Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

1. In the southern Cambrian Mountains, in central Wales, there’s a Terrestrial Dead Zone of around 300 km². It’s composed of degraded blanket mires, entirely dominated by a coarse grass called Molinia, in which other lifeforms, such as birds and insects, are scarcely to be found.

2. It seems to have been pushed past its tipping point in the 20th Century, into a new stable state. The most likely cause, according to the scientists who have studied it, was a switch from cattle to sheep grazing, and an increase in the stocking rate.
link.springer.com/article/10.100…

3. Flips like this are called hysteresis. Although, in some places, there has been no grazing for 30 or 40 years, the land has not recovered. Once any complex system undergoes hysteresis, the effort required to reverse it is much greater than the effort required to cause it.

4. The data go back only 2000 years. It’s possible that the blanket mires were themselves artefacts of human action, such as burning for cattle grazing in the Bronze Age. The natural vegetation type in this region is likely to be temperate rainforest.
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

5. Here’s what British temperate rainforest looks like.
(Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor, photo by Neil Burnell).

6. Here’s what the Terrestrial Dead Zone looks like from space. It’s a wet desert. Restoring it to either functional blanket mire or rainforest should be possible, but would require full investigation, doubtless followed by a lot of effort.

7. But before that happens, as in all cases, first we have to acknowledge that there is a problem. Even mentioning the issue can trigger anger and reactive denial. There are plenty of people who don’t want to accept that things have gone badly wrong, even if no one is to blame.

8. The Cambrian Mountains are designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. To my eye, these parts are among the most dismal landscapes in Europe. But when we tell ourselves something often enough, we start to believe it.

9. For many years, our national parks and AONBs have been blighted by Consensus Reality. We have told ourselves “this is thriving”, “this is beautiful”, even when an insistent inner voice asks “so where is everything, then?”.

10. I love Wales, and I want it to thrive, ecologically and socially. As in all countries and all cases, this means being honest about history, challenging consensus reality and facing difficult truths.

11. On a side note, it pisses me off when I hear people call heather moorland “Britain’s rainforest”. Like all deforested landscapes, it is highly impoverished by comparison to what once grew there. But more importantly, Britain’s rainforest is … rainforest.

12. Bizarrely, while heather moorland is treated as a conservation priority by the major NGOs, our rainforests, which - thanks to centuries of destruction - are much rarer, are not. It’s time to mend not only our impoverished ecosystems, but also our impoverished understanding.

13. For too long, we've celebrated denuded wastelands, while forgetting what they once were and could be again. Conservation in the UK has been timid, unambitious and anally retentive. As rewilding goes mainstream, this is now changing, at long last. But there’s a long way to go.

14. A couple of people have pointed out a mistake in the thread. The Cambrian Mountains are not yet an AONB, but the status has been applied for. Thank you.