What is ‘Natural’ Anyway?

We have a tendency in our modern science based culture of separating and categorising almost everything. We have done this in our management of land too. We have now reached an all time low in relations between farmers, estate owners, conservationists and rewilders. This is significantly limiting our progress towards a better future at a time where we cannot afford a delay.

In Wilderculture we don’t see ecological restoration as being on one side of the fence and food production on the other. We blend the science and learnings of regenerative agriculture with some of the principles of rewilding in ways that help us achieve both. Not only can we produce food and improved ecosystem services, but we believe that we can do both better than if we try to do them separately.

Agriculture.

The management of agricultural land has been heavily influenced by a number of factors that include the ‘green revolution’ and a post war subsidy system that prioritsed economic values over and above ecological or social impacts. We, as consumers have driven modern agricultural practices too by demanding cheap food without paying attention to the consequences.

At the same time, and partly in response to the negative ecological effects of a farming system that was rapidly shifting from a relatively benign activity to a highly mechanised and chemically dependent system, a ‘nature conservation’ movement emerged.

Nature Conservation.

This movement should be acknowledged for its huge positive achievements. In the absence of nature focused organisations and their supporting members actively protecting threatened species and habitats, we would have a fraction of the remaining, albeit depleted, biodiversity we have today.

But holding a complex living system in a ‘state’ and arresting natural succession to manage for a specific species or habitat is a problematic business. ‘Nature’ is self organising. Unlike a machine where you can replace a broken cog and expect it to run the same way after repair, ecosystems adapt and advance in unpredictable ways that don’t often fit into our prescriptive management plans.

Rewilding.

Then the rewilding movement burst onto the scene in the form of rewilding Europe and the small but highly effective organisations in the UK including ‘Trees for Life’ who have made significant gains in protecting and re-establishing some of our threatened remnants of native pine forest and rewilding Britain who have been promoting large scale restoration projects throughout the UK.

Feral.

Rewilding as described in the popular book ‘Feral’ authored by George Monbiot tapped into the uncomfortable truth that there are some serious issues with certain aspects of both conventionional conservation and farming practices and outcomes. The book highlights many valid points and promotes the benefits of rewilding as a way of achieving more significant ecological outcomes for areas of marginal uplands.

But ‘rewilding’ is now being used to describe a range of land management practices.

Wikipedia’s definition is;

Rewilding is large-scale conservation aimed at restoring and protecting natural processes and core wilderness areas, providing connectivity between such areas, and protecting or reintroducing apex predators and keystone species.

Tree Planting.

Currently many, if not most, of the rewilding projects in the UK have primarily involved planting trees, and in order to achieve success this usually involves removing all livestock and deer by fencing them out. This has been partially successful, and where successful, these worthy efforts that will act as seed sources and well-established refuge points as more connected corridors are established, but this is a far cry from having apex predators creating trophic cascades of ecological outcomes.

Grazing Ecology and Forest History.

Another key person in the rewilding movement is Dr Frans Vera. Vera’s hypothesis is that Europe’s true native habitat would have probably been less of a closed canopy forest and more like a temperate savanna that included a significant portion of grassland.

Vera identifies grazing animals as a key natural process and necessary force of the disturbance required to drive the cycle of a wood pasture through the stages of 1) an open grassland park grazed by herbivores, 2) the scrubbing up stage where thorns protect young trees from the browsing animals, 3) the grove, where trees dominate and shade out shrubs and 4) the break up, where trees die and glades open up into grassland again.

Each of these stages relies upon large herbivores (the largest of which are now extinct) and their differing grazing behaviour which is essential to maintaining the health of the grass plants included in wood pasture habitats. Herbivores are also critical to the transfer of seed across a landscape, the trampling and dunging of the field layer which accelerates the cycling of minerals and soil building processes, rubbing and ring barking which creates dead trees and dead wood, and puddling which creates a mosaic of habitats at different stages of ecological succession.

This complex dynamic landscape would have supported greater biodiversity than typically seen in a closed canopy forest.

Vera’s ideas have been a welcome and dramatic shake up to conventional nature conservation, but I feel the role of predators is underplayed. Vera’s hypothesis maintains that herbivore populations are limited by resources, not predation. In the Netherlands on Oostvaardersplassen nature preserve which is managed under Vera’s methodology, the livestock that are used as proxies for the long lost large herbivores are allowed to starve or are shot when the resources no longer meet their needs – the carcasses providing food for important species such as the sea eagle.

Serengeti Rules.

The work of Biologist Professor Tony Sinclair highlights the complex and dynamic nature of the factors that regulate herbivore populations. In his lifetime study of the Serengeti, Sinclair has shown that herbivore populations are regulated from both the top down and the bottom up. The balance of regulatory pressure is influenced in turn by the size of the species, the mobility of their young, and if they are migratory – which in turn is influenced by seasonal grassland growth patterns and the presence of certain predators – it’s complex!

This observation is confirmed by the work of Zimbabwean ecologist Allan Savory who developed the holistic management framework which we use in Wilderculture to underpin our projects.

Holistic Management.

Savory, who started his career in game conservation realised that the relationship between predator and herbivore was critical to the health of the land – especially in the regions of the world with seasonal rainfall. He maintains it is the presence of the predator that changes the behaviour of the groups of herbivores.

Even where only a few predators are present, herbivores tend to bunch together to protect themselves and in doing so jostle for resources leading to a higher impact on the landscape and long periods before the group can return to the trampled vegetation now covered in dung and urine. This period of rest allows proper plant recovery and supports reproduction so that biodiversity is maintained.

In parts of the world where rain falls in a short season, this trampling and processing through the gut of a herbivore is the only effective way that tall plant material grown in the rainy season can be properly cycled – the lack of this process leads to the ‘locking up’ of minerals in tall standing vegetation which is the first stage of the desertification process.

Herbivores.

Herbivores and their pack hunting predators it seems are one of the most essential components to a functional and healthy ecosystem.

So if we turn our minds back to the UK, it becomes apparent that we have a fairly big problem as herbivores are absent from many of our ‘rewilding’ projects.

In our green and pleasant lands we have very effectively eradicated any wild animal with teeth and claws that’s bigger than a small dog! We have also severely disrupted or damaged the populations and genetics of even the smallest predators such as birds of prey, badgers, foxes, wild cats and otters! Through this process we have created an intensely domesticated culture in our human population too.

We are now terrified of all things wild!

I hope that one day we will again see some truly wild pockets of our marginal highlands complete with wild predators. But in the short to medium term is simply fencing off large areas of land and planting trees really any more ‘natural’ than farming it?

All of this management constitutes human intervention of the highest order.

Regenerative Agriculture and Soil Health.

What the incredible advances of regenerative agriculture has taught us is that the same complex and adaptive web of life we can see above ground with trophic levels and cascades is occurring below ground too.

When ecological succession is advancing in a truly natural system, so is the corresponding soil food web. A healthy wood pasture or woodland soil is alive with trillions of interdependent organisms who quickly complex nutrients into stable forms that don’t leach (or show up on most conventional soil tests), and can extract nutrition from the crystalline structures in the soil profile. They can even transfer nutrients between plant species to maintain a high level of health and disease resistance throughout the above ground plants and animals.

In these systems, plants and animals are utterly intertwined. The microbes from the gut of the herbivores ‘top up’ the soil biome and the soil organisms populate and protect all of the plants and animal species within the ecosystem. It is really just one whole system with no defined edges. This is why we call our management approach ‘holistic management.’

Modern agriculture has reversed succession to an early state, much of our grazed lands suffer from the symptoms of low levels of species connectance and diversity. The soil health is equally barren – bacteria dominated soils with few microscopic predators and mycorrhizal fungi present.

Changed Forever.

When we remove grazing animals from land with all but the most fertile underlying geology, these ecosystems don’t simply return to their pre-agricultural state through rest from grazing alone. Often the grasses become rank and in some cases the soils lose structure turning organic and anaerobic – biodiversity can drop to an all time low. We plant trees into this barren soil and expect these high successional plants to thrive – they don’t – which is one of the reasons we see such high attrition rates and instances of disease in our habitats.

Adding fungi or other microbial inoculants can be a waste of time too. Unless a healthy system is in place to feed and maintain this population they will soon die off just as any species would if reintroduced without the correct complex habitat in place to support it.

Some conservation projects recognise the benefits of large grazing ungulates and have introduced hardy grazers to help cycle some of these rank grasses and perform some of the other missing natural functions.

The Challenge in the Uplands.

The challenge in upland environments of allowing sedentary livestock to graze without the influence of predators is that because they are not stressed and on high alert, they linger and preferentially graze certain species and habitats.

Even the less selective grazers such as native ponies and cattle will spend a disproportionate amount of time on the palatable grassland areas and minimal time on the ranker grasses and dwarf shrub communities. This can lead to a reduction of the habitats that include grasses and a shift towards the species and habitats that remain under-impacted and ungrazed or browsed.

This may be what some managers are looking for, but can this really be described as ‘natural?’

Wilderculture.

What we work on through our Wilderculture projects is rebuilding the ecosystem from the bottom up. Instead of focusing on species and habitats we look at how we can optimise the ecosystem processes of the water cycle, mineral cycle, energy flow and community dynamics.

Water Cycle.
How effectively can you capture and retain your rainfall so that it is used by plants and animals throughout the year.

Mineral Cycle.
How efficiently can plants and animals access nutrients and how rapidly are these recycled so they can be made available again and the food web can thrive.

Community Dynamics.
How complex and resilient are nature’s dynamic networks in your landscape so that pests are reduced, disease is minimised and the growing season is long and stable.

Energy Flow.
How optimal is the conversion of sunlight into food for the whole food web including the livestock, wildlife and plants you are directly managing.

We divide the land base we are working with into functional management blocks to achieve the highest possible ecological benefits in a cost effective way, that will benefit the landowner too. We cover this process in detail in our three day Wilderculture foundations course. 

It is our belief that all land is managed by humans in the UK in one form or another. Our soils and habitats have been changed forever as a result of the centuries of impact and influence of humans.

The process started with the first nomadic settlers who hunted wild herbivores, killed their predators and cut down the trees that kept the soils aerated and base rich. More latterly our negative intervention has accelerated as technology has advanced and our machinery become more monstrous.

A Modern Keystone Species.

The notion that we can restore ‘natural processes’ to the point that they become ‘self willed’ is highly appealing. I believe however, that clinging to this ideal in the UK is preventing us from managing our land optimally for both humans and wildlife.

It has created a rift between those who produce food and those who ‘care about nature’ and does little to shift our culture towards one that welcomes wilder landscapes and recognises the importance of biodiversity in all forms – sharp teeth included.

By separating our nature conservation from our food production, and ‘handing back’ to nature (which as we have discussed doesn’t really work in the UK) then relying on industrial agriculture to produce our food, we are simply deferring the degradation of our soils and loss biodiversity to somewhere else in the world.

As we are part of this one ‘whole’ ecosystem within one shared atmosphere this is certainly not a long term plan! Our actions are also perceived by those scratching a subsistence living from a rapidly desertifying landscape in the dry-lands of the world as a ‘first world’ response that puts wildlife above humans – especially those who don’t have white skin and the money or means to buy healthy food.

In Wilderculture, we believe that humans are part of the ecosystem and have an important role to play in ecological restoration. We think land managers could become conscious keystone species who can use our technology and resources to rebuild our dysfunctional ecosystem processes and feed ourselves healthy food at the same time.

We believe citizens can become conscious consumers who drive beneficial changes in land management through their purchases.

These ecosystem processes pivot around the health of the soil. We use the careful application of tools – including managed herds of livestock – to recreate functions that stimulate soil building processes.

We can and must have managed whole land systems that rebuild our damaged ecosystems and also produce healthy food. Our mission in Wilderculture is to develop and refine these techniques for application in the UK uplands and help train others in our successes.