White Stork return no cause for complacency

8 June 2020

Last month we heard the enchanting news a pair of white storks had successfully bred in the wild in the UK for the first time since the 15th century.

The news, yet more tangible evidence of the sustained and visionary work of the team on the Knepp Estate in West Sussex, and those involved with the white stork project, lifted the heart and soul at precisely a time we were all craving good news.

Amidst the coronavirus-related doom, gloom and despair, a flicker of light and a gentle glimmer of hope provided by nature working in harmony with humankind. Or should that be the other way around?

The Rewilding project at Knepp, the brainchild of husband and wife team Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree, is well known to those of us who have long since sought to understand how we can reverse the accelerating human-caused desecration of the natural world.

As farming methods grow ever more intense across the globe in the endless pursuit of greater scales of productivity, landscapes are scarred, habitats lost and biodiversity decimated.

Rewilding, for many, offers one of the few paths out of the mess we’ve created through sensible and logical restructuring and reworking of our arable land. It involves, among many things, re-educating ourselves when it comes to understanding what beauty truly is in our farmed landscape.

Tree’s bestselling book “Wilding; The Return of Nature to a British Farm” is proving to be seminal across many industries with respected young British furniture designer Sebastian Cox recently using it as his inspiration for a highly-acclaimed booklet “Modern Life from Wilder Land; a manifesto for nature first land and resource use.”

For an increasing number of people, the team at Planted among them, we can see a future where the insipid encroachment of humanity and consumption on our land is not just halted, but redressed. Balance can be restored. Nature enabled. And all of it with demonstrable economic, environmental and societal benefits. Finally some hope to cling to.

But, as so often, amid the hope comes fresh warning. Last week analysis from researchers at Stanford University found the sixth mass extinction of wildlife on Earth is accelerating, while warning it could be the tipping for the collapse of civilisation as we know it.

These were the sort of findings, you would have assumed, would have made the top line for every national newspaper and every news website. That they did not, speaks not only of the extraordinarily dangerous times in which we live in, but also of the uphill struggle those of us who care about nature – our life support system no less – face in redressing the balance and affecting meaningful change.

The Stanford research team found more than 500 land animals to be on the brink of extinction and likely to be lost within 20 years. To put into context, that’s the same amount lost over the whole of the last century. Without the human-driven destruction of nature, a previously evolutionary processes would have taken thousands of years for this to occur.

Coronavirus, many scientists argue, is an extreme example of the inevitable effects of ravaging biodiversity, which we rely on for our health and wellbeing.

“When humanity exterminates other creatures, it is sawing off the limb on which it is sitting, destroying working parts of our own life-support system,” said Professor Paul Ehrlich, a member of the Stanford University research team.

“The conservation of endangered species should be elevated to a global emergency for governments and institutions, equal to the climate disruption to which it is linked.”

With so much death, destruction and despair around the world, now perhaps more than ever before we must consider what the future may look if we do not start pulling together and begin putting back in what we have so ruthlessly and relentlessly taken out.

We need to collectively change our thinking. Our planet simply cannot sustain the endless pursuit of growth and carefree consumption. At some point, things run out. At some point, things stop.

The white storks breeding in the world provide an enchanting, uplifting story worth shouting about from the beautiful treetops upon which those wonderous and mystical creatures nested.

But in terms of biodiversity and the losses being sustained at ever increasing rate, they are a relative drop in the ocean. Time is ticking by. There is so much to be done. This is no time for complacency.

Written by Sam Peters, founding partner at Planted