My worldview is being turned on its head. Again.
And again it’s all about how I have been taught about the land, or perhaps even more accurately, how I have been surrounded by common perceptions and assumptions about the land.
A beautiful friend was being taught by a well-regarded permaculture teacher. This teacher was showing slides of grassland – one slide showed old pasture fenced off and left alone. The grass had grown lank and smothering, no new species had yet come in and it was ‘poor’. Another slide was grassland that was mowed once a year – and was overflowing with diversity, a species-rich flower meadow. The implication was that human management can be beneficial to a living system, and that lack of management can often lead to ‘poor’ land. The friend asked how the gorgeous wildflower meadow existed before human interference. He was told that it didn’t, that it is a human artifact. “But then, where did all the wildflower species and specialist insects come from? Where did they live?”
We all know that before humans started farming, the whole of Britain, and the whole of Europe, was covered in forest. Wildwood. Everybody knows this. It was humans who started to clear trees for growing crops and keeping animals. This is backed up by our experience – if you leave a piece of grassland alone without human intervention, trees grow and it eventually becomes a wood. You can see this happening right now. This is also backed up by science – eminent 20th century biologists like Tansley and Watt developed the theory of succession to describe how a field turned into woodland: first dense weeds and shrubs invaded, then scrubby trees and pioneers like willows, hazel, birch, rowan etc, then eventually came your ‘proper’ trees, your beech and lime and elm and oak which made up the ‘climax’ vegetation. Colonisation always happened in stages. This was demonstrated by the archaeological pollen record – this kind of succession of species could clearly be seen in the spread of trees northwards as the climate warmed in the aftermath of the last ice age. It was noticed, however, that young trees need light, and therefore do not grow very well underneath a dense forest canopy. The regeneration of trees within the forest was explained by saying that when old trees died, they collapsed and created a grove in the forest where light could reach the ground and new trees could sprout and replace the previous generation. Makes sense, no? This is accepted knowledge. It is received wisdom.
The problem with received wisdom is that you just receive it – you don’t think about it for yourself. Is it really wisdom then?
My worldview is being turned on its head because I’ve been reading Grazing Ecology and Forest History by Frans Vera. It’s a pretty dense beast of a book, rigorous and academic. And I’m wondering how to summarise it, to get across the important bits. Here goes.
If all of northern Europe was a closed canopy forest, why do we have so many species that do not exist in dark, dense forest? Why have there always been loads of oak and hazel and birch and thorns when these tree species only regenerate in the light? Why do we have species-rich wildflower meadows and grasslands? If there was only forest, where did the wild grass-eating animals live, the aurochs and bison and wild horse and red deer?
Vera compiles bucketloads of evidence (from pollen records, documentary sources, observations of current forest dynamics and animal behaviour, how trees grow etc.) to support the theory that the natural (see how this word is used to mean “does not include our human culture”?) vegetation of northern Europe was not closed forest but a constantly shifting, dynamic mosaic of different habitats. This system was driven by the large native herbivores (aurochs, bison, deer, elk, reindeer, wild horse, wild boar, beavers etc.) and as a massive generalisation went a bit like this:
A wood will spread, as we saw above with the theory of succession. Scrub and thorns are the first to emerge, and then within the thorny thickets oaks and hazels can grow because they have both light and are protected from hungry animals by the thorns and branches. Vera shows that a wood can spread even with grazing going on – it is only with very intense grazing that a wood cannot spread. So these light-demanding species do not grow in the forest, they grow on the edge. As the thorns spread and more and more trees grow, they start to shade out the scrub and thorns, which allows shade-tolerant trees such as beech and lime and hornbeam to grow up and form what we think of as forest: dense, dark woodland with lots of trees. These trees will eventually die, and because there are browsing animals around and no spiky havens to protect the tree seedlings, the seedlings get munched and the vegetation becomes grass-dominated. This grassland in turn, eventually, is colonised by more scrubby thorns which protect the oak and hazel, and the whole cycle revolves. So there are always areas of grass, and of scrub, and scattered trees, and woods, and this must just be a simplified version. There are niches for all the species we see and know.
You might think: So What? This book was written for nature conservationists who try to preserve enclaves of natural Nature, and therefore the system described is in the past; it no longer exists. To begin with I was also thinking: This is cool, but So What?
Firstly, I think it is mind-bending and incredible to start (just to start!) to see the land as constantly shifting; it is never stable; it is fundamentally dynamic. Habitats and systems are surging, roiling, not just within themselves but through space. A wood wants to move. It is always walking. “Fear not, till Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane!”
Also, it totally changes how I think about the place of humans in this system, and what we’ve done over the centuries. Agriculture emerged within this shifting mosaic, open and closed and diverse and abundant, and as such agriculture evolved to take advantage of what was already there: grains and crops were grown in the already open areas, domesticated cattle were grazed on the existing grass, pigs foraged in the present woodland, fuelwood was cut from the scrub and thorn. The first agricultures were almost certainly shifting, in mimicry of their environment. In this respect agriculture copied the actions of the large herbivores: eating and cutting grasses, removing trees, replacing wild with domestic animals. In a sense humans harnessed already existing forces that created growth, we stepped into the role of the large herbivores. All of them. And then made most of them extinct. The last aurochs was killed in the forests of Poland in 1627. We also made most of their predators extinct, at least locally. Bears, wolves, lynx etc.who were also part of the complex system – regulating herbivore numbers, which affected vegetation dynamics and so on. It makes sense to me that mimicry of pre-existing forces within the system was the most ‘productive’ way of growing food – it was merely taking advantage of the strong currents and mechanisms which have evolved over millions of years. And this mimicry has been passed on and passed on and it still exists today – albeit in an ever-more perverted way. Cutting hay is a analogue of areas of winter grazing; coppicing is an analogue of the browsing of young trees; forestry is an analogue of the growth and death of shade-tolerant trees.
The change from shifting to settled agriculture is also relevant and fascinating, because it leads to increased specialisation and compartmentalisation of land-use. A growing agricultural pressure on land means that different uses of land, such as arable, livestock and wood production, become more and more incompatible. It is more ‘efficient’ to enclose land, to parcel it up. That is why the vast majority of the land in this country is a field with a fence, wall or hedge round it. But as soon as you create boundaries you stop habitats shifting. You trap them. A wood cannot walk any more. That is why grazing woodland these days is so disastrous, even at low levels: the wood cannot escape through its thorny edges and fringe. Any regrowth within a woodland is vulnerable, because it has evolved to be so. That is part of the system. Woodlands have evolved to be grazed, but only if they can run.
The facts that we (humans/our culture) have a) removed from the ecosystem nearly all of the drivers of the dynamic pattern of habitats, and b) replaced them with animals which we control, and c) fenced off these habitats so they cannot shift, really really help me to understand how we exist in relation to the land. I cannot overstate this. That understanding seems key to me, fundamental, and it nudges me towards reinterpreting everything I thought I knew about the land, about what is ‘natural’, and about what land health means.
A Country Punk 