Re-wilding the UK

We went to a bird reserve near Oxford last week on a school field trip. Despite sounding elementary, the place was quite interesting, because of the wildlife there and because of the interesting discussion it precipitated about the meaning of "wild". This was contrasted to my freshly uprooted North American idea of "wild" or wilderness, and i was struck at how different the two sides of the ocean seem to be.

The Otmoor reserve used to be an agricultural wetland, and it occupies an valley in the headwaters of the River Thames. In the 1960s, the broad valley was drained to make way for agriculture. This had been attempted previously, but had not been totally successful. In the 1990s, the area was aquired by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), one of the UK's largest non-governmental organizations. The refuge managers have actively worked to restore this area to pre-1960s wetland, by digging new ditches, diverting flows, and planting reeds. The main goals of the reserve are to provide habitat for threatened bird populations like the bittern.

All well and good. The problem comes when we examine the natural history of the area: 3,000 years ago, soil samples indicate this area would have been forested, not wetlands. So, why are we aiming to restore an ecosystem type from 50 years ago, when that was not the original anyway? What IS pristine? What is a healthy ecosystem, and how far back should we look for restoration goals? How much should we intervene, in order to reach goals, and which goals are worth intervening for?

These questions are especially tricky in western Europe, and in other places where humans have had an impact for hundreds of years. These lands have been significantly altered by humans for such a long period of time, such that we don't even have a record of what the ecosystem might have been like, really, if we were to restore to "pre-human".

So this method of restoring a wetland that was drained recently seems to make sense. It still supports species of local, national, and global concern. It creates another possible "core" area of habitat, which could plug into a regional or national network of connected reserves. But, is it "wild"? Will Europe, or the British Isles specifically, ever be "wild" again? There are parts of the UK that are still pretty untracked, at least in recent history (these areas may have been settled at some time in the past), but the islands still lack most of their native species. In class this week we learned that of all species in Great Britian, only 4% are native. So what good would "restoration" even do, or what target are we working towards? Nicer wetland habitats? Prettier places? Or do we restore systems and manage reserves in the UK for ecological principles?

For some answers, i like this article about the difference of terminologies in central Europe and North America. Diemer et al are saying that the concept of rewilding (returning the landscape to a wilderness state) is well received in Europe. Its just that the scale of implementation is quite different, and the assumptions that we might want to make about a "wild" place, i.e. native species, top predators and ecological processes intact, might not be appropriate here. If it were, then this controversial idea published in Nature, to reintroduce large megafauna to North America as surrogates for wooly mammoth and saber-tooth tiger would be considerably more legitimate.

Most of central Europe is probably past some threshold where it could be considered "untouched wilderness". Given that, it seems that conservation in the UK does well to focus on the local, and to ensure that there are places where rewilding is always occurring. So, even though we're not setting aside "wilderness" or regaining all the species that once were there, we are maintaining areas of untractable, wildlife-priority land. In the case of Otmoor, we're not going to regain the forest that once existed before humans arrived. But we do gain another area where some amount of rewilding can take place.