Then, at the World Wilderness Congress 11 days ago, I heard how people and nations with very few resources, under almost impossible circumstances, were protecting or reintroducing "difficult" wild animals, species which are controversial, and which require the largest habitats.
Amid the hope and wonder, what hit me hardest was this: while in Britain we applaud the courage of people in poorer nations and celebrate their successes, while we send money abroad to conserve large wild animals and, rightly, become upset if people start killing them, we seem determined not to participate. Protecting species towards the top of the food chain, with all the difficulties that can involve, is something other people should do: we would rather stand back and watch.
I have been trying to understand why we are so far behind the rest of the world, why we fetishise deforested and almost empty ecosystems, why the United Kingdom, in the words of the biologist David Hetherington, is "the largest country in Europe and almost the whole world" which no longer possesses any of its big (or even medium-sized) carnivores, and why, above all, our conservation groups seem so unconcerned about the depletion of nature in Britain and so disinclined to address it.
Rewilding Europe points out that its findings do not invalidate concerns about the global loss of biodiversity. This is happening at rates unparalleled since the previous mass extinctions, caused by meteorite strikes or gigantic volcanic eruptions, and it is being driven by human action: the trashing and clearing of habitats, pollution, acidifiation, global warming and the direct killing of vulnerable species.
Europe is not immune to these extinctions, and some species, on land and particularly at sea, are being pushed to the brink with astonishing speed.
But at the same time something remarkable and unexpected has been happening. In many parts there has been a great restoration of habitats: partly accidental, as farmers have vacated marginal lands; partly deliberate, as ambitious European conservation groups have secured the protection of large areas. There has also been a sharp reduction in the persecution of many species which people previously either hunted for sport and food or sought to exterminate as vermin. Animals which were once hated are now protected and cherished. Even the species which seemed least likely to return – those which require large territories and were reviled by people – have started to bounce back.
For example, by the first world war, the wolf's range in Europe had contracted to just 7% of what it had been at the time of the French Revolution. It was extinct almost everywhere. Well into the second half of the 20th century it was still persecuted in its last redoubts.
But since 1970 its population in Europe has quadrupled: there are now about 12,000 wolves on the continent. Relict populations in eastern Europe, Italy and Spain have expanded into much of Germany, the French Alps and as far as central France, Catalonia in Spain, Denmark, Belgium and even, on two occasions, the Netherlands. While its populations are not everywhere secure, it is now as likely to be welcomed as feared, as a new generation of nature lovers delights in its reappearance, and as wolf-watching businesses have sprung up, generating income and employment in places where both were in short supply.
Photograph: David Ebener Lynx populations have also quadrupled over roughly the same period (to about 10,000 animals), and have spread – largely through deliberate reintroduction by conservationists – from their holdouts in the Carpathians, the Balkans and Scandanavia into places from which they had previously been erased. They are once more living in France, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland and Italy.
<SNIP> Please click this link to read the rest of this fascinating article!
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