Nature's Ghosts The World We Lost and How to Bring It Back

Can the conservation movement learn from the (distant) past? This turns out to be a fraught question, with many practitioners preferring to preach pragmatism over nostalgia. Journalist and writer Sophie Yeo agrees that there is no turning back time, but this is no reason to ignore history. In Nature's Ghosts, she mixes several parts reportage with one part nature writing to both criticize different conservation approaches and showcase some really interesting research. Though centred on the UK, she also discusses projects and problems in Europe and the USA.

What unites Yeo's criticism of current conservation practices is how they ignore the past. For example, designating sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) aims to keep these frozen in time. EU subsidies as part of the Common Agricultural Policy aimed at enhancing biodiversity in practice have had the opposite effect, as discussed for Romania. They are disbursed on the condition that farmers abandon traditional practices, even though these are far more interwoven with the natural world than the centralised rules imposed by the EU. Fortress conservation, the designation of areas as nature preserves or national parks, has been frequently combined with the forced eviction of Indigenous people from their lands. It replaces the actual past with a mythical past of virgin wilderness that never existed in the first place.

Yeo is more positive about the track record of rewilding though here the problem of baselines crops up. "The natural world has never experienced one perfect moment of Eden: it has always been a series of novel ecosystems" (p. 66). With nature forever in flux, where do you plant your yardstick? She is critical of the feted Knepp Estate and feels conflicted by the Carrifran Wildwood project that has accelerated its rewilding goals by gathering tree seeds from all over Scotland and Northern England. She likes what she sees but also considers it an example of intense micromanagement. The Finnish Snowchange Project has the more nuanced aim of integrating humans into the landscape, in this case by supporting traditional small-scale ice fishing. Project leader Tero Mustonen argues that rewilding becomes powerful once you integrate cultural knowledge into it.

Of course, Yeo acknowledges more than once, we cannot turn back time. There are good practical and philosophical reasons for conservationists to be pragmatic and future-oriented. However, "that does not mean that we should treat the past as irrelevant" (p. 5). So, how is the past relevant to conservation today? The second half of Nature's Ghosts features fascinating research of which I can only discuss a few examples.

First, the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna can be pinned on a combination of climate change and humans. Novel is the notion that humans effectively replaced megafauna as a keystone species, with a new suite of plants and animals becoming dependent on our role in ecosystems. The displacement of traditional societies through colonialism has disrupted such relationships, such that rewilding should "reinstate not only the lost ecological functions of megafauna but also people" (p. 136).

Second, shifting baseline syndrome. Novel is the idea that, with each passing generation, we have not just collectively forgotten how abundant the natural world was, but also how animals used to behave. Ecologists mistakenly assume that an animal's current habitat is both its preferred habitat and the limits of its tolerance, with conservation boiling down to "wherever an animal lives now, we need more of that habitat". The fact that many plants and animals are more tolerant than we give them credit for is a feeble ray of hope in the ongoing maelstrom of extinction.

Third is how time matters both more and less than we think. On the one hand is the long shadow cast by past human activities. Presumed old-growth forest in France hides the ruins of Roman farms. Amazingly, the soil and plant communities still differ as a result of fertilizer application two millennia ago. One shudders to think what that means for the future legacy of today's environmental footprint. On the other hand is temporal dispersal. Yeo discusses the many ponds that once dotted Britain's landscape but were backfilled over time. When such ghost ponds are excavated again, their old bottoms contain spores, eggs, and seeds that remain viable centuries later. Many plants and invertebrates can rely on dormancy as a survival strategy to bridge time.

Yeo is quick to step in and prevent her examples from being misinterpreted or hijacked. No, the traditional agricultural practices in Romania or Wales are not blueprints for feeding the world. No, the Finnish Snowchange Project is not "arguing for the revival of a Stone Age lifestyle in North Karelia" (p. 138), etc. She is well aware that conservation debates have been toxic at times. But it does beg the question, if these are not solutions, then what is?

I have two minor frustrations with Nature's Ghosts. First, Yeo is reluctant to name the elephant in the room. Even if at times she comes close when admitting that traditional farming cannot feed the world and restoring wildlife to prehistoric levels entails fewer people on the landscape, she studiously avoids the dreaded O-word. Second, her solution. By no longer seeing landscapes as something sacred we paved the way for today's relentless extraction. Rather than revitalising old beliefs or rituals whose meaning has been lost, she thinks we each need to rewild ourselves and find new symbolic connections with the natural world. Though that might sound a bit wishy-washy, I actually agree with her. Somewhat. We are not moved by facts but by stories, so, yes, we do need a new narrative. However, I am rather thinking along the lines of Eileen Crist's call for an ecological civilization that does not see nature as a mere larder, or Carl Safina's call to abandon the Platonic dualism that has allowed us to think of ourselves as apart from nature. Abandoning the currently dominant fairytale of endless economic growth will mean a wholesale revision of our socio-economic system, likely involving a period of degrowth towards a steady-state economy. Tall order? Absolutely. Do I expect Yeo to here write the book-length treatment that such big topics need? No, but acknowledging them would have been nice.

Those niggles notwithstanding, Nature's Ghosts is intriguing, discussing some of the fascinating insights gleaned from studying the past. Yeo has read up on the literature and gone to great lengths to speak to researchers and conservationists first-hand. Given how she combines journalistic flair and evocative writing to explain the relevance of this research, it is easy to see why the Wainwright Prize jury shortlisted the book.