Revisiting Scale
Puddock Hill Journal #80: It’s a big, big, big, big world—and every acre contributes to our fate.
The dry spell worsens.
As of this writing, nearly 52 percent of the area of the lower 48 states are in drought, according to NOAA, threatening more than 300 million acres of cropland. Here in southeastern Pennsylvania and northern Delaware, we have moved up from D1 to D2 drought designation in the past couple weeks. The New Jersey pine barrens, not far away, are now in D3.
As the drought was deepening, I read a hopeful book about restoration ecology entitled Wilding by Isabella Tree. Both the dryness and the book have me thinking more about the matter of scale, which I have written about here and here.
Wilding tells the story of how, over the past two decades, one couple returned to nature a 3,500-acre English property called Knepp Castle Estate. The current owners inherited this old farm (yes, a castle too) in a town called Horsham, located in the Weald region south of London, and struggled to continue a hundreds-year agricultural tradition. The clay soil proved poor, making it increasingly difficult to compete with industrial farms, so they came up with the radical idea of rewilding the property by introducing herds of mammals that had existed before humans civilized the countryside or introducing the nearest modern relatives of those ancient mammals.
The scale of Knepp—and therefore the steps they could take to transform their landscape—makes my casual use of the term “rewilding” at Puddock Hill almost laughable. On our 16 acres, my version of rewilding consists of fencing out destructive deer, planting native trees and encouraging native volunteer plants to take over the outer edges of the property, growing where they may and how they may and, I hope, attracting and supporting wildlife.
By contrast, at Knepp they brought in herds of old English longhorn cattle, Tamworth pigs, Exmoor ponies, and red and fallow deer. (The Exmoor bloodline is so ancient that the living animals precisely resemble 17,500-year-old cave paintings in Lascaux, France.) Before agriculture came to dominate, the land’s natural ecology is believed to have been open grassland akin to African savanna. Great herds of wild grazing animals once roamed the Weald.
After their reintroduction, these grazers and rooters quickly transformed the old farm, sometimes in unanticipated ways. For example, the rooting of the Tamworth pigs, chosen for their close genetic relationship to ancient wild boars, caused a cascade of life to follow, bringing forth wildflower blooms, rare solitary bee nests, large anthills that attracted birds, small copper butterflies that basked on the anthills, and even scarce lizards.
Collectively, the behavior of the various herds also resulted in an explosion of wildlife, attracting birds, butterflies and other insects, some on the verge of extinction in the British Isles.
The book had me wondering what it would look like to truly rewild southeastern Pennsylvania, which earned its name from the mostly forested conditions that existed when William Penn received his vast land grant. I picture a tall green canopy stretching to the horizon and beyond, as one still sees in parts of the Pocono Mountains or Maine, where 6,000 acres of old-growth trees hang on among 17.5 million acres of forest.
Mammals that have largely disappeared from Pennsylvania—often due to human extirpation—include fisher (Pekania pennanti), gray wolf (Canis lupus), and mountain lion (Puma concolor). While we still have native coyotes (Canis latrans) nearby, introduced red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) have largely displaced native grey foxes (Urocyon cinereoargenteus). Black bears (Ursus smericanus) and bobcats (Lynx rufus) have retreated to remote areas. Even if I could return these animals to our region, the neighbors would be up in arms. In fact, Knepp’s neighbors resisted efforts to rewild at first, despite the fact that there was never any suggestion of introducing apex predators to the mix.
If wolves and mountain lions attempted on their own to repopulate the suburbanized landscape, modern citizens would find it hard to tolerate them. And yet, we feel their absence. We see it in the damage that unchecked white-tailed deer herds do to our native flora, which in turn reduces our native insect biomass, which in turn reduces our native bird population, and on and on.
To contemplate rewilding is to remind oneself that all life on earth is connected.
The drought and the unusual warmth raise similar thoughts. According to climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, this will be the warmest year on record worldwide (“the projected global average temperature for 2024 is virtually certain to exceed the prior record set in 2023”), and we have witnessed our share of this in eastern North America with highs too often reaching into the eighties and upper seventies this fall. Meanwhile, the variance in the jet stream eerily jibes with predictions of longer periods of extreme weather, in this case causing drought.
Out in Puddock Hill’s bone-dry meadows, a great number of sparrows frolicked these past few weeks, eating seeds and hiding from migrating hawks. I feel satisfied to have provided them this habitat, but their concentration also reflects the fact that, over the fence, the neighboring housing development mowed their meadows too soon, depriving the sparrows of places to hide and feed. Whither go the sparrows if I make that same mistake?
In 2020, a scientific study found that anthropogenic mass—all the stuff humans have made—surpassed all global living biomass for the first time. This is just another measure of how aggressively we are crowding out nature, the scale of which is nearly unfathomable at 1.1 teratonnes—2,425,084,884,033,654 pounds.
In 1663, Baruch Spinoza, writing on metaphysics, used the words “God” and “nature” interchangeably. The heresy of viewing them as one in the same promptly got him excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam, but two and a half centuries later, when asked whether he believed in God, Albert Einstein replied, “I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”
The irony is that nature now must reckon with the actions of human beings after all. When I’m out with the water tank at Puddock Hill, trying to save my young trees, I see signs of the discordant fate we have chosen for ourselves and all life on earth.
Native goldenrod (Solidago spp.) somehow manages a late bloom in sere conditions in the barn meadow:
Seed heads of native wild basil (Clinopodium vulgare) have been picked clean by the birds:
A fall view of the big pond looking southwest:
Fall foliage on a bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) takes center stage:
Looking north across the pond to the high bench:
The barn meadow path is as dry as it’s ever been during our time here:
Native red osier dogwoods (Cornus sericea) flaunt their winter color by the barn:
An old non-native cut-leaf maple looks bright on the west side of the house:
