"Freedom from fear has arrived...

... but glory has departed" - Aldo Leopold.

The book 'Feral' by George Monbiot seemed to crystallise a feeling that I had been aware of but never really formalised before. Not only does he discuss ecological re-wilding, but also re-wilding our experiences of nature; how to alleviate "ecological boredom", as he coins it.

It's a good way of summing up that feel of something lacking as you walk through the woods or on the hills. You might see some run-of-the-mill birds; possibly a deer, white tail brightly contrasting with the greens and browns as it bounds away from you; maybe you'll flush up a hare, or a woodcock. You might see a dipper down by the stream. Maybe things will get more exciting every now and again - a bird of prey perhaps, or an adder slithering away into the undergrowth. If you're really lucky, and I mean really lucky, there are still some magical creatures around - otters in the rivers, or in a few places, pine martens might run through the trees.

But those encounters are few and far between. I've never come across a stream and found trees felled into dams by what looks like an axe, but you know it's not. Luckily, there are now (and only for now - let's not dare to dream) a few places in the UK where this might happen. But there's certainly no fear any more. I was surveying woodlands recently, in the middle of the forest, and yes - seeing deer and hare was interesting. A buzzard called overhead. But there was not even a tingle of excitement that I could share the landscape with something bigger and more dangerous.

I would love to see beavers in the streams. But more importantly, no matter the very small risk it would pose, I would love to at least feel a primeval fear knowing that there are large predators. Lynx in the forest? Wolves in larger areas, possibly areas of Scotland or perhaps northern England? I cannot even imagine the presence of bears in the woods, and I don't ever think I shall know it in the UK - although it must be an enjoyably terrifying thought in places where this is still a possibility.

Yes, some of these animals could pose a threat to humans. They could possibly threaten livestock, and pets. But is that a bad thing? We decide that we have the right to exist without them, but on what grounds? Our ego-centric perception of the natural world as one which we must control, dominate and sanitise has led to ecological loss beyond description, as seen in Yellowstone National Park (where apex predators are restoring vital ecosystem functioning). But it has also led to a loss of excitement and fear - a healthy, primal fear - that makes the countryside much more mundane and much too predictable compared to the real natural environment we should be part of.

We'll accept ridiculous risks from traffic, from chemicals, from unhealthy lifestyles, and yet even mention apex predators and half the nation goes up in arms (with significant lobbying power from self-interested farmers and gamekeepers, I feel). The dangers are over-stated, but the imperialist approaches to land management continue, depriving us all of a vital need to understand and develop a healthy respect for nature.

Re-wild our environment, yes - and whilst we're at it, re-wild our lives. 

Thoughts and floods

Whilst those directly affected by flooding must have more pressing concerns on their mind, and my heart goes out to them, I wonder if those in charge of town planning and environmental affairs should ponder the cause - and potential solutions - seriously.

Let's put aside for a second the wider (almost certain) cause of extreme weather events - climatic change, thanks to us. Let's keep the scope to flooding.

We fell the woodlands and clear the vegetation lining the watercourses, both near the source and further downstream. Trees will have a huge effect - water take up, hence reducing ground saturation; rooting that improves water percolating to the soils; and simply by being physical barriers slowing water, through their position but also dropping debris into rivers.

We all want bigger, detached houses, with that all important hard-standing for our cars. Meanwhile I see a worrying increase in paved, sterile gardens, sometimes even using artificial turf (because keeping lawns, or better still meadows, is such hard work when there's facebook to check). All of this further covers the amount of ground available to soak up water, let it enter the ground and not run off.

We think we no longer have the space to allow rivers to meander, find their own course and maybe dam up slightly every so often. We 'need' that land for farming. We, you and I, want to consume food as cheap as possible, pushing that intensive agriculture relying on artificial inputs, clearing hedges and riparian vegetation, and absolutely not having space for little bits of seasonal flooding. So we channel the rivers, quickening the flow and giving much less opportunity for percolation.

So water speeds up, doesn't have a chance to dissipate, reaches our concrete impermeable towns, and the inevitable happens. And politicians wring their hands from London, pretend that the answer is more walls, more sandbags, more barriers. More built solutions to a problem with a simple natural solution, money spent in the wrong places.

Why aren't we happy with smaller houses, greener urban landscapes, vegetation lined rivers? Who needs detached houses in a matrix of concrete and paving? Why won't we pay that bit more for food and allow farmers to leave riparian vegetation where it is. Let the rivers find their own courses, don't fight it. Reforest along the rivers, especially before they reach towns.

Where are our priorities?! We want new phones, boxing day sales, social media presence and status, and go to all manner of lengths to achieve them. But ask the people mopping out their homes and shops in the north if any of that matters to them right now. Or if we showed that riverside woods helped, would people accept less paving, less house space, and more natural space?

Yet another ecosystem service we've lost through greed and a sense of mastery. How many others will there be?

A wild place

Another jaunt into Heath Bank Woods tonight, just as an antidote to three days straight in the office. I was studying recently about spiritual attachments to trees and forests, and how forests - even if not pristine - still represent nature, wilderness, and simplicity in contrast to our frantic and artificial modern lifestyles.

A few oak trees were too tempting not to climb, the first proper tree climbing this year. I climb trees way more now than I ever did when I was younger. There were no ropes, so climbing was both more liberated and more constrained at the same time. Sitting up in the top of the trees the wind could be felt more keenly, and it was easy to become half-lulled by the swaying.

Down near the stream is a notable old oak, hollowing out at the base. Last year I found this just a week or two too late - there were prolific chicken-of-the-woods fruiting in it, but just a bit too past it. In the winter they had turned white and rubbery, and for now only white patches of mycelia remained visible. There has, in the not-too-distant-past, been a fire in the base, and the inner wood is charred and blackened. You could stand in it, a bit of a squeeze and putting your head up into the dark, unopened upper part of the cavity, but you can still do it. The wood around the hollow is slowly buckling under the weight of the tree, but I reckon it still has plenty of years left. I drew my friend an old pirate-style map so he could find the tree and hopefully a bountiful fungus crop too.

Following a small track past the tree takes you down to the stream, and another oak only metres away has a lower bough comfortable enough to perch on. The wild garlic was in flower prolifically, and bluebells, ferns and other flora were carpeting the floor. The trickle of the stream was the only sound. I know that the wood is hardly 'untouched' - there are public footpaths, albeit rough ones, as well as occasional dog walkers and evidence of camping. Even the big hollowing oak has been touched - fire charring and graffiti on the decaying wood. But even so, it is nice to feel like you're in "the wilds". I suppose it's the so-called shifting baseline of what is considered 'natural' to each generation, as the world becomes more and more altered. 

It doesn't matter what analysis of historic land use and present influence you apply though. It's interesting to look for features of old influence, and to consider why some features are the way they are. But on the other hand my phone had run out of battery and I'd left my watch at home, so I sat there without any knowledge of how much time was spent there, just listening to the running water, feeling the moss on the tree, pondering and tuning out. It might not have been true wilderness, but it still felt natural.

Talking the talk

Recently at work, I did a Picus on a veteran Ash tree on behalf of someone else's project. This was in the same week that I was talking to my boss (a high-up figure in the Arb Consultancy industry), who was proclaiming enthusiastically that he'd been talking to some other equally high-up consultant about the necessity to preserve veteran trees at the recent Arb Association conference. The Picus revealed about 50% hollowing from a major limb loss, so I recommended gradual reduction works, phased over a period of years.

The project was a development one, so I called the client just to explain what I had found. I was told this was a big problem, because the tree 'needed' to go to build a road into a new housing development. It appears that this road apparently over-ruled a 200 year old living organism. Anyway, I passed the buck, saying that I just did the Picus, those were my recommendations, but its not my project.

I then saw - by chance - an e-mail from my boss to these developers, saying that whilst the Picus couldn't be used to immediately justify felling for safety purposes, it could be used to indicate 'limited long-term usefulness' and so could justify removal for development. As a reminder, this is the same boss who stood there at an industry conference extolling the virtues of veteran trees. This is the same person who puts up, on linkedin and twitter and the like, endless posts about the importance of trees and the need to preserve them.

Now I hear that the council - rightly - put TPOs on the trees, and my company are supporting an objection to the TPOs.

This illustrates a massive flaw in the arb industry. Everyone talks the talk, claims to be an environmentalist, turns up at industry conferences and give speeches about how we must do more to protect our trees, integrate them into urban environments, "green the cities". But, when it comes to clients telling us what to do in light of their development (in itself, making a mockery of the British Standard for development in relation to trees), all that green-talk goes out of the window. No-one has a backbone to stand by their proclamations. I don't know if that's because people don't really believe it, or if (as I suspect) people are too scared of losing business to someone who will compromise.

If it's the latter case, then what the industry needs, as a whole, is to tighten up its ethical code. If you don't bend to a client's will, of course they're going to go to someone who will - and, since everyone is playing the game, there is always someone. However, if arboricultural consultants care about trees half as much as they publicise that they do, then if the industry united, tightened up, and advised, honestly and independently, instead of doing what clients tell them to do - then developers aren't going to go anywhere else, because every consultant will say it as it is, not what clients want. Then, the industry will truly be doing what it pretends at the moment to be doing - properly advising and caring for trees. 

Perhaps this needs the help of tree officers; at the end of the day, tree officers are all too often suspicious of consultants' motives (not without reason), whereas really we should all work together for the sake of what we (claim to?) believe in. Consultants advise, out of belief and passion for tree preservation; tree officers support it, through enforcement; and developers can't get what they want, when they want. Any consultants who do bend to the whim of their clients are quickly caught out by local authorities.

Sadly though, it will take some brave (and honest) people to stand up for what they believe in, in the face of losing business. However, if the industry is going to pat itself on the back and talk the environmental talk, then everyone should really start walking the walk - together.

A civilised society

Civilisation.

Where forests - carbon sinks, oxygen sources, habitat, water regulation, firewood, medicinal plants, huge biodiversity - are felled in huge swarths to provide bare land for building, or growing crops or animal feed.

Where we've "moved on" from eating edible plants to selecting vast monocultures of crops to grow. Where the soils have been depleted and natural resistance eroded, so we apply sticking plasters of toxic fertilisers and pesticides to prop it up for one extra season at a time. Where the natural balance of variation, and its benefits not only for biodiversity but also for food production, are ignored.

Where, to grow our crops, we remove trees that would provide alternative food sources, shade, natural soil binding and nutrients, and firewood for fuel. Where our soil, now empty and near-lifeless, washes into rivers.

Where we want driveways for our cars, or paved areas so we don't have to cut the grass, and so we pave over the soil. We cover the ground, and then bemoan the flooding that ensues. The flooding that is already worsened by the removal of riparian woodlands, and of wetlands that should be slowing the water rushing down the rivers.

Where conservation of the natural world, and all that it gives, has to fit in with the economy. Where we should be grateful for people "compromising", and leaving a bit of greenery whilst the rest is destroyed in pursuit of profit.

Where the belief is that everyone makes money and everyone's happy. Everyone can buy bigger houses, more material goods, flasher cars, and no-one loses. Well, only those people in sweatshops making the material goods. Only the environment, resources plundered to produce raw materials for goods. But that's irrelevant, as long as the money keeps flooding in.

Where its more important to 'fix the economy' and push the green agenda down in importance - it's all good to make vague promises about carbon reductions, but that's second place to making more money. All hail this artificial construct of the economy, of the stock market, of "the markets" that seem to rule all of human society. They're not even real, yet we worship them above all else.

Where we drive to work, drive home, shop at supermarkets, eat food of questionable origin, whilst we forget about who lives around us. Where we know more about what goes on in social media than we do about our neighbours' lives. We forget that our meat was once an animal, often maltreated and suffering before being slaughtered just for us.

Where we turn a blind eye to everything collapsing around us, and carry on as normal - make money, consume, repeat. Where we ignore the warning bells of a world pushed to the limit by our selfish, greed-driven behaviour.

Where corporations - businesses, mere businesses - now have the power to sue entire countries if they won't allow resource exploitation on their land

Sometimes it's hard to feel positive about 'civilisation'. I feel like we've taken a wrong turning somewhere.

BCEP in the woods

An environmental charity that my friend works for have recently taken over management of an urban woodland in Bradford, and he asked me if I'd be willing to do a bit of volunteering to help with the practical side of the woodland management. I must admit to missing the sunny days out in the woods and so happily said yes. So far, I've spent a couple of days there this summer, carving a fallen sycamore into a play feature for children and thinning out some dense sycamore over the footpath, to make it less gloomy and foreboding.

Partway through, with "steps up"
made along one co-dominant stem

  

A probable factor in the tree falling?
Dryad Saddle fruiting on the stump

Criss-cross cuts to make it less slippery

The finished piece...

Also spent a while thinning an area dominated by birch, where the charity hope to create a forest schools area for local pupils.

Before...

...after

In a geeky way, I find something so
aesthetically pleasing about birch logs!

There's still work to be done, and more thinning, but it's a nice project to be involved in and a way to hopefully utilise a slightly neglected and overlooked woodland.

New discoveries

A handful of more unusual trees that I've seen over the past wee while, mostly from Sheffield Botanic Gardens.

Cyprus cedar (Cedrus brevifolia) - a bit like an Atlas cedar, but with super small needles:

A strawberry tree (Arbutus unedo) - after seeing this, I recognised another on the same street as my girlfriend's house:

 A purple-leaved variety of Katsura (Cercidophyllum japonicum), one of my favourite trees due to its lovely, caramel smell in autumn. I think the variety may be 'Red Fox'?

Styrax japonicum - a snowdrop tree:

Whilst it is a native tree, I don't think I've ever seen a wild service tree (Sorbus torminalis) outside of collections. The craggy, patchwork brown and grey bark is lovely.

And, from Paignton Zoo in Devon, a cork oak (Quercus suber):

Finally, mulberry trees (Morus nigra) must be like buses - been looking for ages, and then have seen three this year. Even ran around one of them.