Rewilding is tres a la mode at the moment. From brown bear, lynx and wolves in the Pyrenees to Golden and Benelli eagles in the Corbieres. Converting disused farm land into forests, re planting Grouse moors, grazing the garrigue to provide hunting grounds for raptors, the idea of transforming under utilised land into green lungs teaming with a large range of herbivores and predators is capturing both the public and the political imagination. With European biodiversity under numerous threats, from climate change, agricultural inputs such as pesticides and herbicides, creeping urbanisation, road and rail building, rewilding offers and attractive alternative vision for transforming the countryside.

Perhaps the best known Anglophone proponent of rewilding is the campaigning journalist and Guardian columnist George Monbiot. A well known and much respected writer and researcher Monbiot has for a long time argued that the present use and ownership of the British countryside is not fit for purpose. Monbiot has worked with a range of environmental groups to show how huge swaths of rural Britain is owned by a handful of individuals, NGOs and corporations, such as the Royal family, the National Trust, and the super rich like Dyson, he of the over priced day glo Hoovers. Monbiot has highlighted the ineffective, from an environmental and social perspective, of their use of the land. From huge tracts of upland hills reserved for hunting for the rich, at the exclusion of walkers, to the planting of plains for growing cereals for animal feed he argues that these land owners are effectively running rural deserts for personal profit at an enormous cost to the environment and particularly threatening the biodiversity of the rural, and by knock on of the urban areas of the country.

What Monbiot has highlighted in the UK is also reflected to a greater or lesser extent across the rest of Europe.

Eric Hobsbawn in his classic The Age of Empires argues that the UK made the conscious decision to sacrifice it’s agricultural sector to concentrate on industry, finance and the service sector, at the time shipping. It was simply easier, and cheaper to import cereals, and meat from the dominions and transform them into food than to grow them domestically. Equally raw materials such as sugar, coffee and cocoa that could not be grown in a Northern European climate could be cheaply imported and transformed by British factories into high value products for domestic consumption and export. The UK, itself already heavily deforested exported it’s need for land to the global South and the developing nations.

Britain did indeed for much of the latter 19^th century become the workshop of the world, and it’s naval force did rule the waves. A new class of rural land lords emerged as factory, forge and mine owners bought estates and build grand halls. No longer reliant on agricultural revenues from their land as the old rural aristocrats were the new breed of owners treated the land as a source of leisure not profit. The old great landowners left the land to make their livings in the cities and many of their estates end up in the hands of the National Trusts or sold off to new urban money. Ironically the latter half of the 20^th Century saw the conscious decision by the UK Government to sacrifice the country’s industrial sector in favour of finance and the service sector, now less so shipping and more insurance, advertising, and consultancies. . Many of the grand estates were sold off and ended up in the hands of the National Trust or sold off to a new type of urban money.

Here in France there was a determination to preserve the agricultural sector, not at the cost of industrial development, but alongside. During the Napoleonic Wars Great Britain, with its powerful Navy effectively blockades both France’s Atlantic ports and it’s Mediterranean ports, cutting it off from both it’s colonies in the New World, and it’s possessions in the Maghreb. A strong domestic agricultural sector was essential in a time conflict to feed the population. This model effectively continued to one decree or another until the end of the Second World War. Since then modernisation of French agriculture has seen a large rural flight, with a huge abandonment of marginal agricultural land, like the Hautes Corbieres. It has also seen a concentration of land ownership of fertile agricultural land and the partial exportation of particularly animal feed cereals to developing countries similar to the UK. While not as pronounced as the UK we are certainly following in their path.

Monbiot argues that we need to fundamentally rethink our approach to land usage. Firstly too much of our agricultural production, 53% of all seeded land, is to produce feed for animals. Animals increasingly raised in intense production units. Meat and dairy factories in effect where the animals are caged, feed nutrient rich transformed feed, pumped fill of growth hormones to encourage fast growth and the “right” type of meat and milk, and by the necessity of their close proximity a constant supply of antibiotics to prevent viral infections. As well as the associated environmental costs of chemical run off from the land turning rivers green, and algae covered beaches; and all the issues to do with slurry management Monbiot argues that the whole system is simply a very ineffective way to produce proteins. Quoting a research paper published by Harvard academics Helen Harwatt and Matthew Haye, Eating Away at Climate Change with Negative Emissions Eating-Away-at-Climate-Change-with-Negative-Emissions––Harwatt-Hayek.pdf (harvard.edu) Monbiot writes “If our grazing land was allowed to revert to natural ecosystems, and the land currently used to grow feed for livestock was used to grow grains, beans, fruit, nuts and vegetables for humans, this switch would allow the UK to absorb an astonishing quantity of carbon: equivalent, the paper estimates, to 9 years of our total emissions. And farming in this country could then feed everyone, without the need for imports. “ Spectre at the Feast – George Monbiot 

Monbiot’s book  Feral: searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding published in 2013 marked the movement of rewilding from the political fringe to a much more central role in the debate about the countryside and  biodiversity.

In his Manifesto for Rewilding Monbiot writes

“Through rewilding – the mass restoration of ecosystems – I see an opportunity to reverse the destruction of the natural world. Researching my book Feral, I came across rewilding programmes in several parts of Europe, including some (such as Trees for Life in Scotland and the Wales Wild Land Foundation) in the UK, which are beginning to show how swiftly nature responds when we stop trying to control it  Rewilding, in my view, should involve reintroducing missing animals and plants, taking down the fences, blocking the drainage ditches, culling a few particularly invasive exotic species but otherwise standing back. It’s about abandoning the Biblical doctrine of dominion which has governed our relationship with the natural world.”

What Monbiot is proposing is not a few natural parks but the large scale transformation of the British countryside, and a large scale transformation of what people eat. It marks a clear U turn both environmentally and dietary from the present direction of the world.

Here in France there are a number of conservation and rewilding projects, such as the re introduction of apex predators in the Pyreenes and Alps. These have not been uncontested. Shepherds have demonstrated against the loss of animals across the country. Funding schemes have been put into place to compensate them but dissent continues. I have just proof read a book that looks into the reintroduction of predators into the Pyrenees which looks at the issue in much more depth and upon; hopeful publication will review it and the arguments it contains in more details soon.

The key question that reading the book left me with was why start with apex predators, who are we reintroducing the predators for? Nature or tourism? If it is nature then should we start by looking at the whole food web, What are apex predators going to eat, if not sheep, horses, and donkeys? Surely we need to start by reintroduction the herbivores that predators prey on. Which of course leads to the next question what are the herbivores going to eat? Herbivores need large areas of pasture and under forest growth to survive, and in mountainous areas with snow in Winter they need to mitigate to lower pastures.

Now as I have written about a number of times there is quite a lot of abandoned ex agricultural land in areas like the Hautes Corbieres, and Pyrenees. But In many cases it is not just abandoned, through a combination of deforestation and over grazing leading to massive soil erosion has depleted the land has been turned into a semi desert. Up to date reforestation has taken the form of fast growing pines, which do little to replace the missing vegetable matter in the soil. Elsewhere the famous low scrub of the Midi has taken over, the Garrigue and young green and white oask forest will over time replace some of the lost soil, but we are talking a long time, and that assumes that threats of climate change, with the ensuing biodiversity loss, and fire do not serious hamper the process. Listen to the news this morning the Aude Prefecture announced there has been 288 wild fires in the
Department since June. So that might be a very big assumption. Along the coast in the Var 8,000 hectares of forest and Garrigue burnt down last week.

If we want to see bears and wolves back again maybe we should start at the other end of the food web.

The decimation of the wild bee population and other pollinating insects across Europe is probably the most well known example of the loss of biodiversity. The knock on effect up the food chain is also gaining public recognition, birds, small mammals, their predators..

Less known is the decimation at the base of the food web, in the soil, the mycelium, invertebrates, insects and microbes that live in it and transform the minerals and organic components into nurture for all that grow in and on it. Killed off by pesticides, fungicides and herbicides used in industrial agriculture to be replaced by the fertilisers for fast and consistent yields. It has been estimated by scientists based on studies done of worked land in Europe and beyond that about 70% of industrial agricultural land has a marked deficiency in soil life. Farmers Weekly, the UK’s agricultural trade press reports that between soil erosion and nutrient deficiency the UK has only 100 harvests left if the present industrial farming system continues. Only 100 harvests left in UK farm soils, scientists warn – Farmers Weekly (fwi.co.uk)

Also the runs offs from the land that pour into the seas killing off the microbes that form the basic building blocks of ocean life is only starting to be studied and understood.

If we want to start preserving the existing biodiversity of the rural areas then the best place to start is with the soil. Not just the soil of abandoned land and pastures but also of worked land. It has been estimated that 70% of all worked agricultural land is basically dead, that is soil with a very low level of vegetable matter, and the concurrent dearth of soil life. Farmers now use input of fertiliser to replace what nature in unworked land supplies, the nutrients and minerals needed for plant growth. Organic and regenerative agriculture provide solutions to rebuild soil fertility on worked land. Agroforestry reintroduces hedges and trees onto farm land, providing spaces for insect and bird life.

Forests grow better on suitable soil. Here in the Hautes Corbieres so sever is the soil erosion that any successful reforestation programme will first need a determined effort to rebuild the underlying soil structure. The hills are covered with the ruins of old terraces the peasant built to hold the soil. These could be rebuilt, the young scrub forests are presently barely managed.  A management programme that combines includes both the Communal forests with that of us private land owners could be developed by expert advisors from the ONF, the French version of the Forestry Commission, that helps the larger trees develop, cleans out the younger growth and transforms into into vegetable matter than can be integrated with the soil. Appropriate mushrooms applied, and once areas of soil have been re enriched old varieties of trees re introduced.

Maybe we should be aiming for more soil rather than brown bears, it is a lot less sexy and tourists won’t flock to take photos of worms, by starting at the beginning and not jump starting to the end makes sense to me. Life after all is a journey and not a DVD. 

I live on Mont Tauch, the mountain of the Yew. There is at the moment not one Yew tree growing on a mountain named after it. How wonderful if within my life time they started growing again.

This is an interesting read The expansion of drylands is leaving entire countries facing famine. It’s time to change the way we think about agriculture from David R Montgomery, author of Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations and Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life