Jules Pretty

Professor of Environment and Society
University of Essex, UK

Perspective

Thinking like a wolf

Human connections to nature have deep roots, as for 5 to 7 million years we walked this earth as hunters and gatherers, entirely dependent on our knowledge of wild resources, and on our collective capacity to gather plants and catch animals. About 10-12,000 years ago, we began to domesticate plants and animals. For most of the time since then, the culture of food production was intimately bound up in some form of collective action, and in an intimate knowledge of nature. It was not until the advent of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, just 200 years ago, that food production in some countries began its drift away from the majority of the population. It is barely two generations since agricultural became industrial, and food becomes a commodity.

Aldo Leopold's masterpiece, Sand County Almanac, was published in 1949, a year after his death. His greatest contribution was the idea of the land ethic - a proposal for an ecological, ethical and aesthetic science to shape human connections with nature. Ethics is about limits to freedoms. We are free to destroy nature (and we do), yet we should prescribe and accept certain limits. Leopold says, "We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect." There are many different views of this land ethic: some say it is visionary, others that it is dangerous nonsense. But the point remains that most people in industrialised countries still tend to see nature as a bundle of resources separate from us. Thus the land ethic remains radical, more than half a century after it was woven together by Leopold.

The choices we make matter in today's food systems. Each time consumers buy some food, they help to shape nature and communities somewhere - though we should not overstate the power of consumers in the face of the structure of the world economy. Nonetheless, we are all connected within a much larger system, and we can make these connections work to the good - if we wish.

What do we need to do differently? Perhaps the most compelling of Aldo Leopold's essays is called Thinking Like a Mountain, in which he details the relationship between the wolf, deer and mountain. He recalls his own shooting of a mother wolf caring for a pack of tumbling cubs: "in those days, we never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf". But he comes to mourn their loss and his earlier lack of understanding, and goes on to describe the consequences of eliminating the wolves, for, without them, the deer expand too greatly in numbers, and the mountain loses all its vegetation. In the end the whole system collapses.

Leopold would feel at home in today's ancient beech and fir forests of the Carpathian mountains. For these are home to the largest numbers of wolves in Europe, and testament to the principles of ecological balance and diversity. The Carpathian range stretches 1500 km in a giant elbow from Austria to Romania. About half is forest, and the rest flower-rich meadows and valley-floor farms. More than half the Carpathians are in Transilvania, the region of Romania best-known for the fiction of Dracula and werewolves. Today, these forests contain deer, wild boar and chamois, and Europe's largest concentration of carnivores - 5500 brown bears, 3000 wolves and 3000 lynx.

Walking through these grand forests, the heady scent of resin in the air, you would not know it, for the predators are mostly mysterious. Some bears have become notorious locally in the city of Brasov. In Racadau neighbourhood, where harsh tower blocks march in ranks to the forest's edge, habituated bears come down to ransack the garbage on summer nights. The Carpathians are still farmed as they have been for centuries, with small valley farms, and livestock herded on the common mountain meadows for the summer. Each year, shepherds lose a few sheep to bears and wolves, some 10-20 per flock. To date, through, there has been reasonable balance, and shepherds earn a living despite the dangers. The wolves keep down the numbers of deer, without which the trees would suffer. Tree damage in Bavaria, where there are no wolves, is ten times greater than in Transilvania.

But there is something very significant about the Carpathians that goes beyond the quirky behaviour of town bears or the distant howls of wolves. Cultural traditions still persist, the landscape is patchy and diverse, and nature coexists with people. But most people are still very poor, and so the question is: can there be sustainable economic and social development without throwing away all that is culturally valuable and distinctive? Or will Romanians tread the same path followed over much of the industrialised world?

I believe that it is possible to have food producing systems that complement and enhance nature. More often than not, such nature will be in farms and fields. There is now growing confidence that we can indeed make the transition directly to sustainable and productive agricultural and food systems that both protect and use nature. It is such a significant break from the recent past that this coming movement may come to be called another agricultural revolution.

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