A World of Wounds
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen.”
This line from ‘A Sand County Almanac’ by the American ecologist Aldo Leopold was much on my mind when I started writing pieces about the plight of the countryside. I aimed to write for those who love our countryside and may not always be as uncomfortably aware as I am of ‘the damage inflicted on land’. Although I wouldn’t lightly wish my own pain on others, change is not possible without awareness, however painful. Since then I have been re-reading Leopold and through his writings have been re-entering the extraordinarily remote-seeming time and place that is the world of the outdoorsman in the American West a hundred years ago. There is enjoyment, almost adventure, in reliving through his writings a time and place so different from one’s own that it might almost serve as fiction, but there is pain also in feeling his awareness of the destruction of the wilderness, and in knowing that he died in 1948 saddened that many of his insights had not (yet) been taken seriously.
Before he became an ecologist in the modern sense Aldo Leopold worked as a forest assistant at the Apache National Forest in the Arizona Territory and later in the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico. In those days foresters and people who worked in game conservation had a very blinkered vision of the natural world – foresters were only interested in trees, and only trees that were ‘profitable’; conserving game meant mainly shooting predators such as wolves and bears. As for livestock farming, the aim was to clear the ranges of all predators, a work that was nearing completing when Leopold was working in New Mexico. An understanding of the interconnectedness of the natural world was not usual and when Leopold became conscious of the interconnections his was not a popular view, and I suspect if it had not been that his nature writing is so pleasurable to read (‘A Sand County Almanac’ has sold 2 million copies) his ideas might not eventually have gained credibility. People experiencing the great American wilderness from the comfort of their Lay-Zee-Boy recliners began to absorb Leopold’s ideas because the pleasure of reading his essays seeped into an understanding of his views.
In ‘Thinking like a Mountain’ he describes how the death of a wolf when he was working as a forester in New Mexico changed entirely the way he thought about the natural world.
‘A deep chesty bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night. It is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow, and of contempt for all the adversities of the world.
Every living thing (and perhaps many a dead one as well) pays heed to that call. To the deer it is a reminder of the ways of all flesh, to the pine a forecast of midnight scuffles and of blood upon the snow. To the coyote a promise of gleanings to come, to the cowman a threat of red ink at the bank, to the hunter a challenge of fang against bullet. Yet beyond these obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.
Those unable to decipher the hidden meaning know nevertheless that it is there, for it is felt in all wolf country, and distinguishes that country from all other land. It tingles in the spine of all who hear wolves by night, or who scan their tracks by day. Even without sight or sound of wolf, it is implicit in a hundred small events: the midnight whinny of a packhorse, the rattle of rolling rocks, the bound of a fleeing deer, the way shadows lie under the spruces…
My own conviction on this score dates from the day I saw a wolf die. We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the current, her breast awash in the white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realised our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the centre of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.
In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.
We reached the old wolf in time to see a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunter’s paradise. But after seeing that green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view…..
Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed… every edible tree defoliated… In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd…bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers…’
I wonder if Aldo Leopold would have come in the end to the same view if he had not seen the wolf die. For him the emotions felt seeing the death of the wolf seem to have driven the development of ecological insights that are as important now as they were then. Leopold’s idea that the mountain ecosystem needed the wolf to keep the deer in balance has only grown in significance since his time. Since then scientists have learned much about the extraordinary interconnections and interdependencies of the natural world. For Leopold this awareness grew from the emotions arouses by the death of the wolf, and maybe his ideas also spread because of the pleasure of reading his words. Maybe the emotions recalled in the tranquillity of the Lay-Zee-Boy recliner in generations of American readers of ‘A Sand County Almanac’ set in train the changes that led to Aldo Leopold’s utter vindication in Yellowstone National Park fifty or more year after his death in 1948. At its best conservation is ecology driven by emotion, I think.
Long after Aldo Leopold retired as the first ever professor of wildlife management, at the University of Wisconsin, another generation of ecologists was increasingly concerned that the huge National Parks were not the thriving natural wildernesses that had been intended. The rivers were eroding, the groves of willows and cottonwoods along the river valleys were disappearing along with the birds and much of the aquatic life. Some species, like the pronghorn deer of Yellowstone, were also in serious and unexpected difficulties.
In 1973 the Endangered Species Act signalled the beginning of a change in attitude in the US towards species that had previously been persecuted close to extinction, and it was this change in attitude that made it possible to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone, seventy years after they had been exterminated there. Bruce Babbit, the Secretary of the Interior at the time, was quite explicit in attributing the change of policy to the influence of Aldo Leopold, and he said of the initial re-introduction in January 1995 : ‘ I helped carry the first grey wolf into Yellowstone, where they had been eradicated by federal predator control policy only six decades earlier. Looking through the crates into her eyes, I reflected on how Aldo Leopold once took part in that policy, then eloquently challenged it. By illuminating for us how wolves play a critical role in the whole of creation, he expressed the ethic and the laws which would reintroduce them nearly a half-century after his death.
I’m not sure what the ecologists expected to happen. I’m not sure they were too sure either, but there was now an expectation that wildlife managers should encourage threatened species. Certainly they may have expected the wolves to kill some of the elk, a deer more like our red deer than the European moose-like elk, an d possibly that some of the vegetation might recover from overgrazing. The actual consequences have I think astonished even the ecologists working in the park. The elk are now too fearful of wolves to hang around in the valley bottoms, and the cottonwood groves and willow stands are now recovering, and the river banks no longer slumping. The beavers thrive on these new trees, which provide both their food and their building materials; there are now 12 beaver ponds where there was only one. The effect on the fish and amphibians and insects in the river system has been similar, and the birds have returned to the restored groves of trees.
Meanwhile the wolves have been harassing and killing some of the coyote, which were preying heavily on the pronghorn deer calves, and that endangered population is now recovering. The wolf leftovers feed ravens, eagles, vultures, crows, wolverines and a host of other creatures, and the ecologists have not yet worked out the effects on the insect populations that feed on the kills. It probably even includes those moths, like our clothes moth, that evolved to feed on the skins of dead animals.
One result of what has happened in Yellowstone is the awareness of concepts such as ‘keystone species’, of species like beavers and large herbivores being seen as ‘ecosystem engineers’ and the concept of the ‘trophic cascade’, by which is meant ‘ an ecological phenomenon triggered by the addition or removal of top predators and involving reciprocal changes in the relative populations of predator and prey through a food chain, which often results in dramatic changes in ecosystem structure and nutrient cycling.’ The sort of thing that sees nutrients washed into the sea becoming part of salmon bodies and returning with the salmon to the American west coast rivers where they are eaten by the bears who as we all know, shit in the woods and fertilise the forests. (See my piece ‘Scottish Salmon Forests’ here on Substack).
You may well say that this hasn’t much to do with us in the UK, but I’d have to disagree with you. Here, to quote a ‘the size of Wales’ statistic, roughly a third of the UK – if you include Scotland, or if Scotland includes itself – is upland grazing. A kind of wilderness. Some people see it as magnificent wilderness, which it may be if you do not have the benefit of an ecological education, or have like the rest of us been brought up to see bare mountains as magnificent, following on from William Wordsworth and his friends who also lacked an ecological education.
Our mountains have been gnawed to the bone by sheep. In Scotland they have been doubly gnawed by red deer and sheep. Vast areas have nothing but short feggy grass with maybe a bit of heather and bilberry too gnawed, usually, to bear berries. Wildlife in these ‘wildernesses’ has declined drastically but so long ago that we have become accustomed to the catastrophe. A few grouse, encouraged by burning the heather and damaging the peat. Usually there are no eagles or hen harriers because the gamekeepers are expected by their landed employers to get rid of them, and between the keepers and the sheep farmers the foxes have a hard time too. There may be a few curlew, though they are rare now, and the odd dotterel, maybe, and a lot of crows and ravens, and sometimes a few pipits or larks. I’m racking my brains to populate these wastelands, and that is all I can come up with.
The crazy thing is that farming the sheep that keep these places destroyed makes no sense at all. It is only possible if it is subsidised. We even subsidise farmers in North Wales to produce inedible sheep, poisoned by the fallout of Chernobyl. This is not farmland by any sensible definition. Our best hope of any ecological recovery in the UK lies with just this land, because it is less affected by poisonous industrial farming, yet we have been subsidising a system that keeps the hills in a state of ecological dereliction.
In Yellowstone the destruction began at the top of the ecosystem, and was repaired by restoring keystone species like the wolf. Here in much of the UK’s mountain landscape the task is to start from the other end. There is on our mountains, in the heather and bilberry and dwarf willows and bog myrtle and birch and fungi that still hang on, the basis of a forest understory. Plant trees in a field and years later you have no wood, just trees in a field; allow trees to grow on our mountains and you have the essence of a forest very soon because the undergrowth is already there. This has been started in places such as Carifran in the Scottish lowlands, or on estates such as Mar Lodge, Alladale and Glenfeshie in the Highlands, and the results are extraordinary. All manner of creatures are breeding, arriving, thriving, the beginning of an enrichment which has to have as its logical conclusion the return of predators such as the lynx and the wolf. The beaver, which irritates the chemical farmers because their ponds may take a bit of their cash cow out of production, could build all the dams it wanted in such a mountain landscape, and would help to save some peat and reduce some flooding.
There are some conservationists who see what they probably call upland acid grassland as a precious environment, because they see the landscape as some sort of academic text to pore over. For me moorland offers the hope of creating the sort of woodlands I know from Sweden, open forests of spruce and pine and birch and rowan, rich in berries, fungi, elk, roe deer, woodcock, snipe, fieldfares and redwings, growing among an understory of the sorts of plants that are already on our mountains. These forests are also exciting because there are still bears and wolves and lynx in Sweden. Even the vague possibility of their being somewhere nearby gives the forest a charge, an excitement you will never match taking your dog for a shit in the woods round here. Such a revitalised landscape would have a richness never approached by sheep-gnawed mountains, if we begin to appreciate the riches in a complex natural ecosystem, riches that become part of the spirit of the wilderness shared by all who walk there, rather than whatever scabby riches a farmer can extract by keeping the land ruined at the expense of the taxpayer.