Across Tasmania, farmers are erecting miniature wombat-high electric fences to keep the burrowing marsupials from “making a mess” of their cattle pastures. Ten thousand miles away, in Gloucestershire, the Forestry Commission have built shooting towers to help hunters take out wild boar, who are unpopular for the occasional damage they cause to grass verges, parks, sports pitches and church-yards. And in Norway, participants shown photographs of their native forests consistently judge them more preferably when any dead and decaying logs (home to literally thousands of insects and other invertebrates) have been edited out.
It seems that our fondness for nature is contingent on it it staying nice and tidy.
According to the same group of Norwegian scientists behind the photograph study, the sorts of forests members of the public prefer are “managed or ‘neat’ with moderate tree species diversity and stand stratification…and visual penetration with few obstacles that would hinder walking through the stand”. There’s a word for a forest that looks like that. Homogenised. Perhaps a nice stroll through a timber plantation might be advised instead?
And as far as wild boar damaging some lawns and roadside verges goes, yup, that’s probably not an unreasonable fear*. But neither is Arachibutrophobia (the fear of getting peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth), which is to say it’s not exactly worth shooting a boar over. Besides, what with the increasing trend of people laying down artificial lawns, maybe the boar-and-lawn problem will just vanish anyway, along with our bees and butterflies.
In any case, it’s not abundantly clear to me why we should worry so much about wild boar ruining road verges if we’re cutting them down merrily enough by ourselves. I once spoke to a researcher who’d carried out a large-scale project in collaboration with Sheffield City Council in which roadside verges were either left to grow or were mowed at different intensities. Her project involved literally hundreds of hours painstakingly identifying all the invertebrates found in growing or mowed roadside verges, and more hours still interviewing the public on their perceptions of these different treatments. Hours and hours and hours. Yet one of the strongest memories she took away from this all was the capacity for residents to complain about verges looking “too messy” the moment they got a bit long.
Focusing on Britain for a second, it’s a sentiment that’s perfectly summed up by this tweet:
And by this section in Jeff Olerton’s great blog.
A big problem that we have in the UK is an unwillingness to let nature just get on with itself. We feel that we have to manage everything: Too many ravens? Cull them. Hedgerows or road verges looking a bit untidy? Cut them. Old tree infected with a fungus? Chop it down. In part this mindset is linked to an idea of what natural heritage should look like, an idea of order within a landscape, of making the countryside look pretty, and of doing things simply because that’s what our predecessors did.
I guess another way to put it is that we like our environments to be aesthetically pleasing rather than ecologically valuable.
Even our vistas have to be orderly and uncluttered, even when this comes at the cost of future biodiversity. Abandoned oil rigs, considered a blot on the seascape by many (and so in the process of being dismantled from California to coast of Scotland) actually provide uncommon hard structures on the ocean floor that can support rare cold-water corals, barnacles, mussels, and sea anemones, even coming to resemble wild ecosystems. And those pesky windfarms–the bane of many sore-eyed coastal or countryside campaigners–are actually amongst the greenest of green energy sources, especially when efforts to mitigate any adverse affects (e.g bird moralities) are taken. Indeed, wind energy is an essential piece in the puzzle for generating power whilst limiting species extinctions from climate change.
Where this urge for tidiness comes from is something of a mystery. Maybe the very same impulses that once saw us tame wolves now underlie our desire to have spick and span surroundings? And maybe, armed with with the right ecological knowledge, it’s something we can learn to overcome? After all, given a bit of extra information on their ecological importance, it turns out Norwegians can be much more positive about leaving logs to rot in in the forest. I’ve written before about how the tools of marketing can be powerful in swaying public opinion.
Or maybe it’s more simple than that. Maybe we should just grow some thicker armour and learn to live with a bit of good old-fashioned untidiness…
**What definitely isn’t warranted is the still touted claims by the Forestry Comission that wildboar could be causing irreversible damage to forest ecosystems. Because, as George Monbiot puts it, “the very notion of damage to native ecosystems by a native species at numbers well below carrying capacity is nonsensical. What a forester…call[s] damage, a biologist calls dynamic ecological processes.”
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