It is Midsummer’s Eve, and as the sun slides towards the tree-obscured horizon behind me, I sit facing south, looking for ripples. My seat is a log by the edge of a large pond, in a place whose name is not important here. Beyond the water stand birches and pines, and above their green fringe rises a bald mountain ridge; but it is the pond’s topaz-blue veneer that holds my gaze.
Midsummer has come, here in the northern hemisphere, and the days will be getting shorter now. To mark this turning point in the annual cycle – the rhythm to which life is bound – households and communities around the globe’s upper belt are feasting and lighting fires. Greeting the darkness in this way, they are honouring an ancient tradition.
By the pond, a change in colour tempts my eyes upwards, to the mountain ridge. Those distant slopes, and the small lenticular clouds above them, are now burning with the low red rays of our Earth-powering star. Yes – the scene has become spectacular. But it is incomplete; and the fire within me, mere embers.
The sunset’s lightshow fades gently to a close, and the darkness begins to seep in – seeming, as ever to me, more a presence than an absence. The pond is blackening; and the moon, while nearly full, has not yet risen. My diurnally biased faculty of sight is just powerful enough, however, to perceive the double-humped outline that has appeared above the surface, near the far side of this dark body of water.
With a growing exhilaration, I raise the binoculars to my eyes and track the furry shape’s passage across the water, its bow a discernible nose. Then, looking with naked eyes once more, I detect a second outline, following in the wake of the first. My spirit is suddenly ablaze.
The pair of beavers whose company I am sharing are the first to make a home on this pond for many centuries. Their kind disappeared from the surrounding area over 400 years ago, having been extirpated by humans for their fur, their meat, and their oil. Now, through government-sanctioned translocations, they have been given a second chance here.
As these ecosystem engineers permeate back through the landscape, they will bring manifold benefits for the invertebrates, the fish, the amphibians, the birds, and the fellow mammals who in different ways share their freshwater habitat. For, as in so many other examples of rewilding across the globe, the beavers’ reintroduction – if I may apply my flamy metaphor in a different way – has stoked nature’s fire.
In these times of planetary warning and extreme conflagrations, the figurative application of burning may seem a little jarring. To help douse such disquiet, therefore, let me expand on one of the aforementioned benefits of beavers. Specifically, there is emerging evidence (e.g. from this study) that the presence of these mammals protects riparian corridors during wildfires, helping the vegetation survive and offering refugia for other wildlife.
The global picture
Rewilding is truly a global movement. People around the world are experiencing joy and excitement from spending time in, or simply learning about, places where nature’s flames are gaining vigour once more. This should come as no surprise, as our mental well-being, like our physical vitality, is intertwined with the fate of the Earth’s broader community of life.
So how, then, do we keep the fire burning? As with the triad of heat, fuel, and oxygen that is needed for literal combustion, this wondrous blazing of life might be said to depend on a trinity of factors.
The first of these is the Earth-wide pool of biodiversity. This is comparable to heat in the analogy in that it is both a source and a result of life’s blossoming. If we allow biodiversity to continue to decline, there will come a point where its rebounding will be impossible on anything short of a geological timescale.
The second element is conservation activities, including the full gamut of rewilding initiatives. Carrying out such activities can be thought of as adding fuel; and the more fuel that is added, the stronger the fire.
The third factor is sharing and tolerance, something that will necessarily entail both a reduction of the ecological footprint of human activities and a rediscovered will, at a societal level, to let life flourish around us. Here, we have the oxygen for nature’s rekindling flames.
This last factor leads me to another iteration for the metaphor of fire. In A Sand County Almanac, a classic of ecological writing first published in 1949, Aldo Leopold described his personal transition to a full-blooded conservationist. A seminal moment in his life in the United States came when he was a young hunter.
As part of a deer-stalking party, he watched an old female wolf greeted by a half-dozen grown pups with “wagging tails and playful maulings” as she returned to her pack after fording a turbulent river. The hunting party – being taught that wolves were bad for deer and thus bad for their hunting too – unleashed a torrent of lead, maiming a pup and killing the female. They reached the old wolf “in time to watch,” as Leopold wrote, “a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.”
For Leopold, “green fire” symbolised a higher awareness of the wolf as both an individual being and a vital member of her ecosystem. This idea grew through many years of reflection into his famed Land Ethic, in which he pointed to a transformation of humans from “conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”
Seventy-five years on from the publication of A Sand County Almanac, we still have a long way to go as a species to realise Leopold’s hopes. During the intervening period, biodiversity has declined dramatically and countless wild places have been ravaged. The work of the rewilding movement in healing the wounds of land and sea has now taken on an urgent importance. Only with it can nature’s fire continue to blaze.
Back at the pond
I will finish back at the pond, for some cool relief in the growing dusk. The time has come for me to leave the beavers to the beauty of their tranquil home. For me the path is northwards, along a fading gravel track and towards my bed for the night.
As I walk, I am brimming with a serene pleasure, from knowing that the rewilding movement has cured one more wound. I have been lucky enough to experience the healing first-hand; and, while most memories will slip away, sooner or later, I feel sure that this one will last forever.
Joe Gray is a Founding Editor of ‘The Ecological Citizen’, Editor-in-Chief for Rewilding Successes and a writer for us at the GRA. In this series, which is named Rewilding Reflections, Joe will take us on some thoughtful journeys through the wider dimensions of rewilding.
Photo details
- Red sky (photo in the public domain).
- The pond (photo courtesy of the author).
- A Eurasian beaver (cropped with contrast adjustment from a photo by ‘Brown-tailed eagle’; CC BY-4.0).