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Rebirding by Benedict Macdonald review – rewilding Britain and its birds


The peoples of this globe have variously assaulted, modified and shaped the lands they live in, but few have manicured their homelands to death. Yet this, so Benedict Macdonald argues in his splendid new book, has been the fate of the British. The changes began long ago, he says. Britain’s mammoths were gone around 12,000BC, helped on their way by ice age hunters. Its last brown bears were vanquished by 2,000 years ago, and its wolves by the 18th century.

Yet even at the beginning of the industrial age, Britain still retained its wild reaches. It was the Victorians and Edwardians, with their enthusiasms for “improvement”, who routed the last of the raptors and other “undesirable” wild creatures. But it was the age of fossil fuels and neoliberal economics that finished the job. Before machine mowers, weedicides and whipper snippers, British landscapes had their untidy corners where insects could feed and songbirds forage and find safe nesting sites. Today, the baleful influence of economic efficiency is even depriving small creatures of their last sustenance – the grain once left behind by harvesters. Apart from the mendicants at our nest boxes and bird feeders, Britain’s wild creatures are increasingly left homeless and starving.

In many areas, the landscape changes happened so long ago that nobody remembers the land in a less altered state. Indeed, many Britons resist measures aimed at releasing nature from their vice-like grip. This would be unproblematic were nature not dying off in this tidiest of lands. Thankfully some young environmentalists, Macdonald among them, have had enough.

Until around 3,000 years ago, 20% of Britain’s surface consisted of fens, swamps and marshes. Such environments are highly productive, and British fens were rich enough to be the redoubts of giants. The great Dalmatian pelican, the world’s largest freshwater bird, flourished in Cambridgeshire and Somerset until Roman times, and for long after Britain was a land of white-tailed eagles, cranes and bustards.

Bison, cattle, wild boar and the predators maintained European diversity over millennia.
Bison, cattle, wild boar and the predators maintained European diversity over millennia.

Bison, cattle, wild boar and their predators maintained European diversity over millennia.Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images

Reintroductions of red kites and white-tailed eagles following their extermination have redressed the balance to some extent, and Macdonald even dares to dream of Dalmatian pelicans soaring again in Cambridgeshire skies. But as Rebirding plaintively points out, today the bigger battle is being lost: Britain is being emptied of even its smaller, more common birds, such as cuckoos, swifts and sparrows.

Its not that Britain is lacking national parks and other unpopulated places where wild creatures could thrive. Scotland’s Cairngorms national park is half the size of America’s Yellowstone, which supports 4,000 bison, 30,000 elk, 500 brown bears, 250 black bears and 95 wolves. Yet the Cairngorms are bereft of all such creatures except a few reindeer and red deer. Saliently, Macdonald reminds us that Britain’s national parks were not established only for the preservation of nature, but to benefit industries as varied as cereal cropping, sheep and dairy farming, and deer and grouse hunting.

Surely the most dismaying message of Rebirding is that the British are gardening their islands to death. Everythingfrom landscapes to individual endangered species are being managed and monitored according to human-set targets. But nature is dynamic: populations and habitats need to grow, mature and change if biodiversity is to thrive. If only the British would keep their hands off it and let nature take its own course, Macdonald contends, it would stand a chance.

One of the most important arguments he mounts is that the large mammals he calls “landscape architects” must be returned to Britain – bison, wild boar and the predators that influence their density and distribution are what maintained European diversity over millennia. There is one place in Britain where this great experiment is being run – Knepp Estate in West Sussex, 3,500 acres where primitive breeds of cattle, pigs and ponies have been left to roam.

Let’s be the first generation since we colonised Britain to leave our children better off for wildlife

Benedict Macdonald

The result is astonishing. Some of Britain’s rarest birds and butterflies now thrive at Knepp, and habitats lost for generations are returning. Tiny Knepp is now outshining many much larger, supposedly natural areas, in terms of its biodiversity. Yet many of the people living around Knepp have objected to the changes. Some see the new emerging landscapes as untidy and the resort of weeds (which is by and large untrue), while others feel that the messiness is profoundly unBritish. Such attitudes remind us of how difficult the job of rebirding Britain will be.

Macdonald is persuasive that the current uses of many of Britain’s unpopulated places offer poor economic returns relative to the activities they could support if the focus was on the restoration of nature. Rebirding argues for four changes that must occur if we are to hope for better outcomes: first, national parks and other wild lands must be managed for wildlife rather than for grouse, deer, sheep, forestry, dairy and cereal farms. Second, we must introduce large mammals, the landscape architects, and let them do their work. Third, we must let nature heal itself. Finally, we should stop tidying things up.

“Let’s be the first generation since we colonised Britain to leave our children better off for wildlife,” Macdonald exhorts. All rational argument seems to be on his side.

Rebirding is published by Pelagic. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.