Whale sharks – the world’s largest fish – roam less than previously thought. Local and regional actions are vital for the conservation of this globally endangered species, according to a new study by researchers from the Marine Megafauna Foundation, University of Southampton, and Sharkwatch Arabia.

Previously, genetic research indicated that whale sharks mixed within distinct populations in the Indo-Pacific and Atlantic Ocean, respectively. The findings are published today in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.

This new study used stable isotope analysis, a biochemical technique, to demonstrate that whale sharks feeding at three disparate sites in the Western Indian Ocean (Mozambique and Tanzania) and the Arabian Gulf (Qatar) rarely swim more than a few hundred kilometers north or south from these areas.

Electronic tags

Dr Clare Prebble, who led the research as part of her PhD project at the University of Southampton, said: “Whale sharks are amazing swimmers, often moving over 10000 km each year, and they can dive to around 2000 meters in depth. Biochemical studies tell us more about where they go and what they do when they’re out of our sight.”

The researchers used isotopes of nitrogen and carbon that have similar chemical properties, but vary in their atomic mass. Ratios between the heavier and lighter isotopes of these elements vary naturally across different habitats in the marine environment.

For example, more of the heavier isotopes are found in near-shore environments than offshore. These ratios stay consistent as they are passed up through the food web, from tiny marine plants to top predators, and therefore provide a record of the animal’s feeding and movement behaviors. Stable isotope analysis thereby provides a ‘biological passport’ for whale sharks.

Electronic tags are commonly used with marine animals to record their movements and diving behaviors.

However, the challenge of keeping them attached to a large shark, while minimizing disturbance, has meant that only short-term deployments (weeks to months) have been possible.

Unique patterns

This study used tiny samples of skin tissue from wild, free-swimming whale sharks. These small pieces of skin, collected over 2–3 years at each location, were sufficient to reconstruct the sharks’ movements and feeding preferences over the weeks and months prior to sampling.

Values of both carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes differentiated at each site. To complement the biochemical analysis, the researchers also took photographs of the natural markings on each whale shark to identify and track individuals over a 10-year timeframe.

Every whale shark has a unique spot pattern, similar to a human fingerprint. The team recorded 4197 encounters with 1240 individual whale sharks within these three countries.

Only two sharks moved between sites, both swimming around 2000 km north from Mozambique to Tanzania.

Taken together, these findings indicate that there are limited movements between these major aggregation sites over months to years. These results have implications for the conservation of this endangered species.

Local protections

Prebble added: “The best data available suggests that more than half of the world’s whale sharks have been killed since the 1980s.

“Although the Western Indian Ocean remains a global hotspot for the species, even the largest feeding areas only host a few hundred sharks. Our results show that we need to treat each site separately, and ensure good conservation management is in place, as the sharks may not re-populate if they’re impacted by people’s activities.”

The study stresses the need to protect these filter-feeding sharks at the areas where they come together in numbers, particularly where human pressures are also present.

Whale sharks are an incidental catch in coastal gillnets, which are frequently used in Mozambique and Tanzania. The Arabian Gulf is a huge oil shipping area where vessel strikes pose a major threat to the sharks when they are feeding near the surface.

Dr Simon Pierce, Principal Scientist at the Marine Megafauna Foundation and a co-author on this study, commented: “Whale sharks are fully capable of swimming across oceans, but it seems like the juveniles, at least, are choosing not to. They like coming back to the same sites each year to take advantage of predictable feeding opportunities.

“Looking on the bright side, that emphasizes that local protection can have a major benefit for the recovery of this endangered species. The rewards can also be felt locally, with whale shark tourism now worth over $100 million each year around the world.”

Population distribution 

Earlier this year, colleagues reported that whale sharks regularly visit Madagascar to feed, which has led to a growing ecotourism industry between the months of September and December.

To date, none of the sharks identified in Madagascar have been seen outside that country, further reinforcing the results from this new study. 

Dr Clive Trueman from the University of Southampton concluded: “Interestingly, most sharks found at these feeding sites are juvenile males of less than nine meters.

“To truly assess how populations are globally structured and distributed, we need to learn more about where the sharks go once they reach adulthood. They may well move out of our sight to feed and breed in deeper offshore waters.”

The study was supported by WWF Tanzania, Shark Foundation, Aqua-Firma, Waterlust, Maersk Oil Research and Technology Centre, Qatar Ministry of Municipality and Environment, PADI Foundation, Rufford Small Grants, and two private trusts.

This Author 

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from the Marine Megafauna Foundation. The MMF was created in 2009 to research, protect and conserve the populations of threatened marine megafauna around the world. The study – Prebble et al., ‘Limited latitudinal ranging of juvenile whale sharks in the Western Indian Ocean suggests the existence of regional management units’ – was published on 9 August 2018 and available here

The decision by Theresa May’s government to allow the building of a third runway at Heathrow Airport is unlawful, according to a formal legal action which has begun at the High Court. Opponents to the decision argue that it fails to address the country’s climate change obligations.

The legal challenge brought by Friends of the Earth challenges the legal basis of the government’s decision to designate the Airports National Policy Statement (NPS), the policy framework for expansion at Heathrow Airport devised by the Transport Secretary Chris Grayling, which gives the go-ahead to a third runway at Heathrow.

Lawyers Leigh Day, on behalf of Friends of the Earth, filed papers with the High Court this week asking for the Airports NPS published in June to be quashed.

Paris Agreement

The environmental campaign charity claims that the NPS fails to account for all the impacts on future generations, who will be left with the adverse consequences of growth from aviation-increasing climate impacts. 

In the papers filed at the High Court Friends of the Earth argues that the government’s Airports NPS is unlawful as it amounts to a breach of the UK’s climate change policy, as well as its sustainable development duties, due to the following:

•    It does not explain how it takes account of domestic targets for greenhouse gas emission reduction under the Climate Change Act 2008;

•    It does not factor in the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit global warming to well below 2°C and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C;

•    It fails to factor in the non-CO2 climate impacts of a third runway, such as the emission of nitrogen oxides, which generate warming effects of a similar magnitude to CO2 emissions;

•    It does not lawfully and fully consider the likely impact on future generations of a third runway, who will be stranded with the climate-damaging infrastructure.

Liz Hutchins, Friends of the Earth’s director of campaigns, said: “The government’s airports strategy completely ignores its obligations to tackle climate change – this is short-sighted, incredibly reckless and we believe it is unlawful.

“Allowing the aviation industry to pump more pollution into the atmosphere will make it far harder to prevent catastrophic climate change – and leaves future generations to suffer the consequences.

Catastrophic change

“It’s time to end our reliance on the fossil fuels that are already roasting our planet and threatening peoples’ lives, homes and livelihoods.”

Rowan Smith from the public law team at Leigh Day said: “Our client believes that the expansion of Heathrow Airport will jeopardise the UK’s ability to make the very deep reductions in Greenhouse Gases that will be necessary to prevent global warming from causing catastrophic, irreversible impacts for the environment and future generations.

“In no sensible terms can this be described as sustainable development, when the additional costs of carbon-offsetting and the global warming potential of non-CO2 emissions from aviation do not feature in the government’s plans.

Smith continued: “The government has a legal duty to take into account climate change policy and the Paris agreement it has committed to with the global community, the Airports National Policy Statement does not adequately consider those factors and we therefore will argue that it is unlawful.”

A decision on whether there will be a full hearing about these issues is expected to be made this Autumn.

This Author

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This story is based on a press release from Friends of the Earth. For more information visit its website.

Even the sunset is sponsored by the global resource industry in Gladstone, Queensland. Looking west in the early evening, you cannot help gazing at the three tall chimneys of the power plant as they interfere with the yellow disc just about to sink below the horizon.

It is a vibrant industrial city, one of the world’s largest coal ports, with two large alumina refineries, an aluminium smelter, three LNG (liquid natural gas) plants, a cement factory, a cyanide factory, and much more. It is prosperous, thriving and energetic.

But there is a Faustian dimension to the contracts signed by workers and executives: these industries threaten people’s health, pollute the local environment, and contribute to global climate change.

Industrial landscape

Approaching Gladstone airport in a smallish propeller plane from Brisbane, you notice the contrast between the serene greenery of the remaining forest cover and the raw brutality of the small open-pit mines and construction areas.

There is a clash between the blue Pacific Ocean and the crimson pools of bauxite refuse from the alumina refinery; green pastures next to barren fields of red wasteland reminiscent of Martian landscapes; beaches and suburbs rubbing shoulders with smokestacks and warehouses. 

Before landing, you catch a glimpse of the industrial port facilities that define the boundary between city and sea. There are hundreds of empty coal wagons on railway side tracks. Then you see the distant metal structures of the LNG terminals on Curtis Island, the cranes at the wharf, and the foreign cargo ships waiting to load.

Gladstone is a child of globalisation. Since the industrialisation of the then fledgling rural town began in the 1960s, its population has mushroomed along with the growth of its export-oriented, resource-based industry. 

Change has been rapid, and has turned the city into the undisputed industrial hub of Central Queensland. Yet with globalisation comes vulnerability and powerlessness.

Industrial powerhouse

Until 1967, Gladstone was mainly integrated with the surrounding countryside and had no fossil-fuel related industry. 

Its cornerstone enterprise was Swift’s meatworks, which grew in importance and prosperity as a supplier of tinned meat to Allied forces during the Second World War. 

The meatworks were closed down in 1963, and on the very same site, one of the world’s largest alumina refineries was opened in 1967. It would eventually get its electricity from the coal-driven power station on the edge of town, opened in 1976. The alumina would eventually be turned into aluminium at the nearby Boyne Island Smelter from 1982. 

With the opening of the Moura railway line for transporting coal from the interior of Queensland in 1968, and the construction of a coal terminal at Barney Point, Gladstone had, in the space of just a few years, become a fully-fledged industrial city.

Industrial developments in the Gladstone region have continued at an uneven pace. 

A second alumina refinery has been opened in Yarwun west of the city; Cement Australia operates a factory at Fisherman’s Landing just north of Gladstone and a mine in Mount Larcom to the north-west; there is a quarry, a chemical factory and many auxiliary activities – scaffolding, mechanical workshops, transport companies and so on – adding to the industrial, and industrious, face presented by Gladstone to the visitor.

Research expectations

The main research question raised by my recent research in Gladstone concerns local responses to these changes, and the unintentional side-effects of rapid industrial growth more generally. 

No matter where you look, there are signs of industrial activity and growth. Wherever you turn, there are visual, audible and sometimes olfactory reminders of industry.

Fine coal dust settles on your window sills and garden chairs, city beaches are deserted due to the visible pollution of the water, the dredging of the western harbour to allow large ships to enter has been fraught by controversy and environmental concerns. 

There is a constant hum of distant machinery and din of heavy trucks passing through the Port Access Road intersecting the city centre.

I had expected to devote much of my attention to exploring ambivalence around climate change and the use of fossil fuels. It stands to reason that people who depend on fossil fuel-intensive industries for their livelihood should take a sanguine position towards questions to do with climate change and environmental destruction. 

Still, considering the recent (and ongoing) controversies around LNG developments and dredging, the relative lack of environmental anxiety and wariness towards the fossil fuel industries initially came as something of a surprise.

Limited options

Although the green movement is vocal, well-organised and at times influential in Australia, it is all but invisible in Gladstone. 

In the 2012 Queensland elections, the Green Party got 2.1 percent of the votes in the greater Gladstone region (602 votes), compared to 7.54 percent in the State. 

As one of my interlocutors said, if Greenpeace would offer him a sustainable job enabling him to pay his mortgage and his daughters’ education, he would take it immediately, but for the time being, he had no other option than holding on to his factory job.

Instead of widespread environmental activism, what I found in Gladstone was a strong commitment to industrialism. Admittedly, this was coupled with an anxiety about health risks, and a somewhat muffled concern with the local and global environmental destruction wrought by fossil fuel-based industrial activity. 

Yet, with the exception of a few heroic green warriors, some of whom have formed the Gladstone Conservation Council, attitudes to industrialism are on the whole positive. Unlike in cities like Melbourne and Sydney, green voices seem largely powerless.

This Author

Thomas Hylland Eriksson is a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo. His recent book, Boomtown: Runaway Globalisation on the Queensland Coast (July 2018) is available to buy from Pluto Press.  

The most ambitious and high profile rewinding project in the UK – with six lynx being reintroduced to Kielder for a five-year trial period – has received a boost. Landowners covering 700km2 of potential habitat for the medium-sized cats have now approved access.

Michael Gove, the environment secretary, and Natural England continue to consider the Lynx UK Trust licence application for a trial reintroduction of Eurasian lynx to Kielder Forest in Northumberland. 

If the trial is successful, it could lead to a wider reintroduction of the lynx in other parts of the UK such as the Scottish Highlands.

Team effort

Advocates expect the lynx would bring a range of benefits, helping to control and reduce the UK’s over-populated deer numbers, reducing damage to forests and improving habitat for smaller animals in the process.

Expert analysis has also estimated a potential tourism value of tens of millions of pounds for the local rural economy, based on similar reintroduction projects in Europe.

Dr Paul O’Donoghue, the chief scientific advisor for the Lynx UK Trust, said: “I think this speaks volumes for the confidence in the trial reintroduction plan we’ve laid out, and the potential it has for improving the local ecosystem and expanding the local tourist economy. Literally every landowner we have approached has given permission.

“We’ve got an incredible team of ecologists, four wildlife vets and highly experienced reintroduction specialists ready to start work, with a combined 300 years of experience between them.

“This will be an exceptionally rigorous, scientifically-led reintroduction trial using cutting edge technology to monitor these cats in stunning detail. Everything is in place to deliver a world class project that will breathe life into Britain’s dying forest ecosystems.”

Apex preditor 

Wildwood Trust, has extensive experience in the conservation and reintroduction of protected species and managing large carnivores, as well as working closely with Government regulators, such as Natural England and DEFRA, developing conservation licensing systems for a range of threatened species such as water voles, dormice, red squirrels and European beaver. The Trust has recently joined the Lynx UK Trust reintroduction team. 

Peter Smith, the director of Wildwood, said: “Our ecosystem desperately needs reintroductions like this; apex predators are critical for controlling species like deer which can overpopulate and cause serious damage to natural habitats.

“Lynx aren’t the complete solution, but they’re a keystone element in the construction of one. We’re very happy to be making a big commitment of time, staff and resources to this project, and thoroughly believe the time is perfect for these shy animals to come back to the UK.”

Lynx have been successfully reintroduced in countries across Europe.

They have proven themselves to be of no threat to humans anywhere they live, and that they present a very limited threat to sheep farmers, with the average Eurasian lynx killing one sheep every two years.

Insuring sheep

Lynx UK Trust have already arranged insurance for every sheep in the UK against lynx attacks, backed by Lloyds Syndicate ARK Speciality Programs, a specialist division of Lloyds of London headed up by Richard Bryant

He said: “I hope this insurance cover will provide sound financial security for the Trust so they will be able to generously compensate farmers if any of their sheep are injured or killed.

“Having assessed all the science and research on lynx predation we’re very confident that sheep attacks will be rare, so if our support can help make a trial reintroduction practical it’s a great opportunity for us to do something really positive.”

O’Donoghue added: “There’s a perceived threat to sheep which has come largely from baseless National Sheep Association scaremongering, the union has avoided every opportunity to engage with the project and seem to have no interest in their members benefitting from the extensive opportunities a reintroduction could bring. 

“Lloyds will insure their sheep, farmers will have an incredible opportunity to diversify their businesses and benefit from the increased tourism into the area, and we’ve laid out a range of investments we want to make into predation mitigation. These would reduce attacks by any predator, including foxes and dogs. 

“There is literally no evidence that lynx will have any significant negative effect on sheep farming, quite the opposite. We can’t let completely unsubstantiated rhetoric take priority over scientific evidence, economic evidence and incredible public support, and I’m hugely excited to see that all of the Kielder region’s major landowners have now confirmed their approval for what we hope to do.” 

This Author 

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from the Lynx UK Trust. For more information visit their website.

An excitable Keith Joseph met with Ralph Harris of the Institute of Economic Affairs and his deputy Arthur Seldon at one of his favourite Westminster restaurants, Lockets, in February 1974.

Joseph was at the time a member of the Shadow Cabinet and the third most influential politician in the Conservative party. He had invited his close friends from the IEA to lunch so he could get their clearance to set up a rival free market think tank.

His new Centre for Policy Studies would be overtly political and use the methods of the Socialist Fabians to win the battle of ideas in favour of radical liberalism within Britain’s natural party of government.

This was cloak and dagger politics. An audacious, secret, plan to challenge seize the party leadership, win the forthcoming election and install a new Cabinet dedicated to making Hayek’s economic prescriptions official policy for the first time. “My aim was to convert the Tory party,” Joseph would later explain.

Joseph would become known even among his closest friends as the “Mad Monk” in part because of the purity and forcefulness of his political thought. He would concede that he was “a convenient madman”.

Offer Encouragement

He had relied on Harris’s instruction and help in economics and social policy, devouring the stack of books, reports and articles that the IEA recommended over the previous months.

“Harris assured Joseph that he was not troubled by the fact that there would be two organisations promoting roughly the same message. In fact Harris and Seldon could not have been more helpful,” records Antony Fisher biographer Gerald Frost.

The CPS was in fact “the logical next step” in the battle against the State. Antony Fisher was just as welcoming of Joseph’s bold move and paid a visit “to assure him of his personal support and to offer encouragement”.

Joseph was the Marcus Brutus of his time, convinced that disloyally disposing of his leader, Edward Heath, would be good for his party, his city, his empire. He was the leader of this conspiracy.

Strangely considering his part in the internal leadership coup, Lawson would describe his friend Joseph as being: “Tormented by self-doubt, devoid of guile, and with a passion to educate, he laboured under the delusion that everyone else, friend or foe, was as intellectually honest and fundamentally decent, as lacking in malice and personal ambition, as he was.”

Provoking Wrath

Heath was deeply suspicious that his colleagues were secretly plotting a leadership bid but gave his approval to the new think tank only half convinced it would study Polish economic policy. “Heath’s intention must have been to give Joseph a chemistry set with which he would hopefully blow himself up,” said one contemporary.

Joseph recruited Margaret Thatcher as vice chairman of the CPS in May 1974. “His was a risky, exposed position, and the fear of provoking the wrath of Ted and the derision of the left-wing commentators was a powerful disincentive – but I jumped at the chance,” Thatcher recalled years later.

“From Keith and Alfred I learned a great deal. I renewed my reading of the seminal works of liberal economics and conservative thought.

“I also regularly attended lunches at the Institute of Economic affairs where Ralph Harris, Arthur Seldon, Alan Walters and others – in other words all those who had been right when we in government had gone wrong – were busy marking out a new non-socialist economic and social path for Britain.”

Joseph prescribed Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom as required reading. Gerald Frost, was a member of the CPSboard and would hand books and reports to Richard Ryder, Thatcher’s political secretary, for her to read over the weekend including the latest output from the IEA.

“Joseph was also responsible for ensuring that Mrs Thatcher struck up relations with the IEA directors, and through them, Hayek and Friedman,” recalls Frost.

The new Conservative think tank operated on an annual budget of £150,000 from private donors – which included the largess of the tobacco companies.

Hung Parliament

The official founding meeting of the CPS was held in Room G of the House of Commons on 12 June 1974. Joseph was joined by Thatcher and Sherman and also an industrialist named Nigel Vinson.

Vinson had written an article for the IEA and shortly after was called by Fisher and taken to lunch. Vinson was invited by Fisher to join the board of trustees of the IEA.

Vinson agreed because he “admired him hugely”. Thirty years later he told me: “That’s the link between the IEA and the Centre for Policy Studies: that’s me. I, Maggie Thatcher and Keith Joseph, we were the first three directors of the Centre for Policy Studies.”

The IEA, he explained, wanted to form opinions over decades and also protect the charitable status as educational rather than party political. The CPS, on the other hand, wanted to transform British politics in the next months and years.

Joseph went on a speaking tour while Britain was in tumult. Edward Heath had taken on the mining unions and lost.

The election in February had delivered a hung parliament and when negotiations between the Conservatives and Liberals collapsed, Labour formed a minority government. Harold Wilson and his Labour party won the second general election of the year, on 10 October 1974, but only by three votes.

“The result was much less of a disaster for the Tories than it might have been,” according to Geoffrey Howe, who would later become chancellor under Thatcher. “We had lost, certainly. But disaster had been averted”.

It was well understood that Heath would not last long as Tory leader. After the election he put Thatcher in charge of housing, and she in turn asked Nigel Lawson to join her clique.

Weathy Stockbroker

Lawson was born in Hampstead, now one of the most desirable parts of the capital, in March 1932. His father was a successful City of London tea merchant and his mother’s father was a wealthy stockbroker.

His childhood home was “complete with nanny, cook and parlourmaid”. Lawson during his formative years immediately after the war developed the distinctive distrust that would make him amenable to the free market philosophy.

“It seemed to me that in every respect the socialism the Labour Government was seeking to put into practice went against the grain of human nature – not least its Utopian disregard of original sin or of what Anthony Quinton has called ‘man’s moral and intellectual imperfection’.”

Lawson won a maths scholarship and went up to Oxford University to study philosophy, politics and economics under the tutelage of professor Roy Harrod, an ardent Keynesian.

He specialised in philosophy and was influenced by the Linguistic Analysis school which would prove a useful foundation for his elegant rhetoric during his political career.

He joined Chatham, the “somewhat decadent high Tory dining club” and played poker. After university he joined the navy and in 1955 married Vanessa Salmon, a wealthy tobacco heiress. He then joined the Financial Times as an oil correspondent.

His son Dominic, currently a climate sceptic columnist, and his celebrity daughter Nigella, were both born during this period. Lawson then moved from the newsroom to the political backroom.

Oliver Poole, chairman of the FT and of the Conservative party, recognised his shrewdness and way with words hired him as a speechwriter to Harold MacMillan, the prime minister. Lawson would edit the right-wing Spectator and then the city pages of the newly launched Sunday Telegraph when in 1970 he stood unsuccessfully as an MP for Slough.  

He was finally elected to Parliament on the eve of his 42nd birthday in 1974 and in the same year had a hand in drafting the Conservative party manifesto, committed the Tories to creating an ministry for energy and then found himself in Thatcher’s policy group.

“This was my first experience of working with Margaret,” Lawson would note. The proximity to Thatcher meant proximity to Joseph who at that time was the free market cabal’s great hope for leadership.

Lawson  recalled: “Keith was the founder member of the group of Tory radicals which, under Margaret’s leadership, were the government’s driving force during the first two Thatcher parliaments. The only other full members of that group were Geoffrey Howe, Norman Tebbit and myself.”

Delinquents and Denizens

Howe made it clear that he wanted Joseph to join the leadership. “I [told] Joseph that he would have our support if he chose to stand, and no doubt others were doing the same. Keith seemed willing to accept the challenge.”

But then disaster. Joseph would during the course of one speech wreck his leadership ambitions on the rocks of public good will and tolerance. “The balance of our population, our human stock is threatened”, Joseph warned at Edgbaston in October 1974.

“A high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up.”

He continued: “Many of these girls are unmarried, many are deserted or divorced or soon will be. Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment….they are producing problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals, sub-normal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters!”

The blame for this apparent malaise was clear. “The Socialist method would take away from the family and its members the responsibilities which give it cohesion”.

Almost before he had sat down after the address there was a storm of protest across the country. Many working class families were deeply offended and Joseph was “accused of being a racist and an advocate of eugenics”.

The speech would in fact do for Joseph just as the “rivers of blood” had killed the political career of his close friend and fellow IEA advocate Enoch Powell years earlier. He was no longer a serious contender for the Conservative leadership and future prime minister.

“Keith, naive rather than deliberately provocative, was genuinely surprised by the fuss,” according to Howe. “Sadly, I concluded that Keith’s judgment was too erratic for him to be entrusted with leadership of the party.” [Howe, 1994: 89].

Hostility to Women

Shortly after the speech a humbled Joseph called at Thatcher’s offices at the Houses of Parliament. “I am sorry,” he told his unofficial campaign leader. “I just can’t run. Ever since I made that speech, the press has been outside the house.

They have been merciless. My wife can’t take it…and I have decided I just can’t stand.” The free market advocates had to decide what to do. They were deeply unhappy at the prospect that Heath and his national consensus would grind on for ever.

Thatcher’s ambitions were limited to that of chancellor, especially because of the hostility to women that dominated the Conservatives at that time.

Her husband, Denis, had sold the family oil business to Castrol in the 1950s for what would today be many millions.

She was therefore comfortably off enough to risk everything. “Look, Keith, if you’re not going to stand,” she said finally. “I will.”

Thatcher’s victory in the election for the Tory leadership was decisive. Two days later she met with the 1922 Committee of Conservative back bench MPs. “The room was packed,” Howe recalls.

“Tears came to my eyes. The Conservative Party had elected its first woman leader…By her almost reckless courage she had won their support, if not yet their hearts. A new bond of loyalty had been forged.”

Thatcher quickly assembled her team. She surprised almost everyone by making Geoffrey Howe, the IEA supporter and member of the Mont Pelerin Society, her chancellor and therefore putting him in charge of the country’s economy.

In doing so, she looked over Keith Joseph, although he remained at her side as a policy advisor. Howe concluded: “Keith Joseph was widely, and rightly, seen as the man who had blazed the trail for Margaret’s victory.”

She then recruited a team of young, privately-educated free market thinkers to help her meet the terrifying prospect of confronting Harold Wilson – still a “cunning and attractive parliamentary performer” – in the House of Commons.

The Gang of Four was led by Nigel Lawson.

Adam Curtis, the BBC filmmaker, captured the significance of this moment in the transformation of British political life. “She turned to the Institute of Economic Affairs to create the policies for a future government. What Fisher and Smedley had dreamt of twenty years before had finally happened.

“Once upon a time their Think Tank had been marginalised and despised – now it was at the centre of a counter-revolution that was about to triumph.”

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk. 

Almost a hundred years ago the organic farming movement threw down the gauntlet and challenged industrial agriculture. Sir Albert Howard, his first wife, Gabrielle, and, following her death, his second wife, Louise, were the brave pioneers of this movement.

The Howards were a new breed. They merged the latest science with the ideals of peasant farming. Albert and Gabrielle fell deeply in love at the turn of the 20th century and forged a working relationship remarkable in the annals of science history. Side by side in the laboratory they united deeply held traditional values about Nature with the hard, cold facts of science.

By the 1980s, long after the Howards had died, the movement had gained public acceptance from many of the same corporations and government institutions that had called Albert Howard and his followers cranks and kooks.

The myriad of followers hailed from both left and right of the political spectrum, attracting the support of green activists, neo-traditionalists, socialists, fascists and capitalists. High-profile luminaries, from Gandhi to the Prince of Wales, along with millions of consumers, have been counted as faithful adherents of organic farming. How did this come about?

The making of a manifesto

In 1905 the government of India hired Albert and, soon after, Gabrielle as economic botanists. They worked in a new India-wide agricultural research station in Pusa, Bihar and developed new varieties of wheat. But they also attempted to solve India’s largest agricultural problem: how could small farmers who could not afford expensive chemical fertilisers and pesticides improve production and stave off plant disease using natural methods they could afford?

After gaining his own research centre in Indore, Albert devised a new scientific method of drawing nitrogen from the atmosphere through the natural bacteria in a compost pile.

Treating the soil with this compost rejuvenated the humus and enabled the roots of the plants to absorb vital nutrients. All this was accomplished using commonly available plant material and only a small amount of manure as starter.

When Gabrielle tragically died of cancer in 1930, Albert retired to England, heartbroken. Gabrielle’s sister Louise had just retired as an agricultural adviser for the League of Nations in Geneva, and she met often with Albert to handle family affairs.

After lengthy discussions on agriculture, they both soon realised that what worked in India could work for the whole world. They met again for a holiday in Italy to work together on a new book titled The Waste Products of Agriculture.

They fell in love, and married a few years after Gabrielle’s death. Louise helped Albert fashion his vision for agricultural reform into a powerful and popular book called An Agricultural Testament, published in 1940. It quickly became the manifesto of the organic farming movement.

After Albert died in 1947, Louise carried on the battle for the health of the soil through her own herculean efforts. Along with the Soil Association and a host of other advocates like E.F. Schumacher, organic farming activists were a vital bridge between the earlier conservation movement and the modern environmental movement that arose after 1970.

Louise Howard, largely unknown today, sustained a global network of organic farming activists who also advocated clean air and water, the protection of wildlife, and the urgent necessity of cutting back on deadly chemicals like DDT that poisoned our ecosystem.

Her vital role in keeping these issues alive from the late 1940s to the late 1960s places her as arguably the single most important woman in the environmental movement. Even Rachel Carson drew largely from organic farming material that activists secretly provided to her for writing her seminal book, Silent Spring.

Connecting heart and science

Little could Louise know at the time of her death in 1969 that the incremental efforts of gardeners, small farmers and small markets would, over the next few decades, reach a tipping point and swiftly convert not just millions of people, but also numerous governments and international organisations to the ideas of her late husband.

She would have been surprised that authorities would from 1980 onwards transform the reach of organic farming so radically and bring the movement she once led in exile into a global system of agricultural management. Nor could she have foreseen that the accumulation of market forces would finally, through large corporate enterprises, produce organic farming on a monumental scale.

What does the future hold? First, the environmental need for organic farming is likely to drive its expansion in the future. Industrial agriculture takes a toll on water catchment areas. Wildlife and human health can suffer from the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Industrial agriculture does not sequester carbon in soils as well as organic farming does, and this has implications for global warming.

The lessons from this science of the heart are many. The most important is that in order to have impact, science must connect with deeply held values. Today the public is divided over how far to push environmental protections.

Often these debates suffer because the science behind them does not connect with people at the local level, or they present only scientific modelling that is overly abstract and disconnected from spirituality.

The Howards understood how to connect science with the heart. Albert Howard attempted to modernise the values of peasant farmers who felt a profound connection to the land and who handed down traditions of husbandry from generations of peasant farmers in Europe, India and China.

Peasant farmers provided examples of how humans could sustain agriculture on the same plot of land for thousands of years without exhausting the soil. The Howards wanted to place modern agriculture on the same footing.

They successfully modernised and systematised ecological values into the modern farm economy and blazed a path for the future that revealed how science, ecology and tradition can thrive together.

Author

Gregory Barton is Professor of History at Western Sydney University. His latest book, The Global History of Organic Farming, is published by Oxford University Press.

This article was first published in the current issue of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, which is available now. 

With a blade, I flicked the mussels off the rocks into my waiting bucket. Purple-shelled, they lay on a bed of sea lettuce and samphire. Later, cooked together in white wine and cream, my seaside discoveries created a marine feast. This was food at its best – fresh, seasonal, packaging-free, and utterly delicious.

If you enjoy food and love to spend time outdoors, then foraging soon becomes a way of life. You see the world differently – pretty elder­flowers bursting into creamy bud are still charming, but you will scrutinise them to pinpoint that perfect moment when the buds unfurl, ready to harvest for your fragrant cordial.

A simple walk becomes an opportunity to gather. Recently, a woodland stroll saw us returning with a few handfuls of ramsons, or wild garlic, which I crushed into butter with a little salt, smeared onto ciabatta and baked, to make wild garlic bread. I’m quietly awaiting the blackberries, hazelnuts and chestnuts.

Knowledge is everything

Foraging connects you deeply to Nature. After all, taste is the most intimate of our senses. When a wrong choice could kill you or make you unwell, suddenly knowledge is everything. You will check and check again that your identification is correct, and on seeking the advice of an expert, learn more than you ever set out to. Even today, I am wary of most mushroom types unless I am accompanied by a more experienced gatherer.

Safety is about more than accidentally eating something poisonous. It’s advisable to avoid dog height (!), to pick well away from traffic fumes, and to check your skin and clothing for ticks if you’ve been walking through undergrowth.

The foraging guides online by the Woodland Trust are very accessible for beginners. Richard Mabey’s Food for Free in pocket size is a worthwhile field companion whatever your level of experience.

We spend years training children out of their innate desire to taste the world around them. My own two ate books, mud and insects if my back was turned for two seconds. Yet when children are old enough to understand safety, they take to foraging with relish. Expert little fingers will pluck the petals from deadnettles, sucking the sweet nectar found there, or pick the tiny wild strawberries that are practically invisible from adult height.

Foraging is the antithesis of supermarket shopping, where everything is always available whatever the weather or time of year. Sometimes you will return empty-handed from a foray. It also comes with the responsibility that we can easily absolve ourselves of when in a shop.

Take what you need

A good forager will never trespass and will always leave plenty for next time and for Nature. If you dig up plants, they will be killed, whereas if you just snip off a few leaves from each, the plant will continue to grow. Similarly, whilst I want plenty of blackberries for my crumble, I will always leave plenty for the creatures who depend on them for their survival.

When I don my rubber gloves and pick young nettles, I am conscious that I am stepping outside the norms of society – I do look slightly mad by modern standards. However, foraging was once not only normal, but vital.

After all, for a vast stretch of human history, we survived by foraging for wild plants and animals. Even when agriculture became widespread, many people still depended on hedgerow and field edge for food and for medicinal plants such as yarrow and elderflower (which were often combined with peppermint to break a fever).

Today, fewer of us in the western world need to forage to prevent starvation, yet when we do we are feeding not only our bellies, but also our knowledge and that deep, forgotten part of ourselves that is animal and truly part of Nature.

Puffball mushroom pizza

The giant puffball mushroom is a white globe that can grow as big as your head, with a tasty, earthy flavour and firm texture.

This magnificent and entertaining fungus is also the safest way to introduce some wild mushroom into your diet because it is so easy to identify. Look out for them on grassy meadows and field edges. Just check that your mushroom is bigger than a grapefruit, and – cut from bottom to top – is pure white throughout. Look on www.wildfooduk.com for useful images and descriptions.

The puffball is very versatile and can be used like any mushroom: stir-fried, cooked in garlic butter, baked or grilled… My favourite way is as a very healthy pizza base, making this a low-carb and gluten-free way to enjoy pizza.

Recipe and method

Customise with your own favourite toppings, but here is a basic puffball Margherita. Serves 4.

Ingredients

a giant puffball

1 medium-sized onion, finely chopped

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

Salt and pepper

400g tin chopped tomatoes

2 tbsp tomato purée

pinch of sugar

1 ball of mozzarella, shredded

1 tsp dried oregano

1 tbsp olive oil for the sauce – more will be needed for brushing the puffball slices

Heat a saucepan over a medium heat and add the oil. Once hot, add the onion and a pinch of salt and fry for 4–5 minutes until softened. Add the garlic and cook for a further 2 minutes.

Pour in the tomatoes and tomato purée and season with pepper, more salt if needed, the oregano and a pinch of sugar. Reduce the heat and simmer gently for 20–30 minutes until the sauce has thickened to a jam-like consistency.

Next, slice your puffball into discs about 2cm thick. Each of these is a pizza base.

Heat the grill to hot. Brush oil on both sides of the puffball slices, season with salt and pepper and grill for 2–3 minutes on each side until soft.

Now top with the tomato sauce and mozzarella (and any other toppings you fancy). Grill until the cheese is melted and bubbling, which should take another 2–3 minutes.

Author

Kate Blincoe is a freelance writer. The recipe is an edited entry from her book The No-Nonsense Guide to Green Parenting (Green Books, 2015). 

This article was first published in the current issue of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, which is available now.

Encouraging farmers to change from keeping cattle on conventional agriculturally improved pasture to grazing them on species-rich grassland could help save Britain’s meadows.

According to new research for the Save Our Magnificent Meadows campaign, the nutritional benefits of feeding cattle on wild-flower meadows could far outweigh those of feeding on conventional pasture, Trevor Dines from Plantlife, one of the organisations involved in the campaign, told Resurgence & Ecologist.

Creating consumer demand for cattle fed this way would make it more financially viable for farmers to manage wild-flower meadows, and so protect them, Dines said.

More than 97 percent of wildflower meadows have disappeared in Britain since the 1930s, and this has in turn affected valuable insect populations.

Need for balance

With so few wild-flower meadows still around, people have lost touch with what it’s like to experience one, Dines said. “Sitting in a meadow, picking buttercups – that has disappeared from our landscapes,” he continued. “There’s nowhere else that’s as thrilling as a wild-flower meadow.”

To encourage interest in preserving wild-flower meadows, Plantlife organises the annual National Meadows Day, being held this year on 7 July. There will be bug hunts, butterfly identification, and the chance to run through a meadow “all senses firing”, as Dines puts it.

In the past, traditional meadows were allowed to grow from January to the beginning of August and were then cut for hay. This was followed by bare-field grazing livestock in September and October. Today’s highly managed farming techniques – silage fields are harvested two or three times a year – do not allow enough time for wild flowers to grow.

“Meadows get overlooked in the rewilding debate,” Dines said. “We’ve got fixations with woodland, but we need more balance because they do different things for different species.”

This Author

Marianne Brown is Deputy Editor of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. She tweets at @brownmariannes. This article first appeared in the latest issue of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. 

Friedrich von Hayek had abandoned his early socialism in favour of neoliberal free market ideas. But the fashionable theory at the time sat somewhere between the two. John Maynard Keynes had apparently devised a historic compromise between the markets and full scale socialism.

Keynes argued that the government should use its economic powers to manage the markets. This included government lending and spending to promote growth, and encouraging housewives to spend their savings. 

The Cambridge professor attained his prestige and influence because his prescriptions had survived academic scrutiny and practical application during the wars.

Burst out laughing

Hayek had an almost impossible task. He had to devise an economic counter-argument to Keynes, and to expose any logical inconsistency in his analysis and works. 

The “war of ideas” would have global economic consequences. And the Marxists, Fabians and Keynesians who dominated both Cambridge and the London School of Economics (LSE) were not going to make it easy.

Nicholas Kaldor, a disciple of Keynes at the LSE, took delight from in humiliating his intellectual counterpart.

He recalled one spat: “I said, ‘Professor Hayek, this is intermediate economics,’ and Hayek got redder and redder. And afterwards, in the tea room, Hayek came in and said, ‘You know what Kaldor said, what Nicky said? He said: “Professor Hayek, this is intermediate economics and you ought to know it.” I said ‘I protest. I never said that you ought to know it!’ Everyone burst out laughing.”

The paradox

One typical seminar given by Hayek at the LSE was described as “possibly the most aggressively vocal gathering in all economic history. It was extensively and imaginatively devoted to telling Hayek why he was wrong.” But Hayek was about to challenge the dominance of Keynes himself.  

His boss Professor Lionel Robbins translated and published “The Paradox” in Economica, the LSE house journal, and in August of that year he printed Hayek’s full frontal attack on Keynes’s latest work, A Treatise on Money.

“It is a hallmark of Hayek’s sublime confidence, tinged perhaps with the fearlessness that can accompany ignorance, that he was willing to take on Keynes in Keynes’s home territory,”, notes Nicholas Wapshott, the author of Keynes / Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics.

“Hayek’s harsh review of A Treastise on Money invoked howls of rage from Keynes. The subsequent debate…quickly descended into blunt and often brutal assaults that would long outlive both Keynes and Hayek.”

Keynes was not convinced, nor threatened, by his supposed arch-rival. He described Hayek’s work as “one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read…It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlham”.

Elsewhere, Keynes dismissed Hayek’s thinking as “the wildest farrago of nonsense yet”. After Hayek visited Keynes in Cambridge, the latter noted: “…But what rubbish his theory is – I felt today that even he was beginning to disbelieve it himself.”.

The decisive blow came on 4 February 1936 when Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which was almost universally accepted as showing he was right, and Hayek was wrong. According to his biographer Alan Ebenstein, “Hayek was virtually forgotten as a technical economist.”

A remarkable reversal

Then war was declared. Many of Hayek’s colleagues were in the trenches or working in government administration and soon he was elevated to editor of Economica in place of Robbins. The LSE was evacuated en masse to Cambridge. Keynes, in an act of extraordinary good will, ensured that Hayek was given comfortable rooms at King’s College where he served as master.

Hayek’s war could not have been in starker contrast to that of Antony Fisher. The economist enjoyed a remarkable reversal of fortune during the war. It had elevated him from a ridiculed and marginalised lecturer to one of the three most influential and celebrated economists of the age.

The Austrian was living and working in Britain at the outbreak of hostilities and was refused permission to serve with the armed forces or even as a propagandist with the Ministry of Information, despite his repeated appeals.

“Life in Cambridge during the war years was to me particularly genial,” Hayek would reflect. “Somehow the whole mood and intellectual atmosphere of the country had at once proved extraordinarily attractive to me, and the conditions of a war in which all my sympathies were with the English greatly speeded up the process of becoming thoroughly at home.”

One night in the spring of 1942, Hayek found himself sat with the 59-year-old Keynes next to the limestone balustrade on the roof of the Gothic chapel of King’s College, Cambridge.

Extremism and tyranny

The men had both volunteered for fire duty and were ordered to dispatch any incendiary bombs dropped by the Nazi Luftwaffe dropped on Britain’s historic towns in retaliation for the aAllied attack on medieval Lüubeck in Germany.

“On the whole when we met we stopped talking economics,” Hayek recalled. “So we became personally very good friends.”

The terror of watching Hitler’s “shock and awe” assault invoked in the two men very different conclusions. Keynes was determined to use governments to manage the market to prevent further extremism, while Hayek thought that any such interference would itself lead to tyranny.

“It was while he sat out there at night that he began to wonder about what would happen to his adopted country if and when peace came,” according to John Blundell, who we will meet again later in this story. “Hayek detected a growing sense of, ‘as in war, so in peace’ – namely that the government would own, plan and control everything.”

The unintended consequence was that as his colleagues were drafted to the war effort, Hayek was elevated through the academic hierarchy while also finding time to write a fiery polemic.

Hayek made the extraordinary claim that the socialism he onced celebrated had been the true cause of the rise of Nazism in Germany, and the deadly war that had destroyed Europe and slaughtered tens of millions of people.

Deeply pessimistic

“Few are ready to recognise that the rise of Fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period, but a necessary outcome of those tendencies,” he wrote in a small, red notebook.

The Road to Serfdom set out clearly the case for free market economics. It was a stark presentation of the idea that human societies had simply grown too complex to be managed, that any attempt by government to intervene would lead to cohesion and tyranny, and the organised distribution of goods would centralise power in too few hands.

At it’s heart, this theory was deeply pessimistic and assumed that people would, because of their selfish and greedy nature, abuse power. “Men are, in fact, not likely to give their best for long periods unless their own interests are directly involved,” he warned.

“At least for great numbers some external pressure is needed if they are to give their best. The problem of incentives in this sense is a very real one, both in the sphere of ordinary labour and those in marginal activities.”

He concluded: “Only where we ourselves are responsible for our own interests and free to sacrifice them, has our decision moral value.”

But while Hayek believed in capitalism, red in tooth and claw, he did not advocate markets free of any moral or practical limits. There are vital aspects to his prescriptions that appear to have been missed, or even deliberately erased, by his most staunch supporters today.

First and foremost, Hayek argued that capitalism must respect tradition, honesty and the rule of law. Civilisations not built on these moral limits would ultimately fail, he argued.

He warned against the power of corporate monopolies. “A system in which large privileged groups profit from the gains of monopoly may be politically much more dangerous,” he explained.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Hayek was, at this stage in his thinking, a keen supporter of state-imposed environmental regulations. These are the very same regulations being fought in his name in the acrimonious and sometimes dishonest war against climate science.

Hayek is absolutely clear: “Nor can certain harmful effects of deforestation, or of some methods of farming, or of the smoke and noise of factories, be confined to the owner of property in question or to those who are willing to submit to the damage for an agreed compensation. In such instances we must find some substitute for the regulation by the price mechanism.”

Hayek’s book was rejected three times before making it into print, on the grounds that it was “unfit for publication by a reputable house.” Hayek himself expected to sell just a few hundred copies. But then he found himself supported by men of extraordinary wealth and influence. Industrialists who were delighted to find an academic at last championing profits, and identifying them as wealth creators and good men.,

International sensation

Hayek was sailing to America for a small-scale speaking tour when The Road to Serfdom became an overnight international sensation.

“Imagine my surprise,” he wrote on arriving at a speaking engagement. “There was 3,000 people in the hall, plus a few score more in adjoining rooms with load speakers. There I was, with this battery of microphones and a veritable sea of expectant faces.”

The praise for The Road to Serfdom was far from universal. The book could not have been more insulting and personally upsetting to his socialist adversaries. Many had lost friends and family fighting in Spain against fascism during 1936 and in the bloody trenches of the Second World War. The book was widely derided in academic circles as emotional, political and not really about economics at all.

Keynes was also sailing to the United States when he first obtained a copy of The Road to Serfdom was published, en route to take part in the Bretton Woods negotiations to advise on the establishment of government institutions to manage the market.

“The voyage has given me the chance to read your book properly,” he told Hayek in a telegram.

“You will not expect me to accept quite all the economic data in it…I should say that what we want is not no planning, or even less planning, indeed I should say that we almost certainly want more.”

Deficient and authoritarian

Herman Finer, a US academic, best summed up the contemporary opposition to Hayek’s case, and in The Road to Reactionset out to prove that his “apparatus of learning is deficient, his reading incomplete, that his understanding of the economic process is bigoted, his account of history false, that his political science is almost non-existent, his terminology is misleading, his comprehension of British and American political procedure and mentality gravely defective, and that his attitude to average men and women is truculently authoritarian.”

But Hayek’s friends proved more influential. The first edition of 2,000 copies sold out in days and; newspapers and magazines around the world rushed out reviews.; Churchill was “fortified in his apprehensions” about socialism and his Conservative Party desperately sought one-and-a-half tonnes of scarce paper to print further copies in time for the general election.

The book was read by Winston Churchill, and by a young Margaret Thatcher while she was studying chemistry at Oxford University.

Readers’ Digest was decisive in propelling Hayek into the public mind, publishing extracts and also distributing 600,000 copies through its readers’ club. “Hayek became a celebrity, and the work, a symbol,” records Ebenstein.

The magazine was read by millions, including a Battle of Britain veteran determined to take on the tyranny of the state.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This series first appeared at Desmog.uk.

All that exists right now is the wolves, the forest and the mystery pulling me deeper and deeper into the primeval forest. I’ve been tracking the wolves for hours. Their profound presence is vivid in their enormous paw prints that lace through the snow.

After many hours I eventually tire, and look for a place to rest. I peer inside a great fallen oak, and find a central cavity so large I can sit upright inside. All along the cavity walls, the long fibres of the decaying tree are coming undone, here shaggy hay-like lumps fall from above, there black shatterings into cuboid charcoal-like shapes.

I find myself spending the whole night inside the tree, holding vigil for the wild. Throughout the night I hear the wolves in the distance, the howling cry of wilderness echoing down through the ages, as if to remind us who we once were; who we could be again. Calling us back into the family.

Agents of regeneration

When I first arrived home from Bialowieza, Europe’s last primeval forest, I was desperate to return, sensing there was so much more depth and mystery to explore in the wildness of the place.

I spent some time on rewilding land near my home in west Wales and decided not to rush back. I realised that though I had left the forest, the forest and its wildness had not left me.

And although there is no ‘true’ wilderness in any of the landscapes I know as home (the roots of the word wild are in willed, as in self-willed) through my time spent on rewilding land, and participation in active rewilding, I have come to realise it is not lost forever.

It is not a pure state which once defiled can never be attained again. Wildness remains dormant in the land – and in us – patiently waiting for her time to come again. And what’s more, we can participate in her return; wilderness does not have to mean the absence of human participation.

Indeed, for wildness to return to our domesticated landscapes we will have to participate in its creation, for we have eliminated all of the key agents of regeneration: wolf, beaver, boar, bear, and others.

Rewilding process

And in this participation lies reciprocal healing, for the land and the human spirit, as I’ve found in the time I’ve spent working on rewilding projects.

Ripping out internal fences was one of the first jobs at Bwlch Corog, a site recently acquired by the Cambrian Wildwood rewilding project in west Wales.

Removing the borders, the boundaries, the containment into sizes and shapes for easy human perception and control, was an exhilarating experience. As we liberated the land, on some level it also felt like we too were somehow being liberated. It felt like a sacred act; an apology, a reconciliation.

Beneath the necessary work of restoring our destroyed landscapes is perhaps this other work that rewilding asks of us: to step back into the family – to participate.

As key agents in the ecosystems we dominate, humans must be part of the rewilding process – we too must be rewilded.

Deep nature

That process includes reconnecting with nature, just as rewilding aims to reconnect core wilderness areas, and reclaiming the ancient spiritual relationship to nature that we have forgotten in recent human times.

And so, an invitation. In August, I will be holding a wild nature immersion retreat at Bwlch Corog. The invitation is to come and rewild yourself, participate in wildness, commune with the wild and discover the wildness that lies dormant within you.

We’ll learn to interpret the language of birds, the body language of trees, and the tracks and signs of wildlife – magical doorways that reveal the ever-unfolding dramas of the natural world around us.

And then, with that unique knowledge, open to the sacred within nature, the divine mystery that lies beneath the surface of all things, and see what awaits for our souls to discover when we commune with the wild…

Imagine herds of wild – and surprisingly friendly! – horses, regenerating landscapes, overnight solos, wild swimming, deep nature connection, and entering a magical realm of animate nature, where rocks and trees and birds can communicate. This world of sacred ecology awaits us – we only need to step through the door that has always been open.

Combining modern science with ancient wisdom, practical ecology and spiritual practise, nature connection and rewilding, it will be a 5-day experiment of re-imagining – or remembering – the world as sacred, animate… wild.   

This Author

Kara Moses is a facilitator of rewilding – landscapes and people – and a freelance writer. She is an associate fellow of St Ethelburga’s. Rewilding Spirituality: Wild Nature Immersion runs from 17-21 August in west Wales. Book before 5th August to guarantee a place. Book here. More stories of Kara’s time in Bialowieza and Bwlch Corog can be found in this essay recently published in Emergence magazine.