Rewilding barren lands is now a real possibility, say campaigners
Jessica and I were speaking at the Northern Uplands Chain Local Nature Partnership last week about the challenges facing farming. It is not just George Monbiot who supports and alternative approach to sustaining rural farming communities as this article demonstrates. It still leaves the question of whether people are really up for a loss of some of our most bucolic landsc apes. The article tells us:
“Many people look at these expansive views and call them beautiful,” says Alan Watson Featherstone, looking out over the remote hillsides north of Loch Ness. “But what we’ve really got is a barren landscape that is almost entirely devoid of native woodlands and predators. It is frozen in time.”
Mr Featherstone is a leading advocate of rewilding – a strand of the conservation movement with ambitious plans to revive the biodiversity of rural Britain by reintroducing native species. He wants to see the return of birch, oak, Scots pine and aspen across the Highlands but his plans don’t end with flora.
If the rewilders have their way, wild boar, lynx and even wolves could soon be restored to sylvan Britain, where they once roamed more than 1,000 years ago.
“What we’ve done here, and across much of rural Britain, is to allow herbivores [deer, sheep and cattle] to run wild, destroying flora and fauna,” he says. “At the same time, we’ve hunted all their natural predators to extinction.”