Sheep farming representatives and grouse shooting interests in particular are adamant that rewilding is to blame for the fires: the reduction in sheep numbers, the emergence of scrub, and a buildup of fuel. Anti-rewilding politicians and commentators have jumped on the opportunity to quell growing British enthusiasm for ambitious nature restoration, and to slow a momentous and wonderful change that is well underway in our landscapes.

The truth is in fact the precise opposite of what they say. For it is only in recreating wilder, wetter upland landscapes that we will find true fire resilience. We simply do not know what we’ve lost. The poet John Clare described mysterious uplands endlessly swathed in great wetland mosaics known as blanket bogs, “the moors’ rude desolate and spungy lap”. The single most effective thing we can do to reduce the prevalence and intensity of wildfire today is to restore the wondrous, wet upland landscapes known by earlier generations. This is the clear conclusion of the IUCN UK Peatland Programme.

Centuries of drainage, carried out to replace living bog with grasses and heather that sheep can eat, have left our once-vast bogs desiccated, and dominated by a relentless monotony of flammable heather and purple moor-grass. When a flame catches in these dried-out hills, it doesn’t just burn along the surface, it smoulders deep into the peat itself, producing the most destructive, unkillable wildfires we have in Britain.

Fixing our broken hydrology ought to be a priority not just in the uplands, but everywhere. Vast networks of sub-surface field drains, ditches and artificially straightened streams and rivers across nearly all our agricultural landscapes send rainfall barreling fast to the sea. On its way it floods anything that lies in its path; and when its gone, the water table drops precipitously and we are left exposed to seasonal drought and wildfire far beyond the hills. It hasn’t gone unnoticed that it rained in Britain pretty much continuously from Christmas to Easter, and yet hosepipe bans were being declared by the water companies as early as late May. We’ve stripped our land of its ability to hold water. Blocking up the ditches and restoring the natural hydrology raises the water table to the surface almost immediately, slowing rank heather growth and creating powerful natural firebreaks.

At Wild Haweswater in the Lake District, the RSPB and United Utilities have blocked nearly thirty miles of drainage ditches. Sphagnum, a moss that holds many times its weight in water, is fast returning. Water quality in the reservoir was the primary aim, but the reduction both in wildfire risk and winter flood peaks have been equally dramatic. The same work across the Peak District and South Pennines for two decades has been turning fire-prone moorland into a beautiful and fire-resistant sponge landscape. When a notorious wildfire raced for days in 2018 across the managed grouse moor above Saddleworth, a few miles from where the land is burning again right now, rewetted areas nearby proved noticeably resistant to its spread.

Add beavers and the effect is multiplied. By building strings of dams along the streams and creeks, beavers create ribbon wetlands that raise the water table across valley floors. Ponds, scrapes and re-wiggled streams, whether made by beavers or by people, serve as landscape-scale firebreaks, while providing new habitat for amphibians, dragonflies, water birds and wildlife of all kinds.

The answer, we’re told endlessly, is more rotational burning of the kind generally carried out on moorland managed for driven grouse shooting, so-called ‘cool burning’. This reduces fuel and therefore flammability, so the logic goes. Writing in The Spectator recently, my friend Matt Ridley made precisely this case. But what this argument overlooks is that grouse moors comprise continuous heather only because they have been deliberately drained and burned to produce it, heather being the preferred food of the grouse. The monoculture is not a natural condition of our uplands, it is manufactured. Rewetting the moors would reduce the heather and with it the grouse, hence the pushback. Absurdly, both driven grouse management and overgrazing by sheep actively accelerate the very climate change that is giving us hotter summers and increasingly unpredictable weather, by releasing vast quantities of carbon from the drying peat, and by destroying the bog which does the exact opposite.

The answer, we’re told endlessly, is more rotational burning of the kind generally carried out on moorland managed for driven grouse shooting, so-called ‘cool burt quantities of carbon from the drying peat, and by destroying the bog which does the exact opposite.

But it is sheep farming, not grouse shooting, which must shoulder most of the blame for the fires. Tens of millions of sheep have been an ecological disaster for Britain’s uplands. Sphagnum is suppressed not by sheep eating it, it has almost no nutritional value, but by trampling. The damage persists for years and prevents recovery of the feathery carpet of moss. Sheep also graze out more palatable plants such as deciduous scrub and tree saplings that would otherwise compete with heather, further locking the landscape into the flammable monoculture we see today.

Far fewer sheep, at much lower densities, alongside native cattle and especially hardy upland ponies, is the surest pathway to fire resilience. Belted Galloways, Luing cattle and Fell Ponies, all now grazing at newly rewetted Wild Haweswater, trample gorse and bracken, forage randomly, and help to restore the varied mosaic of trees, scrub, grassland and sphagnum bog that breaks fuel continuity.

Author, ecologist and native pony fan Benedict Macdonald has said: “For millions of years, wild horses, of which our beloved Exmoor pony is the closest descendent, have been the most powerful hoover of dry grasses in our landscapes. Horses are specifically designed to tackle coarse and dry matter. Reducing burn load is essential. Burning it is not. We need our native herbivores back on the land.”

Macdonald’s company Restore has recently acquired Emblehope, a 3,000 hectare Northumberland estate, which will become England’s largest single-owner private rewilding project. More than 800 hectares of degraded peatland will be rewetted, the land returned to a living tapestry of Sphagnum bog, patches and sinews of bog woodland and open water, the kind of landscape you might find today in Estonia or Finland, and a surface that simply does not support fire in the way drained, heather-dominated moorland does. Soon Emblehope will teem with wildlife, and with birds that were once vastly abundant in our uplands, curlew, golden plover, dunlin, snipe, jack snipe and more.

The rewetting of landscapes, the return of Sphagnum, beavers and their ponds, native cattle and ponies, pockets of woodland in the valleys and on the slopes, this is how we achieve lasting fire-resilience, alongside a host of other benefits which makes restoration a no-regrets thing to do. None of this happens overnight; heather monocultures take years to yield even after drainage is reversed. But keeping our uplands locked in their denuded, carbon-belching state, and doing so in the name of fire prevention, only compounds the misery.

Rewilding is not the cause of Britain’s worsening upland wildfires. It is the answer. As the smoke drifts across the Pennines once again and helicopters return to Dovestone, the question is whether those who make policy about our uplands will finally have the courage to confront the nonsense and set in place incentives to restore magic to our desecrated but fabled uplands.

*Original version of this article published in The Spectator in July 2026

American Prairie buys land on the open market from willing sellers, legitimately leases public land from the BLM and works with private landowners and native American reservations in order to piece together and restore a great tract of prairie. The organisation is pioneering a new economic model for the remote plains, one which includes cattle ranching alongside ambitious nature recovery; is creating tons of new jobs; all while restoring an American icon, the bison, which currently numbers less than 0.1% of its historic population. It does all of this without deviating from the principles of free markets, private property rights and good stewardship.

You’d have thought conservative regulators would applaud this new approach for an area increasingly known for economic, ecological and social decline and rural depopulation. But no, the return of the bison is simply too much for local and federal republicans. And so, under pressure from shady cattle industry lobbyists, they’re bending and breaking long-established public lands rules to get the bison gone.

Real conservatives believe in private property rights, free market enterprise and a level playing field. These new kind of ‘conservatives’, however, are in fact cronyists, who go full socialist whenever one of their favourite industries, such as coal, corn-for-ethanol, sugar in the Everglades (a particular monstrosity), industrial fishing, logging, cattle, etc., begin to come up against reality. Big government intervention, state protection, and ever greater subsidies for the status quo are really not conservatism.

What *is* conservatism is standing up for America’s natural inheritance, which these politicians are betraying. Real conservatives would cheer the return of the bison to a remote corner of the Great Plains. These politicians are on the wrong side of history.

Poll after poll shows that nature really is non-partisan. Young-old, rich-poor, rural-urban, left-right - people across the board love nature and want it rebuilt and protected. That’s why, at the state level, good things are happening across America. Consider the Florida Forever program of land acquisition for conservation; the dramatic expansion of the Texas state parks system; and the adoption by Illinois of rewilding as a core principle of public land management.

I should note, before the trolls get going again …

I am not an American, unlike the overwhelming majority of AP donors. My involvement in American rural policy is precisely zero. But I was for ten years Chair of the UK Conservative Environment Network and I am amazed by the chutzpah of fellow conservatives across the Atlantic going all socialist in their increasingly hysterical efforts to stand in the way of nature recovery - all while burnishing their free market, conservative credentials.

PS, yum

I had Alison Fox, chief executive of American Prairie, as my first ever Rewilding the World podcast guest a couple of years ago. Here is the episode. I have invited Alison to come back onto the podcast in the coming weeks to talk about all of this.

Decades of poaching by Sudanese Janjaweed militias and highly armed, organised criminal networks left wildlife in Zakouma decimated and local people destitute. I’ve been told appalling stories here of whole elephant families machine gunned at their watering spots, and local girls abducted across the border into neighbouring Sudan. There was nearly nothing left, as is the case across the rest of Chad, until 2010 when, at the invitation of the Chadian government, African Parks took on management of the park. The results have been breathtaking. Bouncing in low over a great savannah and wetland mosaic, now in its dryest season, I could see that the largest pans retain some water at this time of year, the rest are flat, brown and dotted with countless wild herbivores.

Arriving to a flamboyant display by the rangers on the dirt landing strip, and an ice cold cup of hibiscus tea each, we received our first briefing. In total, African Parks employs three hundred Chadians at Zakouma, included in which an impeccably trained ranger force which has all but eliminated poaching. Rangers patrol in a blend of camouflage and traditional garb, on horseback, motorbikes, jeeps (some of which captured from the poachers themselves), tiny planes and even kayaks. The operations centre and armoury are a sight to behold; conservation in Africa is not for the faint hearted, and the good guys most definitely need to be armed. African Parks is not only the largest employer now in the region, but also the largest educator and healthcare provider. Wildlife is resurgent. The park is a triumph and has become a source of pride for all Chadians.

It’s difficult to describe in words or with photographs the sheer abundance and vibrancy here. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced. The place simply thrums with life. Herds of elephants, giraffes, buffalo, hartebeest, tiang, cob, waterbuck, kudu, gazelles grazing and browsing the last vegetation before the rains return; warthogs rootling; crocodiles basking by the thousand; and birds everywhere. Limitless storks, herons and hornbills congregate around the remaining water, kingfishers flitting back and forth over the water, fishing eagles, harriers and vultures and vast flocks of quelea which at fist and last light arrive in murmurations millions strong, forming huge genies shape-shifting above our heads. Lions number once again in the hundreds, and cheetahs, spotted and striped hyenas have returned as well. Everywhere you look there is life.

Sitting outside my small tent amid the sunset cacophony one evening it dawned on me that this kind of abundance was once to be found in places all over the world; even in Britain. Imagine the Somerset Levels before we drained and desecrated our most sacred landscape in the way that we have. We can have life back, if we choose it. It really is a choice. The Chadian government made a choice to restore Zakouma. We too can make the same choice in our most precious landscapes.

Asleep on my second night I was woken by the deep growl of a lioness passing just metres by my flimsy tent, just a mosquito net between me and her. The sound rippled through my bones, and I felt a terror the likes of which I remember only from fever dreams of childhood. I froze in my bed, eyes wide open and thankfully she moved on. The nights here are studded by the grunts and roars, clacks and splashes of animals which could crush or crunch me without a moment’s consideration, although of course we were perfectly safe within the camp. Being among wildlife like this reminded me of the risible fear so many Britons have of our own much less scary wildlife, wild boar, red deer, lynx and wolves; animals which have as much right to live in our landscapes as we do.

African Parks is perhaps the most effective and important rewilding organisation in the world today. Its co-founder and leader Peter Fearnhead, who travelled with us, is truly an inspiration. The charity he has built manages twenty-three protected areas now in thirteen countries, deliberately restoring wildlife across an area spanning more than 600,000 square kilometres. Peter described to me plans for connecting many of these vast areas with corridors; and African Parks’ recent acquisition of a bankrupt rhino farm in South African comprising fifteen percent of all the white rhinos in the world. The rhinos are now being translocated to locations across Africa, some of which haven’t had rhinos for decades. Governments are listening. Communities are engaged. Funding is coming in. It’s happening. Please do follow and support this extraordinary charity. The future of Africa’s wildlife and its wildest places depends on them.

From Zakouma we hopped back onto the same properllor plane to fly two hours north to another Chadian park managed by African Parks, Ennedi Natural and Cultural Reserve. Ennedi spans more than fifty thousand square kilometres (five million hectares, the size of Croatia) in the heart of the Sahara. Its famous for extraordinary, rock formations stretching to the horizon in all directions, arches and labyrinths, oases, ancient rock art and funeral mounds.

Ennedi differs vastly from Zakouma. This is a remote desert landscape in which nomadic and pastoral communities numbering about fifty thousand live and work. This of course presents a different set of challenges, of which overgrazing by domestic livestock, goats, sheep and camels, is a big one (sound familiar?). Moreover, livestock animals represent a store of wealth, whereas wild animals offer a free lunch. So poaching, especially since the since the arrival of cheap motorcycles and guns, has wiped out all but a scant few dorcas gazelles and Barbary sheep. Everything else is gone.

The community however, alongside the Reserve and African Parks, is now united in its determination to restore its lost wildlife, animals which have been central to their culture for millennia. They understand what they’ve lost, and now they want it back. This sensitive Saharan ecosystem here, which comprises huge areas with very little water, once supported large, mobile herds of Addax, a brilliant-white antelope which, astonishingly, derives all of its water needs from the plants it eats; majestic scimitar-horned oryx; dorcas and dama gazelles; African wild ass and Barbary sheep in the rockier areas.

I tagged along with Peter and his team in meeting the local governor at his compound. Various family members dozed in the shade outside. A small boy eyed me suspiciously before breaking a white-toothed grin. African Parks is the second largest employee in this vast region, after the Chadian government. The governor expressed his support and gratitude for the charity’s work; as well as his wish to restore the vegetation he knew as a young man.

Having made great strides towards eliminating poaching of wildlife, with the help of the community, African Parks is actively reintroducing each of these lost mammals here in growing numbers. The charity is also restoring another critically endangered species, the red-necked ostrich, which now number more than a hundred in the reserve. I was lucky enough to spot a pair with ten spotty pompom young in tow. The goal of course is tens of thousands of each of these species. Long term, this is ideal wide-open arid grassland habitat for desert cheetahs too, free from competition with lions, leopards and spotted hyenas.

Striped hyenas and jackals are still found here, and we saw patas monkeys sprinting across the sand like gazelles; a pair of fennec foxes; Sahara hares; a family of baboons barking from their verdant territory within a steep-sided, rocky oasis at the top of a gorge; and a pair of black eagles soaring high overhead. But this vast landscape is famous for more than its fabled wildlife. This is a land of ancient rock formations with chimney-like turrets, rock labyrinths and towering arches; of millennia-old cave paintings depicting long-lost wildlife and of funeral mounds which pre-date Islam by as much as seven thousand years. Apart from the wildlife, it’s all still here.

This region is not as universally poor as people might think; camels in particular are worth as much as a thousand dollars each (racing ones more than that still), and some nomadic families have up to a thousand camels, as well as large numbers of goats and sheep. While the local governor is considering a cap on the price of wives, no such cap is proposed for livestock. The result is overgrazing across enormous areas. Livestock, often herded by young boys, reaches every last patch of forage, leaving little for any wild ungulates which may return to the park.

Moreover, I saw precious little recruitment of new young acacia and the other Saharan trees which otherwise dot the landscape. There’s talk of developing wild animal tokens which might come to represent an alternative store of wealth and prestige for the people here. An Addax token may become the Bitcoin of the Sahara. We shall see. Meanwhile, African Parks is working closely with tribal leaders to set aside crucial areas from grazing by domestic livestock, a bit like marine no take zones, but for desert vegetation.

Thank God for this extraordinary charity; for its leader Peter Fearnhead, a brilliant, steely yet gentle and kind man; for the hundreds of Chadians who protect and manage these two parks, and for the wisdom of the Chadian government in choosing this future for both. Please follow and consider supporting African Parks!

In Colombia’s enormous Magdalena River basin, an ecological anomaly has triggered an extraordinary debate among ecologists. Ought some invasive species to be tolerated, or even welcomed, for the ecological role they play as proxies for lost Pleistocene keystone species? In the early 1980s, infamous trafficker and kingpin Pablo Escobar smuggled four hippopotamuses, one male, three females, from an American zoo to his private menagerie at Hacienda Nápoles. Years later, on December 2, 1993, Escobar was shot dead by members of the Colombian National Police's Search Bloc in a shootout in Medellín. After his death, Escobar’s collection of exotic animals was dispersed to zoos around South America. The hippos, however, deemed too large, too dangerous, and too costly to relocate, were set free and made their way down into the nearby Magdalena River, where they settled and began to breed.

Today, their descendants are thought to number around two hundred, roaming a tropical river basin larger than Yellowstone National Park where they can be observed grazing riverbanks, wallowing in oxbow lakes, and reshaping wetlands in ways no South American native species has in several thousand years. At the outset, amid rising institutional alarm, environmental authorities declared Escobar’s hippos to be an invasive species and even a ‘biological pollutant’, calling for their immediate eradication. In 2009, a young male dubbed Pepe was shot by hunters sent out by local authorities. The mutilated hippo, draped over a tarp, made front pages. Colombians recoiled, protests erupted and a planned cull was suspended. The hippos, once symbols of narco excess, became popular heroes. Left alone, Escobar’s hippos didn’t just survive, they have thrived. Female hippos breed at three to four years old, producing a calf every eighteen to twenty-four months. Population models now project a thousand hippos by 2035.

In a landscape scarred by deforestation, gold mining, and industrial cattle ranching, some ecologists have begun to observe that these African giants may be fulfilling a vital ecological role missing since South America’s catastrophic late-Pleistocene megafauna extinctions. The continent experienced the most complete megafauna loss of any, losing forever giant ground sloths, saber-toothed cats, giant armadillos, elephant-like creatures known as gomphotheres, and a host of other species, primarily between 13,000 and 11,600 years ago, a period that coincides with the widespread arrival and population growth of humans.

Could Escobar’s hippos represent Pleistocene rewilding in action? The closest native analog to the hippo vanished twelve thousand years ago: Neochoerus pinckneyi, a giant capybara weighing up to four hundred kilograms. Like hippos, it was semi-aquatic, grazed grasses, dug channels, and fertilised wetlands with dung. Its extinction left a vacancy in the role of ‘wetland architect.’ Today’s hippos may have arrived by accident, but their role as an ecological proxy for the lost giant capybara in Colombia’s wetlands turns out to be amazingly precise. Which is why a growing number of ecologists are now calling for the hippos to be welcomed for good.

Hippos are true ecosystem engineers. Their voracious nightly grazing reverses the choking of waterways by vegetation, and their trails on the banks and in the water create valuable aquatic corridors. Their wallowing creates open pools that serve as refuges for fish, caimans, and waterbirds during dry seasons. Most crucially, their dung acts as a slow-release fertiliser. A 2024 study in Scientific Reports found that lakes with hippos had 40% higher algal productivity and 25% greater microbial diversity than control sites. Fishermen are reporting better catches near hippo wallows. Ecologist Rafael Moreno describes the hippos as “the only large herbivores left to do the work that used to be done by many”.

Elsewhere in the world, similar stories are unfolding. In the American West, wild mustangs and burros, descendants of escaped Spanish horses and donkeys, were once targeted for eradication as ‘feral pests’. By the 1970s, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management was rounding up tens of thousands of them for slaughter. Public outcry led to the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, which protected them on public lands. Today, ecologists increasingly appreciate their value. Mustangs control invasive cheatgrass, reduce wildfire fuel loads, and maintain grassland biodiversity. In Nevada’s Virgin Mountains, horse-grazed plots support a third more native plant species than ungrazed controls, as well as providing food for mountain lions, wolves, and even jaguars which are showing up across the Mexican border. An economic boon is underway too; wild horse tourism is worth $50 million annually.

Australia’s feral camels offer another parallel. Brought in by the British in the 1840s for desert transport and freed into the wild with the arrival of mechanised alternatives, feral camels now number more than a million in the Outback. An expensive cull was launched in 2010 amid fears of water depletion and habitat damage. But recent studies appear to tell a different story. Australia also lost most of its megafauna species with the arrival of humans, including large, soft-footed herbivores. Today, in the vast Simpson Desert, camels may be fostering vital lost natural processes. Camel wallows retain water three times longer than natural pans, creating micro-oases for birds, reptiles, and rare plants. Meanwhile, indigenous ranger programs now earn $10 million yearly exporting camel meat and guiding eco-tours. The cull has slowed; and some stations are advocating managed herds.

Colombia seems poised for the same pivot. Hacienda Nápoles, now a public theme park, draws seven hundred thousand visitors annually, many of whom come to see the hippos. Local boat operators charge $15 for ‘hippo safaris’ on the Magdalena. Restaurants serve hipopótamo empanadas (a tongue-in-cheek nod). A 2023 economic impact study by the Antioquia Chamber of Commerce estimated that hippo-related tourism injects $22 million yearly into Puerto Triunfo and surrounding towns. Farmers, once fearful, now lease grazing lands to the park. “They bring jobs,” one guide, María Elena Vargas, is quoted as saying. “Without them, we’d be back to cattle and cocaine.”

Enrique Ordoñez, a biologist at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, calls the herd “a global conservation asset”. Another ecologist, Jonathan Shurin, whose National Geographic study tracks hippo impacts, found “no clear negative effects on native fish” and “enhanced productivity” in microbial food webs. Animal law expert Luis Domingo Gómez Maldonado argues for ethical non-lethal management: “It’s not about saving hippos on a whim, but giving them justice and giving the ecosystem a chance.”

There’s one major issue though. The hippos face a genetic crisis. Descended from just four founders (of which only one was male), they suffer a severe bottleneck. Without new blood, harmful mutations will undoubtedly accumulate. Natural selection may purge some of these, but not fast enough. Within fifty to a hundred years, the population could collapse from immune failure, infertility, or a single pathogen. The only fix is to bring in fresh blood, which seems an idea unlikely to garner the support of the scientific establishment or politicians! Nevertheless, a growing number of conservationists are indeed advocating for such a move. Five to ten unrelated hippos from accredited zoos in South Africa, Europe, or North America would need to be imported, quarantined, tested for disease and then released onto the Magdalena river. Within two generations, the inbreeding depression would vanish and adaptive potential would soar. Such a move would echo Florida’s 1995 rescue of its (native) panthers from a similar genetic plight. Eight cougars were imported from Texas, and the effects of in-breeding were quickly reversed.

The conservation movement is not known for its courage, nor for thinking much outside the box. Puritans will howl at the suggestion of adding new unrelated individuals to Colombia’s invasive hippo population. But the hippos are already there. Eradication appears to be practically impossible, logistically, financially, and politically. Sterilisation, the government’s current policy, is already seen to be ineffective. And the exporting of so-far sixty of the hippos to zoos in India, Mexico, and elsewhere is profoundly inhumane without making much of a dent in numbers. Genetic rescue on the other hand has the potential to transform a problem into an extraordinary ecological legacy.

Imagine, Colombia with the world’s only wild hippo population outside of Africa. A living bridge between continents. A functioning, restored tropical ecosystem. Tourists flocking from Bogotá and beyond. A thriving fishing industry. Children learning about nature from the decks of boats. And with Africa’s hippos facing the destruction of their habitat, trophy hunting, poaching and drought, Colombia’s herd would be a safeguard for the species. I know it sounds mad, but the accidental establishment of a population of African hippos on a major Colombian river system seems to me rather wonderful. An accident of history is transforming a damaged landscape for the better in magical and unpredictable ways. The giant capybara is gone. So too are the gomphotheres. But the hippos are here, grazing under ceiba trees, wallowing in sunlit lagoons, fertilising a river system that sustains millions of people. I can’t help longing for Colombia to make the decision not just to let them stay, but to give them the genetic diversity they need to endure. I know I’m going to get flak for this one!

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The loss of APR seems to have been the final straw. Farmers have mounted big protests, and news of their plight has been all over the airwaves. But the public is not nearly as moved by all of this as it ought to be, or might once have been. Notwithstanding our total dependence on farmers, from childhood they and their happy, storybook farms loom large in our individual and collective psyche. Britain has always adored its farmers and their families. The risk of being labelled anti farmer strikes fear into the heart of any politician, let alone one representing a rural constituency. A quiet NFU hand on the shoulder is all it has ever taken for nearly any MP to leap into line. But all of this feels now to be in the balance, at the very moment farmers most need the loyalty and support of voters. A growing interest in healthy food, increased environmental awareness, and a national yearning, finally, for real nature recovery may be to blame.

You don’t need to have an environmental education to see and feel that we live amid an ecological wreckage. Britain ranks among the most nature-depleted countries in the world. Ask any old farmer, or practically any person over the age seventy or eighty, for a description of the nature they experienced during their childhood and you’ll hear stories of mile after mile of richly flowered hay-meadows (of which we’ve lost 97% since the war), grasslands singing with crickets, teeming with corncrakes, turtle doves; fat hedges brimming with yellowhammers, nightingales and all manner of birds now so scarce most people have never even seen or heard one; rural rivers running clear and full of fish; in every field a pond humming with dragonflies; clouds of butterflies; scrub-rich uplands echoing with the calls of cuckoos, curlews, plovers.

In one human lifetime, a farming revolution, fuelled with lavish EU subsidies, has engineered, tidied and drained our landscapes of water, colour and birdsong such that rural Britain today would be simply, shockingly unrecognisable to our great-grandparents. Our national parks in particular are an international embarrassment, hardly a single one of them is worthy of the title. The farming industry rightly points to factors beyond its control for what has happened, unfair market practices, societal expectations of cheap food, skewed incentives and so on. But it’s not all society‘s fault; a kind of slow-motion moral breakdown has undoubtedly taken hold in farming, as evidenced too by the abhorrent treatment of livestock on innumerable (often certified) indoor and outdoor livestock units. An absence of compassion for the natural world, or even a basic understanding of how nature works, seem to be pretty well widespread.

And all the time the public money kept flowing in the billions and billions. Did the farming industry really expect that people would not wake up in the end and scramble to save the last scraps of nature before there’s nothing left? Did nobody expect that the public might begin to understand the scale of what has been lost, and the threat that this fundamental loss of nature from our island poses to our society, and most of all to farming itself? Did farming not anticipate any kind of reckoning?

We are now six years into a momentous seven-year transition away from the opioid drip of unconditional EU subsidies, to Michael Gove’s new Environmental Land Management scheme (‘ELM’). Under the new scheme, farmers are paid no longer simply for existing, but for making real efforts to turn the tide on soil and nature loss. During the entire transition period, farming representatives privately and sometimes even publicly railed against the very idea of public money for public good. Behind closed doors, farmers were assured continually by their lobbyists that they needn’t worry, the transition would collapse. And yet still, more farmers than not have in time chosen to enter the scheme. In spite of everything, ELMS is starting to work out. England (if not yet the devolved administrations) is building a world-first funding programme for farming based on the delivery of much-needed public goods. It’s as if our society has come to understand that our land, plenty of which is hardly productive at all for farming, is not only for growing food; but that we need from it a whole range of things, such as protection from flooding, year-round clean water, abundant nature, pollinators. Countries around the world watching the progress of ELM with interest.

Perhaps, given relentless campaigning against ELM by the farming industry, it was inevitable that the government would look to slash the Environmental Land Management budget, as is now rumoured. The obvious fraying of voters’ loyalty to farmers, who are increasingly, if sometimes unfairly, seen to be beaver-hating, badger-killing maniacs, can’t have helped. Now farmers and nature-lovers have come together in mortification. Only last year, nature-obsessed uplands farmer and writer James Rebanks said that doubling the ELM budget would solve nearly all food, farming and nature issues. Of course he is right. But the government seems not to have listened.

Perhaps if farming industry representatives had recognised earlier that ELM is the surest way of ensuring the continued flow of public money into farming, and had been loudly cooperative in building it, we might be in a better place now. They might also have acknowledged that it is the right thing to do, given the devastation carelessly inflicted on nature, our life support system, by modern farming. We can only pray that the government will see sense and stick with ELM, even if voters appear to be woefully uninformed and disengaged on food and farming issues generally.

I have no doubt that a generous ELM is by far the best way to put right the wrongs of the past, underpinning farm livelihoods and ushering an era of farmer-led nature recovery, while ensuring the ability of future generations to continue to feed the nation without sawing off the branch on which we’re all sitting. We should all fight for it.

I’m starting to worry now though that we’re living in an altogether different world. The new Labour government was elected on a promise to protect and restore nature. And yet here we are a year later wistfully contemplating those halcyon days when No.10 was criticised for 'lacking ambition' on nature recovery. Seemingly every environmental protection in the statute book is under threat.

Nature is not voiceless in today’s government. Defra Secretary Steve Reed cares and is certainly doing what he can to stand up for nature. Ed Miliband, while much more concerned with the drive for net zero, is also an ally in the struggle for more nature in Britain. But no matter which way you cut it, it’s clear that siren voices in the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government and even more so in the Treasury, are succeeding in their calls for the sidelining or scrapping of protections for nature, as well as the defunding of incentives aimed at nature recovery.

The government’s efforts to diminish protections are starting to seem relentless. Part three of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, currently working its way through parliament, appears explicitly designed to rip apart decades of legal protections for our green spaces. Pledges to create new nesting sites for swifts by mandating the inclusion of 'swift bricks' in new developments have been ditched; the chalk streams action plan, for restoring the health of these waterways, shelved; the chemicals strategy for safe chemicals production has vanished; the list goes on.

There are also credible reports that the government's nature-friendly farming fund, known as the Environmental Land Management scheme (ELM), which replaced the EU’s common agricultural policy with the aim of paying farmers to look after nature, is set to be cut drastically. This would catastrophically undo efforts to meet legally binding targets to reverse the decline of nature in Britain. Quite why Treasury officials are contemplating such cuts is beyond me. Nature-friendly farming incentives represent a drop in the ocean in the context of overall government spending, but delivers huge bang for our buck. The benefits of ELM are already beginning to be felt across tens of millions of acres of our world-renowned countryside. Without it, farmers are unlikely to continue their individual efforts to piece back together the natural fabric of our country. They’ll be too busy just trying to stay afloat.

Now, in the newest assault, the government is turning its crosshairs on the 'biodiversity net gain' (BNG) policy, the key legal requirement that all developers must ensure their projects add to nature, rather than just build over it. In other words, when you build a house over meadows, you must seek to restore other meadows near your development. Now, I declare a partial interest here, as I helped with the formation of this policy. It’s a world-leading initiative which, introduced last year, has the potential to create huge reserves of nature. I’m such a believer that I’ve even invested in Nattergal, a new venture that aims to use BNG and other market mechanisms to restore nature at scale, first in England and eventually elsewhere too.

Already, hundreds of millions of pounds of investment have been poured into efforts to create nature gains in the country. But, in an instant, the government has threatened to undermine the whole basis of the policy. By specifically stating that it intends to exempt 'small sites', which account for well over 80 per cent of all planning applications and a massive proportion of all land use change in England, the government is launching a missile at the very heart of this world-leading policy. Scrap small sites, scrap BNG.

What’s particularly galling about this is that the government promised, just a few weeks ago, that BNG was safe under their watch. In response to repeated requests for reassurance that this world-leading policy would be protected, the government promised that they wouldn’t touch it.

Pushing for the dismantling of BNG are the same ministers who claimed to be consulting with green groups and campaigners on part three of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, but then refused to accept a single amendment to it. They have exploited the goodwill of many, including me, who have entered into talks in good faith, only to find that nothing changes and the systemic dismantling of nature’s protections has continued unabated.

For evidence of this, consider how the government announced its intention to wreck BNG this morning: the housing minister Matthew Pennycook went on the radio to announce that a consultation would be held, only to declare that the result would be the scrapping of BNG for the majority of sites. In other words, there is to be no 'consultation'. The conclusions have already been drafted.

Anyone who believes that nature matters deeply, which according to polls is most of us, should now be worried about where this government stands. Every promise they have made to protect the natural world has been placed in doubt. Every pledge they have made to talk to campaigners has so far come to nothing.

This week’s announcements on ELM and BNG leave me stunned and wondering whether this government is the one now waging an actual war on nature. We badly need people from all walks of life to make their voice heard – now.

Just a decade ago, the average Brit had no idea that there had once been beavers in Britain. Now seemingly everyone knows that beavers are a native species, that they’re back living wild in parts of Britain and that they’re playing a vital role breathing life back into our terribly nature-depleted landscapes, all while helping to protect communities from both flooding and drought. Beavers are the zeitgeist. Yet despite huge and growing public support for the legal return of beavers, as has taken place across mainland Europe, releasing beavers remains firmly illegal.

Beavers were eradicated from Britain and driven to near extinction in Europe centuries ago. Trappers sought not only their fur, but also the yellowish oil, castoreum, that beavers exude from sacs beneath their tail. This oil was in such demand for use in early cosmetics that the value of a single beaver in Dark Ages Britain was equal to an entire year’s earnings for the average peasant. By the time of the First World War only tiny remnant populations of European beavers remained in the mountainous reaches of eastern France, Germany and Russia. Since the beginning of the last century beavers have been granted legal protection in a growing list of countries, while the value of their fur has diminished. Consequently, they are staging a remarkable comeback. Carefully planned reintroductions have taken place across Europe, and while numbers remain at a tiny fraction of their former level, there now exist perhaps two or three million European beavers.

Across the Channel, decades of frustration here in Britain may have led to some rewilders taking matters into their own hands in a practice known as ‘beaver bombing’. Just think: every single wild-living beaver in Britain today is there as a result of unlicensed releases. Beavers have returned centuries after their extirpation in spite of, not because of, government.

Three years ago a family of beavers settled in the Somerset valley I call home. Since then they have created a paradise. Their huge shield-shaped lodge at the centre of a small pond island is built of sticks and plastered with dried clay. They have bred during each of the last two years, and the growing family has extended a string of small, perfectly engineered dams along the length of the valley, giving the appearance of a series of meandering Japanese rice terraces. The beavers have taken a particular liking to the aspen and willow of the young woodland, digging little canals outwards on each side to reach them. By felling some of the trees, they have created a sunlit mosaic of clearings in the woodland that are flooded with water in the winter and with the colours of an English water meadow in the spring and summer. This beaver-made wonderland which sings with life of all kinds is like no habitat I have ever previously seen.

Beaver-made wetlands are not only of huge benefit to wildlife, they also protect us from flooding, seasonal drought and even wildfire. In the absence of beavers, winter rainfall brings torrents of water that flash down all the streams at once, bursting the banks of our straightened and dredged waterways and flooding communities further down the catchment. Floods in turn give way to dry, lifeless ground (and hosepipe bans) through the summer once the water has gone. Beaver dams slow and regulate the flow of water, holding it back, giving nature time to cleanse it of sediment and farm pollution, and releasing it gently, clean, through the year.

Opposition to the return of beavers arises mostly from misunderstanding. There are worries that migratory fish such as salmon and trout might be unable to make it past beaver dams, which ignores the fact that these fish co-evolved over millions of years with beavers. In fact it is likely the beaver taught the salmon how to jump, and young salmonids depend on the cool, stable pools and gravel spawning beds created by beavers. Some people object to the perceived mess created by beavers along the water’s edge. But once we let go of our innate desire to tidy and subjugate every square inch of land and begin to trust that the beavers know what they’re doing, our reactive anxiety becomes appreciation. It’s against our nature to grant another species autonomy over any part of the landscape, which is why the return of beavers represents such a momentous cultural shift in the British psyche.

The return of beavers to Britain is cause for great celebration. We must hope that the Labour government finds the courage to stand up to the bullies and legalises beaver reintroduction now. If they do, a plethora of conservation organisations, farm clusters, river keepers and water companies stand ready to get on with the job of restoring beavers to all of our river catchments. The best way for you to join the chorus is to support the brilliant Beaver Trust today!

[Published in The Spectator 15 January 2025.]

The big question arising from this week’s Cairngorms lynx story is not how the unfortunate creatures got there; but why lynx, a secretive, beautiful British native species, has not been officially reintroduced to Britain long ago. There are no good reasons for not doing so. Britain has some of the remotest, wildest landscapes in Europe: The Cairngorms is Europe’s largest national park, and the Highlands of Scotland are second only to Lapland as Europe’s least densely populated area. Our landscapes are full of lynx’s favourite prey, deer. A lynx is about the size of a labrador, posing no threat to people, and in any case they keep themselves so well hidden that in Scandinavia they’re known as ghosts of the woods. Contrary to the shrill reporting of recent days, lynx don’t tend to take livestock. They’re ambush predators, lying in wait among the trees until a roe or other small deer passes beneath.

Lynx have recovered from near extinction across Europe, and are now found in virtually every mainland European country, including in areas as densely populated, intensively farmed and developed as many of our own lowland landscapes. Lynx would do just fine here and it would be so easy to bring them back, but as usual Britain squats in joint last place with neighbouring Ireland when it comes to undoing past wrongs and restoring landscapes and lost native species. Why?

I’ve seen the answer firsthand during nearly two decades of obsessing over nature recovery in Britain, and especially during five years as a non-executive director of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The assorted vested interests, farming representatives and landed cliques who direct from the shadows how our wildlife and landscapes are managed have an astonishingly poor understanding of how nature actually works. ‘Beavers eat fish.. they’ll kill all the trees!’, ‘dredge the rivers to stop flooding!’, ‘shoot seals to save salmon!’… Calls to kill things, flail things, drain things, spray things, concrete over things and generally to subjugate nature are the knee-jerk response in rural Britain to all questions. It’s worse in Scotland and Wales even than it is in England, where change seems at last to be in the air. But it’s not just ignorance that clouds rural policy in Britain.

The malevolence of a small, organised rural cabal that is opposed to any kind of wildlife recovery, and the stranglehold it has over weak-kneed government officials, simply cannot be overstated. The British public overwhelmingly demands the return of beavers and storks and eagles and lynx and vibrant landscapes which sing with life. People increasingly understand that such landscapes, in which people work with the grain of nature rather than against it, are not only more joyful, but are also far more effective in protecting communities from flash flooding, drought and other natural events. They know that healthy landscapes are the key to maintaining into the future the very ability of nature to feed and nurture us. But a few puce-faced individuals, stuck in a mindset of ruthless, short-term exploitation and cold dominion over nature, just won’t allow any of it. That’s why nothing ever happens.

Life is short, and you can well see why some people are tempted to take matters into their own hands, even if at times their efforts fall flat for lack of basic planning. Just think, every single wild-living beaver in Britain today is there as a result of unlicensed releases, not to mention goshawks, wild boar and a host of other recovering native species. These all returned in spite of not because of government. The holding up of the Tayside beaver ‘fiasco’ by the National Farmers Union of Scotland as a comparative warning against unlicensed wildlife reintroductions is an odd choice when you consider the triumphant reality of that situation; which is a beaver-made ecological recovery unfolding across one of Scotland’s largest river catchments. The River Tay is now the wild source population for all subsequent beaver reintroductions in Britain. While government obfuscated and obstructed, in the early 2000s someone performed a miracle out of the back of a van. Meanwhile, the entirely legal annual release of 50 million+ non native pheasants into the landscape by a different set of people without a shred of paperwork tells you just who is in charge of affairs.

The Scottish authorities were so terrified this week of the wrath of rural vested interests that they turned out hordes of police, supported by acquiescent conservation organisation employees, with guns and cages and heat seeking night sights and drones to seize a family of semi-tame tabbies unfortunate enough to have been left out in the woods. You’d have thought the police might have better things to do.

So save your outrage not for the blunderers who presumably thought they could make a difference by putting the Killihuntly lynx family out there, but for a rural policy system that is entirely corrupted from top to bottom. And be happy that this particular lynx family is now warm and fed in Edinburgh Zoo, safe from the keepers’ guns.

If you doubt what I’ve written here, ask yourself why native, vital beavers are still illegal in England, if not now in Scotland where legal releases are cautiously underway. Year after year, in spite of massive public support and growing reams of science calling for their return, nothing changes. One DEFRA minister after the next has promised to legalise beavers before being bullied into silence by shadowy rural lobbyists. What’s the betting there’s no good news on beavers in England in 2025?

Nevertheless, the times they are a changin’. A number of important organisations are casting out their own caution and joining the fray - this week it was the amazing National Trust.

Public understanding of nature is on a roll, in large part thanks to some excellent comms by Britain’s growing wild population of ‘illegal’ beavers. Even among farmers and larger landowners, and especially the younger ones, attitudes towards nature are changing. The Nature Friendly Farming Network is fast growing into an alternative to the blustering, backwards National Farmers Union. The Oxford Real Farming Conference has started to make the actual Oxford Farming Conference look like a sideshow. Farmers undoubtedly have it tough, and a number of their most pressing demands are bang on. But their representatives have done them no favours by refusing to engage with the zeitgeist and by standing vociferously against the wishes of the public when it comes to relatively small-hat issues such as lynx in our national parks. As DEFRA Secretary of State, Michael Gove used to talk of having to sit through “yet another NFU whinge-athon”, a comment which would have been unthinkable for any of his predecessors, while the new Labour crop don’t seem as bothered about ranked tractors along the Mall as might have been expected. A new social contract may be emerging.

So while we may have to wait a while longer for the return of lynx to the wild in Britain, be happy, because good things are happening in 2025. And join a nature organisation today!

London too is embarking on a rewilding journey. I was lucky enough to play a small part, as co-chair of the Rewilding London Taskforce. The lower reaches of the Thames are for the first time in centuries a place to spot seals in abundance, clouds of seabirds, teeming fish, dolphins and even whales. Beavers, carefully reintroduced at Enfield and at Ealing (where they were released by the Mayor himself), are weaving their watery magic and fascinating locals who pass by in their hordes to see what’s going on. More beavers will surely come to transform the smaller streams that meander down through the suburbs and the city. Led by rewilding organisations such as Citizen Zoo and the London Wildlife Trust, whole communities are coming together as volunteers to heal local nature, hauling out discarded shopping trolleys, clearing invasive plants and plopping hundreds of water voles into newly restored watercourses. Rewilding volunteering is becoming a big thing. London’s parks and green spaces are getting in on the act. Anyone who has visited Hyde Park or Regents Park will have noticed rough, grassy, flowery edges left unmown for the first time and new areas of life-giving scrub dotted with berries at this time of year, a vital refuge for songbirds. Even London’s expanses of flat rooftops are no longer being left to tar, but are being strewn with a mix of rubble, soil and the seeds of wild grasses and flowers, making meadows in the sky that are beautiful new habitat for butterflies, bees and black redstarts. There’s talk of reintroducing white storks and even enormous white-tailed eagles at Dagenham.

Restoring nature in our cities serves a practical purpose: there is no more effective or cheaper tool at our disposal for mitigating flooding and drought, which are two sides of the same coin, than the establishment of ‘green infrastructure’, otherwise known as nature, which absorbs, stores and purifies rainwater before releasing it slowly for us to use. Streaks and patches of nature in the city also clean the air; and reduce the peak temperature of built-up areas on hot days; all while sucking huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere.

More importantly though, this is a visceral thing; and a birthright. Why should a child growing up in the city not experience the wonder of nature in their daily life? Who says we can’t have diverse and abundant wildlife in our cities? Londoners are most likely to suffer ‘nature deficit disorder’, a term conceived by Richard Louv in his marvellous book Last Child in the Woods and used to describe the array of physical and psychological deficiencies attributed to a lack of connection with the natural world. We know that patients recover quicker if they can simply see nature out of their hospital room window; that prisoners are calmer and ultimately less likely to reoffend if they spend time growing their own potatoes or raising chickens. And most of all children need nature in their lives. Anyone involved with raising children knows this. London’s children and all Londoners deserve to have the chance of looking up and spotting a peregrine falcon swooping on the wind, or hearing the profoundly evocative summer sound of swifts screeching overhead; of collecting nuts, berries and fruits to eat; they should know and love the wildflowers and the birdsong of spring and summer.

In her iconic Book of Wilding, Isabella Tree lays out  the importance of creating connective corridors of nature across whole landscapes, including those densely populated by people. Canals, road verges, railway banks and rows of terraced house gardens all provide ample opportunity for green veins to join up the larger patches of nature that dot the city. And in the suburbs, there are opportunities for much larger areas of self-willed nature, places of real wildness. Enfield Chase, Hainault Forest, Dagenham and Crayford Marshes, Epping Forest, Richmond Park and a number of others, these are some of the best ecosystems in southern England, right here in London.

All of us can get involved in the rewilding of London. If you have a small patch of land under your stewardship, amazing. But opportunities to volunteer abound. Anyone can cajole their place of work or their community to do more. There’s so much joy to be found participating in the restoration of nature. ‘Generation Restoration’,  the UN has taken to calling us. And we are. Be happy,  Londoners, because our city is well on the way to joining Mumbai, Bogota, Montreal, The Hague and a host of other newly nature-centric cities.

A nature-loving chief executive of Cemex two decades ago decided that the company would acquire 140,000 hectares of degraded land on Mexico’s border with America, an area larger than Los Angeles, renaming it the El Carmen Nature Reserve. Working in cooperation with neighbouring landowners on both sides of the international border, miles of barbed wire fencing have been removed; invasive trees and other plants cleared out; concrete dykes, culverts, dams and other hydrological infrastructure broken apart and now water is free to flow, eddy and pool as it likes across the land. A great, vibrant mosaic of grasslands, savannah and forest is reawakening and wildlife is pouring back in. Desert mule deer, white-tailed deer and black bears have returned of their own accord, while the team has carefully reintroduced pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep and even American bison, now numbering in the hundreds. These are the first free-living bison in the plains of northern Mexico for nearly two centuries, and they are a source of immense pride and satisfaction for Alejandro Espinosa Trevino who has led this project from the start. I learned all of this in an obscure cement industry publication.

Two thousand miles to the north, in northern Montana, the American Prairie Reserve is quietly rolling out a prairie restoration on a scale never previously attempted, with a goal of piecing together, opening up and restoring to a wild state an area comparable in size and splendour with Africa’s mighty Serengeti. Already hordes of school children and other visitors flock to spend time in landscapes of a kind that have not been experienced in America since the arrival of the Europeans. Just to the west, the ambitious Yellowstone to Yukon initiative seeks to create a corridor of wildlife habitat stretching two thousand miles up through North America’s rugged north-west. The inspiration came from a lone female wolf who managed to make that perilous journey south, dodging traffic, infrastructure, farms and hunters, before being shot on arrival in Wyoming. One of the main achievements of the initiative has been the establishment of wildlife crossings over highways, so-called green bridges, which have the added benefit of dramatically reduce road traffic collisions with wildlife. The results are already astounding. Caribou and elk migration routes that have been severed for decades are open once more, and grizzlies are making a steady recovery southwards and eastwards. The State of Florida too is devoting significant resources to recreating its own wildlife corridor up into Georgia, and there’s even now talk of reintroducing vital cougars to tackle surging deer numbers and an ecosystem that is tipping dangerously out of balance in America’s Atlantic north-east.

It's not just in America that rewilders are on a roll. The recovery of iconic wildlife in Europe has been one of the greatest conservation success stories every told. European brown bears, wolves, wolverines, lynx, bison, moose and beavers, some of which were on the brink of extinction just a few decades ago, are reconquering huge swathes of their former range. Legal protection played a big part in this, alongside farm abandonment and the unintentional rewilding of the continent’s least agriculturally productive landscapes, and the establishment by communities, nature organisations and governments of core rewilding areas. At least two dozen of these can now be found from Swedish Lapland, to Spain’s Iberian Highlands, to Italy’s Apennines, to the wilds of Romanian Carpathia. A growing body of evidence tells us that it doesn’t take much for nature to come dramatically back to life. All we need do is take our foot off its throat and ensure that dynamic natural processes are permitted to play out. Often this means proactively restoring missing keystone species, such as European bison, which by their grazing, browsing, trampling and dung engineer complex, sun-dappled woodland mosaics that simply abound with life. Or beavers, which by their damming of the smaller creeks and streams create strings of pools, awash with the colour of wildflowers, magnets for creatures of all kinds, and vital to the healthy functioning of watersheds for the benefit of wildlife and people alike.

It is hard to think of a movement more overbrimming with optimism, joy and meaning than the one that is dedicated to restoring wild places, of which so few remain. Rewilding may be the most powerful tool we have for restoring equilibrium to our ecosystems, to the climate and to our own individual and collective lives. We need nature not only for everything we have and everything we do, but on a more visceral level, in ways that we barely understand. A brief time spent in nature, walking, swimming, hunting or turning the soil to plant potatoes in the backyard is restorative in a way that nothing else can be. We are nature. And nature is us. Any separation that we perceive is a dangerous illusion. This is why instinctively it feels to right to people that rebuilding what we have broken should be the over-riding task of our time. And it’s happening, from the Caribbean to Kazakhstan, from Chile to China, from Spain to Saudi Arabia, new initiatives are being born and efforts are being ramped up. Bit by bit we are rewilding the world. But hardly anybody knows about all of these extraordinarily inspiring stories. Which is why I found myself nose deep in Global Cement Weekly that winter’s evening, and why I decided there and then to launch my Rewilding the World podcast series. So, please, tune in!

In his brilliant recent book Hunt for the Shadow Wolf, Derek Gow explores the hatred people harboured for wolves. Considered the incarnation of the devil, wolves were loathed, hunted, trapped alive, dragged back and ritually burned alive, eviscerated, torn apart by dogs or cruelly tortured in some other unspeakable way in front of crowds of baying men, women and children. Across Europe, a whole-of-society effort was mustered to do away with them, and in all but a few places it worked.

Anyone who has paid a visit to the beautiful but utterly denuded Highlands of Scotland has seen what happens to a landscape that has been stripped of wolves. In the absence of predation, deer numbers have skyrocketed, stripping the hills and glens of young trees, scrub and flowers. Hordes of red deer, a woodland species, huddle underweight and exposed on bare hillsides that are devoid of any kind of cover. The Highlands has become one of the most degraded ecosystems in all of Europe, largely on account of having lost not just wolves but all four of its keystone species.

The native Highland cattle, whose grazing, browsing, trampling and dung kept in motion a vast, twinkling, semi-open woodland mosaic known as the Caledonian Forest, was expunged along with the native people during the brutal Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th Centuries. Powerful landowner drove out the people and their cattle and cut the trees in order to fill the landscape with sheep. When the price of wool collapsed in the face of cheap imports from across the British Empire, native deer took the place of the sheep as the land was converted to vast hunting estates.

Driven to extinction at the same time as the wolf was the wild boar, nature’s gardener, whose constant rootling in the soil is of vital importance for an array of germinating plants, from ephemeral wildflowers such as poppies and scarlet pimpernel, to the mighty aspen and black poplar, trees which have now virtually vanished from Britain. And some time earlier, the beaver, the keystonest of all keystones, whose intricate dams built along the creeks and streams create sunlit ribbon wetlands which abound with life in a vibrancy that we are unused to seeing in Britain today.

A 4 minute video entitled How Wolves Change Rivers has now been watched nearly fifty millions times. The video documents how the reintroduction of north American wolves to Yellowstone National Park unleashed a trophic cascade of ecosystem recovery. Not only did wolves bring the numbers of wild herbivores under control, they changed their very behaviour, instituting an environment of fear, whereby deer and other grazers came and went quickly to and from the riverbanks, rather than milling about. Berry-laden scrub and trees returned, creating ideal conditions for everything from grizzly bears to beavers to salmon, which began to return in great numbers. Wolves protect the mountain’s green mantle from too many hungry mouths. Take them out and quickly the whole ecosystem begins to teeter.

Now though, across Europe, the keystones are back in growing numbers, and with them, predictable calls for ‘culling’, which is a euphemism for ‘eradication’, made by a small, vocal and often vicious minority. The killing of wolves has already been stepped up in Sweden, Norway and more recently in Switzerland, which appears on course to allow 70% of its wolves to be wiped out in spite of a national referendum vote in 2020 to keep wolf protections in place. Pressure in Switzerland is now also growing for greater leeway to kill lynx, beavers and even eagles. The same influential minority in Austria, Germany, France and Spain are watching with beady eyes, as the EU Commission President, Ursula Von Der Leyen, whose unfortunate pony was eaten by a wolf, has made it clear that the EU most certainly has wolves in its sights.

The reasons given are invariably shaky, including the danger posed by wolves to pets, livestock, game and even to people. Wolves pose little or no threat to humans, with records of wolf attacks on people in Europe virtually non-existent across centuries. Wolves are timid carnivores which avoid humans at all costs. Among the risks to which the European public is exposed, wolves simply do not feature. Meanwhile, dozens of Europeans are killed each year by dogs; and in Britain alone more than 100 people were killed by cows in the last two decades.

If perceived risk to humans is the deciding factor in whether wildlife is permitted to exist or not, then humanity ought to set about eliminating large wild animals from across the world; the leopards, lions and the tigers which are found in countries more densely populated and far poorer than ours; the jaguars of Latin and Mesoamerica; the cougars that live virtually in the centre of Los Angeles (and throughout the American West); and let's not forget the buffaloes and the large antelopes and the hippos and crocodiles and anything else which is capable of injuring or killing a human. Outside of Europe, wild animals larger and more troublesome than wolves are found in many countries, and if we followed to its logical conclusion the argument that wolves are ‘too dangerous’ to tolerate there’d be nothing left anywhere.

Certainly wolves are a nuisance for livestock farmers. But the scale of the impact is substantially overstated. France has many wolves, and lost a total of just 0.02% of its sheep population to wolves in 2022. A tiny number, you’d have thought, but sufficient to elicit histrionics on the part of French livestock farmers, along with demands for lethal retribution (on top of the generous compensation sheep farmers already receive). What they don't tell us is that almost ten percent of sheep in France, millions of them, die every year from all other natural causes (exposure, parasites, falling from cliffs, foxes and so on). Meanwhile, wolf coexistence measures such as dedicated sheep dogs, electric fencing and even donkeys are being rolled out successfully from Belgium to Italy to Spain. Last year sheep losses to wolves were halved in Belgium compared to the previous year thanks to such measures, in spite of a growing wolf population. Co-existence between livestock farmers and wolves is not as hard as we are led by the extremists to believe.

So while wolves, like most other wildlife, will always be considered a nuisance by some, a nuisance factor is just not good enough a reason for deciding to eradicate a native wild species from our midst. If it were, why stop at wolves? The tunnelling of moles in fields creates a menace for cattle and horses; badgers allegedly spread bovine tuberculosis; foxes kill chickens and gamebirds; otters target ornamental fish and aquaculture; eagles are said to take lambs; beavers fell trees; in fact you can hardly name a single species larger than a blue tit which isn’t a nuisance to someone or other. Do we rid ourselves of them all? There are some who would say yes.

Or should we try to find ways in which to coexist with wildlife, perhaps with a little humility as to our own lack of understanding in the way we intervene in the natural order of things? Might we find within ourselves a grudging respect for the wolf, our mortal rival across the aeons; empathy, even, for this intelligent, mysterious, social creature which plays such a vital role in maintaining the health of our shared natural environment and whose very presence injects a much-needed frisson into our lives?

Here in Britain, devoid of wolves, hunters have shown themselves simply unable to stay on top of exploding deer numbers. As well as increasing traffic collisions with deer, Lyme disease from deer ticks and the hollowing out of our remaining woodlands, crop damage by deer now poses a very real threat to our very food security (in a way that a few sheep on the hillside eaten by wolves could never be. It's worth noting that thirty million hopelessly subsidised, environmentally-ruinous sheep account for less than one percent of the food produced in Britain.) 

We are told that all farmers hate wolves. But it's simply not true. European farmers who grow crops, fruit, vegetables or raise pigs welcome the return of wolves for obvious reasons. Is it time, then, to bring wolves back to Britain? And not just to the Highlands, but to East Anglia, where much of our food is grown? Is the idea really so mad? There are now more wolves in the Netherlands, a country more densely populated and more intensively farmed than Britain, than there are in Norway. Wolves don’t need wilderness to thrive. Any British tourist who has travelled to Europe in recent years has been, most likely unknowingly, in a landscape populated by wolves. Wolves are even now to be found hiding out in the outskirts of major cities such as Rome, Amsterdam, Paris and Madrid.

How would wolf numbers in Britain be controlled, we’re asked. The science is clear: wolves and other apex carnivores do not need controlling. Once their numbers are recovered they find equilibrium. A number of North American studies expose the fallacy that humans need to manage (or, revoltingly, to "harvest") wolves.

Poll after poll shows that a substantial and growing majority of people across Europe wish to see continued strict protection for wolves, lynx and other large wildlife. Here in Britain, people want our lost wildlife back. This is as much true of rural people as it is of the rest. In a major recent poll of rural people across 10 European countries, more than two thirds felt strongly that wolves, lynx and other large wildlife species should be protected properly, and the benefits they bring to the natural environment taken into account. The numbers remained high even among farmers. Vanishingly few reported feeling that anti-wildlife ‘special interest groups’ speak for them. The times they are a changin’.

Since the Enlightenment, we humans have managed to remove ourselves from the miracle of nature, which shines all around us. Everything that has gone wrong stems from this. Only when we rediscover harmony with wolves and with all wildlife, no matter how irksome it may sometimes be, will we reimagine our own place in nature, which is surely the greatest task of our time. Learning to live with wolves is totemic.

According to folklore, the Somerset Levels was a hiding place for King Alfred of Wessex at Athelney following the fall of his kingdom to the Vikings during the Easter of 878 AD; thereby coming to be known as the birthplace of England. The earlier establishment of several monasteries and churches at Glastonbury (whose name is derived from the glassy appearance of the water that once surrounded it) is linked to the legend that Jesus Christ came here, having travelled to Britain with the merchant Joseph of Arimathea, later one of the disciples, a legend immortalised in William Blake’s epic Jerusalem. The two are said to have visited the ancient town which, like the other elevated settlements that dot the Levels, is built on top of what was once a natural island known as Glastonbury Tor.

And this fabled landscape was sacred earlier still, to the Celts, because of its confluent position on one of Britain’s most significant ley lines, which are said to link the sacred sites of England. Ley lines are often likened to the Chinese feng shui idea of beneficial alignment, or to the energy associations of Aboriginal songlines.

If Christ did indeed visit the Vale of Avalon, his experience would have been radically different from what you’ll find today. Heading west from Selwood, where I live, undulations give way to a flatness, the latticework of neon-green fields broadening into much larger ones bordered by fences instead of hedges. There are fewer trees, I imagine because of the deep peat beneath. A town named Street heralds your arrival in the Levels. The landscape is wide and seems somehow concave, and sinking. Black and white Friesian dairy cows crowd some of the fields. Interspersed are expanses of maize in summer, and dark, bare soil in winter. Sheep dot the higher ground in the distance. Several canals run dead straight across the landscape. There isn’t much to suggest today that this had once been a marvellous inland sea. Just a blink of an eye ago, wild ox and horses, boar, red and roe deer, lynx, wildcats, beavers, pine martens, cranes, marsh harriers, white-tailed eagles, vast aggregations of wading and sea birds and even Dalmatian pelicans abounded here; the water thronged with salmon, trout, all kinds of fish, extraordinary numbers of eels and even pond turtles.

The Somerset Levels are fed by the rivers Axe, Brue, Parrett, Tone and Yeo, all of which have been engineered beyond recognition, in works carried out mostly since the Second World War with the sole aim of transferring their flow into the sea as fast as possible and creating an artificial area of dry ground for farming. A human-made river, the Huntspill, was built during the 1940s with sluices at both ends to serve as a sixth major drainage channel. Those who worked on the project failed to dig the Huntspill as deep as had originally been intended, making gravity-fed drainage from the surrounding landscape impossible. As a result, the water must be pushed uphill at great expense by the continual action of pumps. A seventh major drain running between the River Parrett and King’s Sedgemoor Drain, named the River Sowy, was completed in the 1970s. For miles around, the landscape is artificially drained by a vast network of smaller rhynes that are pumped up into the larger drains. Meanwhile, much of the peat that underlies the Somerset Levels has been removed using giant machines to sell as fertiliser, leaving behind ugly pockmarks across the western reaches of the landscape.

It’s hard to conceive of a place more comprehensively dominated, manipulated and transformed away from what nature intended for so little gain. What was once western Britain’s great mist-shrouded, sacred wetland has been converted into 140,000 acres of dull, low-grade, unprofitable farmland, all of which is slowly collapsing into a mire of drying peat in a process that produces a greater volume of greenhouse gas emissions every year than everything else in Somerset combined. As the peat dries out and the ground sinks ever lower, the effort required to keep out the water becomes ever greater. The eye-watering cost is borne by taxpayers, though few know anything about it. To me, the whole thing is an ongoing, bewildering act of vandalism.

A gaggle of nature organisations including the Somerset Wildlife Trust, Somerset Wildlands, Natural England and others are doing their best – in the face of stiff opposition – to restore life to the Levels. Their efforts are focused on an area that has come to be known as the Avalon Marshes, recently declared Britain’s newest super nature reserve, where they have cobbled together and rewetted several thousand acres. The unmarked road leading to Shapwick, at the centre of the initiative, is long and straight, and runs above the level of the surrounding farmland. Once, the Neolithic people who lived on the higher, drier ground here used wooden sticks pinched from beavers to put together a huge grid of wooden walkways across the flooded, reedy ground. Some of these are still present today, preserved in the peat and exposed now once again.

The small but growing patchwork of connected reserves here at the centre of the Avalon Marshes offer a glimpse of what could be. The rhynes have been stopped up and water levels have been allowed to rise despite unrelenting obstruction from the internal drainage boards. Life is already flooding back into a mosaic of habitats; channels of water snaking through broad beds of reeds, areas of open water and small elevations of land carpeted with wildflowers beneath stands of willow and alder. The birdsong is rich and varied, different from anything I know from my own patch to the east. Rare wetland birds sing from within the green; last time I visited, two marsh harriers glided lazily overhead. The booming of bitterns can be heard here for the first time in generations, and even majestic cranes, eaten by nobility and royalty to near extinction centuries ago, are breeding here once again. Vast murmurations of starlings take shape during the winter. The Avalon Marshes is a place like no other I’ve ever experienced in Britain.  

There are some parts of Britain where current land management runs so contrary to the grain of nature, for so little productivity, that wholesale change is needed. The landscape of the Somerset Levels, representing both an ecological catastrophe and an economic folly, falls into this category. It really is time for the pumps to be shut down, the drains stopped up, the streams and rivers rewiggled, and the water allowed to return to where it belongs. A whole new way of living needs to emerge here, with an increased focus on nature tourism; traditional, extensive summer-only grazing by native cattle, water buffalo even, and perhaps some semi-wild horses; the harvesting of reeds for building material and soil conditioner; the pathway oiled with so-called natural capital payments to reward landowners for their help in reducing flooding, delivering cleaner water and taking measures that store carbon from the atmosphere. This too is a place where the government should be more prepared to buy land that comes up for sale. With ever greater deluges of water falling from the skies each winter, in the Somerset Levels change is inevitable. So we might as well come together and embrace it now.

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