Why Nature Needs You
Nick Hayes and Jon Moses
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024, 286 Pages
Hardback: £20.00 | ISBN: 978-1-5266-7331-2
Review by Simon Leadbeater
First page
Compare and contrast.
Wild Service: An open church freely available to everyone contrasted with a private country estate excluding all;
In actuality: Public access to 1,700 acres; the church kept open by the landowner’s 91 year old mother unlocking the doors in the morning and then closing-up each afternoon.
It would not be fair to judge Wild Service by its first page. I am going to continue by querying one or two assertions which leapt out, before trying to convey more of a feel for what the book as a whole is trying to say, picking up on individual chapters, and highlighting what I particularly like and less so. My assessment: Wild Service embraces the culture of extinction, mythos, while exiling logos, whose perfect expression – science – underpins much conservation.1
Errata
I felt somewhat dispirited reading in Amy-Jane Beer’s chapter, Reciprocity, that post-glacial Britain was not ‘closed canopy forest,’2 which, without saying so, is to endorse Frans Vera’s hypothesis3 later popularised by Isabella Tree.4 Foolishly I thought our defence of ‘the forest’ had been won in ‘Knepp Wildland; the ethos and efficacy of Britain’s first rewilding project.’5 Writers have every right, however, to argue against the case we made in our Routledge Handbook of Rewilding chapter. The past Dr Beer presents in contrast to ours runs like this: an orchard-like “wild wood of post-glacial, pre-agricultural Britain” was “disturbed and disrupted” by large herbivores such as “short-tusked elephants,” who maintained an open landscape characterised by a mosaic of habitats; woodlands, scrub, glades.6
No such beast ever existed, so far as I can tell. Perhaps the author is referring to straight-tusked elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), who “withdrew from most of Europe at the end of the Eemian….”7 Or, to put this in other words, straight-tusked elephants occurred in Britain during the last interglacial period, between 130,000 and 115,000 years ago. They survived in southern Europe until 30,000 years hence, and would have moved north again as temperatures warmed, except for their human-driven extinction.8 So this elephant species was exterminated well before post-glacial Britain.9
I started with the Prologue (which I surmise to have been penned by Nick Hayes),10 so will conclude this section with Jon Moses’s Epilogue. Here he cites the oft repeated refrain, albeit couched in careful language, that “…3 per cent of rivers [have] a statutory right of navigation.”11 In practice over 25 per cent of the major river and canal network, plus a range of enclosed waters, are accessible.12
I now turn to two chapters to give a flavour of what the book is about.
Guardianship by Paul Powlesland
I hugely admire Paul Powlesland. His activism and work restoring the River Roding is exemplary. I am also a little intimidated by the thought of a personal encounter. A Cambridge (1st Class) educated barrister; he would undoubtedly eat me alive. That does not mean I dare not demur. If he reads this, I hope he will understand that I write out of respect, why I chose his chapter as my launching point into the book proper.
Paul bought a strip of land next to a river, and was dismayed to discover that the adjacent meadow (which I take to mean a combination of grasses and wildflowers cropped July to August annually) was in the process of being converted in to arable land. The fact that his neighbouring landowner is a Viscount has, I feel, little bearing on this act (Paul should see what developers get up to – they aren’t ‘nobles’). I used to be given a grant for meadow maintenance because they cost money to manage appropriately, and surely – as Paul suggests – would not have received one for similarly converting mine. No matter, the more germane point lies is this sentence:
Because the name PAUL… was written in a government title register… it was within my power to destroy every last tree, flower, blade of grass and make all the innumerable creatures that inhabited ‘my’ land homeless.13
This is a right Paul feels he should not have. He takes the view that landowners possess the power to destroy nature, which they should not have. And I agree with him. But reading his chapter, and others, I could not help but reflect on my own situation, as a small landowner who strives to care for a woodland (not as well as I would like) and runs a farm animal sanctuary. Paul suggests that environmental and planning legislation only ‘modestly circumscribe’14 landowner behaviour. But I cannot simply chop down all of our trees with the aim of, for example, grazing cattle or building a housing estate. There would be a public outcry and the local council and forestry commission would jump on me from a great height – and rightly so. There are rare contrary examples, and Paul’s champing environmental justice in these cases is truly inspiring, but they are mostly just that, rare.
There is a more important argument. Power can be exercised both ways. My wife and I have spent thousands of pounds trying to restore and improve the ecology of our woodland – because of our ownership. Would Paul Lister have embarked on his Alladale Wilderness Reserve project unless he owned 23,000 acres? Probably not. Would Sir Charles Burrell and Isabella Tree have created Knepp Wildland had they not owned it? And had it been up to local people, they are unlikely to have started on their Vera project.15 That does not mean I disagree with landowners being recast as ‘guardians of nature,’16 far from it, but the idea that ownership only bestows the power to destroy is unfair as it also empowers creation. There are numerous examples evidencing this, such as Ben Goldsmith’s ‘nature-friendly’ farm17 and Derek Gow’s breeding of endangered species – such as water voles – on his 300 acre farm.
Paul’s support for the Rights of Nature is very welcome, but I worry a little. To start with, the Māori people may be considered Indigenous, but they are not Indigenous to New Zealand. I recommend reading Rat Island 18 which explains how their island-hopping journey from Polynesia culminating in reaching ancient Aotearoa, resulted in one of the worst extinction episodes in all history. And by all means give rivers rights, but to me, the term ‘river’ is a bit like ‘nature,’ a catch it all meaning not necessarily very much at all. We used to talk about the sanctity of marriage, namely, the sacred bond between two people. And that bond, that connection, is indeed important, but not as important as the people themselves. So, when Paul protected the home of a colony of sand martins that has, to me, far more meaning and tangibility than giving what could be construed as abstract – a river – rights.
Thomas Berry, in his ‘inverse jurisprudence,’19 believed we cannot give nature’s components, say trees, rights, but only take them away. So, to repair the river wall where the sand martins nested20 would have been to take away the sand martins’ rights to build their nests and rear their young. Paul’s no mean achievement was to ensure their rights were not violated. But what of water voles that might live in the River Roding? What rights must we ensure are not violated for them? They need quiet water ways and river banks, not disturbed by people or their dogs. To my mind, creating such places would also include a form of ‘wild service’ for one of Britain’s most vulnerable animals. Regrettably, creating refugia from us does not really fit the theme of the book.
Culture by Nick Hayes
Why introduce readers to concepts like animism, logos, mythos, or legends like Gilgamesh, Old Crocken, or the world tree Yggdrasil? To illuminate our understanding of the world, and perhaps to chart the direction our culture is travelling in? Does this chapter succeed in doing so? The general drift is that “scientific rationality”21 is being clandestinely exchanged for “point-blank paganism.”22
Hayes confused me by suggesting that animism “developed into an organised religion,”23 whereas I always thought these beliefs and associated practices espoused the opposite. He also describes logos and mythos as “nebulous concepts,”24 casting them as not merely polar opposites, but set-against one another within a land related context. Logos and mythos merit study (mine being superficial); I feel Hayes could have helped his readers improve their understanding rather than mostly deploying esoterics to frame his argument.
In my last review I considered Strategic Choices, Ethical Dilemmas which set out to demystify the teachings of the ancient Hindu text, The Mahabharat, for a modern audience. The book succeeds at many levels, and contrasts with Hayes’s chapter by explaining arcane complex parables and making them meaningful to modern readers. So far as logos and mythos are concerned, I recommend Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth (2005)25 in which she says logos and mythos can be understood as yin and yang; they both need each other to be complete. Hayes couches logos as part and parcel of iniquitous dominion in a long-lasting struggle against R2R aspirations; another reading of these concepts could perhaps lead us to seek balance and equanimity.
So What?
The purpose of Wild Service is to delve “deep into the roots of the problem [which is?] and attempts a first step towards a new culture that returns nature to the very heart of society, by restoring communities to the beating heart of the natural world.”26 Part of my review should at least ask how far the book succeeds in doing so. But reading vignette after anecdote laced with exhortations to ‘wild service,’ I was reminded of an old LSE tutor. As a graduate student we took turns to give seminar presentations, and having done our best, invariably he would respond with ‘so what?’ Naturally we assigned to him the sobriquet ‘Dr So What.’ This ‘so what’ feeling reoccurred throughout the book, but Nicola Chester’s Community chapter perhaps epitomises the problem. Does anyone really think that the prevalence of second homes weakening rural communities is a good thing? How could anyone not applaud how Nicola deftly managed the farmer and organised village commitment to save some nesting lapwings?27 Kudos to her. But the lost culture she laments (and I agree – being also a fan of Lark Rise), and the one she wishes to rebuild, does not necessitate a R2R. “People working together in a green space for nature, coppicing, scything, planting, wilding…”28 does not require public access. Before my volunteers became too old I regularly had working parties for all the aforementioned. Today there is a hedgehog sanctuary a few miles west of me which relies on volunteers; to the west a new vineyard where all the grapes will be picked by volunteers. Universal access arrangements not being imposed on either landowner have not stopped caring, connection, community, to abound.
What moved me?
Hayes and Moses’s edited book sets out to make a mythos rather than logos case for change, which means it should impact readers viscerally. This is vital, I would say, as reason never wins wars, but rather loyalty, faith, believing in a cause. It helps that some readers will find the book’s writing style attractive:
Nature reveals my complexities, problematises my existence upon this earth, unravels the assumptions I make of myself, that society makes of me and asks me to question, to re-feel myself into new relationship with the world, with myself and with others, and to extract myself from the relationships and structures which harm me…29
This exert from Healing by Dal Kular does exemplify a Wild Service leitmotiv – the emphasis on ourselves and our relationships rather than with nature herself or nature’s denizens – but to my untrained eye is beautifully phrased.
The recounting of certain episodes did move me, sometimes unexpectedly. Romilly Swann’s Inheritance had a lovely ending when she placed a crown of flowers on a little girl’s head.30 The appearance of a chiffchaff and later rainbow in Sam Lee’s Homage was magical.31 But what undoubtedly stood out was the Wild Service in Action section concerning Ibraham’s observations of Roseate Terns; how they behaved affectionately towards each other, how they became better parents with each passing year, and how they then succumbed to birdflu. Ending on that note would have left an impactful and enduring impression. Instead there is a homily about Ibrahim wanting to belong and having to fight immigration officials to gain permanent residence, readers’ attention being thereby diverted from the dire plight of seabirds to human travails.32
What is the book really about?
The book is ostensibly about usurping the hegemonic logos-based outlook that has alienated us from the birthright of our common ancestry, who used to enjoy an umbilical connection with the land and nature, expressed by assumed access, singing, homage, community, and its replacement with the resurgence of a mythos-like culture. There are, however, mixed signals such as that left after reading about the Roseate Terns, and the book feels conflicted between reading like a dirge to lost cultures and rural ways and looking forward to address ‘the problem.’ I am not sure if people reading this afresh without being steeped in R2R lore will understand what problem Wild Service is trying to solve. The problem for me has and always will concern the human-driven extinction of species world-wide and also Britain. I do ask myself, is Wild Service pitying the plumage while neglecting the dying bird?33
To better communicate the totality of what Wild Service concerns, however, there are two important themes in the book, which need further exploration. The first is that nature has always been intimately associated with us, repudiating “unpeopled wilderness fantasies;”34 and, second, the rejection of “our human-centric position of ‘having’ to an eco-centric one of ‘being-with.’”35
- People maximising biodiversity
Harry Jenkinson in Kinship critiques the legacy of John Muir, claiming that an Indigenously peopled nature enhances biodiversity36 and that wilderness fantasies based on the Muir model are even leading to genocide.37 Where the latter has or continues to prevail is obviously morally repugnant. I want instead to focus on the former point about the congruity of people with nature. It is obviously vital to the R2R argument, as if nature might be better off without us – well, their ‘preconditional’ argument,38 must fall away.
The charge that John Muir wrote “highly racist descriptions of Indigenous people”39is easily refuted by a thorough and fair reading of his work. More substantively, let’s examine the case that “[t]he Amazon has been home to millions of Indigenous people for millennia, whose ecological care has shaped the forest to an astonishing degree”40 as illustrative of the general point Wild Service is making.
There will be little dissent that Earth is ca. 4.5 billion years old; if we assume people first entered Latin America some 16,000 thousand years ago this would mean people have been present for 0.0004 per cent of the time in the location where the Amazon rainforest is now situated. Other sources suggest we arrived earlier, 25,000 years ago,41 but the point that we have only been present in that location for a very small fraction of the time remains the same. When we did finally arrive our critical contribution was to cause megafauna extinctions, altering the ecological balance of the Amazon for ever. More generally, as philosopher Martin Bunzl puts it, the arrival of the first nations in the Americas coincided with mass extinctions,42 and the coming of Europeans “wrecked destruction on the nature they found… [and] the nature that they found had already been destroyed once before.”43 What occurred to native American peoples was truly awful; the arrival of Europeans just after 1500 AD caused some 90 per cent of the local population – 55 million people – to die. This resulted in 60 million hectares of farm land returning to forest, which in turn impacted on the world’s climate.44
To put this another way, the first human contact with what was pristine unspoilt nature resulted in the annihilation of large wild animals, with far reaching ecosystem-wide impacts; we then cultivated much (or at least some) of this altered nature until our numbers were radically reduced, allowing nature to transform itself (back?) in to forests. To suggest that unpeopled wilderness is a fantasy does not make much sense historically, and arguing that nature cannot thrive without our custodianship puts our species on a dais that is undeserved.
My reasoning is not meant to infer that Indigenous peoples of the Global South today are not better guardians of semi-natural areas than Global Northern societies have proved to be. Nor does it follow – even if there were clear ecological benefits from doing so – that Indigenous people should be thrown off their ancestral lands. It is also not the case that recommoning (coppicing, meadow making, hedgelaying – the range of country crafts Wild Service harks back to), has no role in restoring nature. It clearly has. But, to my mind rewilding has greater currency, which need only involve people in a facilitating role. But, equally, rewilding, need not necessarily expel people to succeed either.
- Unwitting anthropocentrism and ersatz Indigenous learning
Emma Linford’s chapter Education was generally strong, well referenced, and said things I liked (I also enjoyed Bryony Ella’s Belonging), such as the emphasis on ‘eco-centric’ ‘empathy,’ ‘reverence.’45 But writing down these words is not the same as being them. Anyone who uses the word ‘livestock’ – as Nicola Chester46 and Romilly Swann47 do, belies ecocentric aspirations through the commodification of animals. Language matters; it reveals our latent assumptions. Reading about Becca and her fight to improve river water quality,48 and indeed Ibrahim witnessing the tragic consequences of birdflu, I also asked myself whether these ‘wild service’ activists consumed industrially farmed poultry, the locus of much for both blights.
Where I take issue with Emma Linford is her quest for the wrong sort of knowing. No one who does not sleep on a mountain can know that mountain, she cites. But why should we want to know mountains in this way? Once upon a time we revered Mount Olympus as the dwelling place for a pantheon of gods; better perhaps to venerate from afar and imagine, rather than to climb and find they might not be there after all. The Indigenous Karuk people believe Mount Shasta in California to be holy, which humans should refrain from ever visiting. Building a ski lodge naturally profaned this sacred space.49 R2R campaigners would never dream of such sacrilege, but they would baulk at never being able to visit, to erect a cairn50 at the summit and to stay in a bothy51 on the way down if the weather became inclement. The appeal to Indigenous wisdom does not necessarily endorse the R2R cause.
Nature’s fate awaits
This book is about urging cultural transformation, so not unreasonably tries to keep to its theme. And while there is another publication in the pipeline, this too will ignore the key issue associated with R2R, the inconvenience whose truth campaigners dare not name. I hope that in time these well-intentioned authors will finally notice the elephant – not the literal one we exterminated a short while ago (ecologically speaking) – but the outcome for the habitats they campaign for the right to occupy – and for the wild animals for whom these habitats comprise their only home.
Let us then return, in conclusion, to the relationship between mythos and logos. Nick Hayes mistakenly – I believe – puts each at odds with the other, and to my mind does not elucidate the meaning behind these important concepts. What light can Karen Armstrong cast? Mythos came into being particularly because people recognised themselves as killers, finding it difficult to accept their existence in their violent world. She continued:
Mythology often springs from profound anxiety about essential practical problems, which cannot be assuaged by purely logical arguments… Logos is quite different from mythical thinking. Unlike myth, logos must correspond accurately to objective facts… Myth and logos both have their shortcomings. In the pre-modern world most people realised that myth and reason were complementary… A myth could not tell a hunter how to kill his prey,… but it helped him to deal with his complicated emotions about the killing of animals.52
The mythical worldview arose in the hunters who initiated the Sixth Great Extinction Event at the tail end of the Pleistocene (ca 129,000 to 11,700 years ago).53And thus we arrive at the central question raised by Wild Service. How can the book’s resurrection of mythos – their welcoming back of an age-old culture to redefine our relationship with nature today and tomorrow – restore nature, when it was mythos that enabled us to understand our place in the world as animal killers, ergo as vitiators54 of nature? This question goes some way to answering itself.
We need both logos and mythos; does this book’s celebration of mythos alongside the rejection of logos merely result in a lopsided perspective? As Wild Service denigrates logos at every turn, we should ask what its apogee might be? Science would be a strong contender. What science is missing from the R2R movement’s paradigm? Evidence concerning the consequences public access would have on the natural world if R2R were realised in part or full; evidence provided through the work of ethologists – scientists who study animal behaviour. Research compelling tells us that wild animals fear humans as ‘super predators,’ affecting almost all aspects of their lives; this dread results in ecosystem-wide consequences and even affects evolutionary trajectories.55
References
1. By which I mean especially ‘compassionate conservation,’ as endorsed in Marc Bekoff’s revised book The Emotional Lives of Animals (2024). However, more broadly, I am not sure how conservation of any kind could be successful without studying behaviour of its principal subjects, namely animals. Reference: Bekoff, M., (2024), The Emotional Lives of Animals A Leading Scientists Explores Animal Joy, Sorry and Empathy – and Why They Matter, 2nd Edition, New World Library, Novato, California.
2. Hayes, N., with Moses, J., (2024), Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You, Bloomsbury, London, p. 109.
3. Vera, F.W.M., (2000), Grazing Ecology and Forest History, CABI.
4. Tree, I. (2018), Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm. Picador.
5. Leadbeater, S., Kopnina, H., & Cryer, P. (2023). ‘Knepp wildland: The ethos and efficacy of Britain’s first private rewilding project’. In S. Hawkins, I. Convery, S. Carver, & R. Beyers (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Rewilding. Routledge. 362-373
6. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 109.
7. Stuart, A.J., (2005), ‘The extinction of woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) and straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) in Europe,’ Quaternary International, 125-128 (2005) 171-177, p. 173.
8. Personal communication (LinkedIn) from Dr Rhys Lemione, Postdoctoral Researcher at Gothenburg University, 26 June, 2024.
9. According to Stuart, the elephant clung on in Italy and Iberia for somewhat longer, confirming Dr Lemione’s observations. I also consulted Marco Davoli, lead author of Davoli, M., Monsarrat, S., Pedersen, R.Ø., Scussolini, P., Karger, D.N., Normand, S., and Svenning, J-C., (2023), ‘Megafauna diversity and functional declines in Europe from the Last Interglacial to the present,’ Global Ecology and Biogeography, 17 November 2023: https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.13778. Dr Davoli advised me that he had “never heard about SHORT-tusked elephants.” Personal email communication, 25 June, 2024. Given these two sources I think we can confidently state that Dr Beer meant a different sort of elephant, but one which had ceased to exist for thousands of years before ‘post-glacial, pre-agricultural Britain.’
10. Hayes discusses his encounter with landowner Richard Benyon in Hayes, N., (2020), The Book of Trespass: Crossing the lines that divide us, Bloomsbury, London, pp. 336 – 42.
11. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 270.
12. Wright, C., and Gillett, A., (2024), ‘Going with the Flow,’ Land & Business, February 2024, pp. 28 – 9. As this is a CLA publication, this percentage should also be treated with some caution. But the 3 per cent figure is almost certain bogus.
13. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 64.
14. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 65.
15. Tree, Op.cit., p. 138. This is not, in my judgement a rewilding project, but rather a nature restoration of sorts project based on the work of Franz Vera. See Leadbeater, et al, Op.cit.
16. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit p. 66.
17. Goldsmith, B., (2023), God is an Octopus: Loss, Love and a Calling to Nature, Bloomsbury, London.
18. Stolzenburg, W., (2011), Rat Island: Predators in Paradise and the World’s Greatest Wildlife Rescue, Bloomsbury, London
19. Kopnina, H., Leadbeater, S., Cryer, P., Heister, A., and Lewis, T., (2024), ‘Ecodemocracy in the wild: if existing democracies were to operationalise ecocentrism and animal ethics in policy making, what would rewilding look like? In: Ruales, J.G., Hovden, K., Kopnina, H., Robertson, C.D., and Schoukens, H., Rights of Nature in Europe: Encounters and Visions, Routledge, Oxon.
20. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 73.
21. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 141.
22. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 138.
23. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 141.
24. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 145
25. Armstrong, K., (2005), A Short History of Myth, Canongate, Edinburgh
26. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p.xi.
27. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 128.
28. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 130.
29. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 188.
30. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 254.
31. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 206.
32. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. pp. 233 – 6
33. With apologies to Thomas Paine
34. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 264.
35. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 168.
36. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 81.
37. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 85.
38. Espoused by Caroline Lucas, M.P., in the House of Commons May 2023 debate concerning ‘public access to nature,’ (Hansard, (2023), Public access to nature. 18 May, Vol., 732), and Jon Moses in Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 263.
39. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 82.
40. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 88.
41. I am grateful to Janet Mackinnon for this reference. Personal email communication of 11th July, 2024
42. Bunzl, M., (2021), Thinking while Walking; Reflections on the Pacific Crest Trail, New York, Perry Street Press, p. 29.
43. Bunzl, Op.cit., p. 28.
44. Quirks and Quarks, (2019), ’50 million deaths in the New World drove cooling in the Little Ice Age, CBC, February 11, 2019: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/feb-9-2019-psychology-of-solitary-confinement-mind-over-genes-genocide-and-climate-change-and-more-1.5008739/50-million-deaths-in-the-new-world-drove-cooling-in-the-little-ice-age-1.5008748#:~:text=As%20the%20population%20collapsed%2C%20vast,the%20planet%20at%20the%20time.
45. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. pp. 168 – 9.
46. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 121.
47. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. p. 247.
48. Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. pp. 212-6., specifically the River Avon in Becca’s case.
49. Netflix, (2024), Files of the unexplained: Mysteries of Mt. Shasta: https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81593881
50. See The Architecture of Belonging: Cairn, Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. pp. 132 – 5.
51. The Architecture of Belonging: Bothy, Hayes with Moses, Op.cit. pp. 256 – 60.
52. Armstrong, Op.cit., pp. 30 – 1.
53. See Armstrong chapter title: ‘The Palaeolithic Period: The Mythology of Hunters (c. 20,000 to 8,000 BCE), Armstrong Op.cit. p. 12.
54. Vitiate = to corrupt or significantly impair something. Overkill caused by early man in the late Pleistocene radically reshaped ecological functioning, but did not completely destroy nature, hence I have used word vitiate. Articles such as those led by Marco emphasis the ecological reshaping which took place owing to megafauna exterminations, whose impacts continue today, influencing how we should consider rewilding. Davoli, Op.cit.
55. Leadbeater, S.R.B., and Cartmell, Policy Briefing, Version IX of July 2024. This ‘live’ document attempts to keep abreast of research published across the world concerning the impact of human disturbance on wildlife. Copies available upon request.