ECOS 35(3/4) 2014
Editorial
Who’s wild now?
This edition of ECOS carries several articles based on talks given at the 2014 Wilder
By Design Part 1 conference. The editorial paper below addresses some of the issues
raised at the event and to be continued at the September 2015, Wilder By Design Part
2 conference.
IAN D ROTHERHAM
As the organisers hoped, the 2014 Wilder By Design event raised critical issues in
debates on future ecologies and landscape visions. Not only were key questions
presented and debated, but matters of interest and controversy were laid bare in a
series of excellent presentations and discussions. It was expected that views would
be strongly held and indeed, that there might be disagreements and differences
publicly aired; and we were not disappointed. This selection of articles represents a
cross-section of themes from the event. Full conference presentations and invited
contributions will be published as a book following the 2015 conference. Some
major paradigms and lines of tension were clear in the lively discussions and debates,
and here I highlight some fundamental issues.
Essentially, many of us feel that conservation is failing1,2 and catastrophically, and
wish to see a ‘wilder’ futurescape. It is not necessarily that the toolkit is wrong,
but that it is being applied mistakenly, amateurishly, and misguidedly. However,
listening to the debates, one wondered whose landscapes are these. Many
proposals seem driven from the outside looking in, people separated in some way
from a ‘pure’ idealistic ‘Nature’ almost harking back to the Romantics. This appears
a little like the Imperialist ecological idea that the main problem for conservation
in foreign countries was the natives. Get rid of them, and everything will be fine.
Local peoples and cultures are seen not as a part of Nature, but as a problem to be
solved. In Scotland, many of the areas viewed as ‘wild’ were well populated, utilised
landscapes back in the Bronze Age or earlier, and only lost their communities
through externally imposed clearances by absentee Lairds. These lands were always
wild, but they were not wilderness.
But then one wonders, is the severance between people and Nature desirable; and
much detailed research indicates cultural severance to be a major environmental
catastrophe.3,4 Furthermore, ideas and concepts of ‘wild’, ‘wildness’ and ‘re-wilding’
are human perceptions of the environmental condition, so is it all in the mind? Even
in defining ‘the wild’ and ‘wilderness’, we are imposing human values onto the
canvas of Nature. Just as the American pioneer conservationists were wrong in
believing Yellowstone and other areas were indeed wild, when they were really ecocultural, do we make the same mistakes?
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ECOS 35(3/4) 2014
ECOS 35(3/4) 2014
Is ‘re-wilding’ a human response to a basic need to seek purity and freedom in
a world dominated by human body-odour? Yet in attempting to ‘re-wild’, the
intervention itself is human-driven and controlling. Is there a difference between
the ecologically derived ‘scientific’ view and the geographically, spatially aware,
but subjectively imposed ideas of wildness? In selecting subjective criteria for
‘wild’, does this not mean a circular argument whereby wilderness areas are those
you thought were wild in the first place? For some it seems that the human
perceptions of ‘wild’ and ‘Natural’ outweigh any values we might place on species
and nature conservation. With the aspirations of traditional conservation dismissed
in favour of free Nature to do as it may, to survive or to fail, humans can stand
back and observe. However, how do we feel about upland zones of bracken,
rhododendron, birch thickets, gorse, Sikta spruce and red deer? These could
be exciting and sit alongside lowland recombinant communities of Himalayan
Balsam, buddleia, Japanese knotweed and sycamore, and how fascinating might
that be? Yet as soon as we intervene, as we cull, introduce, eradicate, cut, spray,
re-plant or fence off, we are carrying out a deliberate, calculated intervention;
that is not free Nature. The burden of being human in the modern world is in part
responsibility for our actions, past, present and future. Ecology determines what
is possible, ecological science predicts what this will be, but we decide what we
want; and we intervene or not to get it. Not to intervene is itself an intervention.
5. Rotherham, I.D. (2009) Cultural Severance in Landscapes and the Causes and Consequences for Lowland
Heaths. In: Rotherham, I.D. & Bradley, J. (eds.) (2009) Lowland Heaths: Ecology, History, Restoration and
Management. Wildtrack Publishing, Sheffield, 130-143.
Why does wild stop at the gateways to out towns and cities? Urban landscapes are
rapidly moving from the wild nature ideas of the late Oliver Gilbert and towards
a new horticultural fashion. Yet Ollie’s ‘urban commons’ were nature freed and
unpredictable, but populated by people. If we want urban decision-makers and
taxpayers to support wilder landscapes, then surely we need to sell them the idea
and on their doorsteps. Traditional commons and heaths were populated and
utilised too, and created eco-cultural landscapes of immense species richness.5
Is that really so bad? A chasm appears to lie between those wishing to conserve
Nature, those wanting a Nature freed from (perceived) human influences,
and those desiring a Nature wilded but through grazing with primal analogue
herbivores. In seeking the wild, how wilding balances with abandonment and
severance, is a serious question; this especially so if wilded landscape burn, as
they often do.
This major international conference organised by Professor Ian Rotherham and
colleagues, is sponsored and supported by: BANC, BES, IPS, IUFRO, ESEH, Sheffield
Hallam University, the Ancient Tree Forum and the Landscape Conservation Forum. It
follows on from the successful event in May 2014 which covered a range of perspectives.
So I finish with the questions – Whose Nature? Whose wild? Whose vision? Who’s
deciding? Who’s paying? To be continued in September 2015...
References
1. Rotherham, I.D. (2014) Eco-History: A Short History of Conservation and Biodiversity. The White Horse
Press, Cambridge.
2. Rotherham, I.D. (2014) The Call of the Wild. Perceptions, history people & ecology in the emerging
paradigms of wilding. ECOS, 35(1), 35-43.
3. Rotherham, I.D. (2008) The Importance of Cultural Severance in Landscape Ecology Research. In: Editors:
Dupont, A. & Jacobs, H. Landscape Ecology Research Trends, Nova Science Publishers Inc., USA, Chapter 4,
pp 71-87.
4. Rotherham, I.D. (ed.) (2013) Cultural Severance and the Environment: The Ending of Traditional and
Customary Practice on Commons and Landscapes Managed in Common. Springer, Dordrecht.
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Ian D. Rotherham is Professor of Environmental Geography and Reader in Tourism &
Environmental Change in the Department of the Natural & Built Environment, Sheffield Hallam
University. [email protected]
Wilder by Design? Part 2
Managing landscape change
and future ecologies
9 to 11 September 2015 at Sheffield
Showroom & Workstation, Sheffield, UK
In 2015, the themes will be expanded to look critically at projects, issues and
perspectives from across the world as well as in the UK. The conference will examine
concepts of cultural severance and the nature of eco-cultural landscapes as well as
addressing critical issues around (re) wilding in both rural and urban situations. The
paradigms of wilder landscapes and the interactions between nature and culture,
between history and ecology, and between climate, people and nature, will make
for a continuing and rich discussion.
Speakers already confirmed include Adrian Newton, Alastair Driver, Peter
Bridgewater, Ted Green, Keith Alexander, Jill Butler, Della Hooke, Rob Lambert,
George Peterken, Peter Taylor, Sue Everett, Chris Spray, Tomasz Samojlik, Kenneth
Olwig, Frans Vera and Tom Williamson. Chris and Anne-Marie Smout will be
attending as guests of honour.
The conference will include a poster presentation session for new researchers as
well as displays and posters from more established organisations.
More information and a booking form is available from the events page on www.
ukeconet.org . If you wish to offer a paper or support for the conference please
email [email protected]
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