The Resilience of Nature.

Written by TR Johns

As a student of Geography at Exeter in the 1980s, one of my favourite textbooks was ‘The Making of the English Landscape’ by WG Hoskins (1977). It sought to explain the multiplicity of human activities hidden behind the views and features which make England and Britain so beautiful. Central to his treatise was the fact that nature can reclaim an industrially scarred landscape. I since discovered Rosedale, in the North Yorkshire Moors, which exemplifies this. It was once a noisy, dusty, rail and steam-filled valley, ravaged for its ironstone in the second half of the nineteenth century.

One hundred years on and it had evolved, recontoured and grazed by sheep, cattle and horses, to become part of a moorland National Park, treasured by ramblers, cyclists and its local rural population. Along similar lines, the concept of ‘re-wilding’ has entered our C21st vocabulary, in response to the detrimental impact of commercial farming methods and concerns that soil fertility could be running out. Regenerative farming practices, such as on the 3,500 acre estate of Knepp Castle in Sussex, England, have demonstrated on a local basis the astonishing way that biodiverse habitats and species can recolonise in a matter of decades, when nature is allowed to take the driving seat again.[i]

The ramifications of this are highly significant on a global scale.

In 1989 the Exxon Valdez tanker unleashed 11 million US gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound, Alaska, setting in motion a ‘tsunami’ of pollution that engulfed 1,300 miles of coastline and laid waste an entire ecosystem. It killed 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbour seals, 250 bald eagles, two dozen killer whales and countless salmon and herring. There were doomsday predictions that the area would never be the same. Twenty-one years later there was no visible oil and most of the wildlife had returned in abundance. Despite all the speculation and not forgetting the anguish of those who lived and suffered through the events, there was ‘life after oil’. Ironically the clean-up campaign also helped to save and re-kickstart a failing Alaskan economy.

There were obvious parallels with a similar threat that enveloped the Gulf of Mexico and its coastal states in April 2010. An explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig triggered what was described as the worst environmental disaster in US history, some twenty times more potent than the Exxon Valdez spill. An estimated 210 million gallons of oil were released, with catastrophic consequences for aquatic and bird life and of course human welfare.

By 2017 small signs of recovery were recorded, but the Gulf is complex and 3 or 4 decades are likely to be required to heal this contamination, through a combination of environmental processes involving both passive restoration (eg natural attenuation, secondary succession, gravity) and interventionist restoration (eg clean-up/ removal, bioremediation and species reintroduction).[ii] [iii] Similar regenerative qualities have been recorded in the Chernobyl area 30 years after the devastating nuclear accident of 1986.

As naturalist David Attenborough put it, ‘Nature is our biggest ally and greatest inspiration… the living world will endure’. No matter what we throw at it, despite the huge toll on life and the immeasurable impact on humanity, the Earth has a remarkable resilience and ability to bounce back. In fact, as we will go on to see in the context of geological time, it has a history of recovering its bio-diversity given the opportunity to rewild.[iv]

As the observations above have show, in more recent experience, ‘Nature takes over as soon as people get out of the way’,[v] so part of the challenge is whether humanity can re-envisage and discover a future as part of Nature, rather than apart from it?

References

[i] Wilding – the return of nature to a British farm, Isabella Tree, 2018

[ii] Life after oil. The Daily Telegraph 28-6-2010

[iii] Ecological restoration of oil spill sites in the Niger Delta, Nigeria. T Imoobe & T Iroro. Journal of Sustainable Development in Africa Vol 11, no.2 2009

[iv] A Life on our Planet – witness statement by David Attenborough. Ebury Press 2020 and Netflix 2020

[v] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/09/23/science.abd5777