Thoughts from influential nature conservationists…
JO CARTMELL
Career highlights
I am not sure that an innate passion for Nature, which is as natural to me as breathing and began during childhood from the moment I could walk, could be classed as a ‘career’. My curiosity was nurtured by my Celtic-hearted, Irish father introducing me to a toad and butterfly chrysalis in the garden, and wildlife-loving mother naming a water rat in the nearby chalk stream that I’d noticed (as water voles were then known), the local names of wildflowers on our walks and those found in my grandmother’s meadow.
The main focus of my adult life, apart from my family, has been on saving water voles, wildflower meadows and the reintroduction of beavers.
In 2004, I was alarmed to learn that my beloved water voles were in steep decline whilst undertaking water vole surveys for the Wildlife Trust. There were 8 million of them at the beginning of the last century – and they were still ubiquitous during my 1950’s childhood. This resulted in trying to make the nation aware of their plight through Twitter, blogging, and setting up the watervole.org.uk website with Stephen de Vere, who also created a four minute Quick Guide to Water Voles film which I helped with as a field assistant and wrote the script. It was well received, has been viewed 68,994 times and has been used by Wildlife Trusts and the People’s Trust for Endangered Species.
I also worked as a field assistant for some of the species shown on two feature length documentary films by Stephen de Vere, entitled Return to the River – Diary of a Wildlife Cameraman and Summer in the Meadow – Diary of a Vanishing World. I was delighted with the footage obtained of species such as water shrews, tree-climbing water voles, red-tailed mason bees which nest in snail shells and then thatches to hide them, and mating roe deer. They were unusual sequences to film and the passionate narration revealed their extraordinary lives and the effects of our presence on them. I delight in team effort and the results were amazing!
My intense childhood interest in wildflowers had deepened as I wandered in local wildflower rich hay meadows in the 1960s – which had somehow escaped farmers being told to plough their meadows for food production during the Second World War. In 1999, I was shocked to learn that native wildflower meadows had declined by 97%. Nothing much seemed to be happening nationally, so I became a fellow warden of a local nature reserve.
In March 2015, I began a series of blogs about my garden’s mini meadow, and the insects found there, to raise awareness of their decline: https://nearbywild.org.uk/jos-mini-meadow-1how-transformed-lawn-into-beautiful-nearbywild/. This has inspired people to begin their own mini meadow projects, both large and small, to increase wildlife habitat offering native larval foodplants and diversity, and to help vital pollinators such as solitary bees, bumblebees, moths and butterflies, seed and insect-eating birds, bats, small mammals, and amphibians.
Much to my astonishment, due to my call for beaver reintroductions on social media, I was invited to write an article for The Ecologist in 2014, entitled ‘Beavers are re-introducing themselves – and we should let them’. This reminds me how grindingly slow our bureaucratic nation is to act on this, as other European countries steam ahead with their reintroductions, and is something that Derek Gow rightly challenges: https://theecologist.org/2014/jan/29/beavers-are-re-introducing-themselves-and-we-should-let-them
In Chapter 14, p. 235, of Eoghan Daltun’s An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A Personal Journey into the Magic of Rewilding he says:
“(In Beara, I’ve heard it said that ‘land is like a religion for some people’. As set out in previous chapters, there are very real historical reasons for a frequently obsessive relationship with land in Ireland, passed down over generations.)”
I had wondered whether the combination of my innate love of nature and my father’s passionate relationship with the land and wildlife (for the reasons I have just discovered thanks to Eoghan Daltun) had forged in me a bond with the land and wildlife that few understand, if they do not have the same Irish roots. This bond has deepened over time following a Zen Buddhist training which started in 1983 and sees everything in Nature as being “we inter-are, or no self or Other”. This has fostered an attitude of reverence and respect.
How do you define nature conservation?
Initially in the 1980s, when I attended school trips with my children to wildlife sites, I would have said that nature conservation depended on humanity’s ability to manage the environment so that nature thrived. So, I became fellow warden of the local 17 acre wetland nature reserve Barton Fields, Abingdon, in 2003. Experience taught me that we were always playing catch-up in managing this wetland with its mosaic of habitats, including grassland, marsh, scrub and woodland, alongside the river Thames. The realisation happened whilst watching beavers (in Sir David Attenborough’s The Life Of Mammals) who work tirelessly, creating wetland ecosystems and repairing leaky dams. Also the absence of using grazers, such as Exmoor pony and European bison, to manage the scrub, create wildflower meadows, and provide dung for dung beetles. An ecosystem is not formed by tractors, or even scythes! Part of their formation is through the presence of mammals, including ecosystem-managing water voles!
In subsequent natural history programmes on beavers, and during their reintroductions in the UK, I learnt that these expert hydrologists and ecosystem engineers really do know what they are trying to achieve. We human mammals pale in comparison in wetland management: beavers are able to create new habitats with much more ease than our cumbersome, fossil fuel burning, machinery. Also, beavers have the wisdom to move on to new territory, so that wildflower meadows grow and flourish in dried ponds which are then grazed by Exmoor pony and bison, whereas most humans are very static in their approach to Nature conservation. Donna Rainey in Northern Ireland is achieving success by allowing horses to graze a former silage meadow through the winter which is not cut for hay. This has resulted in an amazing wildflower meadow with abundant devil’s-bit scabious and wildlife in a few short years. My hunch that grazing only would work was correct!
Impermanence is part of Nature’s web of life. We are part of Nature. As Zen Buddhist, Thich Nhat Hanh says: “We inter-are.” This includes clouds, moon, sun, stars… It is prudent to acknowledge that many species arrived on this planet before we did, including beavers! Nature is full of wisdom. I began to lean towards rewilding with a hands-off approach. The question is: “Can we let go?” Eoghan Daltun is doing this with great success in Beara with his Irish Atlantic Rainforest. He describes his inspiring vision and journey in his book An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A Personal Journey into the Magic of Rewilding.
When my children had grown up, I was able to spend hours looking for water vole signs along waterways and film their behaviour. I began to notice over subsequent years that where good numbers of water voles were present, there was a greater diversity of healthier looking plants due to their constant ‘gardening’ through nipping and grazing – compared to lacklustre banksides with a reduction in flora diversity when they were absent. Research has revealed that waterways with increased species-rich plant communities have higher numbers of water voles. So rewilding wetlands with beavers, whose presence has been shown to increase water vole habitat, are going to be thriving ecosystems managed by these wild kin and other keystone species, rather than by us.
Small actions that we each perform to increase the web of life and diversity, to save an environment or species, can radiate across the country by inspiring people to start their own rewilding projects on social media through blogging, giving talks, writing a book or poetry, doing artwork, or participate in making films.
What is the good news about wildlife and nature at the moment?
The encouraging news about wildlife and Nature during the 2022 intense summer drought (occurring as I write this) is that people are beginning to realise and talk about the essential role that beavers play in preventing drought, flooding and wildfires. There is a growing awareness that the current wildlife extinction crisis is entirely of our own making. More than a century of habitat destruction, pollution, the spread of invasive species, wet markets, climate change, population growth and other human activities have pushed Nature to the brink. Also, water vole reintroductions are proving successful where habitat restoration has taken place, alongside American mink being monitored and controlled. There is a new MinkApp being trialled which is an easy way to pull together all American mink control projects whilst identifying areas with no control, thereby helping to increase protection for water voles and other species threatened by them, such as kingfishers. The new website is available in October 2022: https://minkmapp.uk.
Myles Traphagen (Borderlands Program Coordinator at Wildlands Network in the USA) has revealed the work of another vital ecosystem manager almost eradicated by European colonisers: “Black-tailed prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus) who are the dominant Great Plains species of prairie dog and yet the most persecuted. (All five species of prairie dogs have been reduced in range by more than 90%.) Prairie dog burrows are an entire ecosystem unto themselves, hosting an entire community of invertebrates, reptiles and burrow owls.”
There used to be between 1 and 5 billion prairie dogs across the Western grasslands prior to colonisation by Europeans. In witnessing the mass eradication of the prairie dogs, the Navajo and Hopi warned the colonizers that if they killed all of the prairie dogs that there would be no more rain. Their observations were proven to be correct: prairie dogs help to recharge aquifers with their extensive, enormous burrowing systems. They aerate the soil and create fissures that allow for the movement of groundwater towards the surface of the land by the pull of the moon which creates condensation in a similar way to rainforests. Which raises the question, does the Mole (Talpa europaea) have a similar effect on grasslands, thereby rainfall?
Time and again indigenous people notice the important role a species plays in an ecosystem and warn what will happen if they disappear. They also co-exist with wild kin and live sustainably. The good news is that we are beginning to listen to indigenous people’s across the world.
If humanity can learn to coexist harmoniously with Nature by standing back, this could allow the important natural process of ecological succession to take place. Then we can learn about the many symbiotic relationships that are vital for the well-being of ecosystems, even the unseen ones, such as the ‘wood-wide-web’ (and those yet to be discovered), then wild kin will thrive, including the human mammal. Climate change will be controlled by Nature and balance will be restored once more, if we also stop burning fossil fuels. All that it requires, says Satish Kumar, is that “Reverence for nature should be at the heart of every political and social debate.”
If you had a limited budget for nature conservation in Britain, what would you prioritise and why?
If I had a limited budget I would conserve nature in the UK by the reintroduction of keystone species, such as Eurasian beavers, European bison, Eurasian wolf and Eurasian lynx, to rewild vast tracts of land where those populations will be able to increase and restore an ecosystem’s balance. It has recently been proposed that bison and red deer are overlooked initiators of nest holes for birds which is just one exciting effect of rewilding: Do large herbivores have an important role in initiating tree cavities for hole-nesting birds in European forests: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362531244_Do_large_herbivores_have_an_important_role_in_initiating_tree_cavities_for_hole-nesting_birds_in_European_forests.
Some rewilded land would prohibit human presence, apart from research groups in small numbers, to enable wildlife to feed and breed undisturbed by our presence. Rewilding is the most efficient and sustainable way to increase the web of life’s diversity without the need for huge sums of money, which brings with it the funder’s agenda.
My concerns about the effect of human disturbance on wildlife was confirmed whilst reading about the nature writer Barry Lopez’s visit to Cape Crozier with five researchers in Antarctica, which is designated as “Specially Protected Area No 6” in his Horizon and which they needed permission to visit:
“What we saw when we got there had the two same effects, it seemed, on each of us. No one in the group was talking as we approached, but in that moment we all came to a standstill and remained in utter silence, motionless, for many minutes. Each person finally sat down on the snow apart from the others. In a kind of vast amphitheatre on the sea ice below us was the sort of wildlife spectacle one fantasizes about seeing one day, and then gazes at in disbelief, as though confronted by an illusion, a scene that would resolve itself into ordinary reality when the spell broke. The spell never broke.”
Barry Lopez discovered what happens when human disturbance is absent in an environment. So I would also highlight the need to teach junior and secondary school children and university students to reduce disturbance to wildlife by walking slowly and quietly. Keeping to field paths and nature trails to minimise disturbance to species such as bears, bison, wolves and lynx (said she optimistically), unless they are engaged in specific research. Also not to take dogs with them. Dogs’ disturbance to wildlife sometimes results in a kill, or injury. Also the sub-lethal effects of their almost constant disturbance have been shown to harm species, such as birds and mammals, by causing the abandonment of a site, leading to the impoverishment of local wildlife health (which I have observed on once quiet nature reserves where visitor numbers with dogs have increased over recent decades). This has also been reported by Alexander Lees in his article Gone to the Dogs for BirdGuides: https://www.birdguides.com/articles/conservation/gone-to-the-dogs/
How do you feel about your input into the subject – what, if anything has it achieved and would you do it differently if starting again today?
I wish I had been aware of the dominant, anthropocentric view we have of this exquisite planet earlier in my life. Speaking about it decades ago might have helped to prevent the demand of a ‘right to roam’ almost everywhere and recklessly culling species such as beavers, shortly after their reintroduction to Scotland – and forthcoming reintroductions across England, where they will be given enhanced protection on the 1st October and yet farmers will be given the right to kill them if their crops are threatened (which ultimately depend on water!). The badger cull remains a parallel concern.
We need to listen intently, walk quietly and be attentive in order to learn from Nature: As Barry Lopez says in Informed by indifference: A Walk in Antarctica https://westerlymag.com.au/informed-by-indifference-a-walk-in-antarctica/:
“Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters our perception of the human. It is not so much that you want to return to indifferent or difficult places, but that you want not to forget. If you returned it would be to pay your respects, for not being welcomed.”
This is relevant to the Right to Roam movement which pushes for wider access to Britain’s landscapes. Do we ever consider that the land and the wildlife might not welcome us? Rather, wildlife communities would prefer if we left them safe havens where they can reproduce, raise their young and only have to contend with their natural predators, without all the additional disturbance and sub-lethal effects human presence has been shown to have. This is a more than human world.
In the UK some people lobby for an almost comprehensive Right to Roam, whereas in places such as Canada’s Bowmore Valley, residents have a WildSmart approach to coexisting with wildlife, such as bears, wolves and elk with posters saying: “ANIMALS ALREADY AVOID US: THEY’RE MORE SENSITIVE THAN YOU THINK: Wildlife know what days of the week and what times of the day are the busiest. They’ll avoid areas during this time and return when it is quieter. They are sensitive too – animals start avoiding areas with as low as 3 people using a trail per day!” https://www.biosphereinstitute.org/recreation-and-wildlife
Where is our wildlife? We are one of the most nature depleted countries in the world. We need to adopt the WildSmart approach for rewilding to be successful!
The final salient point for humanity was made by Eoghan Daltun in his “An Irish Atlantic Rainforest” p. 317: “The greatest challenge of our era is to begin narrowing the gap between ourselves and the living world again, changing ‘the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it, as Aldo Leopold so presciently wrote.”