I’ve written before about how tidiness is the silent bane of conservation. The need for manicured lawns, forests without deadwood in their understorey and our insatiable need to control every aspect of our landscapes has nothing but ecological downsides.
In the UK, we really take the biscuit. Most of our so-called wild places are truthfully not that wild at all and more of an exercise in compulsive control and fine-tuned what-about-isms. As a great blog post recently put it, if the UK managed the Amazon rainforest, it would be a complete joke.
Neatness is also a very real and under-considered threat to global forest restoration efforts . Of course, plenty of global restoration efforts are currently happening in the neatest way possible, through the planting of nice, straight evenly-spaced rows of monoculture tree plantations.
But with most scientists on board with the fact that enormous forest restoration targets need to include more diverse planting efforts (see here for a great example), or, wherever possible, take advantage of forest’s capacity to bounce back naturally, the issue of tidiness is taking on a whole new level of importance.
The issue boils down to this. Give them a couple of decades and the right set of enabling conditions and forests can bounce back pretty darn well on farmlands. They slowly start to resemble older forests in structure, and rare wildlife, if present in the surrounding landscape, begins to recolonize the area.
But in those first few years, most people are going to look at forest regeneration and think…well, that doesn’t look very neat.
“The early stages of natural regeneration are messy, overgrown, snake- and wasp-infested tangles of vegetation that do not appear to have any conservation or economic value”. (Chazdon et al 2016).
This no doubt plays into the staggeringly high rates of clearance of many regrowing forests (1).
I’m reminded of watching a farmer painstakingly thwacking away at the vegetation regrowing on his pasture lands with a machete on a forest-agriculture frontier in the Colombian Andes.
Of course, there are plenty of other reasons for clearing regrowing vegetation on your land, not least to show good farming protocols to your neighbours, to demonstrate land ownership, and to to maintain the conditions best for cattle or crops.
But in many cases, views of tidiness and control are probably enough to put an end to the nascent stages of ecological restoration and recovery.
This points to something important.
The challenge of deploying large-scale restoration efforts will not just involve the job of changing policies, incentives and laws. It will not just be about recovering nature’s dots and dashes. It will also involve the more complicated task of changing hearts and minds.
RELATED POSTS:
