Is it ethically sound for people to manage habitats and species artificially or should natural succession be allowed to happen?
These are some thoughts around it, how do you feel about it? Please send your opinions to the ethical pages co-ordinator.
Louise Sutherland : In this landscape already so altered by humans; with cities and towns covering the land in concrete for our convenience, with road networks bisecting the land between human settlements, space for wildlife is very limited. All the patches of land we declare as ‘nature reserves', specific places set aside for wildlife, are managed by people to maintain the certain type of habitat in order to support certain locally or nationally important species.
This management means we are constantly chopping down trees, cutting back scrub, dredging out ponds. Ripping away the natural growth, destroying plant communities to preserve an artificial stasis. Without this human interference the habitat would begin to change. As it changed it would support different species...
A pond would begin to silt up, more and more plants decaying within it until it becomes an area of bog or wet grassland, which would in turn become Carr as trees such as willow and alder begin to colonise it. Unless the water table was high preventing some tree species from moving in, it would eventually dry out and become woodland.
A meadow would begin to scrub over, as bramble and birch colonised it, in time more tree species would arrive, until eventually it too would become a woodland. Is this a bad thing? As a Druid it's hard for me to imagine new woodland could be a bad thing. But as an ecologist I know that without diversity of habitats we can't preserve diversity of species.
Before there were so many of us humans, openings in the vast woodland covering these islands would have been naturally created by storms, geology and rivers. This natural variation allowed a range of habitats to exist without our interference. But sadly in our modern world, woodlands are no longer so large, rivers are separated from their floodplains and mineral extraction affects the geology of our landscape. Without our destructive management we will loose habitat diversity and the species it preserves. I find habitat management brutal and seek a way of honouring what is destroyed but on balance I think it is more ethical to manage our patchy little nature reserves than to allow natural succession to create new woodlands.
Cathi Yarrow : Well we've messed things up so much I feel we are duty-bound to manage habitats and species back to some sort of balance. Ideally we would always ask first - what's most appropriate here, for these species, this place, rather than have a blanket rule. I do worry that we preserve some places and species for our own entertainment alone. Again it comes back to not what we do, but why and how we do it.
