{"id":3095,"date":"2016-01-03T09:48:59","date_gmt":"2016-01-03T08:48:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hyam.net\/blog\/?p=3095"},"modified":"2016-01-03T12:03:48","modified_gmt":"2016-01-03T11:03:48","slug":"the-new-wild-garden-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hyam.net\/blog\/archives\/3095","title":{"rendered":"The New Wild : Garden Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"20160102-DSCF3517-Edit-2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Way back in\u00a0the 1980s I worked as a young researcher for\u00a0Prof David Moore<\/a>\u00a0at Reading University on a popular book called\u00a0Plant Life<\/em>\u00a0(OUP 1991) which I believe was also published by Equinox Books under the title Garden Earth –<\/em>\u00a0although I struggle to find much reference to this version on the web.\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps Garden Earth<\/em> was the working title because it is the one that sticks in my mind even though\u00a0the\u00a0copy\u00a0on my shelf is called\u00a0Plant Life.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160103_073750\"<\/a>As my contribution was very minor I feel able to say it is a rather nice book. It is a survey of the world of plants in terms of both evolution and geography with lots of nice photographs. It very much reflects the zeitgeist of plant biodiversity studies at the time that\u00a0I totally bought into. It went like this: The reader needs to be enthused about the diversity of plant life and our dependence on it principally to prevent its destruction . I saw my role as contributing in some small way to this effort. Implicit to\u00a0this paradigm\u00a0is the notion that\u00a0we are protecting the results of someone else’s action be that God or millions of years of evolution.<\/p>\n

In the intervening twenty five years that phrase “Garden Earth” has completely changed its meaning for me. \u00a0By the mid 1990s I was living in Scotland and there is no better country to illustrate a totally modern, synthetic\u00a0landscape than Scotland. The slate was pretty much wiped clean by a sheet of ice up to 12,000 years ago and probably within a few hundred years<\/a>\u00a0of the ice retreating humans had moved in along with handy recolonising species like hazel. Since then humans have been gardening the place like it was the communal drying green of an Edinburgh tenement<\/a>. Fashions have changed. Sheep, red grouse and deer have been\u00a0de rigueur<\/em>\u00a0in the highlands\u00a0since the clearances. Sitka spruce is big but wind turbines and fish farms are also\u00a0popular. The landscape is socioeconomic not natural.<\/p>\n

\"Pentland<\/a><\/p>\n

But surely the real<\/strong>\u00a0wild biodiversity is in the tropics? Well yes but that does mean it belongs to someone else. On the grand scale it belongs to all of us but only in the same sense that the oil in the North Sea\u00a0belongs to all of humanity. The people the biodiversity belongs to are typically poorer than us and have tougher socioeconomic choices to make. Invariably, with each generation, some of that wild biodiversity goes to farmland or more grazing and we end up with nature reserves. Wilderness with a fence around it begins to resemble a garden.<\/p>\n

Then there are global threats. They\u00a0entered our\u00a0guilty conscience\u00a0as\u00a0acid rain then ozone layer depletion and then\u00a0climate change. I remember undergraduate discussion groups in the 1980s\u00a0about whether it was more important to reduce carbon\u00a0or sulphur dioxide emissions. For some reason it took more than a decade\u00a0for me to realise what this meant. Everything, every last square metre of the planet, was managed by humans. As soon as you have global agreements on global pollutants you have effectively set up management committees for a\u00a0shared garden.<\/p>\n

This is when the word “Garden” in “Garden Earth” changed from a noun to a verb for me. The earth is no longer an Eden that we were placed in. It is now something we are making. We\u00a0garden the earth just as we terraform planets in sci-fi films – only starting from the position of a working dynamical system.<\/p>\n

Associated with my paradigm shift was a loss of meaning that lead to a brief period of\u00a0middle aged\u00a0Clarksonian<\/a> cynicism \u00a0before a new motivational story kicked in.\u00a0I now see my role as helping to facilitate the\u00a0dialogue on\u00a0how we manage a shared garden.\u00a0<\/strong>It is worthy of Pseuds Corner<\/a>\u00a0and up to now anyone I mention it to just looks blank\u00a0which isn’t surprising.<\/p>\n

As with all paradigm shifts it\u00a0changes nothing physical only meanings. It is still important to describe and enthuse\u00a0about the plant world but perhaps the\u00a0emphasis shifts more to\u00a0interpretation, education and even spirituality.<\/p>\n

\"516oBThi+9L\"<\/a>I was happy with\u00a0my smug apparently self built world view until now.\u00a0Now I have read\u00a0 “The New Wild: Why invasive species will be nature’s salvation<\/a><\/em>” by Fred Pearce and discovered that perhaps\u00a0I didn’t build it myself but have been swept along on the\u00a0emerging\u00a0zeitgeist. I would strongly recommend that anyone who has the faintest interest in biodiversity, ecology or conservation reads this book. Fred takes the notion of an alien species and uses it to make the case for our planet being a managed space and indeed for it having been managed for a considerable time. He shows that in order for the world to adapt to the rapid changes we are imposing on it we need to loosen up on our notions of what nature is.\u00a0Fred is eloquent and the book is an enjoyable read.<\/p>\n

In my lifetime the conversation has moved from how we conserve what we have through to\u00a0choosing which bits of the\u00a0pristine we can keep to discussing what we will allow to grow where. Humans always have and always will be collaborative gardeners but now instead of conversations around camp fires about grazing and burning we have the IPCC<\/a>\u00a0. They are still effectively talking about grazing and burning but on a planetary\u00a0scale.<\/p>\n

[Thanks to Ian Edwards for suggesting The New Wild<\/em> to me.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Way back in\u00a0the 1980s I worked as a young researcher for\u00a0Prof David Moore\u00a0at Reading University on a popular book called\u00a0Plant Life\u00a0(OUP 1991) which I believe was also published by Equinox Books under the title Garden Earth –\u00a0although I struggle to find much reference to this version on the web.\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps Garden…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3096,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hyam.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hyam.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hyam.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyam.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyam.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3095"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyam.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3122,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyam.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3095\/revisions\/3122"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyam.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hyam.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyam.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyam.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}