation with patchy enhanced runoff. Enhanced runoff also leads to loss of nutrients from farmland and pollution of watercourses. In South West England, an example of joined-up thinking here is funding support from the Environment Agency to enable Devon Wildlife Trust to provide soil aeration machinery to grassland farmers to alleviate compaction problems in the Northern Devon Nature Improvement Area.

Soil ecosystem services The framework for ecosystem services, derived under the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, indicates the wide range of benefits available for human well-being from natural ecosystems.16 Soils are a key component in the functioning of these systems. Key soil functions include: 22

ECOS 35(1) 2014 • providing food, fuel and fibre • storing carbon and controlling climate change interactions • buffering pollution • regulating water storage and flows, and reducing flood risk • supporting biodiversity • protecting buried cultural heritage from damage and depletion • providing foundations for buildings and infrastructure

Soils and nature conservation When concerns were being expressed in the 1970s at the degree and extent to which habitat and consequent species loss were taking place, the role was identified which soil survey information might play in the creation of wildlife habitats within intensively managed agricultural land.17 The debate has since moved on but the principles remain, in particular is the key role played by soil type in defining the habitats in which specific communities develop. Having good quality soil information is vital to the successful restoration of degraded habitats and the creation, extension and management of nature reserves.

Bradley and others review soil-related issues in habitat restoration and the kinds of soil data required to be collected.18 The time scale can be extremely important as too-rapid changes can bring about undesirable consequences. While some soil properties are reversible, such as re-wetting land previously drained, the question of high topsoil fertility, especially phosphorus, a legacy of previous intensive agricultural management, can be difficult to deal with. Stripping of the topsoil to remove nutrients reduces carbon stocks and can increase the risks of erosion and off-site water quality issues. Once a decision has been made about the target habitat, the current nutrient status of the soil should be determined (see case study). If the available-P content is within twice that appropriate for the target habitat, harvesting biomass should be the first option to reduce fertility. If P-content is higher, then topsoil stripping becomes an option, or deep inversion ploughing by which topsoils are buried up to 1 meter depth. Other soil-related factors in habitat restoration include structural degradation, organic matter levels, water regime, microtopography, microbial communities, soil fauna and seed banks.

Case study: Dunsdon National Nature Reserve, Devon The 57 hectare Dunsdon National Nature Reserve, owned by Devon Wildlife Trust, contains some of the best examples of Culm grassland, or Rhôs pasture. Dunsdon is also a demonstration farm for educational purposes. Culm grassland comprises marshy grassland and heathy vegetation developed on poorly drained impermeable soils over shales and sandstone of the Culm Measures, the Carboniferous rock outcrop of mid and north-west Devon and north Cornwall. Surviving remnants of 23

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Culm grassland are being linked by restoration of adjoining fields of predominantly reseeded pasture.

Dunsdon is part of the Culm Restoration Project, with early stages of habitat restoration which include taking soil factors into account. Identifying the suitability of sites for re-creation of Culm grassland from rye-grass monoculture has included a measurement of residual soil fertility indicated by the content of phosphate in the topsoil. There are many examples, both locally on the Culm, and more widely in the country, where phosphate level is low in agriculturally improved fields, and where reversion to semi-natural vegetation of higher wildlife value has been achieved with appropriate management such as avoiding drainage and fertilizer use, and employing an appropriate grazing regime. Where moderate or high levels of phosphate exist, other techniques of soil management need to be considered.

In March 2009, soils were sampled from candidate fields with low wildlife value to determine phosphate levels at the surface and at 15 and 30 cm depth, followed by plant surveys undertaken in April. No unusual or interesting assemblages of plants were found. Soils here are two distinctly different type in equal proportion19: one is a seasonally wet poorly drained surface-water gley soil of low permeability with a topsoil of heavy loam (clay loam or silty clay loam) over a heavier subsoil (clay, silty clay or clay loam); the other is a better drained brown earth comprising more permeable heavy loam, susceptible to only slight season waterlogging. Phosphate content was found to vary from low to very high. In principle, where moderate phosphate levels were found, the soils were shallow ploughed to around 25 cm depth. Where phosphate levels were high or very high, the soil was deep-ploughed to a depth of 50-70 cm in order to bury the topsoil and bring subsoil material of lower fertility to the surface. Some shallow soil stripping has taken place including in one area to provide material for the construction of a hedge bank. Ground works were started in spring 2009. In July 2009 ploughed and scraped areas were rolled and power-harrowed prior to reseeding with a meadow mixture of 22 species; parts were also hand-sown with ‘green hay’ obtained from adjoining areas of Culm grassland. Details of the site and work of the Culm Restoration project, including ecological survey results are given in Dunsdon annual reports on the Devon Wildlife Trust website. (www.devonwildlifetrust.org).

It is fortunate that the area of Dunsdon is covered by a detailed published soil map.19 But it is not clear whether this was used in the selection of locations for habitat restoration nor design of the work programme. Comments in site reports suggest that some soil compaction had probably been caused during operations, and in fact this was noted by the author on a site visit for another purpose in 2010. This highlights how beneficial it would have been to have undertaken an assessment of soil structural condition during the first winter following ground works in order for soil loosening and aeration to take place the following spring or summer to aid habitat restoration. A linking of the vegetation survey with the soil map could also help to explain details of plant recolonisation, including relations to the kinds of material brought to the surface by deep ploughing.

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Culm grassland at Dunsdon NNR, Devon Photo: Peter Burgess/Devon Wildlife Trust

Protecting future soil quality

In 1996, The Royal Commission’s report on The Sustainable Use of Soil highlighted the need for a soil protection policy.20 Among its key recommendations were implementing such a policy for the UK, giving greater weight to appropriate use of soils in the planning policies, and establishing a national monitoring scheme for soil quality. Work is ongoing to develop indicators of soil quality and a monitoring network.21 In September 2006, the European Commission adopted a Thematic Strategy for Soil Protection, which included proposals for a Soil Framework Directive, agreement about which has not been reached among member states, some of which feel the issues are better addressed at a national level. The proposed Directive targeted seven key threats to European soils: erosion, organic matter decline, compaction, salinisation, landslides, contamination and soil sealing. The FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations) has designated 2015 as International Year of Soils, which will provide the opportunity for a global raising of awareness about soils.

References 1. Defra (2009). Safeguarding our soils: a strategy for England. Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. http://defraweb/environment/land/soil/index.htm 2. White, R.E. (2006). Principles and Practice of Soil Science: the Soil as a Natural Resource (4th ed). Blackwell Publishing. 363 pp.

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ECOS 35(1) 2014 3. Walker, D. (1970). Direction and rate in some British Post-Glacial hydroseres. In: Walker, D. and West, R.G. (eds.)

Studies in the vegetational history of the British Isles. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge pp117-139.

4. Hutchinson, J.N. (1980). The record of peat wastage in the East Anglian fenlands at Holme Post, 18481978 A.D. J. Ecol.68, 229-49.

5. Hodgson, J.M (ed.) (1997). Soil Survey field handbook; Soil Surv. Tech. Monogr. No. 5; Harpenden 6. FAO (1998) World Reference Base for Soil Resources. World Resources Report No. 84.

7. Soil Survey Staff (1999). Soil Taxonomy. A Basic Classification for making and Interpreting Soil Surveys. 2nd edn. Handbook No. 436. United States Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service, Washington DC. 8. Avery, B.W. (1980). Soil Classification for England and Wales ( (Higher categories). Soil Surv. Tec. Monogr. No. 14.

9. Bullock, P and Jones, R.J.A. (1996). England - Wales. Databases to support sustainable soil management. In: Soil databases to support sustainable development. C. Le Bas & M. Jamagne (eds.). European Soil Bureau Research Report No. 2. EUR 16371, p.27-35. Office for the Official Publications of the European Communities.

10. http://www.landis.org.uk 11. http://www.soils-scotland.gov.uk 12. http://www.soilscientist.org 13. Cruickshank, J.G. (ed.) (1997). Soil and environment: Northern Ireland. Institute of Irish Studies. 214 pp 14. European Soil Bureau Network (2005) Soil Atlas of Europe, European Commission, Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, L-2995 Luxembourg, 128 pp 15. Palmer, R.C and Smith, R.P. (2013). Soil structural degradation in SW England and its impact on surfacewater runoff generation. Soil Use and Management, 29, 567-575 16. Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (2005). Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis. Island Press, Washington, DC. 17. Thompson, T.R.E. (1979). Soil Surveys and Wildlife Conservation in Agricultural Landscapes. In: Jarvis, M.G. and Mackney, D. (eds.) Soil Survey Applications. Soil Surv. Tech. Monogr. 13. Harpenden, UK. 18. Bradley, R.I. and others (2006). Guidance on understanding and managing soils for habitat restoration projects. English Nature Research Report No.712. English Nature, Peterborough.

19. Harrod, T.R. (1978). Soils in Devon IV: Sheet SS30 (Holsworthy). Soil Surv. Rec. No. 47.

20. RCEP (1996). Sustainable use of soils. Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Nineteenth Report.

HMSO London, 260pp.

21. Environment Agency (2008). Using Science to Create a Better Place: design and operation of a UK soil monitoring network. Science Report SC0600743. Environment Agency, Bristol. 209 pp.

David Hogan is an environmental consultant based in South West England with a particular interest in soils and their management. dvhogan321@gmail.com

ECOS 35(1) 2014

Drowning out nature on the Levels?

This article offers a personal view from the heart of the response process to Somerset’s 2014 winter floods. What are the lessons from a situation where the political message was emphatically ‘we cannot let this happen again’?

MARK ROBINS Following the major floods of 2012-13 we entered 2014 on the Levels with the wettest Somerset winter for 250 years brewing. Post-Christmas, apocalyptic scenes hit the country’s consciousness, with miles of flood water penetrating homes, communities, businesses, major roads and even rail routes. There was misery for those directly affected, magnified by a sense of failure and abandonment, with rural Somerset left to fend for itself in extreme conditions. Self-help and community leadership stirred, the media descended and then the Westminster political machinery began to turn.

On January 27 the visiting Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Owen Paterson, called for an Action Plan. As the rains continued and despair built, the Prime Minister, concluded: “We cannot let this happen again” (13 February).

The rhetoric was clear, the actuality is in the 20 Year Flood Action Plan and in its longer oxymoronic form ‘A 20 year plan for a sustainable future’.1,2 But for the nature organisations what was the context we found ourselves in?

Planning for resilience The nature NGOs, the RSPB and the Somerset Wildlife Trust (SWT) have a long-standing presence in the Levels, with a range of nature reserves, projects, staff, volunteers and supporters. These bodies all offered constructive ideas, proposing a more sustainable future for this largest of England’s lowland farmed floodplains, with nature as a powerful ally in a package of measures for a brighter future. We saw the floods as a foretaste of things to come on the Levels. We have offered constructive engagement at every point.

In response to the 2013-14 flood events the nature NGOs proposed five key principles: • focus flood defence resources on protecting lives, homes, businesses and utilities; • slow the water flow upstream to reduce peak floods; • use the existing water management infrastructure better by spreading flood water more appropriately when it reaches the floodplain; • build greater resilience in the floodplain land uses; and • maintain critical watercourses to ensure appropriate levels of drainage.

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ECOS 35(1) 2014 Drainage Board Vice-Chair), John Osman (Conservative Leader of the County), Anthony Gibson (ex NFU Director) and Edwin White (past Chairman of the Royal Bath & West of England Agricultural Society). Perhaps this is not obviously a nature friendly bunch? Indeed from his press musings, Liddell-Grainger appears to promote one of the gravest misconceptions of modern times, that efforts to nurture nature are a real drag on economic growth. Surely the outstanding environment of the Levels is a powerful asset, part of the area’s unique selling points, and a resource for enterprise? Even at a micro level, pubs in the Levels are reporting significant boost in their trade from bird watchers and especially the Great crane-watching visitors.

Making the most of the Levels brand means getting unambiguous leadership for gaining value from, rather than squandering, this natural capital. Astonishingly though, Somerset’s new County Plan4 offers nothing on the natural environment – reflecting this hole in parts of the collective psyche?

The biblical flood on the Somerset Levels, Winter 2014

Second, a ‘Leadership Group’ twice met the Floods Minister Dan Rogerson. Entering the first meeting of this cadre, I was faced with a room of older (I’m not young) white men (I’m one) with only a single woman. This didn’t feel like the kind of multi-perspective, non-dogmatic, group of creative navigators needed to devise a plan for more resilience for people and nature. These meetings smelt of incumbents and status quo (am I part of this?) rather than new direction and change. Maybe we are beginning to understand not just the Plan’s contents – an understandable focus on reducing the adverse effects of flooding and who can and should pay - but why these voices are present and consciously or otherwise legitimising a status quo?

Dis-connecting nature with the functional landscape There’s nothing new in these points, they had been made collectively by many local organisations after all the big flood events in the last 15 years. We argued that a plan for the Levels should take the best of this tradition-rich landscape but also innovate to unlock change. With the 6 March publication of the Flood Action Plan it’s hard to conclude other than that these ambitions barely got out of their starting block. What circumstances prevailed and why were wildlife concerns marginalised?

Plans, visions and politics One outcome of the 2012/13 floods was a new Vision for the Somerset Levels and Moors, namely: “We see the Somerset Levels and Moors in 2030 as a thriving, nature-rich wetland landscape, with grassland farming taking place on the majority of the land. The impact of extreme weather events is being reduced by land and water management in both the upper catchments and the flood plain and by greater community resilience”.3 Here is an all party version of a functional and peopled landscape, one richer in nature than now, but much more resilient in the face of extreme weather. Did this Vision get any traction in the new 20 year Plan?

Did the leadership across the Levels stand up for this brighter future? Let’s say what we know about the power and guile of the moment as politics at both the highest and perhaps lowest levels came into play.

First, Owen Patterson met a ‘gang of five’ advisors at least twice in his visits to the Levels: Ian Liddell-Grainger MP (deep blue Tory), Tony Bradford (farmer and 28

The more formal work of Plan making was done by an Executive Group, the statutory partners alongside the local authorities, and led by a Defra Deputy-Director. Civil society had a single voice – me, for the nature NGOs. Hard slog by many, under extreme time pressures, generated a wealth of material. But the real brokers of the style and content of the Plan were more out of sight, senior staff of the County and Districts, working to their political leaders. And then to the Defra civil servant - was he only crafting a Defra exit strategy? One which enabled his Ministerial masters to slip away while Somerset chose to agree or otherwise on a brighter future?

There’s a very human side to this effort too, public servants and a willing third sector (at least as the environmental NGOs) working all hours to find a good response, while the Environment Agency in the thick of the action, got scapegoat treatment.

Natural England was reduced to a minor advisor, and the circumstances unleashed a sometimes vicious, ‘we-know-best’, voice of lazy localism.

Old guard - new Plan Look at the new Plan - but ask what wasn’t included and why? Who and what were missing from the preparations? Is the shared 2030 Vision just an illusion of a nature friendly and resilient C21st Levels? For those with homes and farms ruined, lives turned upside down, even with the tremendous solidarity of the moment, the despair will live on. On the dark side the area needs to cope better with extreme weather events. There could have been a light side – a brighter distinctive future making the most of the area’s special assets including wetland nature.

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ECOS 35(1) 2014 It’s too much to suggest an “unconscious workable perversity based on collusive denial”.5 Most of the people I met this winter, be they farmers fighting for their future, battling locals typified by the social media savvy ‘FLAG’ (Flooding on the Levels Action Group), or public servants working way beyond the call of duty, know the Levels is special. There’s a much more powerful response waiting to emerge, where action for nature is not viewed as an awkward distraction but seen as a genuine ally.

Paraphrasing one visiting Dutch flood-risk expert this winter: “Your problem is not what you might do, but choosing together to do the sensible resilience-enhancing things”. There’s something very deliberate surfaced by the Action Plan, one that feels stuck in the mindset of drainage infrastructure and floodplain politics which marginalises the natural environment. This can’t be a Fukuyama-like End of History; it’s just too perverse and turning a blind eye to a future when it rains.

When it comes to the next Levels Action Plan (and there’s been lots!), for natures sake, for the sake of a better, safer future for this special place, we will need a different kind of leadership – an outlook which embraces wider public interests as well as the tasks of the moment. Planning a better future for the Levels needs idealism blended with pragmatism, solidly founded on recent achievements which have begun to link people and nature.

References 1 Daily Telegraph (1 Feb 2014): Unsung heroes gave Owen Paterson his solution to the Somerset floods crisis.

2. Levels 20 Year Flood Action Plan March 2014, including the executive summary: http://somersetnewsroom.com/flood-action-plan/ 3. The Levels Task Force vision: http://somersetnewsroom.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/task-force-vision.pdf 4. Somerset County Plan http://www.somerset.gov.uk/policies-and-plans/plans/county-plan/ 5. Long S. (2008). The Perverse Organisation and its Deadly Sins. Karnac Books

Mark Robins has worked for many years in and around the Levels. He is a visiting Fellow at Exeter Universities Centre for Rural Policy Research. These are his own opinions. mark.robins@rspb.org.uk

ECOS 35(1) 2014

Wildlife on the level?

Political and personal opportunists use the flooding of the Somerset Levels to advance their agendas – and the rational middle ground disappears amid the mists of a changing climate.

PETER TAYLOR According to the journalist Christopher Booker, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, 9 March 2014, the recent severe flooding of the Somerset Levels was down to a lack of dredging of the River Parrett, itself a consequence of the Environment Agency following EU directives that put wildlife above “peoples’ homes and farmers’ livelihoods” and has nothing to do with ‘climate change’ (aka global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions). According to George Monbiot, writing for The Guardian, dredging will have no effect (informed by talking to EA specialists in the area) and the lack of dredging was a decision taken to protect the wildlife – and climate change (aka global warming) is to blame for the excessive winter rains.

A contested landscape In the blue corner, we have an avowed anti-environmentalist and anti-EU writer who is also a global warming ‘denier’ (to use The Guardian’s terminology). In the red-green corner, we have an avowed environmentalist and defender of the UN and EU’s model-based assessment of climate risk. The referee in this public debate is an anti-environmentalist, slightly anti-EU, warming-skeptical environment minister and within a month of the flooding, he apparently backed the dredgers and added talk of a barrage and sluice gates on the hitherto freely draining River Parrett. Owen Patterson is promising £20m for the contractors and maybe a total of £100m if the barrage is approved.

It is not easy to disentangle fact from convenient fiction, and most people will not bother. They will go with their tribal loyalty or economic interest. I live in Somerset, on high land just above the flooded Parrett catchment. Homes are regularly flooded, and although this has been the worst in living memory, it is not unprecedented. A century ago, the Levels flooded every winter and the wetlands were internationally important for waterfowl. In the post-war years, agricultural interests and drainage boards created new rhines, pumping stations were installed, peat workings were extensive, and crops were grown on the peaty soil. The combination of draining and cropping shrank the peat-rich soil, bringing large areas beneath the winter water levels of the drainage canals – in the northern moors (Meare Heath, Ham Wall, Shapwick Heath), as much as two metres. The Levels rapidly lost their wealth of breeding bird species on the wet pastures and winter wildfowl flocks were diminished.

In the last few decades, the RSPB began purchasing the worked-out peatland, reshaping the pools and creating artificial reed-beds in the Avalon Marshes, adjacent to Shapwick NNR. The resultant mosaic of open water, reed and alder carr relies upon the pumped drainage systems and sluice controls on the Huntspill ‘River’ (a drainage

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ECOS 35(1) 2014

canal). On the southern moors, where drainage is more natural, and wet-meadows the main interest – with RSPB having extensive holdings, the Environment Agency has instigated ‘flood control’ with extensive engineering works to protect property and transport links. These moors have also dried out. The RSPB on its Sedgemoor reserve does its best to keep the ground wet enough for breeding waders – without a great deal of success, since there has been a long-term decline of wetland birds. Adjacent areas also have significant acreage under agri-environment schemes that target water levels and hay-cropping regimes, but maize-growing with its fertiliser use, pesticides, and soil loss has been increasing, and some voices claim that, particularly in the upper catchment, it has increased silt levels. The Environment Agency suggest that dredging a narrow river would not alleviate the damage from such a major flood and would devastate the wildlife of the river.

Politicians tend to make rash promises in knee-jerk reaction to public outrage – and this is a high-profile opportunity for opportunists on both sides. In the green corner, there is a chance to bang the drum for action on climate change, and efforts to enhance the established wildlife. In the blue corner, farmers press for money and engineering solutions which no doubt include local dredging contracts. The sight of long-suffering home-owners repeatedly hit by years of flooding creates a ‘something must be done’ alliance that hardly favours wildlife protection at the expense of homes. It is a stage set for political anti-environmentalists to take a swipe at the perceived metropolitan wildlife huggers as well as subservience to EU directives on habitat protection.

For now, it looks like the more fundamentalist farming camp has won the day and put back many years of conservation work on the Levels. But in my view, conservation arguments have played into the hands of its opponents. The focus has been on bad-farming practices, soil loss, silting, upland grazing, soil compaction and the potential of ‘ecosystem services’ for flood protection – all very rational, but it has not cut it with the public. None of these factors have been quantified for this region and I doubt the data exists. Voices raised for a back to nature, end-ofsubsidies future do not communicate compassion and understanding nor represent the quieter long-term working together that has been the policy of RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts.

The Levels’ legal status It is odd that no one seems to have adequately communicated the special wildlife value of the Levels. It is a Special Protection Area (for birds) – and thus has legal protection under an EU directive. The subject for protection is actually the winter residential and migratory wildfowl – ducks and swans, rather than the meagre summer breeders. These depend upon the Levels flooding every winter. So one thing is clear – the EA were acting correctly by allowing the river to silt up and the Levels to flood. Booker does not mention the SPA nor the legal obligation to protect migratory birds. The EA were simply caught out by the amount of rain – but had themselves to blame for the engineering of the Parrett embankments that protected low-lying farmland and homes that perhaps should not be there – much building has been allowed on the assumption that big floods were a thing of the past.

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Flood impacts on the Somerset Levels in Winter 2014. How can farming stay resilient to extreme events?

The amount of rain was exceptional – but only at a regional level in an otherwise wet and mild winter everywhere in Britain. The watershed was overloaded and already primed for this ‘disaster’ by policies of trying to confine the river. As the EA reportedly said, deepening the narrow river channel will not contain another such flood.

So here we have it: overly engineered rivers, poor floodplain management, bare catchments, soil loss, and the potential to withdraw management, rewild the river flow and create wildlife habitat in marginal agricultural land. It is a classic case for the argument of ecosystem services and integrated landscape-scale management.

But we have polarised politics with both sides guilty of opportunism, and it looks like wildlife will come second to ‘homes’ and ‘livelihoods’. Unless, of course, someone stands up for the law – meaning not some nameless EU bureaucratic directive, but our international obligation to protect migratory species. In this the law is clear – neither farming nor housing in an otherwise marginal agricultural region should compromise those obligations.

If there really were a budget of £100m, I would like to see a study of strategic purchase and rewilding of marginal farmland, re-meandering the river, and protecting only residential areas and roads. It would likely be money better spent than more engineering on the river that ultimately may not solve the problem.

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ECOS 35(1) 2014 And that problem may be climate change, but perhaps not in the way many people assume. The proximal cause of the rains this winter has been a ‘stuck’ Jetstream.

The Met Office press team issued it’s customary ‘may be linked to global warming’ statement by the head of science, Julia Slingo, only to be contradicted by their advisor who works on the Jetstream (Professor Collins, Exeter University), who reportedly said he did not know where she got that idea from – since all of the ‘warming’ models predict an opposite shift of the Jetstream. In fact, there is a burgeoning science literature on the southern shift of the jets being linked to the magnetic status of the Sun. The solar magnetic fields are lower than ever recorded and this has given rise to suggestions of a Maunder Minimum (which would result in several decades of cooling) for the northern hemisphere, as I predicted in 2009 in Chill: a reassessment of global warming theory.

But of perhaps greater importance than who is right in interpreting the climate data, is the fact that the left-liberal-green press will not cover this inconvenient science nor report Professor Collins contradicting his boss (it was reported in the Daily Mail). Nor will they tell their readers that the decade 2003-2013 was cooler than 1993-2003, or that North Atlantic sea surface temperatures are also in decline.

The Jetstream shift southward from 2007 onwards has nothing to do with global warming because there is no warming in the last ten years – at least not on the surface, where it matters. If the defenders of the models are right and ‘missing heat’ has been dragged down to the deep ocean, even though no models predicted it, then it is not going to come back to haunt anyone for several hundred years.

So what caused the winter monsoon?

The solar far-UV flux normally heats the stratosphere but it declines rapidly at solar minima as we have at present. When the flux is high the polar vortex is tightly confined by the jets thus keeping cold Arctic air well to the north, when the flux is low, the jets weaken and the polar vortex spreads out southward. The weather can also get ‘stuck’ for months with one particular loop of the Jetstream dominating a region. The UK got a stuck loop of cloud and rain from the south – hence the mild winter. The eastern and southern USA got the opposite, a down-loop and the polar vortex sitting over central North America, bringing record cold and snowfall. That geography could easily reverse.

In conclusion, I would say to government: expect more episodes of heavy rain, at least until the Jetstream shifts further south, and then expect much drier and colder conditions. To the farmers of the levels I would say: the future is bleak in such marginal conditions, so why not seek a partnership with the wildlife interests and completely shift the focus. And to the RSPB and sundry environmental pundits who have nailed their colours to the carbon mast, I would say you have done wildlife a great dis-service, by playing into the hands of the anti-environment lobby. Better to have stuck to areas of real expertise and years of steady cooperation with the farming community.

Peter Taylor is author of Chill. peter.snowfalcon108@gmail.com

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ECOS 35(1) 2014

The Call of the Wild Perceptions, history, people & ecology in the emerging paradigms of wilding This article introduces some key issues of nature conservation and future landscapes in the context of achieving a more wild state of nature. The lessons are drawn from a programme of Sheffield-based research, seminars, conferences and debates extending over 20 years in Britain and linking across Europe. In terms of British and European ecology and biodiversity these are some of the most resonant contemporary debates.

IAN D ROTHERHAM The work on which this article draws was inspired by the writings of three people in particular, and all have contributed to the ongoing discussions and publications.

These three are Frans Vera, Oliver Rackham, and George Peterken.1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Many others have been involved with perhaps over a hundred leading scholars and practitioners taking part in the related cross-disciplinary events. The outputs from this Sheffield based work address issues of fundamental importance to visions of our future landscapes and their associated ecologies, and the core issues include the eco-cultural nature of landscapes, the roles of grazing herbivores (both domestic and wild) in driving landscape ecology, and the impacts of ‘cultural severance’ through abandonment or displacement of customary land-use practices across Europe. These are discussed in more detail in the publications cited in the literature.8,9,10,11,12, 13, 14, 15, 16 The principal mantra of these debates has been ‘the need to consider the past, in order to understand the present, and to thus, better inform our visions of future landscapes and tomorrow’s ecologies’. I would argue that nature conservation as a movement has hit what long-distance runners describe as ‘the wall’, and there is a need for a wide church of radical thinking.

Wild nature – what baseline?

In a recent issue of ECOS, Mark Fisher17 wrote an extended article on ‘Wild nature reclaiming man-made landscapes’ which was in part a review of my recent edited book, ‘Trees, Forested Landscapes and Grazing Animals: A European Perspective on Woodlands and Grazed Treescapes’.12 Mark’s passionate insights are a breath of fresh air in long-running scientific debates. However, there are issues in some recent discussions on wilder landscapes and wilding, such as a recent seminar in Sheffield on this theme (How can we manage a site’s landscape, ecological and human history and safeguard our archaeological and natural heritage?18), when 35

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ECOS 35(1) 2014

Fisher’s article also slightly muddles the concept of Shadow Woods or Ghost Woods14 when he suggest these are “islands of ancient, worked woodland discovered in the English Midlands”. In some cases, the shadows are indeed the lost remnants of enclosed, named, medieval woods, but in many examples across a wide area of Great Britain, these are lost wood pastures, (treed landscapes rather than ‘woods’) which were never enclosed under the Act of Commons. They therefore represent tantalizing glimpses, albeit much altered, of the pre-enclosure landscape. Indeed, it is these fragments, which resonate with many moors, heaths, commons, bogs and fens, and share a common origin with ancient woodlands.

One of my grumbles with some re-wilding arguments is the flights of fancy and romanticised ideas of ‘free nature’ in the absence of basic understanding of ecological successional processes and landscape changes in highly modified eutrophic environments of the twenty-first century. The work of Philip Grime and colleagues20 tells us clearly how these ecologies will change. This does not mean they are somehow bad, but we need to view them with open eyes. What we get in terms of landscape and ecological outputs is determined by nature and human interactions; even the decision not to manage a site is a positive management decision. Long-lived dense stands of bracken and heathlands blanketed by speciespoor birch growth are options and may be acceptable, but the implications for biodiversity are predictable and involve the loss of many species considered of great value by conservationists. Freeing up nature is also problematic when it involves most highly successful, invasive, exotic species, and often it seems that we only want ‘free’ nature if it is ‘good’ nature. (See for example Rotherham and Lambert21). Areas in England such as the Peak District and the Lake District certainly 36

NEIL BENNETT

opinion and ideas become mixed and mistaken for fact, history and scientific evidence. There is room for all of these but it is important to recognise where the boundaries lie. One significant error in Mark’s otherwise interesting and challenging review article, is the assertion of an “absence of robust evidence in the book (and elsewhere)”, which cannot “be replaced by inference alone”. As evidenced by the references I provide at the end of this article, the arguments have been developed with the insight of 20 years or more of fieldwork across Britain and Europe, and multi-disciplinary contributions from leading researchers, academics and practitioners at major conferences over the same period. This is not a matter of inference but interpretation of robust evidence and in some cases, particularly detailed, site-based studies. Furthermore, the emerging arguments and evidence, now influencing policies of the EU Council of Minsters19 UNESCO and FAO, are being addressed at major international conferences (e.g. 1st European Conference for the Implementation of the UNESCO-SCBD Joint Programme On Biological and Cultural Diversity, Linking Biological and Cultural Diversity in Europe, 8-11 April 2014, Florence, Italy), and the Sheffield conference series is part of this on-going dialogue. A key paradigm is how to fit ideas of wilding into both a sensible sciencebased view of ecological processes, and into a historically valid time-line. From both perspectives ‘re-wilding’ as a term is problematic as most of these landscapes have not been ‘wild’ for hundreds, and in many cases, thousands of years and ignores the roles of, for example, indigenous peoples and of cultural influences.

have a feeling of the ‘wild’ about them, but they are certainly not ‘wilderness’ and furthermore, they have not been so for thousands of years.

Setting the scene for catastrophe From the Amazonian rainforests to the Australian outback, people have depended upon and have influenced Nature over countless millennia. Across Europe and North America for example, our landscapes and their ecologies are not ‘natural’ but are ‘eco-cultural’ and the distinct habitats and wildlife, which we value today, have emerged from long-established interactions between people, Nature and the environment. Abandonment of these ecosystems now will lead to inevitable, and predictable, successional changes determined by macro-disturbances, massive eutrophication, and an absence of traditional, locally based utilisation. The results will be simplification, catastrophic species losses, loss of aesthetics, damaged local and regional economies, and impoverished ecosystem services. Above all, abandonment will not lead to some sort of reversion to a mythical, former, pristine condition of pure Nature, but to a plethora of degraded, species-poor, secondary successional endpoints.

Nature and the eco-cultural landscape In Europe, we are now able to construct a convincing time-line to show how the most diverse, species-rich, and in conservation terms, valuable, sites and habitats 37

ECOS 35(1) 2014 have descended from the ancient ecologies of a primeval landscape. Now highly modified but nevertheless retaining species and ecological diversity of interactions and functions, grasslands, heaths, bogs, fens, woods and forests, were adopted by early peoples, utilised and modified. In an age before petrochemical subsidised agri-industry and forestry, landscapes and ecologies were changed but biomass and nutrients cycles were mostly kept in balance. Once industrialisation took hold with the rise of capitalism, and especially with the importation of energy and chemical nutrients into ecosystems, the pace of change and the irreversible dysfunction of ‘cultural severance’ kicked in. However, it should not be thought that this suggests that early human cultures and subsistence economies were either environmentally benign, or inherently good for people: they were not. Indeed, the reason for technological advancements being welcomed was that they potentially removed ever-present threats of famine, and freed people from endless physical labour. Yet there are ecological consequences of these slowly evolved relationships, which we do well to consider; and there are important lessons to heed.11, 22

The ending of traditional and customary practice Cultural severance8,11 is best considered as the end of traditional, local, and often subsistence management and the results are predictable, long-term ecological successions with associated increases in available nutrients and biomass, and rapid declines in biodiversity. The species we are gaining are largely catholic, competitive, ubiquitous ones, which are rapidly acquiring global distributions. We are losing the stress tolerators and the stress tolerant ruderals. We are also seeing simplification of ecosystems and the loss too of species and forms of species associated with longterm utilisation by people. Therefore, in Europe for instance, we have lost most of our coppice woods and associated with that, the demise of associated ground flora, of birds like nightingales, and of woodland butterflies. Ancient wood pastures are abandoned so we lose 1,000-year-old oaks with their unique saproxylic insects, lichens, fungi and more. Heathlands and grasslands such as meadows and pastures, are essentially ecocultural. When they are severed from people and tradition, they become rank, eutrophic communities of little ecological interest aside from catholic, competitive, opportunists.

All these ideas are widely known, and predicted in the work of Philip Grime20 looking at plant strategies, and by specialists like Nigel Webb considering European heathlands.15, 16 As these areas are abandoned, the landscapes become contested spaces and local, traditional peoples are squeezed out by capital-intensive land-uses, by absentee landowners, and by leisure or recreation. With biomass increase and eutrophication, and especially with intensive recreational use or urbanisation, many areas become vulnerable to rampant wildfires. From California, to Australia, from Greece, Spain, and Italy to France, and from the Dorset heaths to the Peak District moors, such fires are a direct result of cultural severance and abandonment, and are entirely predictable.

Traditional peoples often used regular fires to manage their landscapes, to re-cycle and release precious nutrients, and to provide essential grazing at the right time of year. When European imperialists populated the planet, they generally viewed native, indigenous peoples as ignorant and primitive. In particular, from South African Fynbos to New Zealand, to North America, and to Australia, they suppressed the local fire management of the landscape.21 Today’s catastrophic wildfires are direct consequences and descendants of past cultural severance.

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ECOS 35(1) 2014 Turning my environmental historian’s gaze to Britain, we have the case of the English Lake district, which George Monbiot23 recently described as an ecological desert (caused by over-grazing by herbivores particularly sheep). George Monbiot (pers. comm.18), even suggested that the parts of the Peak District, which I walk every week, are virtually devoid of wildlife and he would see more bird species in his back garden. This is a strange view of the world, which does not accord with the reality of place unless his garden hosts skylarks, meadow pipits, stonechats, wheatears, red grouse, curlews, lapwing, snipe, short-eared owls, kestrels, peregrine, merlins, ravens, snow buntings, cuckoos, whinchats and more; one hell of a garden. I find this view of the world troubling since the southern Lakes are beautiful and ecologically rich almost beyond description. The ancient coppice woods, the meres and mosses, the limestone pavements of Gaitbarrows, the evocative limestone of Whitbarrow Scar, down to Arnside Knott, Leyton Moss and Silverdale, are certainly not an ecological desert. We all know and accept the damage done by intensive over-grazing by sheep, and growing up in the 1970s Peak District I was involved in conservation battles to remediate this. Therefore, we take as read, these impacts, and the dreadful state of many hilltops in mid-Wales for example but this does not mean that all farming or grazing is inherently bad.

History as a great informer The northern, high ground of the English Lakes is bleak, climatically extreme and highly leached, and is composed of low nutrient, acidic bedrocks. Furthermore, areas such as the Skiddaw massif were intensively exploited for peat turf fuel in the 1500s to the 1800s. Peat turf and peat charcoal were stripped from the hillsides and mountains to fuel the smelting of metals such as copper and iron. Given these hugely significant factors that have formed the landscapes we see today, simply abandoning them cannot be expected to cause much ‘improvement’, even if the idea of improvement was valid. In areas, which are over-grazed, reduced herbivore pressure may allow some species to recover but only within the confines of the broader environmental stresses.

However, history provides real-time salutary examples of landscape abandonment and its potential impacts. Take the 1950s to 1970s human-induced epidemic of myxomatosis that wiped out millions of exotic rabbits from the British countryside.

For ancient pastures, meadows, commons and sheep-walks this released a rapid ecological succession to dense herb and then scrub. The catastrophic loss of many wildflowers, butterflies and other insects, fungi, birds, reptiles and more, is well known to older ecologists who recall the speedy declines and extinctions. These ecosystems had been maintained by rabbit grazing after the ending of traditional management and hence cultural severance during the early to mid-1900s. Removal of the rabbits, an exotic mammal, unleashed a dramatic decline in biodiversity across much of the countryside, and then twentieth-century farming improvement did for much of the rest. This is a well-documented cautionary tale.

Wilder and wilding There are major difficulties with approaches to conservation which advocate ‘rewilding’ or ‘abandonment’. The first concern is that they may compound the 39

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ECOS 35(1) 2014

already desperate decline in biodiversity of the last half-century. Re-wilding itself is a misnomer since it implies a reversion to a former ‘natural’ state, which in reality is a myth. Re-planting the Great Forest of Caledon for example is a great idea, and one, which catches the emotional senses; if only it had existed, then the whole idea would be even better. Archaeology and history tell us that most of the landscapes, which lack trees in northern Scotland, have done so for 5,000 years or more. These were settled, populated landscapes and not ‘wild’, ‘natural’ areas. Separating people from Nature and taking people out of the landscape is wrong on many levels of social, ethical, economic and political processes. We need to re-establish functionality from a local to a landscape level. The essential controls and cycling of energy and nutrients that control the balances of competitors, ruderals, and stress tolerators, have to be re-established if the inevitable successional changes and biodiversity declines are to be avoided. These processes were a part of the primeval landscape of Europe and were maintained or even enhanced through long-established traditional practices over several thousand years.

We also need to break free from the misguided ideas that trees are somehow inherently good for the environment and everything else is either less good or even bad (see for example Rotherham and Bradley24). Planted trees are just that, and early phase ecological succession colonisers can bring some associated landscape and conservation benefits, but are often of limited biodiversity and environmental value. Ancient woods, wood pastures, heaths, commons, dunes, meadows, fens, bogs, mires and unimproved pastures provide the complex tapestry of a rich and culturally relevant ecology. Our research indicates how these landscape components have descended and been modified by human activities over millennia from a dynamic European ecology described in part by writers such as Rackham 3, 4, Vera5 and Peterken.1, 2 A particular example, which demonstrates the scale of loss and the importance of the human imprint over millennia, is that of the Lost Fens of Eastern England.25 In this book, I quote from James Wentworth-Day amongst others about the consequences for fenland ecology and conservation of taking the fenman out to the fen; an understanding of the implications of cultural severance which was lightyears ahead of its time. The challenge now is surely how we integrate the richness we desire, into a sustainable framework of functioning landscapes into the future.

Much good science, practical knowledge and skill, and insight into land-use history has been lost in recent years and cannot easily be re-captured. A result is that site management, even of SSSIs and nature reserves, is often disastrous, and here I agree with Mark Fisher17, in that misapplication of livestock grazing is often to blame. However, I do not agree that abandonment to nature is the answer and I worry that the current crop of politicians will welcome such a hands-off approach with open arms! Thinking that we no longer need to fund nature conservation because nature can care for itself is a dangerous road down which to travel.

The environmental conditions, which we inherit today, are not ‘natural’. For example, soils and waters have been altered by eutrophication, dynamic landscapes with fluid ecologies have been replaced by fixed locations, and their habitat areas have been carved up and are left fragmented and isolated. Furthermore, regular 40

Overgrown heath with colonising birch Photo: Ian Rotherham

micro-disturbance effects, which are vital to many species, have been replaced by unpredictable macro-disturbances. Grazing by domestic herbivores or by wild or wilded stock may be beneficial or calamitous for conservation target species, depending on what, how and when. Introducing large herbivores into small, isolated sites cannot be expected to reap ecological benefits. These areas lack the dynamics of larger-scale ecosystems and animal behaviour is not ‘natural’ because the sites lack large carnivores, which influence and direct feeding patterns and movement of the grazers. Abandoning areas to‘re-wilding’ in the absence of either or both large herbivores or carnivores is also not ‘natural’ because what remains is an attenuated ecosystem. Devoid of keystone fauna and potentially lacking any traditional management from local people, ecological successions will kick in with predictable results. Nevertheless, this is no more ‘natural’ than the other options which I have noted. To intervene or not is a management decision for an already highly modified landscape.

Wilding the urban Something lost from the recent discussions on re-wilding is the urban context of much of Britain and Europe, and the increasingly urban status of people and of Nature. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a growing movement to allow urban nature and urban greening in Britain but this has been seamlessly replaced by a 41

ECOS 35(1) 2014 new urban horticulture with nature once more manicured and kept in place. The recolonisation of the city by feral nature is a direct challenge to this corporate control of tidy urban ‘green’. Where now the urban wild and what, I wonder, became of Oliver Gilbert’s exciting and locally distinctive ‘urban commons’?

Wilder by design We want and indeed need ‘wilder’ landscapes, but simple re-wilding by abandonment will consign many species to oblivion. The test will be to recognise why these ecosystems have changed, and to apply long-term solutions to re-constructing a functioning ‘Nature’ that includes people. Given basic sets of ecological parameters, we can easily predict the outcomes and consequences of successional changes with or in the absence of intervention. The successful vision will also require long-term, socio-economic function and socio-political currency; or else it will simply fail. It has been said at meetings to discuss the future of the uplands, that farmers can be done away with and the Pennines for example, would be economically powered by ‘ecotourism’.27, 28 A national newspaper even ran an article, which suggested that herds of reindeer and perhaps Heck cattle might roam the moors and bogs between Sheffield and Manchester, and become an ecotourism spectacle.29 Such statements show zero knowledge of landscape history, ecological carrying capacity, or animal welfare, or of tourism and economics. Yet many ecologists at the meeting in question seemed convinced that a ‘re-wilded’ Pennines, complete with reindeer, might be a great idea. But most of this rural tourism is based on people visiting traditional landscapes and the monetary flows are through resident, local communities.

Tourists come to experience local communities in their landscapes, and to partake of locally distinctive hospitality, cuisine and drinks, not of de-populated, abandoned dereliction. Furthermore, what may be a bleak, forbidding, upland landscape, which is profoundly depressing to one person, may be ecstatically close to heaven for another; our opinions and emotional responses are subjective.

Finally, the idea of abandonment to allow Nature to follow its own course will appeal to the current crop of politicians who see conservation as needless red tape, and environmentalists, (according to George Osborne) apparently as “a sort of Taliban”.

In a Brave New World with a Big Society, we will no longer need nature reserves, wildlife trusts or conservation officers, and we will not need grants or other monies to pay for all of these. I know plenty of politicians who would love this ‘free market ecology’. That alone, is a frightening thought.

References 1. Peterken, G.F. (1981) Woodland Conservation and Management. Chapman and Hall, London.

2. Peterken, G.F. (1996) Natural Woodland – ecology and conservation in northern temperate regions.

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

3. Rackham, O. (1980) Ancient Woodland: its history, vegetation and uses in England. Edward Arnold, London.

4. Rackham, O. (1986) The History of the Countryside. Dent, London.

5. Vera, F. (2000) Grazing Ecology and Forest History, CABI Publishing, Oxon, UK. 6. Rotherham, I.D. (ed.) (2007) The History, Ecology and Archaeology of Medieval Parks and Parklands.

Wildtrack Publishing, Sheffield, ISBN 1-904098-03-7, 116pp.

7. Rotherham, I.D. (2007) The implications of perceptions and cultural knowledge loss for the management of wooded landscapes: a UK case-study. Forest Ecology and Management, 249, 100-115.

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ECOS 35(1) 2014 8. Rotherham, I.D. (2008) The Importance of Cultural Severance in Landscape Ecology Research. In: Editors: Dupont, A. & Jacobs, H. Landscape Ecology Research Trends, ISBN 978-1-60456-672-7, Nova Science Publishers Inc., USA, Chapter 4, pp 71-87.

9. Rotherham, I.D. (2011) A Landscape History Approach to the Assessment of Ancient Woodlands. In: Wallace, E.B. (ed.) Woodlands: Ecology, Management and Conservation. Nova Science Publishers Inc., USA, 161-184.

10. Agnoletti, M. (ed.) (2006) The Conservation of Cultural Landscapes. CAB International, Wallingford, Oxon, UK. 11. 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.

12. Rotherham, I.D. (ed.) (2013) Trees, Forested Landscapes and Grazing Animals: A European Perspective on Woodlands and Grazed Treescapes. EARTHSCAN, London. 412pp 13. Samojlik, T., Rotherham I.D. &J drzejewska, B. (2013) A conceptual model to estimate and quantify historic human impacts on forest environments – a case study in Europe’s last primeval lowland forest.

Environmental History, 18, 576–602.

14. Rotherham, I.D., Handley, C., Agnoletti, M. &Samoljik, T. (eds) (2013) Trees Beyond the Wood – an exploration of concepts of woods, forests and trees. Wildtrack Publishing, Sheffield, 378pp.

15. Webb, N.R. (1998) The traditional management of European heathlands. Journal of Applied Ecology, 35, 987-990.

16. Webb, N.R. (1986) Heathlands. Collins, London.

17. Fisher, M. (2013) Wild nature reclaiming man-made landscapes. ECOS, 34 (2), 50-58.

18. How can we manage a site’s landscape, ecological and human history and safeguard our archaeological and natural heritage? A Workshop organised in Sheffield by Action for Involvement, 27 June 2013.Unpublished.

19. Agnoletti, M., Anderson, S., Johann, E., Kulvik, M., Saratsi, E., Kushlin, A., Mayer, P., Montiel, C., Parrotta, J. & Rotherham, I.D. (2007) Guidelines for the Implementation of Social and Cultural Values in Sustainable Forest Management: A Scientific Contribution to the Implementation of MCPFE - Vienna Resolution 3.

IUFRO Occasional Paper No. 19, ISSN 1024-414X,IUFRO Headquarters, Vienna, Austria.

20. Grime, J.P., Hodgson, J.G. & Hunt, R. (2007) Comparative Plant Ecology.A Functional approach to common British species.Second Edition.Castlepoint Press, Dalbeattie.

21. Rotherham, I.D. & Lambert, R.A. (eds.) (2011) Invasive and Introduced Plants and Animals: Human Perceptions, Attitudes and Approaches to Management. EARTHSCAN, London.

22. Rotherham, I.D. (2014) Eco-History: An Introduction to Biodiversity & Conservation. The White Horse Press, Cambridge.

23. Monbiot, G. (2013)The Lake District is a wildlife desert. Blame Wordsworth. The Guardian, Monday 2nd September.

24. Rotherham, I.D. & Bradley, J. (eds.) (2011) Lowland Heaths: Ecology, History, Restoration and Management.

Wildtrack Publishing, Sheffield.

25. Rotherham, I.D. (2013) The Lost Fens: England’s Greatest Ecological Disaster. The History Press, Stroud.

26. Rotherham, I.D. & Derbyshire, M.J. (2012) Deer in and around the Peak District and its urban fringe.British Wildlife, 23 (4), 256-264.

27. Rotherham, I.D. (2008) Lessons from the past – a case study of how upland land-use has influenced the environmental resource.Aspects of Applied Biology, 85, Shaping a vision for the uplands, 85-91.

28. Rotherham, I.D. (2008) Tourism and recreation as economic drivers in future uplands. Aspects of Applied Biology, 85,Shaping a vision for the uplands,93-98.

29. Vidal J. 2005. Wild herds may stampede across Britain under plan for huge reserves. The Guardian Thursday October 27.

Ian D. Rotherham is Professor of Environmental Geography and Reader in Tourism & Environmental Change in the Department of the Natural & Built Environment, Sheffield Hallam University. He is Chair of the BES Peatlands SIG. i.d.rotherham@shu.ac.uk Wilder By Design, a major international conference in two parts, addressing issues raised in this article, is in Sheffield 15-16 May 2014 and 9-11 September 2015. It is supported by BANC, BES, IUFRO, ATF, NE and others. We are now inviting contributions for the 2015 conference.

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ECOS 35(1) 2014

What future for Bears in Western Europe?

The brown bear has been pushed to the remotest forests and mountains in western Europe and a small number of critically endangered populations teeter on the brink of extinction. But recent experience suggests that recovery may be achievable and that reintroduction can play a part in this.

CHARLES J. WILSON John Craighead, in his Preface to The Grizzly Bears of Yellowstone, 1959-1992, said “how fares the (grizzly) bear, so fares the ecology of the region” – not a comforting thought, perhaps, for those of us interested in conservation in the UK.1 But we are fortunate, at least, that elsewhere in densely populated western Europe you can still have the thrill of seeing these impressive animals amongst some of the wilder forests and mountains.

In fact, something of a renaissance for Europe’s large mammals has given some cause for cautious optimism in recent years.2 But for the bear Ursus arctos, outside its relative strongholds in Scandinavia, the Carpathians and the Dinaric/Pindos mountains, the detailed picture is less assured. In central and western Europe, a handful of fragile populations teeter on the brink, facing varied fortunes – from extinction and stagnation, and attempts at reintroduction to, perhaps, tentative recovery. So what future do they have, and what lessons are there to be learnt for further reintroductions of the species?

Extinction The brown bear in the Alps had been in decline since the late 18th century. By the mid-1800s it was extinct throughout most of the western Alps and by 1950 persisted in low numbers only in the Adamello-Brenta and Monte Cadria-Altissimo mountains in Italy3. By the 1980s there were only 14-16 individuals, producing an average of 1.2-1.4 cubs per year, but after 1990 there was no further evidence of reproduction and the population was functionally extinct.3 Despite intensive monitoring, only three bears were recorded in 1996-97 and in 2000-01 only a single elderly male remained3; an end to thousands of years of indigenous bears in the Alps.

In the Pyrenees, the story is similarly depressing; from a population of perhaps 100s in the first half of the 20th century, by the 1990s only five or six individuals were thought to remain.4 Genetic tracking corroborated this, finding only three adult males, one adult female and one or possibly more yearlings.5 Both here, and in the Italian Alps, the authorities took the decision to augment the populations – effectively reintroduction, given the plight of the indigenous bears.

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Brown bear habitat in the Abruzzo region, Italy.

Photo: Charles Wilson

For the Pyrenean bears, however, the final insult was still to come. The start of 2004 was not auspicious. On New Year’s day 150 shepherds and farmers staged a protest against bear reintroduction, which had started by then, calling for the removal of one bear that had allegedly killed 100 sheep over the previous year.4 At this stage there were probably only two breeding-age females in the population.

But in November of that year ‘Cannelle’, the only remaining indigenous female, was shot and killed by a hunter in the Aspe valley, supposedly in self-defence. The killing, in an area where a female bear and cub were known to be present, caused outrage amongst conservationists.6 Fortunately, her 10-month old cub, which was with her at the time, managed to survive on its own. But, in 2010, the last remaining indigenous male also disappeared, so closing the final curtain on the native Pyrenean population.7

Stagnation The Apennine bear population, centred in the Park National d’Abruzzo, Lazio & Molise, for a long time, was believed to be the largest remaining remnant population in western and central Europe, south of Scandinavia. The animals here have been separated from the Alpine population for at least 400-600 years and are recognised as a distinct subspecies; the Marsican brown bear Ursus arctos marsicanus8, so especially important as an evolutionary unit.

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ECOS 35(1) 2014 The first serious attempt to census this population in the 1970s suggested that it was around 70-100 animals, and similar figures continued to be quoted until the mid- to late 1980s.9 However, only since around the turn of the millennium has the population received a level of scientific interest commensurate with its importance.

Now more reliable estimates, using genetic tracking, put the population at 37-52 animals, suggesting it is “stagnant” at best, despite 1-7 females with cubs having been recorded annually in recent years.7 To a large extent this stagnation is down to human-caused mortality.8,9

Reintroduction With growing public support for conservation, and obligations placed on national authorities by legislation such as the EU Habitats Directive, attempts began, from the late 80s and 90s, to promote the recovery of the species using reintroduction.

In Austria there were moves to ‘augment’ tentative colonisation by bears presumed to be wandering across the border from Slovenia, whilst reintroduction efforts got underway in both the Pyrenees and Alps in response to the plight of the indigenous animals.

In the Pyrenees, this started in 1996 with the release, in the Haut Garonne area, of Melba and Zivos, two sows translocated from Slovenia.4 The following year a male was released, but in September Melba was shot by a hunter – again, allegedly in self-defence. No further releases took place until 2006, by which time, despite the killings of Cannelle and Melba, there were believed to be 16-18 bears present.4 Four sows and a boar were released in 2006, bringing the total to around 20 animals, but one of the females died in a fall later that year, and the following year another female, Franska, was killed in a road accident. On examination, Franska was found to have shotgun pellets in her rump.4 By 2011, the total population, both sides of the French-Spanish border, was estimated at 22-27 animals.7 Emotions ran high over bear reintroduction in the Pyrenees. Numerous demonstrations took place against the reintroduction, mainly involving farmers and shepherds. Key supporters of the bears received death threats and one, a local mayor, was briefly taken hostage.4 Even so, not all farmers were opposed; some joined an ‘Association for Pastoral Coexistence’, whilst the Association for Economic and Tourist Development felt that the bears had been a boon for the local economy.4 In the Italian Alps things appear to have fared better. Here, reintroduction started with the release of a male and female, Masun and Klavdija, in 1999, again using Slovenian bears.10 Seven more were released over 2000-2002 and a small core breeding population successfully established.11 No respectors of national boundaries, some animals wandered across frontiers and found themselves in trouble. In July 2005 one was spotted in Ofenpass National Park, Switzerland12, and the following year a young male was shot dead under licence in Bavaria following reported sheep killing and attacks on pets and beehives.13 In 2008 another young male was killed in Switzerland because he showed no fear of man and was frequenting populated areas in search of food – non-lethal attempts to modify his behaviour had failed.11 46

ECOS 35(1) 2014 Both of these animals were offspring of Jurka, one of the females released in 2001.

Jurka herself showed little fear of man and, because of concern that she was imparting this behaviour to her cubs, she was taken into captivity. Despite these problems cubs have been produced most years since reintroduction began and by 2012 the population was estimated at 43-48 bears.14 In Austria, small numbers of bears have long occurred in Carinthia, near the border with Slovenia. But in 1972 a lone male turned up and settled in the Ötscher area of Lower Austria, right in the heart of the country. By the 1980s the idea of developing a reintroduction project around this individual had taken shape. However, it was not until 1989 that the first bear was released as part of a WWF-Austria project.15 This animal, a female called Mira, was followed by another female and then a young male, in 1992 and ’93. Three cubs were born in 1991 and five in 1993, and because other wandering individuals from Slovenia were recorded in 1994, no further releases took place.15 Prospects looked encouraging, but already problems were being reported. An increase in damage to pets and sheep led the local authorities to sanction the shooting of two ‘problem bears’ in autumn 1994.15 Despite this, with at least 31 cubs born between 1991 and 20067, hopes might have remained high.

However, genetic tracking showed that the population never exceeded 12 animals and most cubs disappeared as yearlings or two-year-olds. By 2011 no further evidence of the bears could be found and the population was declared extinct.7 The most likely reasons – a combination of low population size and illegal killings.

Illegal killing, of course, is difficult to prove, but a sad postscript to the Austrian story lends weight to this conclusion. A subadult male, known as Rožnik, turned up in a city park in Ljubljana in April 2009. Clearly an unsuitable location, he was immobilized, radio-collared and translocated to prime bear habitat in southwest Slovenia.16 Following release he wandered widely, crossing back and forth into Croatia and eventually into Austria on 27 May. The last signal from his radiocollar was received three days later, still in Austria, and on 11 June his skinned and decapitated carcase was found near a roadside, just inside the Slovenian border.16 An Austrian hunter was later charged with his killing and expelled, for life, from the Carinthian Hunters Association. Both hunting organisations and conservationists condemned the killing, but because large carnivores roam over wide areas and, as in Austria, land-holdings or hunting districts can be small16, it only takes a few ‘bad apples’ to have a serious impact.

Recovery?

Bears in Spain’s Cantabrian Mountains suffered decline as elsewhere. From a probable population of more than 125 at the turn of the last century, by the end of the 1980s it was estimated that they totalled no more than about 50-60 individuals in two small, apparently isolated, populations.17 By the mid-1990s, the eastern population of only 12-16 animals appeared to be doomed, with illegal killing the greatest threat.18 The western population was estimated at 50-65, but still threatened by poaching, with illegal shooting accounting for more than half the non-natural deaths recorded.18 However, observations of females with cubs began to hint at recovery from the late 1990s – although there was still only an average 47

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of 1 or 2 females with cubs each year in the eastern population, in the western population this had risen from 5 or 6 in the late 80s/early 90s to as many as 11 in 2004.19 The authors of this study suggested that mortality in the population was reduced, thanks to increased conservation effort and ranger patrols.

The isolation of the two populations, separated by unsuitable habitat, a railway, motorway and other development, is still a significant problem. However, genetic evidence from samples collected from 2004 to 2008 identified three individuals in the eastern area which genetically grouped with the western population and a male that was tracked in both the western and the eastern areas. In addition, two siblings were identified in the eastern population whose DNA indicated that their father had been from the western group20 – welcome evidence of connectivity between the two areas.

On top of this, in 2010 25 females with cubs were observed in the western population and three in the eastern population – using a recognised multiplier of x8 to roughly estimate the total population this suggests as many as 200 in the west and 24 in the east.7 This may seem implausible, given the status of the population only 10 or 15 years earlier, but a recent genetic study also suggests a population of 195-2107 and the Fundación Oso Pardo, a Spanish NGO dedicated to the study and conservation of the bear, now estimate about 180 in the western population and about 30 in the east21 – the highest number for more than a century.

On the brink The promising signs for the Cantabrian bears and encouraging results from the Alpine reintroduction are clearly very welcome. But why did the Austrian project fail and why is progress in the Pyrenees so slow? And why has the Abruzzo population stalled, unlike that in Cantabria?

Populations such as these are on the brink – their position has been likened to being on the edge of a precipice, in a “cloud of uncertainty” – continual conservation effort is needed to keep pushing them back up hill to a more secure future, but comparatively little impact can be enough to send them over the precipice and toppling to extinction.22 Even where interest groups are willing to live with the bears, but want numbers limited to minimise conflict, this simply serves to keep them in the danger zone and continually at risk.

Clearly the Austrian project, with only three bears released, could only ever have succeeded in the most favourable circumstances and with augmentation by naturally dispersing bears. Fifteen years after the start of the project there were still only 8-12 bears in the reintroduction area23, already the killing of two bears had been authorised and, with suspected illegal killings, it was unlikely the population could survive. In the Pyrenees, with eight bears released, fifteen years after the project started the population was estimated at 22-27, despite the shooting of at least two breeding-age females and two animals killed in road accidents. In the Italian Alps, with ten bears released, although five have been lost as a result of management actions, either killed or taken into captivity, and three have been 48

Mother brown bear with cubs in the Abruzzo National Park, Italy Photo: Charles Wilson

killed in road accidents, the population is doing well. Here, unlike the other two areas, there are no reports of poaching or unauthorised killings. If the growth rate seen from 2002-201214 continues the population here, after fifteen years, will have reached a minimum of 57 animals. However, management effort in this area has been considerable; in 2012 alone the team set up to deal with problem incidents handled over 400 calls and undertook 37 emergency response visits, 16 public meetings were held and numerous interviews and articles were provided for the press and broadcast media.14 Despite this, the recent growth in the population has apparently been accompanied by a fall in public acceptance of the bears, so continued management and outreach effort over the next few years will be critical.

In the Abruzzo there can be little doubt that human-caused mortality is a significant threat to the population. From 1970 to 2009 108 bears are known to have died; 82% of these were human-related, 66% of those illegally and 33% accidentally killed.24 Three bears were poisoned in 2007; a female, cub and a male, known as Bernardo – one of the most frequently seen and photographed bears in the Park.25 Another adult female was found dead in 2008 – possibly poisoned, and in 2013 one male was killed on a motorway near L’Aquila in May whilst another was shot dead in the Monte Marrone area in July.26-28 This continued toll is unsustainable for such a small population.

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Hope for the future?

What is remarkable, however, about the recovery of the Spanish bears, the early success in the Italian Alps, and even the modest growth of the population in the Pyrenees, is just how resilient these populations can be. It seems that, given half a chance, they can recover to viable numbers, at least for the medium term. Certainly, for a reintroduction to be successful, not surprisingly, a reasonable number of animals should be released – and the ten released in the Alps probably points to a likely minimum – but the constraints on the populations are much more likely to be anthropogenic than biological. Stakeholder groups need to be engaged – there needs to be a winning of ‘hearts and minds’ so that the bad apples feel too much peer pressure to pursue their own selfish interests. But the relevant authorities and NGOs also need to be willing to put the necessary resources into liaison with the public and other stakeholders, and to put in place mechanisms to deal with problems when they arise – whether it is to provide information, advice or technical support, or to take management action, or pursue enforcement if necessary.

The growth in the Cantabrian population and success of the Alpine reintroduction give me hope that there is a longer term future for western Europe’s bears – perhaps the tables can also be turned in the Apennines and I can begin to feel more optimistic about the Abruzzo bears as well.

References 1. Craighead, J. J., Sumner, J. S. & Mitchell, J. A. (1995) The Grizzly Bears of Yellowstone: Their Ecology in the Yellowstone Ecosystem, 1959-1992. Island Press, Washington, D. C. 2. Deinet, S., Ieronymidou, C., McRae, L., Burfield, I.J., Foppen, R.P., Collen, B. & Böhm, M. (2013) Wildlife comeback in Europe: The recovery of selected mammal and bird species. Final report to Rewilding Europe

by ZSL, BirdLife International and the European Bird Census Council. London, UK: ZSL. http://www. rewildingeurope.com/programme/publications/wildlife-comeback-report/ 3. Mustoni, A., Carlini, E., Chiarenzi, B., Chiozzini, S., Lattuada, E., Dupré, E., Genovesi, P., Pedrotti, L., Martinoli, A., Preatoni, D., Wauters, L. A. & Tosi, G. (2003) Planning the brown bear reintroduction in Adamello Brenta Natural Park. A tool to establish a metapopulation in the Central-eastern Alps. Hystrix, 14, 3-27.

4. Cummins, B. (2009) Bear Country: Predation, Politics and the Changing Face of Pyrenean Pastoralism.

Carolina Academic Press, Durham, North Carolina.

5. Taberlet, P., Camarra, J. J., Griffin, S., Uhres, E., Hanotte, O., Waits, L. P., Dubois-Paganon, C., Burke, T. & Bouvet, J. (1997) Non-invasive genetic tracking of the endangered Pyrenean brown bear population.

Molecular Ecology, 6, 869-876.

6. BBC News (2004) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3975525.stm 7. Kaczensky, P., Chapron, G., von Arx, M., Huber, D., Andrén, H. & Linnel, J. (eds.) (2013) Status, management and distribution of large carnivores – bear, lynx, wolf and wolverine – in Europe. Part 2.

IUCN/SSC Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe, report to the European Commission.

8. Ciucci, P. & Boitani, L. (2008) The Apennine bear: a critical review of its status and conservation problems.

Ursus, 19, 130-145.

9. Wilson, C. J. & Casellucci, C. (2006) The Apennine brown bear and the problem of large mammals in small populations. ECOS, 27, 75-81.

10. Jonozovic, M. & Mustoni, A. (2003) Translocation of Slovenian brown bears into the Adamello Brenta Natural Park, Italy. In Living with Bears: a Large Carnivore in a Shrinking World (eds. B. Kryštufek, B. Flajšman & H. I. Griffiths). pp. 341-365. Ecological Forum of the Liberal Democracy of Slovenia, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

11. Dalpiaz, D., Frapporti, C., Groff, C. & Zanghellini, F. P. (eds.) (2009) 2008 Bear Report. Forestry and Wildlife Department of the Autonomous Province of Trento. www.orso-provincia.tn.it 12. BBC News (2005) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4720185.stm 13. Times Online (2006) http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/europe/article2600814.ece

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ECOS 35(1) 2014 14. Groff, C., Bragalanti, N., Rizzoli, R. & Zanghellini, P. (eds.) (2013) 2012 Bear Report. Forestry and Wildlife Department of the Autonomous Province of Trento. www.orso-provincia.tn.it 15. Rauer, G. (1999) Status and management of the brown bear in Austria. In Bears: Status Survey and Conservation Action Plan (eds. C. Servheen, S. Herrero & B. Peyton). pp 56-58. IUCN/SSC Bear and Polar Bear Specialist Groups, IUCN, Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge, UK. 16. Kaczensky, P., Jerina, K., Jonozovic, M., Krofel, M., Skrbinšek, T., Rauer, G., Kos, I. & Gutleb, B. (2011) Illegal killings may hamper brown bear recovery in the Eastern Alps. Ursus, 22, 37-46.

17. Wiegand, T., Naves, J., Stephan, T. & Fernandez, A. (1998) Assessing the risk of extinction for the brown bear in the Cordillera Cantabrica, Spain. Ecological Applications, 68, 539-570.

18. Clevenger, A. P., Purroy, F. J., Cienfuegos, J. N. & Queseda, C. N. (1999) Status and management of the brown bear in eastern and western Cantabria, Spain. In Bears: Status Survey and Conservation Action Plan (eds. C. Servheen, S. Herrero & B. Peyton). pp 100-110. IUCN/SSC Bear and Polar Bear Specialist Groups, IUCN, Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge, UK. 19. Palomero, G., Ballesteros, F., Nores, C., Blanco, J-C., Herrero, J. & García-Serrano, A. (2007) Trends in number and distribution of brown bear females with cubs-of-the-year in the Cantabrian Mountains, Spain.

Ursus, 18, 145-157.

20. Pérez, T., Naves, J., Vázquez, J. F., Seijas, J., Corao, A., Albornoz, J. & Domínguez, A. (2010) Evidence for improved connectivity between Cantabrian brown bear subpopulations. Ursus, 21, 104-108.

21. Fundación Oso Pardo (2013) http://www.fundacionosopardo.org/index.php/el-oso-pardo/cuantos-osos-hayy-donde-viven/ 22. Schwartz, C. C. (2001) The paradigm of grizzly bear restoration in North America. In Large Mammal Restoration: Ecological and Social Challenges in the 21st Century (eds. D. S. Maehr, R. F. Noss & J. L. Larkin). pp. 225-229. Island Press, Washington, Covelo, London.

23. Rauer, G., Gutleb, B. & Wagner, W. (2004) 15 Years of Bears in Austria. Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe: Feature Article Series, 5, November 2004.

24. Boitani, L. (accessed 24/02/14) The challenge of saving Ursus arctos marsicanus the Abruzzo brown bear. http://cor.europa.eu/en/activities/commissions/enve/work-in-progress/Documents/10%20Boitani.pdf 25. Wildlife Extra (2007) http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/italy-bears912.html#cr 26. Italy Magazine (2008) http://www.italymagazine.com/italy/abruzzo/marsican-bear-found-dead-abruzzo 27. The Telegraph (2013) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/10082747/Italian-bearsmay-get-underpasses-and-private-bridges.html 28. The Italian Insider (2013) http://www.italianinsider.it/?q=node/1586

Charlie Wilson is a Senior Specialist in Natural England dealing with wildlife legislation and management issues – mainly concerning mammals. In his spare time he pursues an interest in the conservation of Europe’s large carnivores and the brown bear in particular. Email: wildlifeadv@btinternet.com

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The Somerset badger cull – the theory and the practice This article describes events at close quarters, as the author followed some of the night time shooting of badgers during the 2013 pilot cull in Somerset. Watching the cull activity for real allowed a comparison between official guidelines and actual practice on the ground.

AMANDA BARRETT Why we were there The first shots rang out in Somerset on the evening of 26 August 2013, marking the beginning of the Government’s controversial badger cull. Many people from all walks of life, including myself had gathered in the cull zone to protest, monitor, and observe. Little did we know how much we would learn and discover about the cull operation and be silent witnesses to the abject failure of the pilot culls.

We were all aware that the Government had insisted that the six-week pilot culls were to test the efficacy (ie. killing “at least 70%” of the badger population) by the untried method of free-shooting and to see if it was a humane method of killing badgers as well as being safe for both the public and non-target animals.

However we also knew that the proposed monitoring by government services was woefully inadequate.

My husband and I are wildlife film-makers with years of experience working at night in difficult conditions collecting observations from an apparently random set of events. At times, a friend who is a senior ecological scientist was able to come with us. However, we were shocked at the constraints placed on peaceful monitoring.

Rumours circulated that photography could be seen as harassment and a few people were arrested and put under curfew for attempting to record events. Taking notes or going out with maps could be seen as ‘going equipped’ or ‘conspiracy’ and subject to the same penalties. Our movements and behaviour were constantly monitored by large numbers of police ostensibly deployed to ensure public safety.

What we heard and saw Straight away, we noticed that shooting activity with both moderated and unmoderated weapons implied that the operation was being carried out in a haphazard, non-contiguous way departing significantly from the culling methodology carried out by the Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT). We have subsequently found that monitors from Natural England recorded that some cull operatives had so many sites allocated to them that they were unable to reach them regularly. Such a substantial departure in methodology may well mean that none of the expected benefits achieved by the RBCT can be expected. Perhaps this betrays such a profound 52

lack of understanding of the scientific principles underlying the RBCT that it demonstrates the farming industry and cull companies aren’t the right people in which to entrust such a sensitive operation as badger culling in any form.

More observations from the cull zone add to this belief. Prior to the start of the culls, we had familiarised ourselves with the Team Badger, an alliance of groups promoting an alternative to Best Practice Guidance produced badger culling, has been active in supporting local and national

by Defra. Amongst other things, campaigns in 2013-2014. it states that the use of a white light spotlight or infra-red rifle scope required the presence of a second person to “scan the wider area for unexpected non-targets, e.g. livestock and members of the public”. So why did we increasingly see that cull operatives became deployed as lone shooters only equipped with infra-red rifle scopes? Did this constitute a breach of protocol that could have had serious consequences on safety?

The shooting team also had to undertake risk assessments prior to any culling operation in order to ensure that safe sites were selected and “to avoid shooting if there is any risk of accidental injury to humans e.g. near rights of way, near boundaries with third parties, on the edge of villages and near to rural dwellings…”. So why did we frequently hear shots close to footpaths and lanes and, at times, have shots whistle over our heads? The Natural England compliance reports mention that at times an unsuspecting dog walker was only two meters from a shooter hiding in the dark. The ammunition used was highvelocity, so was it purely luck that there wasn’t a fatal accident?

After the first 10 days or so, we heard fewer and fewer shots at night. Although moderators were often used, the sound of a moderated shot can travel a fair distance at night when the air is still. Soon, a leak from within the cull companies and widely circulated in the press corroborated our suspicions that the cull operatives were finding it hard to shoot enough badgers to fill the daily quota required to ensure at least 70% of badgers were killed in the zone by free-shooting. On that date, it seemed everyone who possessed a gun in Somerset went out to fire wildly into the night. The evidence was mounting that some of the cull operatives were far from the professional team of marksmen that the Government so often referred to.

The cull fails Despite the limited application of free-shooting and the lack of accessibility to the cull operation, a few of our patrol members believe they heard wounded badgers squealing in pain and fear as the first shot failed to kill them; and two dead badgers were found that had collapsed and died after running from shooters. Despite heavy police pressure that included road-blocks to search cars, the carcasses of two shot 53

ECOS 35(1) 2014 badgers were successfully rescued and examined post-mortem by an independent expert forensic pathologist. One had been shot in the spine and suffered significant stress and pain before dying. Scientific tests revealed that both were free from TB. Subsequently, we have learned that out of nine badgers shot in front of Natural England monitors, three were shot in the wrong area – a wounding rate amounting to 30%. One of these was shot in the shoulder, ran away, was chased by the operator and then shot again 5-10 minutes later. Bearing in mind the very limited monitoring by Natural England, it is reasonable to suggest that these badgers represent the tip of the iceberg.

We can also testify to the socially divisive nature of such a controversial policy that has torn communities apart and set neighbour against neighbour. Police records show that as the tensions rose, aggressive encounters between supporters and opponents of the cull increased.

Why future badger culling is a dumb idea Since the end of the cull, data leaked from the Government’s own Independent Expert Panel’s report indicate that far less than 50% badgers have been killed in both zones by a concerted combination of cage-trapping and free-shooting. In reply, the Government has stated that the low percentage or numbers don’t matter; a startling reversal from their repeated statements prior to the cull that at least 70% of badgers must be killed. These latest claims are highly questionable. Peerreviewed scientific data1 show if cull rates are as low as 30%, then bTB could rise by 20% in both zones.2 We are also now aware of the estimated cost of culling.

Presently it stands at over £4,000 per badger and when the accurate costs come in, it could be more.

These culls never were justified by the science and are politically motivated. The pilots and extensions have failed to meet the Government’s own stated objectives with regard to efficacy and humaneness. They appear to have been unprofessional, uncoordinated and ultimately meaningless, for the cost of badger culling far outweighs the Government’s own optimistic but meagre projected benefit. In reality, scientific opinion predicts that the culls will have made the cattle TB situation locally even worse. With the improvements to cattle testing implemented in Wales and Ireland already showing significant benefits, it is time to stop deploying culls to address bTB. If culling continues, the increasing numbers of opponents, including myself, will be out somewhere in the culling zones once again.

References 1. Effects of culling on badger abundance: implications for tuberculosis control by Woodroffe et al Journal of Zoology 274 (2008) 28–37 2. Final Report of the ISG on Cattle TB, June 2007

Amanda Barrett coordinates the web site Badgergate. www.badgergate.org amandajanebarrett@hotmail.com

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Speaking for my self I may not know what the truth is – but do I have to lie whenever I talk about nature?

MARTIN SPRAY Peter and me I was given an old, heavy, office manual typewriter when I was twelve, and I taught myself to use it. I still press keyboard keys with just one finger. I am very righthanded, so it is my right forefinger that does the work.

My point? Much of what intrigues and puzzles me about our relationship with what we call Nature is the language in which it is discussed. As I understand it, the problem is this: I speak (or write) as I think. My thoughts I think come from my head, which for me is the centre of the universe. Much as I see myself as ‘part of Nature’, I speak and write of my separation from it. The word ‘my’, for instance….

The English language seems to oblige me to speak of that finger as something that belongs to ‘me'. ‘Mine’ implies ownership; which – when I think about it – implies that it is not actually part of ‘me’. It is, though, my own. Curious…. That puts it on a par with my keyboard, my house, my cats, my wife. Not that I have any feeling of owning her. In fact, nor do I have a sense of owning my finger. Perhaps the point is that until not so long ago a man did own his wife. This annoyance of the language puts finger and wife on a par with my – that is, ‘our’ – young woodland, our badgers in the small out-sett there, and (alas!) our grey squirrels that gnaw our trees.

I’m using ‘my’ and ‘our’ conventionally and conveniently – because I haven’t found or invented a better way of saying what I mean. Peter Pointer is mine in a structural sense.1 Jane is my wife in a contractual-legal-consensual sense. The house and plot are ours in a legal (and fiscal) sense; and I suppose the trees growing here are, too; but what about the titmice and nuthatches that hang around the place, or the rabbits that frolic about the woods and fields, and in my garden?

Being English I am English, I speak English, and carry mostly English baggage. If I spoke (say) Aranda (Australia) or carried Haida (North America) baggage, I would express something different, because I would – and could only - conceive of things differently. In such Other scenarios, my speaking might not include reference to me ‘owning’ trees or beasts, or the ground they and I live on, because such an idea of owning would not be in the baggage. I could speak about my home, but not about my land. Of course, one need not go as far as the Red Centre or North-West America to find conceptions and meanings different from our English ones. Next door to my home, the Welsh have such ideas as hiraeth (longing in belonging) and cynefin (familiar, as “you know the place and the place knows you”). But the borrowing of words is no good by itself; something of the conceptualising and thinking needs to be absorbed 55

ECOS 35(1) 2014 as well. Perhaps there are consequences in England and in English, because we do not have words for these feelings for being part of the land. Maybe we cannot so readily express an emotional connection, or relate to a part of landscape as ‘home ground’. Perhaps someone who is bilingual can enlighten me.

My language is constantly reminding me – and you – that I am different, separate, special. Is that not what we are supposed to think, when we are told that we are the stewards of Nature, let alone its masters? And how else can we see ourselves than masters, when we are encouraged to safeguard the services on offer to us?

Services are provided by (even if we don’t use the word; even if we don’t intend that meaning) servants. Indeed, the root-word means ‘slave’: that is not what I want to say!2 In some such other frames, being autonomous entities, plants and animals can be their own selves – and so too might the land, and distinct features of it such as boulders, brooks and bogs. I might be expected to ask permission of the mire to dig peat, of the ground to use its stone, or of a tree to use its wood.3 I might, indeed, feel that I must do so. There would be no question of me owning them. I would merely be allowed to use them. And my use of them – these things that as an English-baggage carrier (more strictly, an English-English speaking-baggage carrier) I am currently encouraged to call ‘resources’, ‘natural capital’, and ‘ecosystem services’ – could be construed as kinds of usufruct.4 In some cultures, in some languages, I can be intimate beyond the imagining of Deep Ecologists or tree-huggers. For instance, I can talk about befriending a tree.

That makes a sort of sense to me, though in my own language and culture this is properly for children and fantasists only.

I imagine (I can only try to imagine a weldanschauung I do not have…) the things I would use to be a sort of bounty from the land (or waters, of course, or air). I would be expected, unless in dire need, to leave the resource, the bounty, sufficiently plentiful for others to have use of it, too – at least, for members of my society.

But I don’t agree!

It occurs to me that something like this is what actual ‘sustainability’ would entail!

I understand all this to an extent – but it is predominantly an intellectual, academic, understanding. I do not live or live-out much of that understanding. I have to keep reminding myself to go against the words I hear or see, to think it. And I struggle to translate what understanding I have from baggage-English to … I’m not sure there is a name for the language yet. I really don’t think there is as yet such a form of English. I hesitate to suggest Poetics… 5 I am left still saying that I am keying this into my computer with ‘my’ fore-finger on ‘my’ right hand. Or should that be “Peter Right-Pointer and I …”?

But there are much greater implications. Our language, and it is not alone, makes it difficult for us not to sound as though we are in agreement with the generally accepted meanings of the words we use. It is for that reason that I want to define 56

ECOS 35(1) 2014 ‘Nature’ before I use it, and feel I have to explain even a common word like ‘forest’.

It is why I prefer not to use ‘sustainability’, which actually has accepted meanings so wide and fuzzy that it means almost anything – hence almost nothing. It is why I cannot bring myself (!) to use Professionalese to show that I am up with the times, and One of Us, and write (let alone talk) about such objectifications as ‘services’ (functions provided by servants), ‘connectivity’ (somehow implicit throughout ecology) , ‘biodiversity’ (richness of life6), and of course ‘sustainability’ (that which can be maintained – sine die). These are not things that I can live.

About some important things, I cannot easily – or cannot at all – say what I mean.

When I speak or write about them, I lie. For example, without intention I constantly give a false representation of my attitude to – my understanding of – nature (or Nature). And I am never really sure what it is others actually mean, when they speak about it to me.

I don’t want to explore the problems the word ‘nature’ (or Nature) gives us, but note that two sentences ago I used it as a shorthand for something along the lines of “life, the universe and everything”, and to claim that – yes – it is rather like the sense of ‘my’ I used when I wrote “my society”, meaning the one to which I belong. I do think of ‘my self’ as merely a part of the Whole Darned Thing, not as something separate, self-ish, and special, however otherwise my actions may look. In particular, however, I’m conditioned and schooled to use a language which, unless I struggle hard with it, makes me say that I am separate, self-ish, and special.

This has huge implications.

It seems to be this problem that a few writers have struggled with, and the Dark Mountain project set out to tackle7, that ecolinguists study, and that prompted David Bohm to advocate what he called the ‘rheomode’. 8 Conservationists / environmentalists / greens / rewilders9 – myself included – are only slowly, and I think very bewilderedly, realising that they are taking words out of their baggage, and as it were waving them around; and other people see them, and some interpret them as they were intended, some interpret them to mean something that was not intended, and some haven’t a clue what you’re trying to say. And then it’s their turn to rummage in their baggage…. It is frustrating to find such fuzziness even in English, the word-richest of languages – that it is sometimes nigh impossible to say what you mean.

Being erased We ‘find’ new concepts, and maybe new words for them (or stretch old words to fit), but the old framework within which they are used may stay unchanged.

We are still getting used to using ‘Gaia’, if only as a convenient shorthand rather than for Earth-as-living-organism, as the early Greeks used it. Usage implying a more intimate relationship is too embarrassing to be taken seriously. So, we find it awkward to talk of Earth-as-mother, as for instance the Navajo conceive things. We find it hard not to assume a human-centred universe, whatever the cosmologists tell us. Meanwhile, a ‘cold neutrality’ of language is being used increasingly widely 57

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ECOS 35(1) 2014 land”? Some English users do express similar thoughts, and we tend to find them embarrassing, or childish, and ignore them. A member of the Celtic tradition of Christianity, for instance, mused that “it never […] occurs to us to wonder how the Earth sees us. […] Could it be possible that a landscape has a deep friendship with one?”. Is this just being poetic? Perhaps: John O’Donohue is a respected poet.11 This is awkward territory; and that is often because we do not realise that we are actually following suit when we do not intend to, or don’t appreciate that we do not have words to say straightforwardly what we mean, or are simply misunderstood.

Sometimes, when we realise a problem, we sidestep to poetic forms of expression – then face misunderstanding, or simply a switch-off. Most of us have more or less forgotten how to receive poetic language. Science, of course, and politics, the law, news-casting, and so on, shun it. Sometimes, we are reluctant to accept that what appears to be said poetically is in fact what is meant.

Meanwhile, more and more people – though still a small band – are looking for, and trying out, forms of language that allow them – hopefully without fuzziness, without sentimentality, and without exasperating half their hearers or readers – to say what they want to tell the world.

NEIL BENNETT

Notes

to describe and explain the world. We seem to know a lumpen fauna and flora, but we know neither their names nor their quirks. Discussing what he calls the ‘erasure’ of animals, ecolinguist Arran Stibbe examines the UK National Ecosystem Assessment, and asks if it is written in such a way that its readers – economists, planners, conservationists… as well as scientists – envisage actual plants and animals living their varied lives around us, or think (only) of the state of the resources we have for our use.10 His conclusion is that we have switched off the other species as living individuals, in order to reduce them en masse to numbers, quantity and money-value. I agree: I remember that I myself used to be a ‘human resource’ of the institution in which I taught…. Indeed, for the last handful of years I was only 0.6 of a standard human resource.

Saying something different Expressed in modern English, other-culture thoughts can seem odd – or amusing.

How do you react, for instance, to someone who has no notion that land can be ‘owned’, such as the Cayuses chief who, while signing away the lands his tribe occupies, asks “I wonder if the ground has anything to say”? What do we make of various peoples who, rather than “The land belongs to us”, say “We belong to the 58

1. Forefinger, index finger or index, pointer or Peter Pointer or pointer finger or pointling, trigger finger, arrow-finger, demonstrator, insignitor, showing finger, lickpot, teacher, or digitus secundus: I acknowledge that it is part of me. Asomatognosia is a condition in which one does not recognise a part of one’s body as a part of oneself. For example, being afraid of a hand you find resting on your chest because you think it might hit you, or wondering what someone else’s leg is doing in bed with you.

2. I would be grateful for help tracing the source of a scribbled note which I think reads “Real wilding is the release of servants and the freeing of slaves”. I have likewise lost the source (? Pope) of “How can one have love for someone who must obey?”.

3. A vegetable example is appropriate. An intriguing recent publication, Plants as persons. A philosophical botany, by Matthew Hill (2011) State University of New York Press, examines “a variety of contrasting cosmologies, philosophies, and metaphysical systems that deal explicitly with plants”, in a study a main aim of which is “to uncover how and where plants are placed within a variety of human worldviews”. I’m glad I stumbled across it.

4. Usufruct is (or was) the right to use someone else’s property so long as its use by its owner – or someone else – is not impaired. Gathering a few cupfuls of blackberries from someone’s field looks like a modern example that fits the idea. Making a temporary den of fallen branches in the woods seems to fit, too.

Chopping down trees to make a den in the woods doesn’t.

5. Is poetry “the place where we save the earth”, as Jonathan Bate (2000) The Song of the Earth, Picador, seems to have felt? This is not an advocacy of mysticism; rather a continuation of the search for “the best words in the best order”, in order to best convey our meaning.

6. Bio-whatever. Science, art & life in the public engagement of complex environmental issues was the nice title of a report by John Pollock of River Path Associates to the Biodiversity Action Plan Steering Group (1995).

7. Uncivilisation. The Dark Mountain manifesto, Paul Kingsnorth & Douglas Hine, 2009, www.dark-mountain. net; reviewed in ECOS 30(3/4) 98-100, 2009.

8. In the statement “It is raining”, where, asks Bohm, is the ‘it’ that is the rainer?... Bohm was advocating shifting focus from objects to processes, and that a remoulding of language is needed to allow us to do this. David Bohm, (1980) Wholeness and the implicate order, Routledge, is one of several writers who point out the preeminence of nouns over verbs in modern English and similar languages.

9. ‘Conservationists’ is itself a confusing term. In ECOS, it most often means nature conservationists, where ‘nature’ is taken to mean wild-living things but its use assumes relatively large things are in mind.

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ECOS 35(1) 2014 Conservationists seldom have campaigns called Save the Protists or solicit funds for protecting slime moulds. When I joined the ranks, the term ‘preservationist’ was being considered for ditching; in 2005, Peter Taylor’s Earthscan book for BANC was titled Beyond conservation; in Conservation – a fading label?

ECOS 34(1) 61-63, 2013, he asks “Is the very word ‘conservation’ a dead parrot? Is it an old paradigm in a new era?”, when such words as ‘rewilding’ are fresh and sexy and the old conservation mentality is considered stale and dull. These may be overlapping labels, but they do not mean the same thing, and suit rather different views of the world.

10. Arran Stibbe (2012) Today we live without them: the erasure of animals and plants in ecological discourse ECOS 33(1) 47-53; and see Animals erased: discourse, ecology and reconnection with the natural world, Wesleyan University Press, 2012.

11. Quoted in Martin Spray (2007) ‘Also he loved a tree’ ECOS 28(1) 27-40, which enlarges a little of some other points made here. See also ‘Doing without nature’ ECOS 27(1) 9-13, 2006.

Book Reviews

area around the landscape and species found there today. It looks as far back as the urwald, north-west Europe’s primeval forest, through the impacts of various human ages, to the careful restoration and management now being carried out.

Brede High Woods is made up of nine larger ancient woods, such as Greenden Wood, once called ‘Grenedene’ from the Old English meaning ‘green valley’.

Each has its own suite of species, like rare seeding wild service trees, and special characteristics, including charcoal hearths and Iron Age ‘bloomeries’, to charm modern explorers.

Martin Spray is at spraypludds@hotmail.com My thanks to Matthew Oates and the VINE email discussion for promoting the adaption of Welsh terms by (the) English.

The Environment Agency prepares emergency pumps to remove flood water from the Somerset Levels, winter 2014.

BREDE HIGH WOODS The history and wildlife of a High Weald woodland Patrick Roper Woodland Trust, 2013, 183 pages Pbk, £9.99, ISBN 978-0-9566409-1-8 This book is a celebration of one man’s devotion to a magical area of the High Weald in Sussex. Patrick Roper has spent over half a century investigating and recording wildlife in the complex matrix of habitats that make up Brede High Woods. His work and dedication made possible its designation as a Site of Nature Conservation Importance.

Thanks to the archaeological studies of Nicola Bannister in 2009, the book is able to wrap the history of the woods and local 60

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It is the sheer range of different habitats that makes Brede so special – acid grassland, heathland, wetlands, ponds, streams, a reservoir, scrub, coppice and scalloped rides also burgeon with life.

Roper builds up a fantastic picture of the array of habitats and wildlife you can encounter at Brede, illustrated by some splendid photographs he has taken over the years. Habitats supporting rare and specialist species are particularly important for nature conservation. Roper has recorded adders, great crested newts, dormice, nightjars and grizzled skippers, and ancient woodland indicators such as green hellebore, orpine and guelder rose.

Brede also supports a population of the more controversial wild boar.

Like many UK ancient woodland sites, sections of Brede High Woods were negatively affected by past forestry policy, which saw the felling of many native broadleaf trees and the dense planting of non-native conifers. The work being carried out to restore these areas is important for supporting the ancient woodland and species still remaining.

Good management is allowing populations of once scarce species, like 61

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common dodder, lousewort and heath dog-violet, to grow and expand. All changes are carefully recorded by Roper to show wildlife gains over time.

The book is easily broken down into chapters that look, among other things, at the wood’s geography and geology, industrial past, habitats, birds and invertebrates. Yet each of these separate themes captures elements of the others, building a fuller picture of Brede through the millennia. Two useful chapters for anyone particularly keen to visit are seasonal highlights and suggested walking routes. As with many UK woods, spring is an optimal time to meander through Brede. Bluebells and wood anemones please the eye, early butterflies revel in the warming sun, and a host of birds fill the air with song as they nest, while lizards and snakes rouse from their winter hibernation.

The more academic historical and ecological facts of Brede are interlaced with Roper’s obvious passion for a place that holds great emotional significance for him (his now wife first took him to visit the woods); all written in an engaging manner. The book very much entices the reader to go to Brede, and I for one have added it to my must-see list.

Kay Haw

THE LITTLE GREEN BOOK OF ECO-FASCISM The plan to frighten your kids, drive up energy costs and hike your taxes!

James Delingpole Biteback Publishing, 2014, 331 pages £14.99 Pbk, ISBN 978184954635 5 If you’ve not encountered him, James Delingpole is a right wing blogger and 62

to stick to what it is good at. In some circles the organisation is now dubbed the Royal Society for the Prevention of Birds. Throughout the book, eco writers, journalists and commentators all cop it, as well as charities and institutions that promote environmental regulation and offend Delingpole’s libertarian views. And there is a twist to the debate, with Delingpole arguing that his vision of the countryside is the greener one, given that it would not be assaulted from the developments required for climate mitigation policies and industrial renewable energy.

at how green causes are perceived by others, and can too readily be labelled as one homogenous group. There are plenty of reasonable and discriminating voices who might even agree with Delingpole’s stance on some topics, albeit from a different worldview. While Delingpole’s book hints at a UKIP agenda which may frighten many progressive green-minded individuals, it should act as a nudge to the more fundamentalist greens – somebody is prepared to fight fire with fire, and there may be many more like him.

Wendy Neville

former Telegraph writer who counters mainstream environmental viewpoints.

He relishes conflict and is happy to pick a fight with fellow journalists of a different ideology. His favourite sport is taking on climate change campaigners and advocates of wind turbines. Guardian readers in particular are unlikely to warm to him.

The book is an A-Z guide to all that Delingpole despises about what he sees as lefty-green activism. There are entries for the University of East Anglia and its saga of hosting many of the climategate emails, which showed academics rigging the peer review process on climate change material and revealing their own infighting when interpreting their climate research. There is a four page assault on the Met Office for its biased stance on climate change, as the author would see it. The RSPB cops it for its controversial stance in taking income from wind energy schemes and having a strident view on climate change, and even some of its own members are encouraging it to back away from promoting wind turbines and

Although amusing at times, and written in an engagingly grumpy tone, much of the book’s content is spiteful and shallow.

The author is getting things off his chest and settling scores with some of his foes.

Right wing challenges to environmental protection are nothing new, but why do environmentalists find themselves under such vicious attack in this book?

Delingpole would claim that the climate change debate should hinge on empirical data, not model outputs which may be running hot. He is bothered by the metropolitan intelligentsia who won’t look beyond alarmist headlines, and who assume Guardian briefings are the final word on the matter. Delingpole dislikes moral bullying and environmentalists’ retreat to the moral high ground in their pronouncements. Indeed as I write this, the Green Party has called for politicians with a different view on climate change evidence to theirs, to be constrained from any Ministerial status. I would suggest that to gag those who disagree with you, and to refuse debate, is a dubious approach and is far from wise on a tactical front.

Shrill and autocratic demands are rarely influential in any situation.

WHY NATIONAL PARKS? Ian Brodie Wildtrack Publishing, 2013, 144 pages Pbk £14.50 ISBN 978-1-904098-52-2

When I dip into Delingpole’s scathing remarks on green fundamentalism, I worry

Few people are better qualified to write on National Parks than Ian Brodie, whose 63

ECOS 35(1) 2014 background is the Lake District, where he served on the National Park Authority, and from his time campaigning for landscape conservation.

Brodie’s concern for National Parks is timely. “The Greenest Government Ever” cut the Parks’ spending power by nearly a third between 2010 and 2014, resulting in job losses and reduced capability. It has been a struggle to defend the Parks against planning relaxations, including a crazy proposal to allow any farmer to develop up to three open market houses on the site of redundant barns without planning permission. It seems that governments don’t see the point of National Parks, or even that they are somehow qualitatively different from the rest of the exploitable countryside. The 15 National Parks together cost the taxpayer only £75m (the equivalent of a can of coke and a mars bar each), but governments sense they could improve re-election chances if this money could be spent elsewhere.

The book asks four questions: First, how valid today are the values that led to the designation of national parks?

Second, why should we strongly protect only part of the countryside?

Third, is there a vision to re-establish designated landscapes to meet the needs of present and future societies without compromising the original values?

Fourth, has the case for these areas been overtaken by the changing demands of modern society?

In the introduction, Brodie states “The history of this [landscape conservation] movement is not the subject of this publication”. In reality a great deal of 64

ECOS 35(1) 2014 space is devoted to historical analysis of how we arrived at the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949, from the twin forces of the landscape aesthetic and the countryside access movements, and the different but largely compatible values and visions they brought in. This is a fascinating read, and a very scholarly approach, with many long quotations from the main actors of the time. I learnt a great deal about the passions and energy of our grandparents.

National Parks were, and hopefully still are, prized for their “treasure of scenery, wildness and natural beauty”, and for their ability to provide quiet recreation and spiritual uplift to their visitors. It’s all complicated though, because wild as they look, all are the product of untold generations of marginally economic agricultural management, and greater access carries the danger of physical and aesthetic damage. The 15 National Parks may arguably represent the best of our countryside, but the much greater expanse of Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty are not far behind, and the distinction seems arbitrary. Perhaps a more modern approach would see a graduated degree of enlightened landscape protection across all of the country. However, National Parks and especially AONBs have never been given the clout and funding they need to do a good job, so this isn’t likely to happen.

A lot has changed in the 60-odd years the Parks have been going. Agricultural economics have changed, hill farmers are extremely hard pressed to survive, and without them the landscapes will evolve, or go down the pan, depending on your viewpoint. The impoverished post-war heroes of the late forties for whom the access was rightly thought

invaluable, now have cars and money to go overseas for their holidays. Unlike most countries’ National Parks, most land still belongs to individuals within the Parks, not the state or the public, and conflicts of interest are inevitable.

As the Parks’ relevance to the average Brit has declined, the economic pressures on parks for jobs, mineral extraction, housing development, wind turbines, road development and big leisure facilities increases, and without strong planning, the intrinsic beauty of the Parks would decline. How much economic growth can a landscape sustain?

I found the book hugely enlightening, but failed to get any sense of a way forward. These are beautiful places, national assets for sure, but not as appreciated as they were. We now better understand the importance of experiencing nature for human health and wellbeing. National Parks show us what we have lost elsewhere, and can point to how the rest of the country should be managed. Having buffered them from the colossal impacts of the last 60 years, it would be criminal to abandon them to the exploiting hands of developers now.

For me the biggest omission in the book is a lack of discussion of the influence of the status of ‘National Park’ on the 443,000 people living in them, and the corresponding attitudes of the Parks’ population to the designation. While tighter planning controls in the Parks can cause individual resentment to applicants, they are often appreciated by the applicant’s neighbours, and local people are fiercely proud of their landscapes. It’s tough for a farmer or business man to have to negotiate extra rules that would not exist over the hill,

outside the Park. The premium for a freehold property in a National Park varies from 27% to 90%, so housing for the poorly-off rural inhabitants is a massive, unsolved problem.

Nevertheless, the Parks’ 70 million annual visitors spend £4.9bn, sustaining many local livelihoods and businesses.

Given the complexity of the book’s content an index would have been a great help. The extensive bibliography is also inexplicably divided into sections of books, edited volumes of chapters, government publications, tracts, conference proceedings and the like, confounding locating a source.

We love National Parks because they appear “natural”, because they are under-developed, because the landscape didn’t fit industrialisation or intensive farming. This means they are financially poor, and the people who live there, who we rely on to maintain the qualities we like, are greatly under rewarded for the services they provide. I don’t think this book gives us the way forward, but by gum it is food for thought.

Steve Head

THE COMING OF AGE OF THE GREEN COMMUNITY My neighbourhood, my planet Erik Bichard Routledge, 2014, 138 pages £80 Hbk ISBN 978-0-415-51761-4 Anyone who is interested in fracking needs to read chapter three. It is a factual briefing as well as an account of opposition, protest and ‘how is it for you?’ in surrounding communities in the USA. I learnt that over 750 different chemicals have been used, so 65

ECOS 35(1) 2014 far, in fracking processes and there are prolonged struggles between local and federal or State legislation aiming to regulate or free the frackers. This is one of five long but readable chapters detailing green community activism. The first one, titled ‘Living with the gold standard’ is about sustaining the ‘sustainable’ suburbs in Freiburg Germany; another describes environmental ‘clean up the neighbourhood and nourish green spaces’ projects spearheading urban renewal. Another chapter describes Cheshire villagers’ energy saving successes while tenaciously aiming to go carbon neutral.

The ideas of TRANSITION town groups and the OCCUPY movement get mentions but there is a whiff of something a bit old fashioned about some of the text, for example in use of the terms environmentalism and green communities. The summary chapter, which is the nub of the book, is titled ‘Has the green community come of age?’ I would say that much of the achievement described is about poverty alleviation, social justice and the social aspects of sustainability as well as anything ‘green’ in that older more environmental sense. What does ‘green’ mean these days? But perhaps I am tripping up over an attempt by the author to take an inclusive and wide ranging view of community activism. He does specifically point out the different starting points, motivations and life stories of people he has interviewed and how many don’t think of themselves as environmentalists (or ‘ists’ of any sort), they are just making their communities and neighbourhoods better, in their view. At the very end the point is made, by quoting Paul Hawken, that environmentalists and social justice activists have to work together as ‘there is only one bus’.

66

ECOS 35(1) 2014 However I will be more definite in saying that the author has an old fashioned approach to research method, especially in researching community activism. These days the academics I know are abuzz about scholar activism, participatory action research, researcher and activist co-design delivery and analysis of research, and other attempts to research with communities and activists, preferably for mutual benefit.

No doubt some of these changes of approach are responses to general calls for academic research to have more impact in the world but more specifically this is about banishing previous methods of extracting information from people and then disappearing. It is another sort of social justice and acknowledgement of the value of many sorts of expertise and wisdom. So it seems almost quaint to imagine months of interviews done and written up like this book, all to produce a few pages of reflection at the end. Do the people in the book even know that this book has been published?

The reflections usefully include references to the work of Elizabeth Ostrom’s economies of cooperation and comments about governance and scale (global, local). But I particularly enjoyed the eight pages about Incredible Edible Todmorden: “its clear when you talk to these committed and focussed people that [the way this project happens benefits from a woman’s perspective”.

It is a delightfully appreciative and warm account which deliberately draws out the Incredible Edible Todmorden qualities of humour and kindness, cheekiness and serendipity, trust and mutuality. And, of course, they produce food as well as cheer up the Police Station.

Alison Parfitt

This is not disinterested observation, nor the somewhat earnest clipboard and one-way mirrors, carefully constructed interview approach of the social scientist doing field work in a lab coat. The cultural studies project has, if anything, striven to disclose the essential class basis (now inherent racial bias also) of media production, evaluation and promotion in this post-colonial, post modern world. The method is an elaborate one, borrowing on social psychology and contemporary literary criticism (particularly semiotics) than any analysis of conservation as science.

For example Dian Fossey is here an exemplar of something more than the conservation of threatened Mountain Gorillas: She is a brand – an industry.

NATURE’S SAVIOURS Celebrity Conservationists in the television age Duncan Huggan Routledge, 2013, 248 pages £26.99 Pbk, ISBN 978-0-415-51914-4 Nature’s Saviours examines how constructs of media operate through the personalities of five prominent 20th century media figures. However, the somewhat arch subtitle ‘Celebrity conservationists in the television age’ is at variance with the tendency of the actual work. This is not an exposé to join the tidal waves of sensational coverage of the famous; Professor Huggan explores the medium as much as the message. The utility of employing mass communication to advance the claims of nature conservation in general and certain issues in particular, is here not as significant as the assumptions that manifest themselves in broadcasting; historical, cultural or political.

The force of Huggan’s arguments are found in the breadth of his research, including what others have written before him. Nature's Saviours raises many interesting points and drills down into the subject; but by the finish one is putting down a book that has marshalled opinions to present an overview, at all times insistent, utilising a theoretical approach that resonates with presumed authority.

Television, like film production, and publishing before them, can be cast as the product of a social class system (here, late capitalism), one which projects the economic interests of the dominant social class in terms of ideology and narrative. This domination may not always be obvious, but it is implicit. So runs the theory.

From the outset it is clear the book’s title is ironic; Duncan Huggan’s is not an adulatory text or anything like. Neither is he intent upon the kind of criticism that dwells on the usual vulgarities 67

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ECOS 35(1) 2014 that shroud ‘celebrity’ in our time. The theory demands more. Nature’s Saviours cast list is, in order of appearance, David Attenborough, Jacques Yves Cousteau, Dian Fossey, David Susuki and Steve Irwin. Even the author must admit these are far from similar people with vastly differing public perceptions of their personas. They are also well spaced over time and exposure: It was an age ago that I last saw Cousteau on television; Attenborough is still there, 60 years on.

Dian Fossey was never a television pundit, and the chapter on her posthumous status does somewhat depend on its projection in a major motion picture Gorillas in the Mist and Miss Sigourney Weaver, the distinguished actress who portrayed Fossey on the big screen. It is a mixed cast by any standard. Given such a group, it might be intended that they are to be regarded as facets of an overall single celebrity. Vulgarly, it might just be they are, or have been, on the telly.

The questions and issues Nature’s Saviours raises may well be marginal to most working in conservation; the reach of Huggan’s research and meditations would stretch anyone; apart from social scientists, Huggan cites such commentators on the ‘natural’ and its ‘saviours’ as Susan Sontag, John Berger and Adam Curtis to rewarding effect; but how many conservationists have been attracted to these cultural critics for what they had to say about environment and natural history?

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Graham Huggan writes well and this examination of the finger prints of ideology (competing or contradictory) that are inevitably left by the process of visualising nature in an age of mass communication is a serious text that deserves recognition.

The scale of the Dutch pumps used for emergency flood water removal in 2014 on the Somerset Levels.

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Editorial 1. Hedging our bets. Gavin Saunders

Feature Articles Spring 2014 issue 35(1) www.banc.org.uk

2. Why don’t environmental payments work?

John Bowers 7. Does traditional farming still meet nature conservation needs?

Robert Deane 14. Agricultural reform in England – towards a greener farm policy?

Lisa Schneidau 19. Scratching the surface – let’s love our soils. David Hogan 27. Drowning out nature on the Levels? Mark Robins 31. Wildlife on the level? Peter Taylor 35. The Call of the Wild. Ian D. Rotherham 44. What future for bears in Western Europe? Charles J. Wilson 52. The Somerset badger cull – the theory and the practice. Amanda Barrett 55. Speaking for my self. Martin Spray

Book Reviews Brede High Woods The Little Green Book of Eco-Fascism Why National Parks?

The Coming of Age of the Green Community Nature’s Saviours

2014 British Association of Nature Conservationists.

ISSN 0143-9073.

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