Conservation in the 21st Century

[James Fenton]

I read Grant Moir's article 'Conservation in the 21st Century' with interest. However I am concerned that he is promoting a view that is not in accordance with the evidence.

I do, though, fully support his view that, in the hills we should not intervene where possible, but "let nature take its course". However the evidence suggests that over the past millennia this has what has been happening in the Scottish hills, more so than perhaps has been the case anywhere else in Europe. The dominant natural processes have resulted in woodland decline from a post-glacial maximum, so that the relatively rarity of woodland in our uplands is in fact a natural characteristic: this might be expected in the oligocratic phase of an interglacial.

Hence, when 'rewilding' is used to promote native woodland cover in Scotland, it means going against the 'natural processes' which Grant is promoting, i.e. it is in fact the opposite of 're-wilding'. You cannot 'rewild' if much of the landscape is wild already (although getting less so by the day)! To get woodland back into the landscape you have to reduce deer numbers to way below the natural carrying capacity or put fences up everywhere – neither of which are particularly natural processes.

The open nature of the Scottish hills, making them a pleasure for hill walking, is a natural characteristic which we should be celebrating: rather than trying to convert them to something else based on a poor understanding of the ecological history of the vegetation. A topic which warrants much more debate ...

[Alteknacker]

Prompted by the sight of old (Caledonian Forest??) tree stumps in the peat around Ben Alder, I did a bit of reading into the history of the extent of tree coverage in Scotland shortly after walking in the area a couple of years ago. From my admittedly very limited reading, the view seemed to be that it was colder and wetter weather together with man (clearing land for grazing, felling trees for charcoal, etc.) in combination with general overpopulation by grazing animals, starting some 5000 years ago, that lead to the progressive reduction in tree cover. Apparently the forest cover was only about half what it had been by the time the Romans arrived. Is that view superseded?

I was also very interested to read at the time that 14000 years or so ago, Scotland was largely tundra - ie no trees...

[al78]

I don't think any of Scotland's landscape is natural, in the purest sense. Agriculture, the extinction of deer predators such as the highland wolf, the industrial revolution which led to mass deforestation to produce charcoal for industry, have all contributed to the landscape we see today. If you eliminated all humans from the Scottish highlands, in a millennia or so it would look completely different.

Hence when we talk about spoiling the landscape, it is somewhat ironic that it is already "spoiled" by human activity.

[NickyRannoch]

I think the article says let's have an honest conversation and not much more.

To say the open nature of Scotland's hills is a natural feature as if Braeriach, the Angus Glens and the Cuilin are all the same thing is just a bit silly. The habitat of much of upland Perthshire around me takes a hell of a lot of manpower to achieve.

I don't think anyone talking about rewilding is suggesting planting forests on Ben MacDui.

Letting nature take its course doesn't mean picking a date in 2019 and just doing nothing from now on(although on balance it would be a huge improvement in some areas).

There's obviously going to need to be some human intervention and flinging up a few deer fences is definitely on the lighter touch of that scale than introducing lynx.

[dav2930]

May I ask why you think people should believe your assertions as opposed to those of the Chief Executive of the Cairngorms National Park Authority? Do you have any particular qualifications or expertise which might lend some credibility to your unorthodox views? Do you seriously think that all the scientists involved in rewilding projects in the Highlands and elsewhere have a topsy-turvy understanding of the ecological situation?

[Skyelines]

If the original poster is the same James Fenton as the author of this article https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233352373_A_postulated_natural_origin_for_the_open_landscape_of_upland_Scotland then it is perhaps possible to see that he has an axe to grind.

[stirlingdavo]

Do you have any particular qualifications or expertise which might lend some credibility to your unorthodox views?

If the OP is who his username suggests then he may know just a little about the subject.....

In my view at least, he has a point that should be heard. We should be debating the issue more. Evaluating what we are doing in our uplands in terms of management and valuing what we have already are not bad things to do. To be clear I am no supporter of grouse moors and their management. Far from it. But flinging tree saplings of dubious provenance onto unsuitable ground in poorly devised planting schemes and calling it 'conservation' is a folly that occurs far too often.

Even if somewhere supported trees x thousand years ago, it doesn't mean it can, or should, be forced to be wooded now. The Scottish climate has changed, even before humans had anything to do with it, and the land has changed too. Soil nutrients have been lost. Seed banks wiped away. In many places bog exists where trees once stood, and bog is no bad thing. Often it has far greater benefits in terms of carbon capture and flood alleviation than trees do.

Instead of harking back to prehistoric ideals, we should be working towards sustainable landscapes that allow nature to thrive and grow. Of course that can include healthy forests, but it will also mean healthy moors, bogs, heaths, meadows and grasslands. Rewilding does not necessarily equal trees, trees and more trees.

[Border Reiver]

It seems to me that the solution to encouraging tree growth, or indeed all plant growth, is to keep the deer population down. Fencing in (to exclude deer) of small plots of land in Glen Affric, Glen Luibeg and Glen Derry in the 1980's resulted in an amazing regrowth of natural trees without the need to plant anything. The trees are there already and just waiting for the chance to grow without being browsed by deer. A different approach was taken in Coire Ardair. Many of the deer were removed and the forest reappeared.
When I first walked up Glen Lui in the 1980's, it was a bare glen above the bridge and there were hundreds of deer on and near the river flats. I was last up there in March a couple of years ago and saw no deer, but the regeneration of the trees (mainly Scots Pine) was amazing. I remarked to my wife at the time that at some time in the near future, there would be little or no views of the mountains ahead as you walk up the glen.

[Skyelines]

Do we need to be slaves to some imagined past or should we make choices that suit us today and what we perceive to be of benefit in the future for ourselves and the environment?

The fact that there are different views of what the past environment of Scotland’s Uplands was like indicates that they are based on interpretations of the remnant evidence of the past. Interpretations of the unseen past based on remnant evidence depend on the assumptions made by the observers. These assumptions cannot all be verified as true hence the resulting conclusions are based to some extent belief. The further we look back in the past the greater the requirement for belief in the truth of the assumptions and the less certain the conclusions.

In my view since we cannot definitively identify what the past was like there is no reason for us to hold to some imagined past based on any particular interpretation and attempt to recreate it. We are free to manage the environment, both now and in the future, in a way we believe to be most beneficial to ourselves and the environment.
We could create a wide range of diverse habitats in place of the deer and grouse deserts that currently exist in much of the uplands. The limits to the habitat’s extent will be in part dictated by the capacity of the land to support the various flora and fauna and where we choose to establish them. We could leave some areas untouched if we wished but we know that even then activities and changes elsewhere can have consequences there too. The reality is that to a greater or lesser extent we cannot avoid management of the environment.

[James Fenton]

"An imagined past?" Ecology is a science, in the same way geology and climatology is a science. Evidence can be used to determine the geological history of the earth, certainly with some extrapolation, but a consensus view emerges. Why should it be any different in understanding the vegetation history of Scotland, on which there has been a lot of palyonological and historical research? For example, the eminent geologist James Geikie concluded, in 1865, that the Scottish woods disappeared through natural causes (confirmed by modern pollen analysis) and the eminent historian Christopher Smout calls the Great Wood of Caledon 'a myth'.

Certainly the grouse moors of the eastern Highlands have an overlay of human activity, that is a pattern of burning, but they would still be heather moors, burning or no burning. If we stopped managing, they would revert to a more natural state.

And yes, I do believe that the Scottish conservation community is going down the wrong track in promoting more woodland. If everyone is doing and saying the same thing, then it must be the right thing to do! No-one dares to delve too deeply into the underpinning evidence in case they find something that undermines the message they have been giving to the public over the past few years. Peer group pressure is a strong thing!

And the level of debate is not very high, along the lines of:
"How do we know there are too many deer?"
"Because there are too few trees."
"How do we know there are too few trees?"
"Because there are too many deer."

[major ac]

Surely we know there are too few trees and too many deer because when we reduce the deer numbers then we get more trees! Glen Feshie is a good example - deer were reduced to a sustainable level and the woodland came back. There is no doubt that the deer numbers on many parts of the Highlands are far too high - hence the need for winter feeding still carried out by a lot of estates else the deer starve.

[al78]

And the level of debate is not very high, along the lines of:
"How do we know there are too many deer?"
"Because there are too few trees."
"How do we know there are too few trees?"
"Because there are too many deer."

That is not an unreasonable argument if the deer are grazing the small saplings and killing them before they get a chance to grow into mature trees. Since the extinction of the highland wolf deer have no natural predators, so their population does need to be kept in check, deer stalking effectively adds a man-made predator to control populationm, whilst bringing in some income.

The primary reason land needs to be managed is because humans have exploited it to the point where it is out of equilibrium with the normal feedback processes and sustainable cycles which happen in a true wilderness. It is a case of humans trying to compensate for humans trashing the landscape.

[NickyRannoch]

"An imagined past?"

Certainly the grouse moors of the eastern Highlands have an overlay of human activity, that is a pattern of burning, but they would still be heather moors, burning or no burning. If we stopped managing, they would revert to a more natural state.


And the level of debate is not very high, along the lines of:
"How do we know there are too many deer?"
"Because there are too few trees."
"How do we know there are too few trees?"
"Because there are too many deer."

They would still be heather moors but they would be a hell of a lot more ecologically diverse (and yes that would mean less of some species too). You really don't have to wander all that far in the eastern highlands to see where the man management has been taken away that birch and rowan spring up along riverbanks.

Your second point is nonsense. We know there are too fee trees because whenever we put even minimal controls on deer numbers the trees come back.

We also know there are too many deer as there is an entire industry devoted to managing their numbers so that thousands of animals aren't killed by starvation and pestilence every year.

[davekeiller]

I think it's worth remembering that archaeological evidence suggests that the highlands were inhabited in pre-Roman times, and that before the highland clearances there was what we would today call subsistence farming in large areas of the highlands (that's how some of the paths and bothies got there). Scotland is also home to a number of species that were introduced by man (grey squirrels, some deer species, various plant and tree species etc.).
All of this means that the landscape we see today has been influenced and affected by human activity for hundreds if not thousands of years. We therefore need to be clear what we mean when we talk about "conserving" or "re-wilding" areas.
We can't completely return to the past, and nor would we want to, but there should be more of a debate as to how we best focus human activity to obtain a desirable outcome, and what that outcome should be.

[James Fenton]

Tom Devine in his latest book The Scottish Clearances (a good read, by the way) states: "Settlement in the western Highlands and Islands was mainly confined to very limited areas because of the challenging constraints of geology, climate and geography. Therefore, when modern visitors contemplate hills and glens which are empty of people, they should not assume they were inhabited in the past. Or that their present silence and loneliness were necessarily the consequence of later clearance and emigration."

This is confirmed by the Roy maps of 1750 (all available on the National Library of Scotland website) which shows large tracts of the Highlands uninhabited and no more woodland then than now: in the period before sheep farms, sporting estates and industrial exploitation of the woodland. The woods must have disappeard way before 1750 in the period when wolves were present. Research shows that there was a significant decline 4-5,000 years ago (the age of most of the bogwood) attributed to climate change. If early human settlers got rid of all the woodland (how?), why did the trees not regrow in the later period when large tracts were uninhabited (if ever inhabited)?

The arguments presented by others above supports my assertion that people assume that there are too many deer because there are too few trees: people seem to just 'know' that trees should be more common. However the correct questions to ask are:
1) What determines the population size of herbivores?
2) What is the expected natural distribution of woodland in the Highlands in this, the oligocratic phase of an interglacial period? (research shows woodland regression in previous interglacials without humans being present).