Trees, Forested Landscapes, and Grazing Animals: A European Perspective on Woodlands and Grazed Treescapes

摘要

What role is there for the historian in establishing conservation goals? Are conservationists trying to recover a past nature or managing the inevitable process of change brought about by human activities, making any such recovery illusory? Should our perception of the problem be changed by the much heralded arrival of the anthropo-cene? And how has the re-wilding agenda transformed the problem? These are some of the questions provoked by this wide-ranging volume, the latest product of Ian Rotherham's conferences on woodlands and treescapes at the University of Sheffield. It's a somewhat unwieldy volume, perhaps needing a clearer set of organizing themes and sometimes more sharply structured chapters, but there is no doubting its richness or the fascinating detail and insight to be found in its twenty-seven chapters. Oliver Rackham provides the punchy opening. He emphasizes the particular need to distinguish woodland from wood pasture or savannah (a word that seems exotic to British ears), suggesting conservationists should "normally stick... to trying to preserve what is there, rather than recover what might have been." Woodland pasture, as Keith Alexander explains, is not degraded forest but an important ecosystem in its own right, which must be managed to allow trees to complete the lifecycle, fulfilling all their eco-services. But Rackham's "might" is crucial, for running through many of these essays, be they field reports on current conservation or re-wilding projects, analyses of natural history, or exercises in the cultural history of woodscapes, are two broad historical problems or perspectives.