Conservation
Why rewilding arguments get stuck on the same three questions
Rewilding debates rarely turn on ecology. They turn on land ownership, livelihoods and who gets to decide what a landscape is for.
Nell Cartwright
Gear editor, Earth Worth Exploring
Nell tests equipment the slow way — over months, in weather, until something fails.
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21 articles
Conservation
Wildlife corridors fail when they are drawn on the wrong map
Connecting two habitat patches sounds simple. Most corridor projects fail because they connect places rather than populations.
Wild Places
Machair, the grassland that only exists in two countries
A habitat made of crushed shell, wind and centuries of low-intensity farming. It exists on the western coasts of Scotland and…
Wild Places
Sand dunes are moving landscapes that we keep trying to stop
A dune system needs bare sand and movement to stay alive, which is the opposite of what stabilisation delivers.
Conservation
Upland burning is the most contested land management in Britain
Rotational burning of heather has defenders and critics with genuinely different evidence, and the ground beneath is peat.
Wild Places
Reading a river before crossing, and the features to avoid entirely
Some hazards are visible from the bank and are absolute — strainers, undercuts and hydraulics take priority over convenience.
Wild Places
Ancient trees are habitats, not old plants
A veteran tree supports species that exist nowhere else, and most of them live in the decay.
Conservation
Hedgerows are linear woodland and are managed like fences
A hedge is habitat, corridor, carbon store and stock barrier at once, and how it is cut decides which.
Conservation
Nitrogen is the pollutant that changed the countryside quietly
Atmospheric nitrogen deposition fertilises everything, and the habitats that suffer are the ones defined by poverty.
Conservation
Access agreements are how most private land gets walked
A great deal of walking happens on permissive routes that could be withdrawn tomorrow, and mostly is not.
Conservation
Marine protected areas that permit the thing they were made to stop
Designation without management is common, and the term protected does a great deal of unearned work.
Conservation
Green lanes, byways and vehicles on ancient routes
Some historic routes carry vehicular rights, and the conflict between use and erosion is genuinely difficult.
Conservation
Grazing animals are a conservation tool and a conservation problem
Many of the habitats we now protect exist because something ate them. The argument is about which animal, how many, and when.
Conservation
Biodiversity offsetting trades a certain loss for an uncertain gain
The idea is simple: damage habitat here, create or improve habitat there. Almost every difficulty lives inside the words create and…
Conservation
Planting trees is the easy half of making a wood
Getting saplings into the ground is a photograph. What happens over the following twenty years is the actual project.
Conservation
Fences decide what a landscape is allowed to become
A line of posts and wire is the cheapest and bluntest conservation tool there is. It works exactly as well as its side effects…
Wild Places
Glacier forelands are the youngest ground on the planet
Where ice has recently pulled back, bare rock and gravel become soil in front of you. Nowhere else can you walk across a century of…
Conservation
Abstraction is the quiet reason some rivers run low
A river can be clean, undammed and still failing, because too much water is being taken out of it upstream and out of the ground…
Conservation
Small populations fail genetically before they run out of habitat
A species can have space, food and protection and still decline, because the arithmetic of a small isolated population works…
Wild Places
Lowland heath is a human artefact that now needs humans
Purple hills of heather look like wilderness and are the product of clearance, grazing and burning. Stop the management and the…
Conservation
Honeypot sites: what happens when a landscape becomes popular
Visitor pressure is never spread evenly. It concentrates on a handful of places, and almost every management tool is an attempt to…