Imagine a Britain running wild
Bulldozers threaten the land around our cities, but elsewhere in Britain, untamed nature is being allowed to reassert itself
- Sunday August 19 2007
An epic landscape experiment is underway in the Netherlands. Its aim is to make Holland, the most developed of all European countries, wild again. Its method is to establish a vast network of natural habitats and wildlife corridors. Frans Vera, one of the ecologists driving the project, imagines it as a 'green circulation system' that will allow the freer movement of non-human species around north west Europe. Plans for the project show a mesh of green arteries, veins and capillaries, covering much of Holland and infiltrating Germany and Belgium.
The heart of this system is Oostvaardersplassen, an uninhabited coastal region of polder, scrubby savannah and wetland that, for nearly 40 years, has been allowed to run wild. Herds of red deer, Heck cattle and Konik ponies graze its drier reaches. Sea eagles and marsh harriers hunt its skies. Bittern, stork and egret haunt reed beds. Millions of geese, ducks and waders migrate through.
Oostvaardersplassen's biodiversity is remarkable. So is its proximity to Amsterdam - just 20 miles to the city's east. And so is its scale: 5,600 hectares, roughly a quarter of the area of the capital. Imagine the proportional equivalent here. A region the size of the Isle of Wight, in the position of south west Essex, turned over to its animals and plants ...
The management of Oostvaardersplassen is deliberately minimal. In this respect, it is truly a wild place. For our word 'wild' derives from the Old Norse willr, meaning uncontrolled or self-intending. Wild land, by this etymology, is self-willed land. Land that proceeds according to its own laws and principles. Land whose habits - the growth of its trees, the movement of its creatures, the distribution of its streams and reed beds - are of its own devising and execution.
By 2018, if all goes to plan, Vera's 'National Ecological Network' will involve 730,000 hectares: 17 per cent of Holland's total area. The existence of this brilliantly ambitious initiative testifies to the Dutch government's commitment to ecology and landscape (what a contrast with Britain), as well as to the general greenness of Dutch culture.
Could Britain go wild in a similar way?
Only a few years ago, the idea would have been laughable. Recently, however, 'wilding' has moved to the forefront of British conservation theory. Public interest in the values of wildness has also risen, a trend visible in television (the huge viewing figures for Coast and Mountain), in tourism, literature (the popular and critical rise of writing about nature) and photography, sculpture and painting.
There are 'wilding' projects now underway in Britain which resemble the Dutch example in ethos, if not in size. I recently visited two: both remarkable, both inspiring.
The first, Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire, has a '100-Year Vision' developed for re-wetting a great tongue of land. This future fen would extend from Wicken in the north to Stow in the south, with an access corridor down into Cambridge itself, allowing the fen to become the city's 'green lung'. As the area expands - reclaimed from surrounding farmland - it will be grazed by Highland cattle, Konik ponies and possibly water buffalo.
The second is the Wild Ennerdale project. Ennerdale is a remote valley in the western Lake District, whose headwall rises to a cirque of magnificent mountains: Great Gable, Pillar, Kirk Fell, Haystacks. Through its upper reaches flows the clear-running Liza, which fills Ennerdale Water. To my mind, Ennerdale is the greatest valley in England. I once spent a winter night walking the mountain ridge that forms its western border, moving over snow in moonlight so bright I could read by it. Looking down into Ennerdale, I felt I was glimpsing another country.
Ennerdale is jointly owned by the National Trust, the Forestry Commission and United Utilities. Five years ago, after consultation with various stakeholders, these three signed up to a 'wild' vision statement for the valley, to increase the wildness of Ennerdale by 'allowing natural processes a greater hand in shaping the valley's landscape and ecology over the long term'.
In practice, this means that forestry will be reduced. Motorised transport will be restricted. Fences will be removed. Vast spruce plantation will be thinned and regenerated with native species: juniper, birch, ash, alder, poplar. Almost all commercial extraction will cease in the valley, save for the tapping of the lake for drinking water.
The contrasts between Wicken and Ennerdale are many. Fen and fell; forest and marsh; north west and south east. But both projects are tethered by similar practicalities and both are devoted, in different degrees, to the idea of wildness.
This is most powerfully the case in Ennerdale. No one knows what will happen in the valley once it has been left to itself. This is what makes the project so exciting. Because of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act, most of the valley is accessible to the public. People will be able to watch the transformation of Ennerdale for themselves. I intend to return every year or two for as long as I can.
Ennerdale and Wicken are not alone. Ambitious re-wettings are underway at Alkborough, Wallasea, Alnmouth and Freiston. Wildlife trusts across England are working out how to join up their holdings. Native woodland regeneration is occurring all over Scotland, including at Loch Katrine in the Trossachs. There, the Forestry Commission Scotland has begun a massive reforestation scheme. The goal is to link the Katrine forest westwards to the RSPB woods at Inversnaid, and eastwards to the Woodland Trust's Finglas property, running from Loch Lomond to Callader.
So connections are beginning. British conservation is moving away from its 'crown jewels' mentality of isolated and cosseted sites. Fen is being linked to fen, forest to forest, glen to glen, heath to heath. Slowly, the Dutch example is being emulated. Acceleration is possible, too, for as the Common Agricultural Policy reforms itself, more and more farmland will come up for sale.
Indeed, Britain differs from Holland in this exciting respect: it has the space to create several large-scale core wildernesses. In the future, we might prove our tolerance of the notion that, as ecologist Mark Fisher puts it, 'human activity should not dominate every hectare of the landscape in Britain'.
Is this vision of a wild Britain impractical? Not with political and cultural will, of which there is an increasing amount. Is it desirable? Undoubtedly ... environmentally, economically, morally, spiritually and socially.
Take a minute to imagine a transformed British landscape. A Britain in which you could walk for a day and not leave the cover of trees. A Britain of elk, lynx, perhaps even wolves. A Britain filled, in the words of geographer Bill Adams, with 'new spaces for nature, both in the landscape and in our lives and imaginations'.
· Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places (Granta) is published on 2 September
