12 - Rewilding

If you know what rewilding is all about then this podcast may give you a different look at the subject. For those of you who, are looking for a podcast to listen to and are thinking what the !!! is rewilding let me explain.

We live in the natural world. It may not seem like it if you live in the middle of a city but know matter how far you think you are from nature you are in fact very dependant on it for the air, water, and food we all crave.

Rewilding, landscape restoration, ecological restoration, reawakening nature, and restoring natural diversity are all basically the same thing with a lot of different names to confuse the newbie. A vast subject with many differing opinions about what should be done. We try and shed a bit of light, and offer a quick way to come up to speed on what rewilding is all about.

Some of the organisations mentioned in this episode:

Scottish Rewilding Alliance https://www.rewild.scot/
Ray Mears https://www.raymears.com/
Trees for Life https://treesforlife.org.uk/
Coastal Communities Network https://www.communitiesforseas.scot/

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Transcript

0:11

Welcome. You're listening to Mark and Jacky's. Wildlife and photography podcast, explore and learn about the natural world, and how to take pictures. This episode is all about wildlife in nature. Understanding the natural world is important. It's what makes life on this planet possible. Our podcast gives you insights into just how complicated and fascinating that world is. Episode 12, Rewilding. For those of you that don't know, what rewilding is all about. Let me explain. Rewilding has many different names there is rewilding, landscape restoration, ecological restoration, reawakening nature, restoring natural diversity. But call it what you will. It's all about trying to get the nature back into our world, helping to restore what we've destroyed over the years to a level that is sustainable. Now, for the sake of brevity, in this podcast, I'm going to call it rewilding. It's a term I particularly like. But whenever I say rewilding. Don't take umbrage that I'm using rewilding. Just think landscape restoration, ecological restoration, reawakening nature or restoring natural diversity, whatever you like. But I'm going to use the term rewilding. Now, if you asked 10 people in the street what rewilding should involve, your likely to end up with 10 different answers. Perhaps many of them would be. I don't know what rewilding is. However, if you ask 10 people who are currently involved in rewilding, you probably would end up with 10 very different answers. Some people believe that rewilding should be introducing large carnivores back into our landscapes or maybe large herbivores back into our landscapes. And other people believe rewilding should start at the insect level. There are so many different people, all with one goal in mind, and that is to restore the natural world. I don't think the name is important. What I do think is that rewilding brings back some of our natural world where we live, work and use as recreation. If you want to use different term, that's fine with me as long as we're all heading in a similar direction. I'll state here now than in this podcast, we're going to be talking mainly about the U.K., and really focusing on Scotland. The reason for that is that we know more about the rewilding efforts that are going on in Scotland than we do in any other country that includes England. And why should we point the finger at other countries when our own is in such a terrible condition? Start at home, start small, and try and rebuild nature, from where you live. In Scotland and England and the UK in general. Centuries of farming, building and industry have made the UK one of the most nature depleted countries in Europe and indeed in the rest of the world. Extensive agricultural lands and road networks in combination with other factors, have reduced the wildlife in the UK to a point not seen elsewhere in the rich countries of the world. The UK as a whole has some of the lowest amounts of biodiversity remaining. Before the Industrial Revolution. forests covered much more of the UK. These large areas wilderness were home to animals and plants, which are now either very rare or have gone completely. In those days, bears, wolves, beavers and Red squirrels were all common in the British Isles. Beavers, they've been reintroduced, and Red squirrels hang on in isolated pockets, trying not to get the squirrel pox from the introduced Grey squirrel. Wolves became extinct in Scotland lowlands by the 15th century due to the vast amounts of forests being cleared. In the highlands populations reached a peak during the second half of the 16th century. Wolves were driven to extinction by persecution and hunting chieftains and royalty led some of the hunting parties. One attended by Mary Queen of Scots in 1563, employed 2000 Highlanders and ended in the deaths of five wolves and three hundred and sixty deer. Huge swathes of forest in Perth, Lochaber, and Argyll were systematically destroyed to deprive the wolves and their habitat. In fact the remains of wolf trap have also been found in Moy, near us, near Inverness, in the highlands, dating from between the 16th and 18th centuries. When the industrial revolution in the 19th century, accelerated the amount of change that was going on. We had mass farming, factories, roads, train lines, urban sprawl, has been the death for our wild places. And it can be measured if we look at things like the Biodiversity Intact Index, the BII for short. The UK came last week. The G7 countries, the amount of biodiversity retained is for Canada, which is top of the list is 89 percent. Germany, 67 percent. France, 65 percent. Italy, 65, Japan 65. US sixty three. And the UK lags slightly below 50 percent. Compared to the other G7 countries, the U.K. is at the very bottom in terms of how much diversity still survives. The U.K. is the bottom 10 percent of all countries globally. And the countries that make up the U.K., Scotland comes first at 56 percent Wales, 51 percent, Northern Ireland, 50 percent, and England, 47 percent. The UK signed up a few years ago. Well, 10 years ago, to be precise, to the UN biodiversity targets. The U.K. has failed to reach 17 out of the 20 targets that it set. By its own self assessment, it is not how the UN looked at it, but how the UK looks at its failed to 14 out of the 20. So it sounds a bit better. Although these figures are a bit misleading as 6 of those 20 targets, we've actually gone backwards. We're now worse off than we were 10 years ago. To give you some idea, 41 percent of the species in the UK are declining. One in 10 is threatened with extinction in the next 30 years. We see funding that was going to use to protect our landscapes being slashed. There's no money available. It's no longer possible for some of the agencies that have been set up to protect and nurture or nature to function effectively. They are in name only without the means to help or enforce the protection that our natural environment and nature needs. Global corporations are allowed to pollute our rivers and seas, dumping millions of gallons of raw sewage into our fresh water systems each year because it saves money. They don't need to make expensive infrastructure investment. Why bother when you can dump raw sewage into a river, for instance, or into our seas. Here in Scotland, our sea and shores are being devastated by aquiculture, mainly the farming of salmon. Fish farms now contribute more pollution to Scotland seas than almost any other industry. The faeces from the fish, fish poo to you and me from these farms is estimated to be equivalent to the sewage output of about two and a half million people. All this goes into our seas, close to our shores. It means that these waters are becoming very polluted. Our fishing industry are trawling and dredging in more and more areas in the sea and destroying our seabeds and the species that these delicate habitats support. Now, because the UK is an island and it was the birthplace of the industrial revolution, we've seen massive destruction of the natural world. We don't have as much land mass as other countries do. And we got nowhere to expand to. We can't move things out. We're here. This is what we've got. We've got to manage it. Because the UK is a small island with a high population density. The human pressures on our biodiversity and our wildlife tend to be very concentrated. Human population density, transport and urban development have all played their part in the decline of the natural world. However, research has shown that agriculture is one of the main causes for biodiversity decline in the UK. And it's not always been the case. It all started over 300 years ago, and over that time, very few of our landscapes have actually escaped some form of human influence. And the human influence is on a large scale, and sometimes on a small scale pollinators are in decline, struggling due to the urbanization, industrial intensification of agriculture, the heavy use of pesticides and herbicides, and the loss of wildflower meadows of all hurt our pollinators. But we rely on those pollinators to produce our food. In the UK, we have 38 million motor vehicles that are licensed to use on roads. Hopefully they're not all out on the road at the same time. Now, roads fragment, wildlife habitat, motor vehicles are a major cause of air pollution and also wildlife fatalities and casualties. Of our wildlife badges, hedgehogs, foxes, rabbits, squirrels and deer and the most common wildlife casualties with species such as Otter, Pine Martens, Owls and bats also making it onto the list. But these are in the more remote areas. One awful fact. Well, fact, I find awful is that 90 percent of the people in the U.K. have never seen a live badger. Only a dead one on the roadside. A thought I've just had maybe with the introduction of electric vehicles. Will, that increase the number of wildlife road kills? Will it be a saviour? Electric vehicles are quiet running compared to a petrol or diesel engine vehicle, giving much less advance warning to wildlife crossing on roads. Electric vehicles may be our saviour with automation that can detect hazards and avoid collisions. Or perhaps when road tolls replace current fuel tax, vehicles will be aware of their location and will be able to automatically be slowed down and reduce the maximum speeds allowable. Therefore, meaning that people won't be trying to go too fast in areas where there are lots of wildlife about. Or perhaps wild carnivores are the answer. There's a study carried out in America by Dr. Sophie Gilbert and called"The social economic benefits of large carnivore recolonization through reduced vehicle wildlife collisions." It's very interesting read. You can find the paper online. Have a look at it and see whether you think maybe restoring large carnivores might be the answer. Now, I've been going on about this, but why does diversity matter? You may be asking when it matters, because without it we may not be here. The biogeochemical cycle pathways by that, it's a chemical substances which are turned over or moved through the biotic or moves through the biotic, the biosphere and the abiotic, the lithosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere compartments of the earth are all dependent on wildlife and our wild areas. Everything we do as a human being is dependent on the natural world. We have not found yet a way of living without a natural world. The natural world provide us with the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the food we eat. There is a rule of three, which is rule three, which is survival. The rule of three states that you can survive three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food. Maybe something to think about. We are dependent on a vast network of species to keep us provided with these three essentials. One of the important things is we don't understand this web of life well enough to draw conclusions. We think we do. We think we can draw a conclusion about what the outcomes will be if we break certain parts of the Web with our action. But we don't actually know what we believe today may be disproved tomorrow or in a year's time or 2 years time or 10 years time. So something we believe may be good today may actually be a disaster in the making. Think of asbestos. Think of burning coal, burning oil. There are lots of examples where we didn't actually understand the natural world and the web of life. Where we've actually started to destroy it and perhaps ourselves. We need as some matter of urgency to start thinking about what we're currently doing, making changes to our current practices to try and reverse the damage that we've already done. And I believe no matter what your belief system is, we're simply not clever enough to understand what we're doing and the consequences to us and our descendants. We need to start to make changes to return back to a more naturalistic environment. I don't believe we can build our way out or introduce machines and buildings that will help us, think of climate change. There is only one way to do that, that is to restore the biosphere back to a normal temperature or a temperature that we can survive on. It's easy to think when we look around. This is the way it's always been. Come to Scotland. The vast number of visitors always think that the hills have been like they are, but it's simply not true. If you look at maps of the highlands drawn up over 300 years ago, you can see that there was a hell of a lot more tree cover than there is today. Even with the amount of trees planted in the early 60s and 70s by the Forestry Commission, there was still much more land covered by large woodlands than there are today. In some places that were covered in Woodland's don't have a single tree left, the biodiversity was much greater in those days. The sheer number of animals was staggering. Look at some of the estate records for the control of what they called vermin, eagles, birds of prey, wild cats, otters, badgers and foxes they were being killed in their hundreds each year to enable grouse moors and the hunting estates to flourish. The numbers that were killed are staggering when you look at the estate books, especially when you consider you'd be hard pressed to find some of these species at all on these estates today. We've heard evidence within living memory, people telling of relocation of some troublesome Wild cats. You can't find wild cats on the same land today. And the big question is, is what do you want to restore back to, I suppose? Do we want to keep what we've got? Do we want to go backwards? Lots of different answers to that question. Some people say we should go back to the last ice age, the last ice age in Scotland was the Loch Lomond Stadial, which is about ten to twelve thousand years ago. It shaped the landscape and the animals that live near the ice edges. And when the ice started to retreat, we have what we have today. But you should be remembered that we didn't have the North Sea in those days. We had our area of land called Dogger Land. This meant that animals and plants and insects didn't have to cover the vast expanses of water that now surround our island to colonize the lands emerging from the retreating ice sheet. Wildlife. This time would have been the same from the west coast of the U.K., right across into Central Europe, Dogger land itself, supported much wildlife and human activity. Evidence suggests that it's been inhabited for at least 50000 years by our ancestors. Sea levels during the last ice age were much lower, and therefore there was a vast expanse of low lying marshland and good hunting grounds that made up the Dogger lands. Today, you can see the remains of that from the Dogger bank in North Sea. It was all destroyed when a catastrophic wave was generated by a subsea landslide off the coast of Norway and the area was flooded. And we got the North Sea that we know today. So maybe we could use the ice age of 10000 years ago as a benchmark for what our landscape should look like today. Perhaps a better model is to be found by looking across the North Sea to Southwest Norway. After all, we were one time all part of the same landmass. And when you compare south west Norway with Scotland, there are vast differences. There's much more biodiversity in Norway. There's much more tree habitat. Scotland's uplands are affected by both deer and sheep grazing. Whereas in Norway, they manage the amount of grazing that takes place. One way to measure this is to look at the tree lines in the two countries. The tree line in Scotland is about 650 meters. And what I mean by tree line is that's the line at which all trees or most trees, big trees stop growing. In Norway the fully grown trees grow up to 800 meters, which is a full 150 meters higher. The small downy birch, which are classed as trees, but if you ever see one in Scotland, which is very unlikely, you walk over it and think it was a bush. They actually grow in Scotland, to about 800 meters, or they've been found at 800 meters. In Norway that figure is that they grow to a thousand meters. Why is this important? It shows you how much the grazing has affected it. It's actually pushed the amount of vegetation that the mountains will support lower and lower in the in Scotland and the UK. In Norway rich habitats can be found above 900 meters with a ground story that supports nesting birds. Look at Scotland and our land devoid in large parts of these rich habitats, tree felling, sheep grazing deer forests. Don't allow forests to grow where they should. To give you an idea of the forest state in the UK. I'm going to look at a couple of areas. And if we take the Cairngorms National Park, because it's very close to us. And also it's home to about 25 percent of the UK's threatened species as a proportion of its total area, 69 percent of it is natural woodland. As a whole, Scotland is about 22 percent natural woodland. The other national park in Scotland, Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park, is about 25 percent natural woodland. Compare this, for instance, with the city of Glasgow, which is about 40 percent woodland. We may be getting something wrong here, I think. If we are to prosper and survive, we must do something about our depleted natural world. We must stop polluting at the levels we currently do just because our needs seem greater now. It doesn't mean that we're not destroying systems that will keep our descendants alive in the future. We need to start putting more areas under protection. We need to stop doing small scale wildlife initiatives. It all needs to be joined up. We need to be thinking about the whole not just a small bit, can we restore this bit of land so that a few butterflies can survive? Yeah, they are important. But unless we produce a landscape that's joined up that will support nature and that nature can move through. We are, in fact, just creating zoos for a few species to cling onto these few individuals, become at risk from climate change disease and introduce foreign species. In the long term, we need to return our barren landscapes that only support a small number of species into more productive areas for nature. In doing so, we ensure diversity and resilience in our wild places. But all this will mean change farming because it's intimate ties with the land needs to change, and that will not be easy. Sporting estates in Scotland will need to rethink how they do business. And all these changes are going to bring about redundancy and personal loss. Much the same way as the loss of the coal mines and heavy industries have done for vast swathes of the UK. If we can learn to embrace the changes, we believe it will be for the better, more employment, a richer landscape, better able to cope with future changes, benefits for the communities in towns and cities, in spaces for recreation and alleviating the effects of climate change. And don't forget, it's not just the wild areas that need to change our urban areas need to become more involved. Our gardens and parks need to provide large green areas, in our, cities, roads have edges that can be wildlife havens or corridors that wildlife can move about in. And to do this, we need to engage with the landowners and their custodian of the land. Start a conversation about the change in its benefits and its downside. In our countryside, great changes will happen. We must support those that are affected by these changes. If we've learned anything from our loss of mining and heavy industry in this country, people need lots of help and understanding when seismic shifts take away their identities forever. Lessons must be applied to a different group of people. But the effects will be the same. We must help the people that are greatly affected by this. It is going to be seismic changes that they are going to have to undergo, if we want to bring the natural diversity of the countryside should have back again, so that we can restore nature and help us survive in the future. And if you're not in the countryside, don't believe that this doesn't affect you. Stop making your green spaces tidy. You don't need to cut the grass to within an inch of its life. Or a centimetre of its life. Tidy is not nature's way. Maintain your urban space with wildlife in mind. Stop concreting over your land. Yes, you need to park a car, but you don't need to concrete it over. Find an alternative that allows water to drain away. Where may be flowers and grasses to share the space. It doesn't need to be a vast concrete jungle out there. There can be green there and you can still park your car. I say road verges don't need to be cut every few weeks to a couple of centimetres high, let them grow, let them flower, they only need cutting once a year to take away all the cuttings. Hoover up and take it away. Just think of the amount of money the councils would save by not cutting every single road. verge. These road verges would provide us with wildlife corridors, ways that wildlife can move about. We've got vast road network. Why not have it so that wildlife can move between areas rather than what we've got at the moment, which is isolated pockets of small wildlife areas that people have very lovingly built. They've saved butterflies in certain areas. They've saved newts, frogs, all manner of wildlife. But that's where it's staying. It's got no way of moving about or expanding into a wider area. And because it's in such concentrated pockets, it becomes very, very vulnerable to the latest disease that's been brought in or climate change. We said earlier that roadkill accounts for vast numbers of our wildlife. Well, why not bringing in sky tables? These are grids raised high off the ground where you can put roadkill. This helps our birds of prey. And maybe not the most nice thing to say, but when the maggots move in, smaller birds can feed on them. No, it's not tidy. No, it's not sanitized. But nature is all about life and death. We've become far too removed from reality. So much so that we think we're above it. We're not. You don't have to do much, but you need to do something. It's no use just going to a wild place for day out or for a holiday. You need to influence people to start to make changes. No, you're not, see much of it in your lifetime, perhaps. Nature is slow and careful. It tries out many different alternatives before choosing a winner. And that's the way it continues. That's why it's been around for billions of years, because unlike us, it doesn't need an answer yesterday. It doesn't need to spend billions and billions of pounds building something very quickly. It tries things out. If it doesn't work, it puts it to one side and goes, nice experiment. Shame about that, and goes on and invests in other things that it's tried. But it has thousands and thousands of different avenues that it can do that with. We concentrate every all our efforts into one avenue. And when that avenue is actually bad for us or fails, we've got no alternatives. You're listening to one podcast on rewilding, but out and do some more research. Find out what rewilding means. Find out what the effects are, why we should be doing it. Listen to people read from people who know a hell of a lot more about rewilding than I ever will. All I know is, is that it's something that Jacky and I believe passionately in and think that it's the best thing that we should be doing. And become more informed. It doesn't matter to us if you come to the conclusion that rewilding is not a good idea. The thing is that you have made a decision from the point of knowledge and not just rejected a new thing. We're coming to the end of this podcast. I'd like to leave you with a couple of thoughts. Earth got along fine for billions of years before we came along. No matter what we do to the biosphere, it will still be here and ready for another life form to thrive in the conditions we left. And there are two views of rewilding. One from the Scottish Rewilding Alliance. I'm going to read this."Imagine a Scotland where nature is reawakened. Were a rich tapestry of native woodlands, wetlands, wildflower meadows and grassland is stitched back together. Where land and sea team with life. But people feel connected to the natural world wherever they live. Where nature based enterprises support thriving communities far and wide." We think that sums up why we're trying to make small steps to making Scotland that picture. And finally, almost finally, a quote from Ray Mears, which we think is very apt."I've long said that the measure of a civilization is whether it can live in harmony with the animals that share the landscape with it". We must produce civilizations that live in harmony with our planet and do not set out to destroy our only home. My name is Mark Bloomfield, and thank you very much indeed for listening to this podcast. You've been listening to a wildlife and photography podcast produced by M&J Bloomfield. For more information, details about us and our work, visit our website at mandjbloomfield.com. Thank you for listening and we hope you'll join us again soon. Chun an sin, mar sin leat.