why pristine wilderness is a human-made myth

Nature’s Ghosts: The World We Lost and How to Bring it Back Sophie Yeo HarperNorth (2024)

A century ago, the world’s first ‘wilderness area’ was established in the Gila Mountains of southern New Mexico, by the forester Aldo Leopold. He wasn’t concerned with preserving ancient wildlands or resurrecting a memory of the Pleistocene epoch. He wanted hunters to be able to take a two-week backpacking trip without encountering a road. Out of such pragmatic sentiments — and decades before the US Congress offered protections — grew a system of more than 800 wilderness areas on federal lands in the United States. Hundreds more have since sprung up worldwide.

The wilderness is widely seen as a place untrammelled by human activities. Not so, argues journalist Sophie Yeo in Nature’s Ghosts. Advocating lyrically for rebuilding a diverse natural world, she recognizes that, however wild a region might seem, human activities have left a mark in even the most isolated regions. People have been a part of nature as long as they’ve been around, coevolving with its ecosystems for millennia.

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Take the English countryside. In A Child’s History of England (1852–54), novelist Charles Dickens perpetuates the narrative that the country was once covered in pristine forests and swamps, on which humans had little imprint until they acquired metal tools. Yeo dissects the deep flaws in this vision.

Far from eking out an existence on the margins of vast forests, our forebears were reshaping the environment as soon as humans diverged as a species. Spiralling out from her home in England, Yeo explores such transformations by examining fisheries in Finland; restoration of wildwood in the Scottish borders; biodiversity-preservation programmes on small farms in Transylvania, Romania; and farming practices in Denmark and Greenland.

In Finland, for example, fishers at lake Puruvesi have reclaimed rights to fish using conventional practices in areas that were usurped by the crown and state in the sixteenth century. By rebranding the vendace (Coregonus vandesius) — a small whitefish that was typically destined to be pet food — as a marketable delicacy, the fishers are providing a modern rationale for conserving an ancient landscape and way of life. For half of the year, the fishers drill through the ice and deploy large seine nets to scoop up the vendace from beneath the frozen surface of the lake.

Ghosts of environments past

Weaving into her narrative an understanding of ecological niches, previous biodiversity crises and the deep environmental legacy of Roman farming, Yeo demonstrates the fallacy of trying to return the environment to any point in the past, whether that be pre-Roman Great Britain or Pleistocene Europe. Most continents — save for Africa, where large animals live on, and Antarctica, the surface of which has long been buried under kilometres of ice — are, as Yeo puts it, “haunted by the ghosts of the megafauna” that disappeared in the past 50,000 years, yet left an imprint on soil nutrients or made holes in ecological communities.

She recounts how certain sharks in the Kiribati archipelago, white-tailed eagles (Haliaeetus albicilla) in Wales and beavers in California were regarded more as myth than reality, until careful work confirmed that those species once thrived in these regions. Those that remain often have to adapt to humans’ presence. The replacement of Bison antiquus in North America by Bison bison, or the succession of modern cattle from aurochs (Bos primigenius) in Europe, were marked by notable reductions in body size after centuries of evolving, interbreeding and hunting.

The ecological legacies of human activities are pervasive and often subtle. Each environment has a history and preserves a record of its past. Part of Yeo’s mission is to show how these ghostly records should inform decisions about how best to recover some of nature’s past diversity as humanity moves towards a warmer and more uncertain future.

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An important point in her account is that there is no pristine baseline, devoid of human activity, to which restorers might retreat. For example, the woodland around the French commune of Thuilley-aux-Groseilles seems to be a remnant of an old-growth forest. But the enrichment of soils from Roman agriculture is evident in its plant communities, with buttercups prominent around houses and enclosures, and the broad-leaved helleborine (Epipactis helleborine) found in remoter areas.

Yeo concludes that “the natural world has drifted so far from its origins that we no longer know what counts as natural”. It is impossible to establish what an area of land would have looked like or how it would have functioned before humans.

Stuck in the present

Yeo identifies three challenges for efforts to turn back history. First, as with the difficulty of identifying past white-tailed eagles in Wales, conservators often do not even know what is missing in an ecosystem, much less how they once worked. Second, climate change renders moot any effort to return ecosystems to how they were during, say, the seventeenth century, let alone the Pleistocene — and future conditions will differ from those now or in the past. Third, there are too many humans on the planet to leave substantial parts of it untouched.

I am all in favour of continuing to repair the ecosystems of the Rocky Mountains in North America, by rebuilding populations of American bison, wolves, mountain lions (Puma concolor) and grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis). But encounters with humans often end badly for these animals, imposing practical limitations to their reintroduction.

Whereas people in low- or middle-income countries most affected by climate change and environmental degradation stand to gain the most from the restorations described by Yeo, the majority don’t have the luxury of considering rejuvenating nature. Although Yeo does not consider environmental justice and economic inequality as deeply as one might wish, she does recognize that the growing human population limits the opportunities for rebuilding now-vanished landscapes.

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Yeo asserts that properly understanding the past can be a key to building a richer future, not by trying to rewind the tape of history to some pre-human idyll, but by reinvigorating the natural world in a way that is sustainable and enriches lives. This does not require humans to be banished from wild places.

Yeo views nature as “fragile but tenacious”. Her vision is close to Leopold’s a century ago. After the Gila Wilderness was established, he realized that wilderness must be more than a refuge for hunters; the wolves and mountain lions that hunters killed were essential to functioning ecosystems.

Nature’s Ghosts underscores how people have more choices than they realize when it comes to crafting a better future. The book rejects as false the dichotomy between urbanization and economic growth or untrammelled wilderness. Enriching landscapes and healthy ecosystems can coexist with building modern economies. But achieving this goal requires a deep knowledge of what has been lost and an appreciation for the resilience of species in the face of environmental tumult. Importantly, it requires acceptance that, although the future will not be a simulacrum of the past, a future with richer biodiversity is attainable.