THE last wolf in England was killed in 1290 by one Peter Corbet, exterminator to King Edward I. That made the country safe for sheep, giving it a commanding position in the lucrative wool trade – and setting it on its way to becoming a great trading nation.
So claims The Last Wolf, a new book by Robert Winder, which argues that landscape is as central to national identity as beliefs or values. The story may be as much folklore as fact, but helps explain why proposals to reintroduce wolves or lynx to the UK meet with such stiff opposition. Similar arguments are flaring up across Europe, where big predators are making something of a comeback.
Conservationists say rewilding restores ecological balance; but farmers contend that it puts livestock in jeopardy. Experience to date suggests they will not give up their role as stewards of the land readily – and many of the public may support them in that.
All the more surprising, then, that more land globally has been revegetated than cleared in recent years. This is not unalloyed good news: the drivers of this trend, including urbanisation and intensive farming, raise their own questions (see “Back to the wild: How nature is reclaiming farmland“). And land clearance is still rife in some of Earth’s most vital places.
But there is an opportunity here nonetheless. Conservation groups have seized the chance to protect species and their habitats. A potentially dismal picture of agricultural and economic decline can be turned into a conservation success story – with the promise of wildlife tourism and ecosystem services such as flood defence or carbon storage. So now that we have spotted the trend, how much further could we take it?
“Even when land is useless for farming, it’s not enough to just switch off the tractors and walk away”
Even asking the question will raise hackles. Land use is bound up tightly with some of our most fundamental social concerns. Food security, for example, is rising up the agenda in many countries – it has already been flagged as an issue for post-Brexit Britain. Faced with this potentially existential worry, governments tend to be conservative: hence the huge sums spent by the European Union to keep farmland in good order, even if it is unproductive.
Beyond that are the questions of cultural identity. The UK’s Lake District national park was recently admitted to UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites, alongside the Taj Mahal and the Grand Canyon. Should the preservation of this picturesque landscape, famously commemorated in the poetry of William Wordsworth, be a cause for national pride? Not according to rewilding enthusiast George Monbiot, who described it as an “ecological disaster zone”, ruined by heavily subsidised hill farming. Other countries may face their own clashes of perspective as climate change starts to bite harder, from the Mediterranean’s venerable olive groves to fields of golden grain in the US.
So it won’t be easy to win broad acceptance that some agricultural landscapes might be better off returned to the wild – or to agree what “wild” really means. And even when land is seen as useless for farming, it’s not enough to just switch off the tractors and walk away. Land that’s no longer irrigated is prone to fires and drought; and what initially finds root in worn-out soil may be less than ideal in an ecological sense.
That shouldn’t put us off. One reason farmland is in retreat, particularly in Australia, is our preference for synthetic fabrics – a consumer choice that’s been made without drama or fuss. We have learned to live without wool. That makes space for us to learn to live with the wolves.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Bring wolves into the fold”
More on these topics: