Land conversion and the end of the wild

Humans have always been living with the nature of our planet. We’ve always been converting our planet and using the species on it, but it’s only really in the last 50 years that we’ve been able to convert the planet on a massive scale.

If you put it into historical context, you can see evidence of hunting and land use change throughout human history and, of course, much of Europe was converted centuries ago. So, what we’re living in is already a very human-modified area. The areas that concern us now, conservation-wise, are the ones where conversion has had a lighter touch up until now.

Climate change is going to be a huge issue, but much of the effects from climate change are exacerbating effects that were already there. Currently, the most urgent threats to species and habitats are not about climate change: they’re about our use of land.

Each generation remembers what nature was like when they were children. We calibrate our entire understanding of our natural history and our loss of nature to that time.

When I think about my childhood, I think about lapwings, large aggregations of starlings, orchids and those kinds of things because I was born in a chalk grassland in the South Downs of the United Kingdom. Each of us is calibrated to those things.

Of course, the previous generation was calibrated to something very different. You realise this when you go to other places where there’s huge biodiversity. When I went to Australia, it was a huge revelation about what biodiversity can be like, because I was used to the biodiversity of my childhood.

The other thing we need to remember is that, even over our own lifetimes, we forget how things were. So, you might think, oh, well, nothing really has changed in nature. But then you might ask yourself, when did I last see a really large aggregation of starlings? When did I see a particular orchid species that I used to think of as common? Then you realise that it’s maybe only been a couple of years, or maybe it’s been longer.

I was thinking about my son, who’s 20, and about taking him around our garden as a child. Ten years ago, we very rarely found caterpillars. Then I remember my childhood when I was always finding those big furry caterpillars. My mum used to say, ‘Don’t touch it!’ It was quite a common species. Yet, I don’t remember ever saying that to my son, and that’s because I didn’t see it. I think we all need to think about that.

Land conversion mainly means the end of the wild; turning most of the world into what we see in Europe, which is semi-wild but mostly domesticated agricultural landscapes. Those agricultural landscapes are not without value. We have biodiversity in our agricultural landscapes, but they are dual-purpose landscapes. One of the things we may need to think about, as we move forward, is how to have more biodiversity-rich dual landscapes where people and nature co-exist.

I think there’s a real tension within conservation about whether we go the way of separating humans from nature. Do we hold onto the wildness that we still have, i.e. the unconverted areas or converted areas where there is still nature? And then separate out the humans so that we intensify the areas that we have, and grow our food? That’s one way to think about it. The alternative way is to have multi-functional landscapes in which humans, wildlife and natural and converted landscapes can be more integrated.

I’m more for that second path, because I think humans without nature is a sterile existence. I think there’s quite a lot of evidence that people need wild places. People need nature in order to have good well-being, and that includes within the cities. We need to think about how we green our cities and how we live alongside and with nature. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have wild spaces – those last close to pristine areas – but we need to think about how we live alongside nature as well.

The international way of thinking about conservation actually stems from the North American experience, where they have vast areas that are still relatively natural. They have these big protected areas where they think they can maintain a semi-natural function. That doesn’t work in Europe, and I’m not sure it works terribly well in most parts of Africa.

One of the big fallacies we’ve had in our export of conservation from North America and Europe into places like Africa is thinking that you can exclude people from natural areas; that you can take an area that is perhaps lightly populated or where people are using it for a pastoral livelihood, think that it’s empty and treat it accordingly. I think it was the same in South America – coming in thinking that areas were empty because they didn’t accord with your idea of human use, and then truly emptying them.

For example, we brought rinderpest to 19th century Africa. It was a massive epidemic that killed large numbers of domestic animals and wildlife. That meant that when Europeans were thinking about setting up large protected areas like the Serengeti, rinderpest had already run through, and they seemed empty of livestock and people. We were seeing an unnatural kind of fluctuation of what nature should be, and that was caused by us.

This comes back to what I was saying before about shifting baselines, about not seeing the bigger picture and therefore thinking that everything we see now is how things should be or have always been.