Rewilding is a great idea. But it shouldn't involve wolves.

Rewilding is about leisure, pleasure and access to nature. Putting large, dangerous animals in this space probably isn’t the place to start.

There are a bunch of environmentalists for whom sheep are the embodiment of all that is bad about Britain. George Monbiot and Ben Goldsmith, when they aren’t telling poor people they should pay more for food and energy, are enthusiasts for replacing sheep farming, and especially upland sheep farming, with what they call ‘rewilding’. And a big feature of this newly wild Welsh, Northumberland of Scottish Highland landscape is the wolf. Monbiot’s most recent argument for wolves is that Britain has a burgeoning population of deer and, of course, wolves eat deer. Monbiot thinks this is great:

“After years of this nonsense, it’s obvious that humans in Britain are an unreliable control agent. They announce plans but don’t follow them through. They propose incentives, but either fail to deliver them or generate the wrong results. They fret about the problem, but constantly fail to solve it.

Wolves and lynx, by contrast, get on with the job. Wolves may hunt by committee, but they begin with a consensus position that hunting should happen. They require no incentives or action plans, strategy documents or working groups. Lynx, as solitary hunters, don’t even need to discuss the issue.”

What we have here is another example of environmentalists - or some environmentalists - obsessing about apex predators. You only need to spend a few minutes listening to Chris Packham and we’re on about the bird equivalents of wolves - red kites, eagles and harriers. It isn’t that these animals are unimportant or even that reintroducing them is a bad idea, but it is an entirely false perspective. Moreover apex predators are opportunists - someone described sheep as essentially a ‘meat popsicle’ in explaining that the wolves will snack on them long before they chase down fast, lithe wild deer.

These so-called environmentalists are presenting the wrong case for rewilding because they completely misunderstand its purpose and value. Part of this is because of the word itself: ‘rewilding’ conjures up great beasts roaming vast wildernesses, yet the reality is that returning land to its ‘natural’ state is more about wild flowers, rodents and small passerine birds. The Jurassic Park fantasy of Monbiot and the wolf lobby should be ignored. If we want to improve Britain’s biodiversity (a thing that was wrecked by first the ice age and then by the physical separation of Britain from mainland Europe) we need to start with plants and trees, not apex predators.

In her book ‘The Origin of Plants’, Maggie Campbell-Culver describes the biodiversity of Britain after the ice age.

“There were in all probability no more than two hundred or so species in total, certainly little growing that could have been turned into a sustaining meal or a posy of flowers”

It is true that Britain was recolonised by plants in the period following that ice age, not least by woodland. And we don’t need wolves or other apex predators to restore Britain’s woodlands, we need to plant more trees. Instead of targeting places with an existing economic use - sheep pasture, grouse moor and deer stalking -  as Monbiot and other urban environmentalists do, we should focus on places where the economic use is redundant, places that we would consider urban and industrial.

From 1991 to 2016, the South Yorkshire Forest Partnership invested £32m in regenerating land in the county, much of it left barren by a hundred years of coal mining. It is perhaps indicative of how government - local and national - works in Britain that this project ended at a time when there is a heightened awareness of the natural environment in Britain. Too often we talk the environmental talk but fail to walk the environmental walk. Councils and government agencies spend millions on ‘net zero’ and proclaim a ‘climate emergency’ but are unable to support real efforts to improve the actual environment. The preference, as ever, is to hector and lecture the public, to sit in offices writing reports detailing GHG emissions, and to blame big business or capitalism for the lack of trees and the paucity of wildlife.

A few years ago I wrote a short blog post called ‘rewilding Bradford’ where I set out how we should think differently about the redundant, largely valueless industrial places across the city:

“Which means we should green the city - rewild it even. Instead of trying to find a developer to build another ugly square box on the Jacob's Well site (that we'll have to knock down in 25 years), let's turn it into an orchard, get some beehives, plant some trees - rewild the centre. And let's do the same for all those other empty, derelict and unattractive sites that litter the centre of our city - instead of growing houses that we don't really need (at least if the house prices are a guide to demand - which they usually are) lets grow trees, have allotments, perhaps a duck pond, maybe a maze for kids to get lost in.

Instead of building houses on that Drummond Mills site and the other big clear sites in Manningham, let's cut and cover - putting car parking underneath parks, recreation and open space. And then let's gate off all those narrow terraced streets nearby to provide safe outside space for the families in those homes. Let's set a target of pedestrianising half of our inner city terraced streets - we'll see the great benefit of fewer kids run over and lots fewer young folk with asthma. I know there'll be people - mostly men - who'll moan about not being able to park their car in the living room but the world is changing and Bradford can be ready for a society where car ownership isn't an assumed status and where driverless cars, buses and taxis provide safer transport for all.

Imagine the difference if, in twenty years time, flying over the city means looking down onto woodland, park, orchard and meadow rather than urban decay and crammed, amenity-free housing developments rejected by the better off and dominated by social housing and the private landlord.”

We should think differently about Britain’s former industrial places. Instead of spending billions trying to turn them into new industries - many of which seem dangerously addicted to grants rather than committed to economic growth - we should turn it into new woodland, country park and green open spaces. I remember a visit to Morwellham Quay in the Tamar Valley and being told that the wooded valley we could see was, not so many years ago, entirely free of trees with the landscape scarred and poisoned by arsenic and lead mining. A depressing ex-industrial wasteland is restored to woodland providing a wonderful amenity for visiting families as well as a place for wildlife to flourish. There are no wolves.

As a regeneration strategy rewilding makes more sense for much of Britain’s former industrial ‘heartland’ than the dominant property development driven strategies. Places like South Yorkshire Forest, the South Pennine Park and the Tamar valley reflect the reality of our modern economy, for sure we like big grand projects with cranes and great machines, but the reality is that successful places are green places. Britain’s planners and urbanists are wont to wax lyrical about European places, usually those dense urban places like Milan or Barcelona. I want to change the sort of place we look and go instead to the Ruhr Valley. This is where it started in the 1980s:

“A train ride from Dortmund to Gelsenkirchen rattles through what seems like one enormous tract of developed land: a dense fabric of coal mines and steel works, factories blending into housing and small commercial centres, criss-crossed by autobahns, railways and sewage channels; and though it all the Ruhr and Emscher rivers run to join the Rhine at the huge sprawl of harbours at Duisburg.”

The similarity with parts of Britain is striking - vast acres of redundant industrial land left empty by the collapse of heavy industry in the 1970s and 1980s. But the Ruhr Valley doesn’t look like that now because its regional and local governments took a different view. Instead of pretending, as too many British public bodies did, that you could pour money into city centres and recreate Victorian England, the German authorities chose instead to clean up the river, replant woods and to focus on leisure and pleasure rather than industry. The result is that the Ruhr, once the coal and steel heartland of Germany, is now thriving as a post-industrial network of cities and small towns that share a relationship with the river.

In terms of scale, the Ruhr is equivalent to a programme encompassing Merseyside, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire, there is no overarching authority (although the programmes were managed by an appointed parliament of local mayors, regional politicians and councillors) just a shared commitment to the strategy of, for want of a better term, rewilding an environment ruined by 150 years of heavy industry.

If we want to talk about rewilding, we need to forget about wolves or bears or huge raptors and think instead about what we’ve seen in the Ruhr, in South Yorkshire, in the Tamar Valley and in dozens of other projects. And if we want rewilding to contribute to a better society and economy, we need to stop talking about ‘green jobs’ and start realising that great environments breed better business. As I wrote in an article for Unherd, we need to reconnect towns and cities with the woods, hills and rivers that first made them:

“Instead of trying to build gritty urban living in the centres of Bradford, Oldham and Sunderland, let’s turn these places’ unused, derelict industrial sites into country parks — let’s rewild the towns and cities of the industrial North. Let’s learn from the late, great Will Alsop, whose Bradford Masterplan invoked the city to bulldoze the mostly empty, 1970s city centre buildings, and replace them with a park. Note, too, his M62 corridor “super city” showed connection isn’t just about road and rail but about topography and history too.

In greening the inner city, we also improve air quality, get less car-dominated places and begin to transform the relationship old industrial communities have with where they live. We reconnect them with the original environment of the North, with the hills and valleys, the rivers and the woods.”

Rewilding isn’t about wolves, rewilding is about people and their relationship with the places they inhabit. Yes it is about more woodland, cleaner rivers, more wildlife, but it is also about that being on our doorsteps, a place we can experience daily not some fenced off and distant wilderness. Rewilding is about wildflower meadows, well-managed hedgerows, bird boxes and mushrooms. And rewilding is about leisure, pleasure and access to nature. Putting large, dangerous animals in this space probably isn’t the place to start.