A New Future for Nature - George Monbiot

anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physically finite planet is either mad or an economist we don't want to focus politics on the notion that involves the rejection of principles around which a large majority of our fellow citizens we are not as endlessly manipulable and as predictable as you would think have you ever wondered why understory trees such as box and you and Holly are so much tougher harder to break than canopy trees like oak or beech or ash despite the fact that first of all they carry less weight and secondly they're subject to less shear forces from the wind despite that there they've got incredibly tough routes incredibly tough branches that's why you make long bows out of them that's why the Welsh carve love spoons out of Holly because it's such dense fine grained wood why why they have they evolved to be so tough when they seem to be subject to less force have you ever wondered why trees are able to copy soar Pollard in other words to to Rhys Prout from whatever point they're broken or cut why have they acquired these characteristics and I believe there's a single answer to all of these phenomena elephants it sounds ridiculous but that's because we've forgotten that ours is an elephant adapted ecosystem during the last interglacial period our ecosystem was dominated by the straight tust elephant it was a temperate forest elephant and it browse Didache trees and shrubs and stuff and it are doubtless had a similar sort of impact to the impact that elephants have saved in Africa or in Asia and yet somehow that's completely passed us by in this country our trees have exactly the same adaptations they do precisely the same things as the trees do in Africa and yet we haven't made the link they were driven out of northern Europe by the ice about a hundred and fifteen thousand years ago so a rhinos so a hippos lions and hi stayed on longer we had a megafauna in fact when Trafalgar Square just around the corner was excavated to build Nelson's column in the National Gallery and the other things which were built there the gravels were found to be stuffed with bones elephant bones rhino bones hippopotamus bones hippopotamus amphibious the same species that lives in Africa today and yet all this has somehow been pushed out of our consciousness because we don't see it and we're not showing it on a daily basis by the presence of these beasts we've forgotten that our ecosystems have been shaped by them our forgetting of the fact that we had a megafauna of the fact that most of the world had a megafauna until human beings turned up but then it disappeared and we began to forget and this forgetting has got a name shifting baseline syndrome coined by the fisheries biologist daniel pauly and what it means is that every generation conceives the situation in its own youth as being the state of normality and that it thinks of the ecosystem that it was brought up with as being the desirable ecosystem to which we have to get back because that is the untouched and pure and normal state of the ecosystem unaware perhaps that the ecosystem with which we've brought up is a highly depleted one and then the ecosystem gets depleted further and the next generation comes along and sees that further depleted ecosystem as being the state of normality shifting baseline syndrome has begun to be challenged by what I believe is one of the most exciting scientific developments of the past half-century and this is the discovery of widespread trophic cascades now a trophic cascade is an ecological process which tumbles down from the top of the food chain right down to the bottom until relatively recently biologists believe that most almost all ecosystems were driven from the bottom up the type of soil you have and the type of climate do you have determine the kind of vegetation you have which in turn determines the kind of herbivores you get which in turn determines the the number and the type of carnivores that you might get what trophic cascade suggests is that in some ecosystems the process is exactly the opposite to give you a classic example the reintroduction of wolves into the Yellowstone National Park wolves were extirpated from the park in 1926 they were brought back just a couple of packs just as a small number in 1995 and within 10 years they had transformed the ecosystem of that huge area of land they created a landscape in which deer would not go into certain places particularly the river valleys where they were quite easily trapped and caught by the Wolves and as a deer retreated those places sprang back into life within six years the the height of the trees along the rivers that were studied quintupled and when that happened the number of songbirds in the trees greatly increased the number of beavers in the rivers greatly increased because they also eat the trees and as they which are also what are called keystone species that's a species which has an impact greater than its numbers alone would suggest at an ecosystem engineer a bit like the wolf they they created habitats within the rivers habitats for otters for amphibians for muskrats for ducks for fish all of which began to proliferate as the beavers re-engineered the rivers creating pools where their dams were and then riffle II sections downstream of their dams all of these created this habitat diversity which was important to boost the diversity and biomass of the creatures living there the Wolves kill coyotes which meant that there were more rodents around which meant that there were more Hawks and more stoats and weasels and other creatures like that the Bears started eating the leftovers from wolf kills and their numbers rose and they then started killing more deer calves and so they reinforced the impact of the wolves but check this the course of the rivers changed not just because of the Beavers directly because of the wolves the rivers stopped meandering and the reason for that was because as the trees got a hold once more their banks stated their their roots stabilized the banks of the rivers and and meant that they were far less labelled than they were before the composition of the soil began to change because as a deer moved out of some areas and into others their recycling of nutrients through done changed the amount of minerals going into the soils and therefore began to change the vegetation thrown a couple more examples of arctic foxes were introduced by Russian fur trappers to some of the Aleutian Islands but not to others where they were introduced there is scrubby Tundra covering the islands where there are no arctic foxes there's steppe grassland the reason for that is that where there are arctic foxes there's just 1/3 of the phosphate in the soil as on the islands where there are none for simple reason the foxes eat seabirds which bring guano to the islands they have completely transformed the ecology of the places where they live right down to the soil microbe level the Japanese government often claims that it has to hunt the whales of the Southern Oceans among its many other crap excuses because if it doesn't do so then the krill and the fish will be over exploited by the whales and there won't be enough to go round for human beings and it seems intuitive it seems to make sense yes of course that's bound to be the case you know fewer whales is bound to be more krill and fish because the whales eat vast quantities of krill and fish what happens well the population of whales crashes and so does a population of krill and fish how could this possibly be well it turns out that the whales also a driving a trophic cascade they often feed at depth and then they come to the surface and produce what biologists politely call vast fecal plumes enormous quantities of poop une armies this stuff is very iron-rich and iron is a limiting nutrient in the Southern Oceans so when they inject iron back up into the surface into the photic zone the place where there's enough light for photosynthesis that then stimulates the great growth of phytoplankton the plant plankton which in turn stimulates a zooplankton which in turn feeds the fish and the krill and it's not just that by simply by moving up and down through the water column the whales keep kicking the phytoplankton back up into the photic zone and allowing it to reproduce more than it would otherwise because otherwise it just sinks away gradually into the abyss and is then lost from the ecosystem so you get more phytoplankton and eventually when it's been through several cycles kicked up by the whales back into the photic zone it then falls away forever as I say into the abyss and it takes a carbon with it and one study suggests that sperm whales in the Southern Oceans alone despite they're very depleted current population sequester a net two hundred thousand tons of carbon every year just by stimulating the growth of phytoplankton if you extrapolate that to what all the whales must once have been doing in all the oceans around the world when their populations were at historical levels they must have been sequestering tens of millions of tons of carbon a small but significant fraction of the carbon dioxide which would otherwise go into the atmosphere so we are seeing how animals can change not only their ecosystem but also the the physical characteristics of the planet and when those great animals disappear what you were left with it is not just part of an ecosystem which is the ecosystem with a few animals missing it's something completely different it's basically the burnt-out shell of an ecosystem there's almost nothing of its dynamic interactions of it's amazing profit relationships left we live in a shadow land a dim and flattened relic of what there once was and of what there could be again because this is actually an optimistic talk and giving in that rewilding the mass restoration of ecosystems gives us the opportunity to restore not just much of the magnificent wildlife that we've lost on earth but also I believe much of the Wonder and delight and joy an excitement enchantment that we I believe have lost from our own lives for instance in the United States already we've seen roughly two-thirds of the land which was deforested most most of the eastern part of the United States being reforested as a result of the cessation of agriculture and logging in those places what it is is that with globalization places in which farming and and forestry are less competitive are basically left alone that it concentrates in some parts of the planet and releases other parts of the planet now there's a downside to that but there's an upside which we should be taking advantage of in Europe according to one estimate between 2000 and 2030 an area of 30 million hectares of land will be vacated by farmers mostly the uplands of Europe the less fertile land for the same reason that's an area the size of Poland now already we are seeing wolves bears Lynx moose bison Wolverines boar beavers many other species spreading back across Europe at a great rate but if it's true that we're looking at an area the size of Poland potentially becoming available without any policy change even without any change in the Common Agricultural Policy which and changes could greatly accelerate the potential for rewilding then perhaps just in visiting wider ecosystems containing wolves bear Lynx is moose bison and the rest is a little unambitious perhaps we should be considering the return of some of Europe's megafauna why not they still live in Africa same similar species or the same species we've lost a straight tust elephant but maybe the Asian elephant would be a proxy we'd have to find out it's a possibility perhaps the black rhino would be a proxy for the browsing rhinoceri the Mercs and the narrow nose rhino which were here in Trafalgar Square the hippo is the same species the lion is the same species that hyena is the same species why shouldn't we have a Serengeti or two on our doorsteps and at sea it's even easier at sea it's simply about ceasing to fish in certain areas and allowing the ecosystem to recover what this government had promised but now unfortunately it's renamed on that promise to create no-take zones areas where there is no commercial fishing which is good for the fishing apart from anything else because when you've got reserves in which fish can can get to maturity and reproduce produce loads of young they then spill out into surrounding waters where they can be caught and we've seen with marine reserves all over the world how that is boosted the total take from front from fisheries on land I would like to see just really some pretty small tweaks which I think could stimulate a rewilding revolution I would like to remove this ridiculous rule in the the Common Agricultural Policy which says that in order to claim that your major component of farm subsidy the single farm payment you have to keep the land clear of what it calls unwanted vegetation you have to cut the trees down you have to clear the scrub you have to destroy habitats solely in order to claim your money you don't have to farm it you don't even have to keep sheep there you just have to mow it every every few years to prevent these habitats from developing it's a perfectly designed system for maximum ecological destruction and the only reason for it is our money in fact the only reason for any farming whatsoever in the uplands is our money the if you look at Wales for instance the average sheep farmer in the hills sir takes 53,000 pounds a year in subsidies at the end of the year ends up with 33,000 pounds keeping sheep in the Hills costs 20,000 pounds a year now I don't want to see all Hill farming come to an end but I do want to give farmers a choice as to whether they really do want to lose 20,000 pounds a year by chasing sheep over rain sodden Hills or whether they prefer to take the money in lie on the beach I would prefer them to take the money in lie on the beach because then we could allow that land to re wild and we could start bringing back some of our missing species allowing trees to come back to our bare uplands boat most of which are basically bowling greens with contours stopping the perpetual cycle of drought and flood that we see in the lowlands caused in large part by this scarring of the uplands where there's no vegetation to absorb the water and to release it gradually what I would like to see is bringing back some of our missing species some of the ones which can drive trophic cascades and these other fascinating ecosystem processes that things which for me are a source of great wonder and enthrall Minh tand take down the fences block up the drainage ditches and otherwise do nothing we have this obsession particularly in Britain with management and stewardship and we believe that we we have to look after nature otherwise something very bad will happen as a friend of mine says how did nature count before we came along there must have been in a pretty rotten State for the 3 billion years before human beings turned out to look after it but you listened to a lot of British conservation groups and this is exactly the line that they take in there's one reserve close to where I lived in in Mid Wales where in the management plan it says we and we have to spend an awful lot of time and money getting rid of undesirable invasive species so I went to the to the grouper said said what are these undesirable invasive species at all--that's trees and I said what you mean like Sitka spruce or something no no it's only some you know these Romans and birches and Salo and things we just keep coming back and we keep having to cut them down to keep it open well why do you need to keep it open well because that's how it was when we got it and it and they're right on one level but when a Site of Special Scientific Interest is designated its designate to be kept in what's called favorable condition which is a condition you found it in when it was designated and so if the condition happens to be the aftermath of a nuclear winter that see condition in which you have to keep it and my god some of these reserves look like it you are basically preserving what is there however little it is rather than picturing what could live there and so my challenge is as much to the the European Commission and it's crazy farm subsidy rules as it is to conservation as it is perhaps to ourselves about the possibility that we can open our minds to something really fascinating an enchanting which could be right on our doorsteps and this for me is another of the wonderful things about rewilding that it's a positive environmentalism we environmentalists have been tremendously good at telling people what not to do but what we've been missing is the positive vision which tells people is not just a question of making the world a little bit less worse than it would have been but there's something wonderful that we can head towards there's something magnificent that we can aim for rewilding ladies and gentlemen gives us a possibility that our Silent Spring could be replaced by a raucous summer thank you you

Channel: RSA

Views: 14,057

Rating: 4.8743458 out of 5

Keywords: the, rsa, George Monbiot, Tony Juniper, Rewilding, Re-wilding, Wild, nature, Environmentalism (Political Ideology), Environmentalist (Profession), environment, UK, elephant, wales, sheep farming, farming, ecology, United Kingdom (Country), Garden, Agriculture (Professional Field), Green, Flowers, plant, extinct

Id: vEWW178-YYg

Length: 19min 6sec (1146 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 11 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/claird]

Great fun. A fine lecture, worth a viewing--and I'm generally impatient with videos.