Thread by @Jamie_Woodward_

“Our fear of wolves is out of all proportion to the danger they pose us.” Why landscapes need the wolf... theguardian.com/environment/20…

“If the trajectory of the European wolf is dispiriting, it is also familiar. We have become well acquainted with graphs that plot the advance of humans against the decline of all else.”

“But over the last century, a different narrative has been writing itself into existence. In Europe, patterns of farming and land use have been changing on a grand scale, as marginal land – too steep or too depleted to be worth the effort of farming – falls into disuse.”

“While our attention has been elsewhere, nature has been expanding into the gaps left behind. As annual crops fade away without human input, shrubs and fast-spreading thorns take their place.”

“Then tiny trees take root and the ground starts to bristle with new life as soft and hard woods, hoisted from the earth, spread a densely embroidered tapestry of life across the landscape.”

“The still summer’s air is soon vibrating with the tiny wings of insects. Songbirds raise their voices, trail up and down the scales, an orchestra coming into tune. Rabbits, badgers & foxes dig their homes between the roots. Deer graze in shabby pastures, leap tumbledown gates.”

“Along the rivers’ edges, otters dive and beavers build their dams – some reintroduced, many recolonising territory of their own accord. Mice nest in old barns. Wild boar rootle in new woods.”

“All this Arcadian plenty has tempted in the carnivores, who crept in quietly at first, testing the waters.”

Lynx: low to the ground, ear-tufted, slinking through the shadows, rarely seen. Some 9,000 of them or more are now thought to live on the continent, having been hunted to local extinction in western and central Europe by the middle of the 20th century.”

“Brown bears: 17,000 of them, spread through Scandinavia, the Dinaric Alps, the Carpathian mountains, Bulgaria, Greece, Cantabria, the Alps.”

And, of course, wolves.