Paradise lost and found

A man is out hunting, looking for deer in a woodland of towering oaks. Tired, he smells the sea and heads to the thinning trees and then out to a coastal meadow leading up to some grass covered dunes. Climbing to the top of the sand, he sits and stares at the beautiful beach before him.

The man is looking at Ardrossan South Beach.

Sometime a few thousand years ago admittedly. The point of this is to illustrate the fact that “in the beginning” everywhere was nature’s paradise, everywhere was equal. What we have done to the land (and sea) now makes some places more equal than others, in terms of how they look and what nature they contain.

Say that we had newly discovered the British Isles, where habitats were in their natural state, in “pristine condition”, then how would we say which were the best habitats? I suspect that we couldn’t. The truth is that no habitat or place is intrinsically better than another. Even in the pristine state some areas would hold more species than others, but they aren’t better, simply different.

Nature is blind to beauty, so in this “pure” environment, a marsh is a fantastic place for wildlife as much as the mountain or grassland.

It is interesting then that so much of conservation is based on preferences and hierarchies. Habitats are valued on the number of species they contain and especially the number of rare species. In the majority of cases, these habitats are valued because of their bird, plant or butterfly life. In the case of the last two (normally quite closely linked), the diversity of species is often linked to the geology. Thus “we” have favoured to conserve, or at least desiginate, places on rocks with lime in the soils. Thus the limey parts of Britain are seen as wonderful wildlife oases and the acidic bits as uninteresting “poor” areas. The assumption is the more species is better, and obviously for the botanist, it is more interesting, but for nature? Is it any less valuable?

This quest for “biodiversity” means that the commonplace is less valued that the rare. In the wild though, lots of habitats would be fairly mundane and not necessarily biodiverse. A case in point are the Coastal Redwood forests of California, monotonous monocultures of huge trees, with very little growing on the forest floor! I shudder to think how these would be managed if a UK nature conservationist got their hands on them, they would be “coppiced” and glades and meadows introduced for the sake of diversity. And yet what is supposed to be so common and boring can be so rare. Lime woodlands covered huge swathes of southern England in the days of the wildwood, yet there isn’t a single one left and no-one has any interest in replacing them.

Many great habitats are historical quirks. Woodland used by charcoal makers, hay meadows and ponds are a few examples. Their species richness has built up over time, and was never engineered. Given time, any piece of ground should be able to revert to a natural habitat. What this means is that our future habitats may not be of value today, but they might be wonderful in the future. A fantastic case in point can be found in Washington DC, where the old industrial mill areas in the heart of the city have become mature woodland in less than a century. Quarries, bings, flooded gravel pits are all wonderful habitats, all man-made - but nature knows no different.