Rewilding: farmland for hedge funds, Nazi killer species?

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

When the Nazis Tried to Bring Animals Back From Extinction
Their ideology of genetic purity extended to aspirations about reviving a pristine landscape with ancient animals and forests
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-nazis-tried-bring-animals- back-extinction-180962739/

Aurochs
Aurochs illustration from Sigismund von Herberstein's book published in 1556 (Wikimedia Commons)
By Lorraine Boissoneault
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
MARCH 31, 2017
Born to the director of the Berlin Zoo, Lutz Heck seemed destined for the world of wildlife. But instead of simply protecting animals, Heck had a darker relationship with them: he hunted and experimented with them.

In the new movie The Zookeeper’s Wife (based on a nonfiction book of the same title by Diane Ackerman), Heck is the nemesis of Warsaw zookeepers Antonina and Jan Zabinski, who risk their lives to hide Jews in cages that once held animals. All told, the couple smuggled around 300 Jewish people through their zoo. Not only was Heck tasked with pillaging the Warsaw Zoo for animals that could be sent to Germany, he was also at work on project that began before the Nazis came to power: reinvent nature by bringing extinct species back to life.

Lutz and his younger brother, Heinz, grew up surrounded by animals and immersed in animal breeding, beginning with small creatures like rabbits. At the same time that the boys learned more about these practices, zoologists around Europe were engaged in debates about the role of humans in preventing extinction and creating new species.

“It was kicked off by all kinds of what we would consider quite weird experiments. People were trying to breed ligers and tigons,” says Clemens Driessen, a researcher in cultural geography at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands.

While breeders’ imaginations ran wild with thoughts of new species to create, closer to home, European bison, known as wisent, were going extinct in the wild. Scientists began to consider the role of zoos could play in keeping the species alive—and in Germany, to combine those answers with theories about the supposed “purity” of long-gone landscapes.

Should wisent be revitalized using American bison as breeding stock? Would the resulting offspring still be considered proper bison? As they grew older, the Heck brothers were immersed in these same questions.

According to an article written by Driessen and co-author Jamie Lorimer, Heinz saw the extinction of the wisent as the natural progression of the result of nomadic tribes overhunting. His brother, on the other hand, became more and more interested in what he considered to be “primeval German game”—an interest increasingly shared by Nazis who sought a return to a mythic German past free of racial impurities.

In his autobiography Animals: My Adventure Lutz describes being fascinated by animals he associated with that mythical past, especially wisent and the formidable aurochs.

Lutz Heck with a scaly anteater, 1940
Lutz Heck with a scaly anteater, 1940 (Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Alamy Stock Photo)
Aurochs were large, horned cattle that went extinct in 1627 from excessive hunting and competition from domesticated cattle. The brothers believed they could recreate the animals through back-breeding: choosing existing cattle species for the right horn shape, coloration and behavior, then breeding them until they had something approximating the original animal. This was before the discovery of DNA’s double helix, so everything the brothers looked to for information on aurochs was from archaeological finds and written records. They believed that since modern cattle descended from aurochs, different cattle breeds contained the traces of their more ancient lineage.

“What my brother and I now had to do was to unite in a single breeding stock all those characteristics of the wild animal which are now found only separately in individual animals,” Heck wrote in his book. Their plan was the inverse of Russian experiments to create domesticated foxes through selective breeding—rather than breed forward with particular traits in mind, they thought they could breed backwards to eliminate the aspects of their phenotype that made them domesticated. (Similar experiments have been picked back up by modern scientists hoping to create aurochs once more, and by scientists trying to recreate the extinct quagga. Researchers disagree over whether this type of de-extinction is possible.)

The brothers traveled the continent, selecting everything from fighting cattle in Spain to Hungarian steppe cattle to create their aurochs. They studied skulls and cave paintings to decide what aurochs should look like, and both claimed success at reviving aurochs by the mid-1930s. Their cattle were tall with large horns and aggressive personalities, capable of surviving with limited human care, and in modern times would come to be called Heck cattle. The animals were spread around the country, living everywhere from the Munich Zoo to a forest on the modern-day border of Poland and Russia.

But despite their shared interest in zoology and animal husbandry, the brothers’ paths diverged greatly as the Nazis rose to power. In the early 1930s, Heinz was among the first people interned at Dachau as a political prisoner for suspected membership in the Communist Party and his brief marriage to a Jewish woman. Though Heinz was released, it was clear he would never be a great beneficiary of Nazi rule, nor did he seem to support their ideology focused on the purity of nature and the environment.

Lutz joined the Nazi Party early in its reign, and earned himself a powerful ally: Hermann Göring, Adolf Hilter’s second-in-command. The two men bonded over a shared interest in hunting and recreating ancestral German landscapes. Göring amassed political titles like trading cards, serving in many positions at once: he became the prime minister of Prussia, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, and Reich Hunt Master and Forest Master. It was in this last position that he bestowed the title of Nature Protection Authority to Lutz, a close friend, in 1938.

Hermann Göring
Hermann Göring (Wikimedia Commons)
“Göring saw the opportunity to make nature protection part of his political empire,” says environmental historian Frank Uekotter. “He also used the funds [from the Nature Protection Law of 1935] for his estate.” The law, which created nature reserves, allowed for the designation of natural monuments, and removed the protection of private property rights, had been up for consideration for years before the Nazis came to power. Once the Nazis no longer had the shackles of the democratic process to hold them back, Göring quickly pushed the law through to enhance his prestige and promote his personal interest in hunting.

Lutz continued his back-breeding experiments with support from Göring, experimenting with tarpans (wild horses, whose Heck-created descendants still exist today) and wisent. Lutz’s creations were released in various forests and hunting reserves, where Göring could indulge his wish to recreate mythic scenes from the German epic poem Nibelungenlied (think the German version of Beowulf), in which the Teutonic hero Siegfried kills dragons and other creatures of the forest.

“Göring had a very peculiar interest in living a kind of fantasy of carrying spears and wearing peculiar dress,” Driessen says. “He had this eerie combination of childish fascination [with the poem] with the power of a murderous country behind it.” In practical terms, this meant seizing land from Poland, especially the vast wilderness of Białowieża Forest, then using it to create his own hunting reserves. This fit into the larger Nazi ideology of lebensraum, or living space, and a return to the heroic past.

“On the one hand National Socialism embraced modernity and instrumental rationality; something found in the Nazi emphasis on engineering, eugenics, experimental physics and applied mathematics,” write geographers Trevor Barnes and Claudio Minca. “On the other hand was National Socialism’s other embrace: a dark anti-modernity, the anti-enlightenment. Triumphed were tradition, a mythic past, irrational sentiment and emotion, mysticism, and a cultural essentialism that turned easily into dogma, prejudice, and much, much worse.”

In 1941 Lutz went to the Warsaw Zoo to oversee its transition to German hands. After selecting the species that would be most valuable to German zoos, he organized a private hunting party to dispatch with the rest. “These animals could not be recuperated for any meaningful reason, and Heck, with his companions, enjoyed killing them,” writes Jewish studies scholar Kitty Millet.

Millet sees an ominous connection to the Nazi ideology of racial purity. “The assumption was that the Nazis were the transitional state to the recovery of Aryan being,” Millet wrote in an email. In order to recover that racial purity, says Millet, “nature had to be transformed from a polluted space to a Nazi space.”

While Driessen sees little direct evidence of Lutz engaging with those ideas, at least in his published research, Lutz did correspond with Eugen Fischer, one of the architects of Nazi eugenics.

But his work creating aurochs and wisent for Göring shared the same conclusion as other Nazi projects. Allied forces killed the wild animals as they closed in on the Germans at the end of the war. Some Heck cattle descended from those that survived the end of the war in zoos still exist, and their movement around Europe has become a source of controversy that renews itself every few years. They’ve also been tagged as a possible component of larger European rewilding programs, such as the one envisioned by Stichting Taurus, a Dutch conservationist group Stichting Taurus.

With scientists like the Dutch and others considering the revival of extinct wildlife to help restore disturbed environments, Uekotter thinks Heck’s role in the Nazi Party can serve as a cautionary tale. “There is no value-neutral position when you talk about the environment. You need partners and, [compared to gridlock that happens in democracy,] there is a lure of the authoritarian regime that things are all of a sudden very simple,” Uekotter says. “The Nazi experience shows what you can end up with if you fall for this in a naïve way.”

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About Lorraine Boissoneault
Lorraine Boissoneault is a contributing writer to SmithsonianMag.com covering history and archaeology. She has previously written for The Atlantic, Salon, Nautilus and others. She is also the author of The Last Voyageurs: Retracing La Salle's Journey Across America. Website: http://www.lboissoneault.com/
Read more from this author | Follow @boissolm
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[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Rewilding will make Britain a rainforest nation again
George Monbiot
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/25/rewilding-britai ns-rainforest-planting-trees

It will take vision and a willingness to confront vested interests, but we can restore our trashed ecosystems
Wed 25 Sep 2019 06.00 BST
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The forests still burn, but the world now looks away. In both the Amazon basin and the rainforests of Indonesia, the world-scorching inferno rages on, already forgotten by most of the media. Intricate living systems, species that took millions of years to evolve, are being incinerated in moments, then replaced with monocultures. Giant plumes of carbon tip us further into climate breakdown. And we’re not even talking about it.
World losing area of forest the size of the UK each year, report finds
But underneath the grief and frustration, I also feel disquiet. We rightly call on other nations to protect their stunning places. But where are our rainforests? I mean this both metaphorically and literally. Out of 218 nations, the UK ranks 189th for the intactness of its living systems. Having trashed our own wildlife, our excessive demand for meat, animal feed, timber, minerals and fossil fuels helps lay waste the rest of the world.
Among our missing ecosystems are rainforests. Rainforests are not confined to the tropics: a good definition is forest wet enough to support epiphytes – plants that grow on other plants. Particularly in the west of Britain, where tiny fragments persist, you can find trees covered in rich growths of a fern called polypody, mosses and lichens, and flowering plants climbing the lower trunks. Learning that Britain is a rainforest nation astounds us only because we have so little left.
We now know that, alongside keeping fossil fuels in the ground, natural climate solutions – using the mass restoration of nature to draw down carbon from the air – offer perhaps the last remaining chance to prevent more than 1.5C, or even 2C, of global heating. Saving the remaining rainforests and other rich ecosystems, while restoring those we have lost, is not just a nice idea: our lives may depend on it. But in countries like the UK, we urge others to act while overlooking our own disasters.
Foreigners I meet are often flabbergasted by the state of our national parks. They see the sheepwrecked deserts and grousetrashed moors and ask: “What are you protecting here?” In the name of “cultural heritage” we allow harsh commercial interests, embedded in the modern economy but dependent on public money, to complete the kind of ecological cleansing we lament in the Amazon. Sheep farming has done for our rainforests what cattle ranching is doing to Brazil’s. Then we glorify these monocultures – the scoured, treeless hills – as “wild” and “unspoilt”.
The conservation groups have manifestly failed to translate our love of nature into action
When the International Union for Conservation of Nature sought to classify our national parks, it had to invent a new category. Most of the world’s national parks are category I or II: set aside principally for nature. But all of ours are category V: places where, in practice, business comes first and nature last. Much of the land in our national parks is systematically burned. In the northern parks, this destruction is wreaked by grouse estates, and in Snowdonia by farmers. But on Dartmoor and Exmoor, the park authorities do it themselves, torching wildlife, roasting the soil, pouring carbon into the skies: everything we condemn elsewhere.
The government’s new Landscapes Review is better than I expected, but its positive proposals are in no way commensurate with our ecological and climate crises. It suggests that England’s national parks and other protected landscapes should “have a renewed mission to recover and enhance nature … simply sustaining what we have is not nearly good enough”. But it does not argue that any of our parks should aim for something better than category V. Nor does it recommend that burning should cease, or that farming should withdraw from some places to allow rainforests and other rich habitats to recover. Where is the ambition our emergencies demand?
We urgently need more trees, but we appear to believe that the only means of restoring them is planting. We have a national obsession with tree planting, which is in danger of becoming as tokenistic as bamboo toothbrushes and cotton tote bags. In many places rewilding, or natural regeneration – allowing trees to seed and spread themselves – is much faster and more effective, and tends to produce far richer habitats.
Burning gorse on Dartmoor. Photograph: Marc Hill/Alamy
All over the country, I see “conservation woodlands” that look nothing like ecological restoration and everything like commercial forestry: the ground blasted with glyphosate (a herbicide that kills everything), trees planted in straight rows, in plastic tree guards attached with cable ties to treated posts. It looks hideous, it takes decades to begin to resemble a natural forest and, in remote parts of the nation, it is often the primary cause of plastic litter, much of which is never recovered. There are no woodland creation grants in this country supporting natural regeneration: public money is pegged exclusively to the number of trees planted. This is one of the reasons for the shocking failure to meet the UK’s targets for new woodlands.
The government should follow the hierarchical approach suggested by the conservationist Steve Jones. It should fund natural regeneration wherever possible. Where trees struggle to establish themselves, it should finance assisted regeneration (clearing competing vegetation). Only where those options won’t work should it offer grants for tree planting. But while nature loves a mess, officialdom abhors one: instead of natural exuberance it seeks neat industrial rows.
Don’t expect much help from politicians. Michael Gove’s successor as environment secretary, Theresa Villiers, seems tongue-tied, apparently terrified of offending vested interests. Labour’s vote for a Green New Deal, with a 2030 deadline for decarbonisation (20 years before the government’s) is exciting. But we now need to see its commitments on industrial emissions matched by ambitious proposals for ecological restoration.
Grow your own forest: how to plant trees to help save the planet
Nor are the big conservation groups filling the void. Ours is an extraordinary situation: a nation of nature lovers, obsessed by wildlife programmes, represented by gigantic NGOs, but apparently incapable of preventing the precipitous decline of wildlife and habitats. The conservation groups have manifestly failed to translate our love of nature into action.
They betray their radical roots. The National Trust arose from the Commons Preservation Society, that tore down fences to return land to the people. Now it allows the forces it once contested to ride roughshod over its land, allowing trail hunts and exclusive grouse shoots to erode the sense of national ownership. On its Exmoor estate, in the resource book it publishes for school teachers, it celebrates burning the land. The RSPB was founded by women seeking to ban the import of birds’ plumage for hats – they eventually succeeded. Now, as independent ecologists raise massive petitions to ban driven grouse shooting, the RSPB undermines their campaigns by calling for this devastating practice to be, er, licensed. Hesitation and appeasement reign.
We should continue to mobilise against the destruction of the world’s great habitats, and its terrifying implications. But the most persuasive argument we can make is to show we mean it, by restoring our own lost wonders.
• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

[TonyGosling]

Simply put, radical environmentalism, a.k.a. the GREEN MOVEMENT, DEEP ECOLOGY, or REWILDING, is a philosophy that elevates nature over man. Hitler incorporated this naturalistic philosophy in his infamous treatise, Mein Kampf, where he blamed the entire Jewish race for what he called “the pacification of Nature”.

According to Hitler, the Jews, and to a lesser extent, the Judeo-Christian ethic that stemmed from a belief in a “transcendent God”, were responsible for wrecking the environmental health of the planet. Hitler believed that Jews and Christians accomplished this evil deed through the promotion of capitalism, international commerce, and/or the communitarian values of communism.

https://oldmanoftheski.com/2017/11/30/the-nazi-roots-of-the-environmen tal-movement/

----- Forwarded message -----
From: "bonnie@riseup.net" <bonnie@riseup.net>
To: Landjusticeuk <landjusticeuk@lists.riseup.net>
Sent: Friday, 6 March 2020, 21:57:17 GMT+13
Subject: [landjusticeuk] land and ecological crisis meeting March 28

Hi,
The People's Land Policy project is organising a meeting to discuss what
kind of land use and what policies we need to combat climate change and
enhance biodiversity and rewilding. It is on the 28th of March at the
New Economics Foundation in London. Programme includes speakers from the
London Mining Network, Anti-Coal Network, Friends of the Earth and the
Woodland Trust.
All details and registration- see below.



https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/land-and-the-ecological-crisis-tickets- 91114446763

Regards,
Bonnie
---
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[TonyGosling]

THE NAZI ROOTS OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT
On November 30, 2017 By Steve Busch
https://oldmanoftheski.com/2017/11/30/the-nazi-roots-of-the-environmen tal-movement/

Simply put, radical environmentalism, a.k.a. the GREEN MOVEMENT, DEEP ECOLOGY, or REWILDING, is a philosophy that elevates nature over man. Hitler incorporated this naturalistic philosophy in his infamous treatise, Mein Kampf, where he blamed the entire Jewish race for what he called “the pacification of Nature”.

According to Hitler, the Jews, and to a lesser extent, the Judeo-Christian ethic that stemmed from a belief in a “transcendent God”, were responsible for wrecking the environmental health of the planet. Hitler believed that Jews and Christians accomplished this evil deed through the promotion of capitalism, international commerce, and/or the communitarian values of communism.

Hitler’s anti-materialistic, anti-human, indeed anti-Christ philosophy is very much evident in the modern environmental movement. Deep ecologists, a.k.a “radical environmentalists”, seek many of the same goals Hitler sought. Primarily they intend to keep and/or return as much of the planet as possible to a pre-historic or primitive state completely untouched and untrammeled by human beings. For the sake of simplicity, I refer to this agenda as “REWILDING”.

“In fact, the Nazis actually believed that the sick modern world of both international capitalism and communism, led by Jews and spread by Christianity, was entirely disobedient to Nature.”
[Mark Musser- Hitler’s Green Killing Machine c. 2010]

The NAZI’s believed that wild animals and nature needed more space. They initiated plans to depopulate and REWILD large swaths of Europe and replace domestic cattle with wild species such as the Auroch. Much of the NAZI’s genetic research was dedicated to replicating primeval animals of the past. Ironically, in their obsession with the veneration of nature, they treated human beings, in particular the Jews, worse than animals.

“Their ideology of genetic purity extended to aspirations about reviving a pristine landscape with ancient animals and forests.”
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-nazis-tried-bring-animals-b ack-extinction-180962739/#wvUkVlhhUgExszwp.99

Today we see “Smart Growth” and restrictive land use laws based on NAZI notions of “sustainability”. Ironically, the word “ecology” was coined in 1866 by the racist German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. Suffice it to say that Hitler approved of many of Haeckel’s Darwinist concepts, especially as they related to the Jews. Even after the defeat of NAZISM, subsequent generations continue to be programmed to believe that stifling human development in order to “save” fish and frogs or some species of vole is the right and necessary thing to do. We have been programmed to believe that shutting down the timber industry for the sake of non-endangered birds, or promoting large non-endangered carnivores such as wolves and grizzly bears to the detriment of human beings, is right, noble, and just.

“The Reich Nature Protection Act even allowed the expropriation of private property without compensation for the sake of the environment. Sustainable forestry practices called Dauerwald, which ironically means “eternal” forest, were also introduced at the federal level.”
[Mark Musser- Hitler’s Green Killing Machine c. 2010]

Advocates of REWILDING are fond of claiming that “nature needs half”, implying that human beings occupy too much space and therefore we must limit our planetary “footprint” in order to preserve a “sustainable” percentage of the earth’s habitat for wildlife and fish, an amount which only they are competent to define. Climate change is blamed on capitalism and those who hold to a Judeo-Christian ethic or outmoded concepts of industry and “private property”. The extinction of wildlife species is blamed on those who hold to the mindset that man is the pinnacle of creation and nature exists to meet man’s needs. The Deep Ecology answer to all of the world’s perceived “problems” is to reduce human impacts by radically reducing the human population, curtailing development, and re-educating (read: programming) and controlling those who are allowed to remain.

But here are the facts. Over half of the entire human population currently occupies a mere 1% of the earth’s land surface. The perception that human beings are virtually everywhere is based on the fact that we are a communal species that choose to live in settled landscapes where other people, i.e. civilization, if not right out the front door, is close at hand. While the total land surface area of the earth is just under 58 million square miles, approximately 33% is desert and 24% is mountainous. Subtracting this largely empty and/or uninhabitable land from the total land area leaves about 25 million square miles of habitable land.

Half of the total human population lives on less than 1% of the land area of the planet. [Map Info courtesy of NASA]
Our urban centers are often surrounded by agricultural land that actually covers less than 11% of the earth’s land surface. Domesticated animals grazing on open undeveloped land or pastures may account for up to another 20%. That means human activity, in all forms, takes place on less than 1/3 of the earth’s land surface. The fact is, nearly 2/3 of earth’s land surface is very sparsely populated and is considered too hostile of an environment for human habitation or agricultural production. Thus, the REWILDERS already have far more land than they clam to want. In fact, they are GAINING EVEN MORE LAND EVERY DAY!

According to U.S. Bureau of Census statistics, the majority of rural counties in the United States are continuing to lose population while urban centers continue to grow. Over the last several decades, rural land abandonment in Europe has reached problematic levels as urbanization continues to swallow more and more of the population.

Those who think that urban sprawl and unchecked development are the greatest threats to the health of the planet may want to look at the facts. According to the 2014 FAO Global Land Cover SHARE database, a mere 0.6% of Earth’s land surface is defined as “artificial surfaces”. Artificial surfaces include any land surface area that has an “artificial covering” as a result of human activities. This would include any type of construction or infrastructure such as cities, towns, dams, roads, mines, quarries, urban parks, sports fields, etc.

Think about this. Over half of humanity lives on a mere 1% of the earth’s surface while development (infrastructure) covers just 0.6% percent. Let’s use Canada as an example to try to put this in perspective. Canada has a land area of roughly 3.8 million square miles. Nearly 90% of the population lives in only four provinces, with more than 40% living in only one province (Ontario). The vast majority of the Canadian population resides within 100 miles of the U.S. border. That leaves vast areas of unsettled land available for nature. Yet we are repeatedly told by the REWILDING advocates that “nature needs half”, as if humanity has somehow already managed to overrun the entire planet.

There is far more to the REWILDING agenda than meets the eye. Just like their NAZI mentors, modern environmentalists seek the power to create a world of their own making. They will be merciless in carrying out their eco-fascist agenda if they are allowed to succeed in their fanatical quest to obtain complete political control.

Sources for this article:

Mark Musser – “Hitler’s Green Killing Machine” c. 2010

http://www.aim.org/aim-report/hitlers-green-killing-machine/

http://www.curiousmeerkat.co.uk/questions/much-land-earth-inhabited/

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-nazis-tried-bring-animals- back-extinction-180962739/

http://natureneedshalf.org/

http://www.fao.org/uploads/media/glc-share-doc.pdf

[TonyGosling]

Will Reanimation of Extinct Large Carnivores Drive Humans From Western USA?
Rewilding Network—Saving Globe Through Big Wilderness: Another UN Agenda 21 Hoax

https://canadafreepress.com/article/rewilding-network-saving-globe-thr ough-big-wilderness-another-un-agenda-21

By Kelly OConnell —— Bio and Archives--August 7, 2012

Attempts to fathom the United Nation’s “Sustainable Development” program Agenda 21 mean continually peering behind the facade of a thousand “harmless” organizations and programs. This because Agenda 21 is ostensibly socialist dogma seeking creation of world collectivist hegemony on land use, human population size, capitalism and consumption of electricity and water. Since transparent socialism was unable to ever attract a majority in America, these programs must always fly below the radar.

Ironically, Agenda 21 is itself transparently directed towards extreme remedies for the “problem” of mankind. Such ideas as reducing human populations and relocating them near industry, while revoking property ownership rights are the remedies proposed for humanity’s errors. In particular “re-wilding”—or returning huge tracts of land to pristine status while restoring all former animal groups—is one of the most dramatically anti-human ideas ever conceived, defined by one author:

Rewilding is “the scientific argument for restoring big wilderness based on the regulatory roles of large predators,” according to Soul and Reed Noss in their landmark 1998 Wild Earth article “Rewilding and Biodiversity.”

Rewilding is ultimately about property rights. In transferring large tracts of land (aka Big Wilderness) into government hands it thereby cancels any rights of the original owners. This is, in fact, the entire goal of rewilding large, dangerous carnivores—to take away mankind’s property rights to big parcels of land so the elite caste might macro-manage earth according to their dictates. In this way, progressives like eco-terrorist godfather Dave Foreman hope to embargo all constitutional rights and drive mankind into the cold, hopeless servility of the state.
I. What is “Rewilding”?

The term “rewilding” was coined by Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First!—one of the most radical and violent environmentalists in history. Foreman’s book, Rewilding North America: A Vision For Conservation In The 21St Century, is a primary codex for those seeking a radical reduction of humanity’s presence on earth. The Rewilding Institute elucidates Dave Foreman’s book:

Three major scientific arguments constitute rewilding, justifying emphasis on large predators.

The structure, resilience, and diversity of ecosystems are maintained by “top-down” ecological (trophic) interactions initiated by top predators.
Wide-ranging predators usually require large cores of protected landscape for foraging, seasonal movements, and other needs; they justify bigness.
Connectivity is also required because core reserves are typically not large enough in most regions; they must be linked to insure long-term viability of wide-ranging species…

In short, the rewilding argument posits that large predators are often instrumental in maintaining the integrity of ecosystems. Overall, large predators require big space and connectivity.

A congressional example is found in U.S. Congress - H.R. 5101 Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act of 2010, calling for “wild animal bridges and tunnels, and increasing roadless areas.”
II. Rewilding Mission: Reintroducing Large Carnivores

It’s no surprise the rewilding plan to reintroduce expurgated classes of large carnivores onto the American continent will drive out humans. Further, this expulsion of humans from vast land tracts ought not be seen as anything but the ultimate intent of the rewilding project, as its planner admit. This large carnivore reintroduction goal is explained here:

If native large carnivores have been killed out of a region, their reintroduction and recovery is the heart of a conservation strategy. Wolves, cougars, lynx, wolverines, grizzly and black bears, jaguars, sea otters, and other top carnivores need restoration throughout North America in ecologically effective densities in their natural ranges where suitable habitat remains or can be restored. Without the goal of rewilding for large areas with large carnivores, we are closing our eyes to what conservation really means—and demands.

III. Reintroducing Extinct Megafauna—Pleistocene Rewilding

Perhaps the most jaw-dropping part of the rewilding plan involves reintroducing long-gone American animal groups back onto the North American continent. This could happen in several ways. The first would be to reintroduce former indigenous species who once roamed our land—such as elephants and the (wooly) rhinoceros. The second, reminiscent of a sci-fi movie, would be to find DNA materials to recreate extinct animal groups. For example, under this plan, well-preserved extinct animals—such as glacier-bound woolly mammoths, recently disappeared passenger pigeons, or the La Brea Tarpits’ saber toothed cats could be raised as fetuses from scratch. On this Science Daily published: A Plan For Reintroducing Megafauna To North America:

Dozens of megafauna (large animals over 100 pounds)—such as giant tortoises, horses, elephants, and cheetah—went extinct in North America13,000 years ago during the end of the Pleistocene. As is the case today in Africa and Asia, these megafauna likely played keystone ecological roles via predation, herbivory, and other processes. What are the consequences of losing such important components of America’s natural heritage?

In The American Naturalist, 12 scientists provide a detailed proposal for the restoration of North America’s lost megafauna. Using the same species from different locales or closely related species as analogs, their project “Pleistocene Rewilding” is conceived as carefully managed experiments in an attempt to learn about and partially restore important natural processes to North American ecosystems present for millennia until humans played a significant role in their demise 13,000 years ago.

As to the cloning of extinct magafauna, one writer says this—The Mammoth in Glen Canyon:

French explorer Bernard Buigues and Larry Agenbroad, Northern Arizona University hope that Jarkov Wooly Mammoth sitting inside a 23-ton block of ice will contain flesh sample with some perfectly preserved DNA. That and some proven cloning technology could resurrect a long-gone species.

What Buigues and his team would do is something similar to the process that created the famous sheep Dolly: extracting the nucleus of one adult mammoth cell and inserting it into an empty egg cell. The embryo would then be implanted in the uterus of an Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative, a surrogate mother that would gestate it as its own but without transferring to the baby any of the elephant’s genes.

IV. Goals of Rewilding

The goals of Rewilding are staggering, summed up at The Wildlands Project:

The Wildlands Project goal is to set aside approximately 50% of the North American continent (Turtle Island) as “wild land” for the preservation of biological diversity.

The project seeks this by creating “reserve networks” across the continent. Reserves are made up of the following:
Cores, created from public lands such as National Forest and Parks
Buffers, often created from private land adjoining the cores to provide additional protection
Corridors, a mix of public and private lands usually following along rivers and wildlife migration routes
The primary characteristics of core areas are large size (100,000 to 25 million acres), allowing for little, if any, human use.
The primary characteristics of buffers are that they allow for limited human use so long as they are “managed with native biodiversity as a preeminent concern.”
Moral and ethical guidelines for the Wildlands Project are based on the philosophy of Deep Ecology. (Minimization of personal property and possessions)
The platform of Deep Ecology is summarized as follows:
All life (human and non-human) has equal value.
Resource consumption above what is needed to supply “vital” human needs is immoral.
Human population must be reduced
Western civilization must radically change present economic, technological, and ideological structures.
Believers have an obligation to try to implement the necessary changes.

V. Anarcho Rewilding: Green Nihilism

Rewilding exposes roots of doctrinaire Marxism. For example, the final stage of Marx’s Dialectic of History is the emergence of a benign anarchy. The Green movement therefore pushes anarcho-rewilding as a way to sow chaos into human history to cause anarchy to result. Says one site:

Rewilding is the process of undoing domestication. In green anarchism and anarcho-primitivism, humans are said to be “domesticated” by civilization. Supporters of such human rewilding argue that through the process of domestication, our wildness has been tamed and taken from us. Rewilding, then, is about overcoming our domestication and returning to our innate wildness. Though often associated with primitive skills and relearning knowledge of wild plants and animals, it emphasizes primal living as a holistic reality rather than just a number of skills or specific type of knowledge. Rewilding is most associated with green anarchy and anarcho-primitivism or anti-civilization anarchy in general…

VI. Criticisms of Rewilding:

A fair analysis of rewilding efforts exposes profound problems in the doctrine and practice. Here are a few obvious issues.
A. Danger

Rewilding would create clear danger for any residents of North America, especially with the reintroduction of large carnivores from Africa or Asia—such as lions and cheetahs. This risk would only increase with reanimation and release of such exotic beasts as extinct saber-toothed tigers.
B. Anachronistic Heresy

It is a specie of the Naturalist Fallacy that North America should be returned to the habitat existing 13,000 years ago before mankind became preeminent. This fallacy claims that everything in its “natural state” is better than any alternative. But if that were the case, creating vaccines against such dangerous menaces like whooping cough and polio would be immoral or stupid. Further, such attempts at re-balancing a long-dead ecosystem could create an environmental disaster of epic proportions, given how little we know of these extinct beasts, their habits and diseases.
C. Agenda 21 & Property Rights

Perhaps the most pernicious aspects of the entire rewilding plan is its ideological origin. For rewilding is simply an application of Agenda 21, the UN’s audacious attempt to turn the globe socialist (see A Brief History & Description of Agenda 21). So no natural logic or necessity supports the plan, just simplistic Marxism. Further, to accept this policy means giving up our constitutional rights to own property and for due process of law. Finally, socialism never works in actual practice so why adopt a failed ideology?

Many progressive groups, such as the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, toil to put vast stretches of American land under the whip-hand of government control (see Shady Details of Marxist “Earth” Organizations: NM Wilderness Alliance). And the Rewilding Institute’s demand for large carnivores naturally needs massive land tracts to hope to succeed—what a coincidence!
D. Anti-biblical

Finally, rewilding is a stunning rebuke to the Genesis account where God gives mankind charge of the earth, aka the Dominion Mandate, found in Genesis 1:26-28:

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”



Kelly OConnell -- Bio and Archives

Kelly O’Connell is an author and attorney. He was born on the West Coast, raised in Las Vegas, and matriculated from the University of Oregon. After laboring for the Reformed Church in Galway, Ireland, he returned to America and attended law school in Virginia, where he earned a JD and a Master’s degree in Government. He spent a stint working as a researcher and writer of academic articles at a Miami law school, focusing on ancient law and society. He has also been employed as a university Speech & Debate professor. He then returned West and worked as an assistant district attorney. Kelly is now is a private practitioner with a small law practice in New Mexico.

[TonyGosling]

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

This article fails to mention that Rebecca Wrigley is married to George Monbiot


Farming anger forces Rewilding Britain to pull out of Summit To Sea project in Mid Wales
The cross-country ecological scheme will continue but without the charity that helped set it up

https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/local-news/rewilding-britain-summit-s ea-wales-17119541

The five-year Summit To Sea project aims to create a nature-rich area stretching from the Pumlumon massif down to the Dyfi Estuary and out into Cardigan Bay
The five-year Summit To Sea project aims to create a nature-rich area stretching from the Pumlumon massif down to the Dyfi Estuary and out into Cardigan Bay

The lead partner of a £3.4m rewilding project in Mid Wales has been forced to pull out following a furious backlash from farming communities.

Rewilding Britain admitted it had made mistakes in the way the Summit to Sea scheme had been communicated to farmers in Ceredigion and Montgomeryshire.

The project aims to increase biodiversity and restore ecosystems in 10,000ha of Mid Wales – stretching from Machynlleth to Llanidloes and Aberystwyth – and almost 30,000ha of sea in Cardigan Bay.

Farming communities fear they will be constrained in how they run their businesses, and forced to rely on ecological tourism.

A statement by Rewilding Britain this morning confirmed it was withdrawing from the scheme followed feedback from farming unions and local communities.

Last week Powys Council passed a motion calling on the project to cut its ties with Rewilding Britain, seen locally as having more extreme views on land management.

Rebecca Wrigley, chief executive of Rewilding Britain, accepted that, for the project to succeed, it had to have community consent.

“While Summit to Sea held a series of face-to-face meetings and consultations locally, we should have communicated more widely that the project was to be community-led and owned,” she said.

“We’ve learnt some invaluable lessons about how to do this in the most effective way, which we’re committed to putting into practice elsewhere.”


From today, Summit to Sea will continue with seven partners following changes to its governance structure
Rewilding Britain was set up following the publication of Feral, George Monbiot’s controversial book that highlighted the “sheep wrecked” mountains of Wales.

The charity was instrumental in securing funds for Summit To Sea, which will now continue with seven partners – the Woodland Trust, Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust, RSPB Cymru , Marine Conservation Society, PLAS Marine Special Area of Conservation, Whale and Dolphin Conservation and the WWF.

Last month another partner, Machynlleth -based Ecodyfi, also withdrew from the project. At the time it said is was “disturbed” by the scheme’s focus on the environment at the expense of the area’s “cultural, linguistic, social and economic aspects”.

READ MORE
Golden eagles poised to soar above Snowdonia for first time in 200 years
Powys Council’s motion, passed by a 41 to 4 vote, called on the project to include partners as the farming unions, local authorities and Welsh language group Mentrau Iaith.

Plaid Cymru group leader Cllr Elwyn Vaughan, who proposed the motion, blasted the scheme as “privileged middle-class romanticism”.

He welcomed Rewilding Britain’s withdrawal and urged the remaining project partners to open dialogue with local action groups and the farming unions.


“Over recent months it has been emphasised that people are happy working with conservation partners,” he said.

“Much good work already happens with Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust, the RSPB and the Woodland Trust.

“However the lack of respect and trust in Rewilding Britain undermined any opportunity to move things forward.”

VIDEO LOADING
NORTHERN BOTTLENOSE WHALE IN CRICCIETH
Summit To Sea has said local antagonism was based on misunderstandings and that the project was keen to involve anyone with a shared interest in the area’s culture, environment and economy.


Further drop-in sessions will be held to explain the scheme’s objectives, said project director Melanie Newton.

READ MORE
Uplands fire is a 'sign of things to come' if Britain's uplands are re-wilded
She added: “The project steering group – including Rewilding Britain – has taken on board concerns raised by local people and farming unions and decided to make changes to the way Summit to Sea is managed.

“We are now eager to move forward with the community and pave the way for a future which is beneficial to all.”

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Natural England threatens to sacrifice Dartmoor’s farmers
Posted By Laura White on Oct 2, 2020 | 0 comments
https://themoorlander.co.uk/natural-england-threatens-to-sacrifice-dar tmoors-farmers/

The Moorlander is hereby launching a campaign to support the farmers of Okehampton Common and any other areas affected by Natural England’s recent decision to remove all sheep from the common for six months of the year.

As explained so eloquently on the Dartmoor Farmers Association website: ‘Dartmoor has been farmed by man for over 6,000 years; its landscape of open moorland, craggy granite tors and deep wooded river valleys is linked with its farming heritage. As custodians of the internationally important landscape of Dartmoor, our farmers have the responsibility of managing the land for themselves, their families, the environment, local communities, businesses and visitors. Without their experience, expertise and stock, the moor would be an entirely different place. When teamed with selective burning [of dead bracken and overgrown gorse and heather], the mixed grazing patterns of the ponies, sheep and cattle create the open moorland areas with their natural grasslands and peat bogs which support internationally important wildlife species.’

As was mentioned in our Green Issues column in the previous edition, The Moorlander was contacted and made aware of this new order from Natural England but at the time the facts were not known. It has now come to light that, in the name of environmental stewardship, Natural England has indeed signed the death warrant of those farmers and the future of the moor itself.

A statement from Natural England said: ‘Okehampton Common is part of the North Dartmoor Site of Special Scientific Interest and a Dartmoor Special Area of Conservation and Natural England has worked closely with commoners to put in place grazing management which balances the needs of farmers, wildlife, cultural heritage, recreational users and the contribution the common makes to Dartmoor’s special landscape qualities.

‘Management on the common has been supported through an Environmental Stewardship scheme aimed in part at restoring the heather and bilberry heathland that contributes to the site’s national importance for wildlife. We are working with the commoners on changes they can make to ensure their scheme is a success.” (We would like to point out that we have changed the spelling from the original statement, which had Okehampton as Oakhampton.)

However, it appears that they are not working with the commoners; the commoners have no say in this decision that will see their livelihoods taken from them. Commoners have grazing rights on the moor going back hundreds of years. For the past 25 years or so, many have been in agreements such as the Higher Level Stewardship scheme, with Natural England, who pay them subsidies to manage the land as dictated by the government. If the farmers do as they are told, they get their money. This new move will ensure that farmers comply, or risk losing their subsidies which provide many farmers with funds to run their farms. Without this, farmers could see themselves bankrupt. However, by complying, they will be losing their means of income as many farms are not large enough to house such numbers of animals and have no funds with which to feed the flocks over the winter.

Although Mat Cole, Director of the Dartmoor Farmers Association, farms on a different part of the moor, he is all too aware of the huge pressures that farmers are already under. He told us: “Many of us across Dartmoor are tenant farmers; our only capital is our livestock. You take that away, we have no capital to work with. Sheep can’t just be taken off and brought back to the home farm, the home farm is where we grow our winter feed. Sheep can’t just be put on the moor, they need to be born there. The only option would be to sell the sheep and then we’re left with nothing.”

The Okehampton farmers who first brought this new ruling to light keep sheep on the common. They said: “With taking the sheep away, a lot of gorse and other shrubs will grow up. It won’t just be the farmers that will suffer when the common becomes overgrown, the public will too, that’s why we think the public should be made aware of this.”

Another farmer who runs a flock of Scotch Blackface sheep in the area said he had requested a meeting with Natural England, who declined, and also further declined the compromise put to them of reducing the number of sheep by half rather than removing them all. Natural England refused to concede, responding that they wanted numbers reduced ‘close to zero’.

When the Natural England Team Leader for South Devon and Dartmoor, Eamon Crowe, was contacted for comment, he at first denied that his organisation had in place any schemes that would remove sheep from Dartmoor. It was pointed out to him that a member of his staff had indeed contacted the secretary of Okehampton Commoners Association with a letter that was to be distributed to farmers in the area, clearly stating that: ‘I think there needs to be a very significant reduction in numbers over this period with sheep numbers being brought down to as close to zero as possible for this period for the remainder of the HLS agreement’.

To this, Mr Crowe responded that the correspondence was supposed to be private. The Moorlander attempted to get further comment from Mr Crowe but we were simply referred back to the press statement as printed above.

Although each farm with grazing rights has a number of livestock units they are allowed to put on the moor, Natural England has, for the past few years, been raising subsidies to farmers if they reduce the number of sheep grazing. But this latest move to remove the sheep completely, for six months of the year, every year, will undoubtedly leave sheep farming in that area an impossible task.

Mat continued: “Without farming our communities are dead. All we are, are commuter belts for Exeter and Plymouth. Natural England are moving the goalposts and making sheep farming unsustainable, forcing farmers to reduce their flocks to unviable numbers. We’ve been dictated to by Natural England, by those who think they know better than the people who actually farm the land, for the last 25 years. It is their perceived wisdom to take animals off the moor when the moor has so many other things that cause an impact – tourists, the military, climate change. The only thing they have to manage is us, so we’re the whipping boy.”

It is not just the farmer’s livelihoods at stake either. The very landscape itself is under threat. Sheep have been grazing the moor for centuries so it seems to the ordinary person’s thinking that it is not the sheep that is the problem, if indeed there is a problem at all. A Dartmoor hill farmer who farms in another area of the moor said: “This area used to be purple with heather come late summer. The heather has been dying for years and it’s not overgrazing, we’re not overgrazed here. It’s because they don’t like us burning anymore.

‘There’s an area over the hill that we burnt about three years ago. You go there now and it’s covered in new, young heather. The old stuff that hasn’t been burnt for years is leggy and woody – nothing eats it and nothing lives under it and it isn’t regenerating like the burnt areas do. But they don’t like it; the burnt areas look black and not very nice for a while. Yet come back in a couple of years and you can see the new growth; thick, healthy growth.

‘These people out of university think they know it all, think they know best how to manage the land we’ve been managing for years. Farmers don’t want to damage the moor, we love it, it’s our homes and our livelihoods, why would we want to do anything to jeopardise that? They’ve wanted our sheep off the moor for years and now they’re stopping us burning too. They will be the ones who will damage this land.”

Geoffrey Cox, MP for Torridge and West Devon, commented: “I am most concerned to learn of Natural England’s decision to exclude sheep grazing on the moor over the winter. I am urgently seeking an explanation from the agency and, if necessary, I will raise the issue with the Secretary of State.”

The Moorlander would like to encourage readers to sign the petition letter printed below and send it to Natural England. We feel very strongly that in this instance Natural England should be held accountable for their ill-judged decision and a much more lengthy, open and transparent consultancy needs to take place.
Send to:
Mr E Crowe
Team Leader, South Devon and Dartmoor
Natural England
Ground Floor
Sterling House
Dix’s Field
Exeter
EX1 1QA

Or email Eamon.Crowe@naturalengland.org.uk

Dear Mr Crowe,
I am writing to demonstrate my support for the farmers whose livelihoods have been imperilled by the latest direction from Natural England to drastically reduce sheep numbers on the commons. The decision would not only put many farmers, some of whose families have been farming in the area for generations, out of business, but would also change the ecological balance of the area irreversibly.

Alongside being an income stream for farmers, sheep are an incredibly important management tool for keeping the moor accessible and its flora regenerated. Without grazing, the area will soon become an impenetrable forest of gorse, bracken and bramble.

I ask you to withdraw your order to remove sheep from September to March and enter into more considerate and transparent talks with the commoners affected.

The moor may be managed by your organisation but it
is home to many people and an important part of many more people’s lives. Your web site says you are the government’s adviser for the natural environment in England, helping to protect England’s nature and landscapes for people to enjoy and for the services they provide. This move is not protecting our farmers, our landscape nor our flora and fauna.

Please consider the wider implications of your actions.

Yours sincerely,

Author: Laura White




Recent
The rewilding of Dartmoor – Who really understands what is meant by ‘rewilding’? – Part 2
The rewilding of Dartmoor – Who really understands what is meant by ‘rewilding’? – Part 2

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

‘It’ll take away our livelihoods’: Welsh farmers on rewilding and carbon markets
Teleri and Ned Fielden
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/28/agriculture-recycl ing-carbon-farmers-reframe-rewilding-debate

Despite attempts to integrate them into moves to tackle the biodiversity crisis, some farmers still feel sidelined and criticised
Animals farmed is supported Tom Levitt Tue 28 Dec 2021 11.30 GMT

Teleri Fielden is suddenly very despairing. After skirting around the topic for the best part of an hour at her farm in Snowdonia, we’re discussing rewilding and the idea of restoring land to a more natural state and creating more nature-friendly farming practices.

Wales has become one of the focal points of the debate playing out all over the world about how farms and rewilding can work together. Supporters of rewilding say the two can co-exist, but that farming has to change given it is the biggest contributor to nature loss in the country.

Around 1 in 6 species in the country are currently at risk of extinction and birds like turtle doves and corn buntings have already gone from Wales’ skies.

With close to 90% of land in Wales used for agriculture, there is currently little space for wildlife to exist free from the influence of farming. Rewilding, which can involve encouraging and supporting wildlife on-farm through replanting hedgerows as well as giving over unproductive land to nature, could help reverse the biodiversity decline.

A recent report from the Rewilding Britain charity found rewilding at 22 sites in England had led to an increase in jobs from a total of 151 to 222, in roles including animal husbandry, ecology and nature tourism.

But two years ago plans to rewild a large area of mid-Wales sparked a backlash from farmers, who felt sidelined. Rewilding Britain was forced to step down from the project. Adding to the disquiet are reports of Welsh farmland being bought for carbon-offset projects.

Fielden, 31, who has just taken over the tenancy of Hafod y Llyn Isaf, a farm a few miles from Wales’ highest mountain, Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon), is involved in the nature friendly farming network, but nonetheless remains sceptical of rewilding.
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“I just find it bizarre. It is as if they just go, ‘we’ll pluck all you people out of there, we don’t want you, your livelihoods, your traditions or your land management skills’,” she says.

“We’ll just remove you and to hell with the rural economy, people and food. It’s a weird kind of Highland clearance,” adds Fielden, referring to the forced removal of people from farms in the Scottish Highlands by landlords from the mid-18th century.

Together with her husband, Ned, 29, Fielden is building a herd of sheep and cattle, which they rear outdoors all year round. She has made a beautifully hand-drawn map of their plans for creating flower-rich meadows and integrating the woodland on their farm, once an estuary.

“Nature can do amazing things, but if we separate ourselves from the land, we will lose that link, as well as the skills and experience of managing it for ever. We could just import food – or instead, we could create livelihoods, local communities and homegrown protein.”
Teleri Fielden standing in a valley with sheep in the distance
Teleri Fielden’s plans for the farm include flower-rich meadows and making more use of woodland, as well as holiday lets and farm tours. Photograph: Handout

For Fielden, taking on the farm was only possible with a loan from her parents to cover the cost of livestock and investments around the farm. Income streams include selling meat boxes, being paid to graze their livestock on other land, and jobs four days a week off the farm.

It sounds precarious, but Fielden, who grew up in Wrexham, already feels committed to the area and community. “We’re probably going to be here for the rest of our lives,” she says.

“I’ve always wanted to farm and to do something positive environmentally. And for me, beef and lamb is the most ethical way of raising meat. Our animals are very much free range, they’re just here on the land. It’s a closed-loop system [manure is recycled into the soil that grows the grass animals eat]. We’re not buying in soya feed like with chickens and there are no external inputs apart from worm treatment.”

Jane Powell, a coordinator of the Wales Real Food and Farming Conference, and who has been involved in rewilding projects, says farmers are seen by some as “incidental” to the countryside: “That they [farmers] had trashed the wildlife and now someone else was going to restore it.”

Because we rotationally graze, the organic matter of the soil is improving at 0.2% a year, which means more carbon locked up

Rhidian Glyn, farmer

Powell says land-use debates must take account of food, wildlife, tourism and jobs. “Wildlife and food are not two things to be traded off against each other; they need to be integrated.

“We shouldn’t be selling off bits of land for rewilding and keeping intensive poultry production on others,” she says.

Rewilding Britain admits mistakes were made in the mid-Wales project, but insists it is a myth to think rewilding is about abandoning land, food production or communities.

“Growing numbers of farms are showing how they can make a difference to nature – from smaller-scale wildlife projects that are sowing wildflowers or replanting hedgerows or reducing chemical use, to farms that are rewilding marginal and unproductive land on a large-scale,” says a spokesperson for the organisation.

“Farmers are essential for helping society tackle the nature and climate crises – not least because some 70% of Britain is farmland, and because so often farmers know the land intimately, with deep cultural, historical and personal connections to it.”

While Fielden juggles work, the farm and diversification to stay viable, 50 miles to the south in mid-Wales, Rhidian Glyn has a large enough cattle and sheep business to farm full-time.
Rhidian Glyn sits on a quad bike looking from a hilltop with two sheepdogs nearby
Rhidian Glyn on his farm north of Machynlleth, Wales, where for every tonne of meat sold from the farm, nine tonnes of carbon are sequestered. Photograph: Handout

Glyn, 36, is also a tenant, with a landlord who he is keen to stress wants the land to remain in agricultural use.

His type of farming – livestock on hilly land – is often seen as the least viable, yet subsidies make up just 10% of his turnover, thanks to booming lamb sales – “prices have gone through the roof since Brexit”, he says – and a profitable business rearing milking cows for local dairy farmers.

Annual measurements of the farm’s soils show he is capturing and storing, or sequestering, carbon through his cattle and sheep.

“Because we rotationally graze [moving animals between pastures], the organic matter of the soil is improving at a rate of 0.2% a year, which means more carbon locked up in the soils. For every tonne of meat we’re selling from the farm, nine tonnes of carbon are being sequestered,” he says.

Yet for Glyn, this is no financial boom, rather a source of potential conflict if farmers are sold credits for that carbon but later asked to provide meat that can be marketed as sequestering carbon.
Trees for Life volunteers in Glen Affric
Planting a vision: why the secret to rewilding success is about people, not trees

As with the debate about rewilding, Glyn fears that carbon offsetting will accelerate a move away from food production and traditional livelihoods in Wales. He doesn’t want to sell carbon credits from planting trees or sequestered carbon in his soils if it replaces rearing sheep and cattle.

“It would be interesting if the world did come to that, but whether it’s right is another thing. Agriculture is just the recycling of carbon, isn’t it? Whereas the companies that are buying carbon credits are just burning fossil fuels, aren’t they, which is just a one-way system.”

[TonyGosling]

Sidelined Then Erased - Money Grubbing Rewilding mob take over countryside charity, boot out founder Robin Page

Former BBC presenter claims 'dreadful' trustees are trying to sack him from charity he founded

18 March 2021 by Stephen Delahunty
https://www.thirdsector.co.uk/former-bbc-presenter-claims-dreadful-tru stees-trying-sack-charity-founded/governance/article/1710438

The Countryside Restoration Trust rejects Robin Page's claims and says he has been offered a new role

The founder of a countryside charity has claimed he is being ousted by a group of what he called “dreadful” trustees in a bitter dispute over the running of the charity.

Robin Page, founder of the Countryside Restoration Trust and a former presenter of BBC sheepdog trials programme One Man and His Dog, said on Twitter that he was being “sacked” from the charity he established in 1993 with one farm.

The charity, which has since grown to manage 18 properties around the UK, denied this was the case.

It said Page's role as executive chair was being concluded on legal advice, but he had been invited to continue as a trustee.

Page claimed he was being "bullied out" of the charity by a “group of greedy elderly men” who wanted to take the charity away from its members.

He said: “Can you believe it. After 27 years of giving most of my life to the Countryside Restoration Trust – I am being sacked by the CRT in April – a group of three or four dreadful trustees who have lost the plot and have let their expanded egos take over.”

The charity rejected the claims.

Page said he had also removed the legacy in his will he was going to leave the charity.

He alleged his dismissal letter came from vice-chair of the CRT, Nicholas Watts.

But in a statement on the charity’s website, Watts said: “I’d like to address the misunderstandings on social media about Robin Page’s position at the charity.

“There’s no question of him being ‘sacked’ or there being a ‘trustees’ takeover’. His role as executive chair has been concluded, on legal advice, to comply with Charity Commission rules and best practice governance.

“He not only remains a trustee but has been offered an exciting new role recognising his immense service to the charity and enabling him to continue building our membership networks and portfolio of 18 properties around the UK.

“We hope that this clarifies matters and emphatically puts the record straight.”

In a separate statement, the CRT’s trustees said they planned to meet Page today to discuss his future role, which they hoped “will be conciliatory and collaborative in context”.