IRONICALLY, I thought that Fairfax and Lucy Luxmoore’s letter of last week presented as many reasons for ‘rewilding’ as against it. 

To suggest that there are ‘no arguments for rewilding’ flies in the face of all our knowledge about global and local ecological decline and their consequences for species loss, soil erosion, water cycles, human health, and so on. 

However, there appears to be some confusion and misapprehension about the term.  ‘Rewilding’, as a concept, does not mean that we have to re-introduce bears onto Dartmoor or wolves onto Tavistock Meadows.  Neither does it mean that we have to remove all agricultural livestock. 

It does recognise, however, that we must urgently learn to adapt rather more to nature than to continue to bend it to our short term demands. This means that in order to achieve a proper balance between our needs we must change our priorities.  This change might well have to be quite profound and rapid but it does not have to be uncomfortable – indeed, it is likely be very attractive, and the opportunity is within our hands if only we were to take it.  

Because of our increasingly technocentric and urbanised world, we often don’t understand what we have lost.  Only the oldest in our society have any recollections of the abundant wildlife and variety of habitats that our countryside once supported even in relatively recent years.

So, we must reawaken ourselves to the possibilities of what it could be like again.  In the words of the ‘Rewilding’ organisation: ‘Imagine our natural habitats growing instead of shrinking. Where space for nature is expanding beyond small pockets of reserves. Imagine species diversifying and thriving, instead of declining. That’s rewilding.’ 

We could, for instance, by controlling grazing, restore the fast disappearing heathlands and upland species-rich meadows similar to those that still remain in parts of Europe.  We could also enhance insect life, and thus bird life, and mammals merely by allowing some ‘wild corners’ in our gardens.  Even gardens like Tavistock Meadows could be returned to the real flower-rich meadows they once would have been, by simple changes to the management regime. 

Globally, it is now recognised that we are causing the ‘sixth mass extinction’.  Locally, the recent State of Nature report (produced by over 20 UK wildlife organisations) declared that within the last 40 years: ‘Of 1,064 farmland species 60% have decreased and 34% have decreased strongly’ and ‘More species have become extinct in the uplands than in any other habitat’.  

Insect numbers have declined by as much as 60% in the U.K.  The exact ways in which we could improve our natural environment will be always open to discussion, but the fact that this is not inevitable and that we should do something about it are the key points of the re-wilding campaign.  It will enhance our lives.  Surely we can all agree upon that.  If we do not notice the decline of nature, we will not act.  We may already be seeing ‘the end of living and the beginning of mere existence’ (as posited by a nineteenth century American Indian).   

If we do not act, we will even lose the systems on which that existence depends.

Robert Cook

Tavistock