We are sharing more and more of our spaces with wolves: Futures Forum: Sharing Our Lives with Wolves: on BBC's Shared Planet And some are even campaigning to reintroduce wolves to this part of the world: Futures Forum: Reintroducing wolves to Devon For this week's Costing the Earth on Radio 4, Tom Heap goes to France - and the Netherlands, a country which is more developed and densely-populated than the UK - and looks at how things are working with rewilding the wolf on the Continent:
Wolves were hunted out of many European countries over a century ago. In recent years they've been migrating back naturally and have now reached every country in continental Europe. Not everyone is happy - while their preferred food source is said to be deer and wild boar the killing of sheep and goats has angered many farmers. Tom Heap travels to the French Alps, meeting farmers to see if its possible to rear livestock alongside a wolf population and hears about projects to help - including an innovative scheme where volunteers camp out to protect the sheep. Tom's taken his own camping gear in the hope of getting closer to these creatures and hearing or possibly seeing them.
He also travels to the Netherlands. Even here, they've had sightings of wolves since 2015, so he's going tracking in one of the areas they've been spotted - hoping for a sighting or a sign. Tracks or scat can give important evidence and may help indicate if the wolves have now settled here. How will the first resident female wolf - or eventually pack - for 140 years change life for the Dutch? Join him as they wait for important news.
Will human actions result in the demise of huge numbers of other species - in a mass die-off, comparable to the end of the era of the dinosaurs?
Neal Razzell assesses the evidence that species are dying off at a rapid rate, and looks at some of the surprising things we might do to slow or reverse this process.
What is the chance of the human race surviving the 21st century? There are many dangers – climate change for example, or nuclear war, or a pandemic, or planet Earth being hit by a giant asteroid.
Around the world a number of research centres have sprung up to investigate and mitigate what’s called existential risk. How precarious is our civilisation and can we all play a part in preventing global catastrophe?
Contributors
Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute. Phil Torres, Future of Life Institute. Karin Kuhlemann, University College London. Simon Beard, Centre for Existential Risk. Lalitha Sundaram, Centre for Existential Risk. Seth Baum, Global Catastrophic Risk Institute.
Film clip: Armageddon, Touchstone Pictures (1998), Directed by Michael Bay.
North Yorkshire Turtle Dove Project ... turtle doves were given the spotlight during a nice little interview on Radio 4 with Isabella Tree of Knepp:
Turtle Doves
According to the RSPB, Turtle Doves are the most likely bird to go extinct within our shores by 2020. The decline in this lovely species over the past few decades has been catastrophic. In the 1960s there were an estimated 125,000 pairs of Turtle Doves in Britain. That number has declined 96%. In Sussex, considered one of its last strongholds, we probably have fewer than 200 pairs.
Trouble on its long migration route from sub-Saharan Africa is undoubtedly partly responsible for its steep decline: periodic droughts, changes in land use, loss of roosting sites, increasing desertification and hunting in Africa - and then there's the stupendous hazard of crossing the firing squads of the Mediterranean. In Malta alone, the slaughter claims 100,000 turtle doves every season. Around 800,000 are killed in Spain.
But while Turtle Dove numbers are declining across Europe, by far the steepest descent has been in Britain - where we do not shoot them. Here, the decline is almost entirely to do with loss of habitat and food resources.
16 singing males were recorded on 1,100 acres of the southern estate in 2017, compared with three on the whole estate in 1999.
Knepp, West Sussex: A 3,500-acre estate has been transformed from intensively farmed land to a rich natural environment, luring back a bird we are close to losing
A preening turtle dove, whose numbers have fallen by 93% since 1994. Photograph: Joe Blossom/Alamy
It’s 4.30am and the sky is already light above Knepp, the Sussex estate whose 3,500 acres have been transformed from intensively farmed agricultural land to one of the richest natural environments in the country. I’m with Penny Green, the estate’s resident ecologist, and here to see turtle doves, birds whose mellifluous purring once played a starring role in the soundscape of British summers, but whose numbers have fallen by 93% since 1994.
Streptopelia turtur’s devastating decline is largely down to exactly the sort of commercial farming that Knepp’s owners, Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree, have set themselves against. It’s fitting, then, that one of the largest populations of nesting doves in the country – 16 pairs – is found right here.
We walk out towards the setting strawberry moon, hanging huge and milky over meadows in which thickets of oak, sallow and hawthorn rise. We walk long diagonals through fleabane and ragwort, the clay beneath our feet baked hard. In the corner of one field, we hear a strange croaking, then spy its source: a nightingale fledgling newly emerged from its nest.
It’s only as we head back that we see him, the turtle dove breasting the air, tawny in the sun, and then a flash of the scalloped intricacy of his back. He takes up residence in a nearby tree and begins to call. I didn’t hear turtle doves in my own childhood, but the sound is so powerfully evocative that it summons visions of old hot summers, of a time before pesticides and decades of poor stewardship drove these birds from our land.
One of Knepp’s white storks rises in the background, and butterflies and dragonflies dart around us, but I’m wholly focused on that stream of notes, which you seem to feel as much as hear. In Tree’s beautiful book about Knepp, Wilding, she describes how hearing the turtle dove gives you the impression of being “caught in the crosshairs of time”. And that is how it is, standing in this new-formed wilderness, listening to a bird that we are so close to losing but that still feels a vital part of our world.
How best to describe Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree? The custodians of the 3,500-acre Knepp Estate in West Sussex, home to the UK’s largest lowland rewilding project, are certainly landowners — although they consider themselves primarily environmentalists — but they are also educators, entrepreneurs and, perhaps increasingly, impresarios.
In 2000, the couple took the radical decision to give up on Knepp’s arable and dairy farm, which they had tried and failed for years to keep profitable, to pursue an experimental process of habitat creation. They laid off 11 staff, removed 70 miles of internal fences and introduced English Longhorn cattle, Tamworth pigs, Exmoor ponies and fallow and red deer to roam freely. Cultivation of the land was stopped over a period of six years and the transformation was dramatic — the landscape changed from monotonous fields to grass plains, copses and scrubland, harbouring a rich diversity of plant, insect and bird life — and public interest bloomed.
While Tree prepares me a glass of homemade elderflower cordial in the kitchen at Knepp Castle she lists the stream of farmers, environmentalists, government advisers and NGOs that have been knocking at their door this summer. Then there are the tourists booking into Knepp’s glamping site and others who go on “safari” tours of the estate. “We’ve sold over £100,000 worth of safaris,” Burrell explains later, “and the season’s not even over.”
There are good reasons for this summer’s crowd. As the UK hurtles towards Brexit, the environment secretary Michael Gove and his policymakers are racing to replace the EU’s common agricultural policy (CAP), while farmers and landowners — aware that support payments are likely to be reduced — are looking at alternative uses for farmland. There is also the recent publication of Tree’s book, Wilding: The return of nature to a British farm. But perhaps, above all, amid the seemingly relentless bad news Knepp offers something positive: the flourishing of imperilled species such as turtle doves, nightingales and purple emperor butterflies.
From the kitchen, where an open doorway frames views towards an enormous lake, Tree leads the way through a dining room and into the central hallway of the house. “This is where it gets a bit like the Pitt Rivers,” she says, pointing to displays of arrows, each with different heads — for catching fish, birds, pigs, humans — that the couple collected in Papua New Guinea, where they were married in 1993. We duck into the library, a relaxed space decorated with 20th-century art, and meet Burrell in his office, where huge maps of the estate are arranged across dusty-green walls.
Knepp Castle, designed by John Nash in the early 19th century, has been in Burrell’s family for more than 200 years and he took over the estate in 1987. Selling was not an option, but the couple’s decision to cease farming coincided with the English publication of Grazing Ecology and Forest History by the Dutch ecologist Frans Vera, in which he argues that Europe was not historically a closed-canopy forest but a dynamic landscape shaped by roaming megafauna including oryx and wild boar. It inspired them to recreate the grazing effects of these animals — which in turn encourage plant and insect life — by releasing semi-wild animals. “If you release free-roaming animals into an area, give them enough space and freedom on a big enough scale, you can generate habitat that will be of benefit — rocket fuel, in fact — to biodiversity,” Tree explains.
Although lynx and wolves have been discussed as possible introductions elsewhere in the UK, no predators have been brought into Knepp. The populations of the new introductions are managed artificially; ponies are neutered and pigs, cattle and deer are slaughtered to produce 75 tonnes of meat (at a value of £120,000) a year.
I ask if the experiment has caused the unintended decline of any species. “We don’t think we’ve lost anything,” Burrell replies. “We may have lost biomass of stuff, so there may not be as many bluebells but we haven’t lost them, [they’re] now in the fields, they’re in the scrubland, they’re in the hedges.”
Knepp has always received the CAP Basic Payment, but the rewilding project was given a kick-start with a Countryside Stewardship Scheme grant and more latterly the whole estate has benefited from CAP Higher Level Stewardship funding. So why haven’t more landowners followed their example?
“I think what we’ve both learnt is the level of knowledge actually out there, both in rural and urban populations, is so low. So, when you’re describing loose ideas to people, how it’s going to happen or what the changes will mean, they have no ability to visualise any of it,” Burrell says. “I think we were also surprised by people’s reluctance to consider change when it seemed to us there was this huge opportunity,” Tree adds. “We just assumed that our neighbours would be interested. We had visions initially of a 10,000-acre block that would be naturally bordered by rivers and roads, and that our neighbours would join in.”
Although certain farming practices have been destructive to wildlife, Burrell says many farmers are too distracted by the challenge of making a living to consider alternatives. “When I was farming, all you ever thought about was your margin per hectare, and nature was irrelevant; it was just trying to struggle through, trying to keep the show on the road.” Yet there is no question that Knepp is unusually well-suited to this sort of project. Unlike many farms that are sprawling or fragmented, the estate is a block of land, and its location just 40 miles from central London means there is a strong rental market for converted farm buildings, providing another income stream.
To see the rewilding in action, we jump into a 1960s Austrian troop carrier and roar off across the old park. This was the first section of Knepp to be rewilded (the arable ground was reseeded with grasses before the animals were introduced) and we pass herds of red and fallow deer grazing among ancient oaks.
Burrell continues to the largest and wildest part of the estate, known as the Southern Block, which was simply left to revert after the final harvests. This area is now a patchwork of sallow (hybridised willow) groves, thorny scrub (protecting oak and other saplings), water meadows, ephemeral ponds, woodland and floodplain.
We disembark to inspect a dry patch of earth under a thicket where pigs have nested, and then watch as Longhorns emerge from the undergrowth and amble around a pond. “You’re playing with all these different species of animals and the effects of their nutrient transference,” Burrell explains, “the way they carry seeds within their guts, on their fur, on their body. Seed transference for cattle is 230 different plants, whereas a roe deer is 23 . . . ” He is interrupted by the piercing “peep-peep” of a kingfisher as it darts across the water.
Fourteen years ago, the dense vegetation around us was a wheat field. Today, there is a rich carpet of grasses under our feet and speckled wood butterflies drift between the sallow leaves that provide the perfect habit for purple emperor butterflies. “We had no idea we would become the greatest site for purple emperor butterflies in the country,” Burrell says. “The record last year was 143, and that was the biggest [number] anyone has ever recorded in a day in Britain. This year it was 388.”
The regeneration that started with the soil has worked upwards: as well as 19 species of earthworm, Knepp now attracts all five species of UK owls, 13 out of 18 species of UK bats and growing (and breeding) populations of migratory nightingales and turtle doves. These are uplifting figures but, according to Burrell and Tree, it is the speed of transformation that offers real hope for the future of the British countryside.
“I’m not saying this is going to be a solution to a lot of situations but it’s an option that has bubbled to the surface,” Burrell says. “It now holds a position of strength and interest, because you can have a very positive story after 10, 20 years, for nature — and that was believed to be impossible.”
‘Wilding: The return of nature to a British farm’ by Isabella Tree, Picador, £20
‘Calls for us all to switch entirely to plant-based foods ignore one of the most powerful tools we have to mitigate against these ills – grazing and browsing animals.’ Illustration: Matt Kenyon
Veganism has rocketed in the UK over the past couple of years – from an estimated half a million people in 2016 to more than 3.5 million– 5% of our population – today. Influential documentaries such as Cowspiracy and What the Health have thrown a spotlight on the intensive meat and dairy industry, exposing the impacts on animal and human health and the wider environment.
But calls for us all to switch entirely to plant-based foods ignore one of the most powerful tools we have to mitigate these ills: grazing and browsing animals.
Rather than being seduced by exhortations to eat more products made from industrially grown soya, maize and grains, we should be encouraging sustainable forms of meat and dairy production based on traditional rotational systems, permanent pasture and conservation grazing. We should, at the very least, question the ethics of driving up demand for crops that require high inputs of fertiliser, fungicides, pesticides and herbicides, while demonising sustainable forms of livestock farming that can restore soils and biodiversity, and sequester carbon.
In 2000, my husband and I turned our 1,400-hectare (3,500-acre) farm in West Sussex over to extensive grazing using free-roaming herds of old English longhorn cattle, Tamworth pigs, Exmoor ponies and red and fallow deer as part of a rewilding project. For 17 years we had struggled to make our conventional arable and dairy business profitable, but on heavy Low Weald clay, we could never compete with farms on lighter soils. The decision turned our fortunes around. Now eco-tourism, rental of post-agricultural buildings, and 75 tonnes a year of organic, pasture-fed meat contribute to a profitable business. And since the animals live outside all year round, with plenty to eat, they do not require supplementary feeding and rarely need to see the vet.
The animals live in natural herds and wander wherever they please. They wallow in streams and water-meadows. They rest where they like (they disdain the open barns left for them as shelter) and eat what they like. The cattle and deer graze on wildflowers and grasses but they also browse among shrubs and trees. The pigs rootle for rhizomes and even dive for swan mussels in ponds. The way they graze, puddle and trample stimulates vegetation in different ways, which in turn creates opportunities for other species, including small mammals and birds.
Little owls - one of five owl species found at Knepp – feast on the burgeoning dung beetle population. Photograph: Ned Burrell
Crucially, because we don’t dose them with avermectins (the anti-worming agents routinely fed to livestock in intensive systems) or antibiotics, their dung feeds earthworms, bacteria, fungi and invertebrates such as dung beetles, which pull the manure down into the earth. This is a vital process of ecosystem restoration, returning nutrients and structure to the soil. Soil loss is one of the greatest catastrophes facing the world today. A 2015 report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization states that, globally, 25 to 40bn tonnes of topsoil are lost annually to erosion, thanks mainly to ploughing and intensive cropping. In the UK topsoil depletion is so severe that in 2014 the trade magazine Farmers Weekly announced we may have only 100 harvests left. Letting arable land lie fallow and returning it to grazed pasture for a period – as farmers used to, before artificial fertilisers and mechanisation made continuous cropping possible – is the only way to reverse that process, halt erosion and rebuild soil, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. The grazing livestock not only provide farmers with an income, but the animals’ dung, urine and even the way they graze, accelerates soil restoration. The key is to be organic, and keep livestock numbers low to prevent over-grazing.
Twenty years ago, our soils at the farm – severely degraded after decades of ploughing and chemical inputs – were almost biologically dead. Now we have fruiting fungi and orchids appearing in our former arable fields: an indication that subterranean networks of mycorrhizal fungi are spreading. We have 19 types of earthworm – keystone species responsible for aerating, rotavating, fertilising, hydrating and even detoxifying the soil. We’ve found 23 species of dung beetle in a single cowpat, one of which – the violet dor beetle – hasn’t been seen in Sussex for 50 years. Birds that feed on insects attracted by this nutritious dung are rocketing. The rootling of the pigs provides opportunities for native flora and shrubs to germinate, including sallow, and this has given rise to the biggest colony of purple emperors in Britain, one of our rarest butterflies, which lays its eggs on sallow leaves.
Not only does this system of natural grazing aid the environment in terms of soil restoration, biodiversity, pollinating insects, water quality and flood mitigation – but it also it guarantees healthy lives for the animals, and they in turn produce meat that is healthy for us. In direct contrast to grain-fed and grain-finished meat from intensive systems, wholly pasture-fed meat is high in beta carotene, calcium, selenium, magnesium and potassium and vitamins E and B, and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) – a powerful anti-carcinogen. It is also high in the long-chain omega-3 fatty acid DHA, which is vital for human brain development but extremely difficult for vegans to obtain.
Much has been made of the methane emissions of livestock, but these are lower in biodiverse pasture systems that include wild plants such as angelica, common fumitory, shepherd’s purse and bird’s-foot trefoil because they contain fumaric acid – a compound that, when added to the diet of lambs at the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen, reduced emissions of methane by 70%.
In the vegan equation, by contrast, the carbon cost of ploughing is rarely considered. Since the industrial revolution, according to a 2017 report in the science journal Nature, up to 70% of the carbon in our cultivated soils has been lost to the atmosphere.
So there’s a huge responsibility here: unless you’re sourcing your vegan products specifically from organic, “no-dig” systems, you are actively participating in the destruction of soil biota, promoting a system that deprives other species, including small mammals, birds and reptiles, of the conditions for life, and significantly contributing to climate change.
Our ecology evolved with large herbivores – with free-roaming herds of aurochs (the ancestral cow), tarpan (the original horse), elk, bear, bison, red deer, roe deer, wild boar and millions of beavers. They are species whose interactions with the environment sustain and promote life. Using herbivores as part of the farming cycle can go a long way towards making agriculture sustainable.
There’s no question we should all be eating far less meat, and calls for an end to high-carbon, polluting, unethical, intensive forms of grain-fed meat production are commendable. But if your concerns as a vegan are the environment, animal welfare and your own health, then it’s no longer possible to pretend that these are all met simply by giving up meat and dairy. Counterintuitive as it may seem, adding the occasional organic, pasture-fed steak to your diet could be the right way to square the circle.
• Isabella Tree runs Knepp Castle Estate with her husband, the conservationist Charlie Burrell, and is the author of Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm
