I am currently, for reasons I shall explain next week, in Austria. This is why I missed the Linnaean Society debate on Wednesday night on re-wildling. RSPB's Futurescapes Manager Aidan Lonergan participated in the debate and offers his perspective on how it went...
"The Linnaean Society offers a very elegant setting in the heart of London. While the debate was ostensibly on the issue of rewilding, I had to respond to the suggestion that the British conservation model was unambitious, irrational and scared of nature.
I took the group on a five minute trip from Sumatra (where we are working with our Birdlife partner to restore 100,000 ha of rainforest) to the work we have been doing with others to reintroduce Red Kites across the UK to Wallasea (Europe's largest realignment project) to engage 600,000 people through Big Garden Birdwatch to encouraging them to get active through our Giving Nature a Home campaign. I tried to underline our ambition to act from the local to the global level adapting our plans to the circumstances in which we operate. I explained that we do science to understand the problems facing the natural world, find solutions to address our priorities and then use our practical conservation work to deliver more wildlife or to use our experience to influence others. I concluded that we were not in fact afraid of nature but loved it!
I explained that while the rewilding proposition was instinctively attractive and had the ability to engage and excite the public. But there may be a limited number of big locations across the UK (mainly Scotland where for example we are doing great work to restore blanket bogs of the Flow Country or the Caledonian pine forests in the Cairngorms), we still had to protect the best sites which remained under pressure from a range of causes. Our challenge is to help species adapt to changing conditions by scaling up our work through landscape scale conservation.
One thing was perfectly clear from the debate: all four participants were obviously very keen on nature and all of us wanted more of it."
So the debate goes on. I think this is healthy. Anything that encourages us to explore new ways to restore lost biodiversity is a good thing.
Let me know if you want to continue the debate.
It would be great to hear your views.
'If we reduce (to zero) land-use intensity to benefit nature in some places, does that mean that we have to increase land-use intensity elsewhere to make up the difference? The unpalatable answer is yes.'
Maybe, but there is room for considerable reductions in food waste and losses in the distribution chain.
Nature still survives in the areas dominated by lowland farming. Maybe not the diversity in other areas, but a policy of 'letting go' is effectively saying to the human population in these areas that their support for nature has no value. Getting popular support for re-naturing (or re-wilding) requires mass support.
Yes, it is a crucial debate and 're-wildling' ideas do make a real contribution to developing a more expansive thinking around how we look after our environment. However, I'm always suspicious when all too often these discussions get pushed towards the uplands. the uplands are great but they are also a diversion - from where real people live, from where there is most biological productivity and away from the pressing issues surrounding the outdated dominance of land use by agriculture.
The key constraint in expanding our thinking is single-purpose land use and conservation is as guilty of this as other uses; single purpose bumps straight up against the limited space in this country and straight up against competing, and often politically more powerful, opposing uses. The real skill will be in bringing together a whole range of priorities into multi-purpose land use that delivers more than any single use - that is how we effectively make more space in our crowded country. It also makes it affordable: there's no way existing uses can simply be 'bought out' but using the money we are already spending - on farming, on cleaning polluted water (often paid for by the money we give farming), on heavy engineered flood control - we may achieve much of what we need without spending more, in fact, with predictions of the cost of flooding heading towards £40m/pa, we could save - as David Cameron is saying, putting down some insurance against the future impacts of CC looks sensible.
Sorry, ignore my comment about Australia. In my hurry miss read Austria for Australia!! More haste less speed!!
I think it is absolutely essential that this debate continues,(though not necessarily every day or continuously). I think there is a slight element of truth in the proposition that British conservation, in some quarters is unambitious, scared of nature, etc. although I don't think that accusation is true of the RSPB. One of the problems that we have in the UK is that, especially in England,it is, unfortunately, a very crowded country. This means actions by one organisation may affect others in the neighbourhood. This in turn means that the idea of re-wilding and re-naturing of significant species in a particular area needs,on the whole, to have the acceptance of at least the local population.
This is why, as I mentioned yesterday, it is important to start seriously moving this debate into the public domain and not just let it go round and round in the conservation organisations. If that were to happen then we could quite rightly be accused of being unambitious and scared of nature.
Australia of course is currently making huge efforts to re-wild by protecting and reintroducing their indigenous species. Their problems, however are rather different to ours, being primarily those of feral herbivores and carnivores and very damaging fires often started deliberately. However they do have lots of space and many of their conservation projects involve establishing huge feral animal free exclusion zones to the benefit of the native animals and plants.