The list of explicit roaming rights goes on, bringing some surprises. All of the forest and farmland of Belarus, for instance, is decreed by the national post-Soviet constitution to be publicly owned, and anyone may venture into the country’s dark woods and take as much wood, fruit, berries, and medicinal plants as they want and need, without asking. In Estonia you are specifically allowed to gather hazelnuts as you may. In the Czech Republic, on the other hand, you must seek permission if you wish to walk through a garden that grows hops: most other gardens you may pass through freely. Switzerland frowns only on the excessive use of certain parts of certain cantons, and in Bavaria there is a law called the Schwammerlparagraph, or the “mushroom clause,” which gives all the absolute right to forage for and appropriate wild plants from within the regional forests.

  In all of these decidedly non-American places there is an unspoken abhorrence of the very notion of trespass, because—though not to belabor the point—it is so strongly felt that access to land is every bit as much a right as the right to air or water. That was not, however, the right in the United Kingdom until the beginning of the twenty-first century.

  Under intense pressure from bodies like the Ramblers’ Association, Parliament in London offered legislation—famously the CROW, the Countryside and Rights of Way Act, 2000—that opened up much of the country to more or less the same kind of everyman’s right as is recognized in Scandinavia. The government sought a legal means of achieving this—something for which the Nordic countries never felt the need—after accepting that such would compensate for the underlying assumption of most Britons that access to land was not a God-given right, but a privilege in the gift of landowners. It will probably take a long while to nudge Britons toward a more Nordic frame of mind in such matters, but London has at least taken a step in that direction.

  The Scots, meanwhile, have taken something of a giant leap forward. That Scotland has been permitted to diverge at all from its English neighbors and rulers in matters relating to land stems wholly from the result of a Scots-only referendum that was held in 1997, in which a sizable majority of the country’s four million voting residents agreed that Scotland should devolve some its powers from the authority of London, and run much of its own affairs on its own, independently. Accordingly, since 1999 Scotland now has had its own 129-member Parliament sitting in Edinburgh, and although in a further referendum in 2014 its voters opted to remain in the United Kingdom, the country’s nationalist leanings have steadily intensified, accompanied by a fiery determination to undertake changes and reforms that remain unpalatable south of the border.

  Land reform is one such, and a cascade of legislation formulated in this brand-new assembly, led since 2011 by a nationalist party, has changed matters drastically. The crucial component was an act passed early on, in 2003, that did three things—two of which related to exactly who may buy land in Scotland, and altered forever the curious reality that half of the country’s land is owned by a mere three hundred wealthy or land-wealthy families: a curiosity that belongs later in this account. The part of the 2003 act that is most relevant to the notion of trespass was the creation of a legal framework that allows people to have almost unlimited access to all of the land. The fundamental principle now enshrined in Scots law is that all may have access to all land, so long as everyone follows the guidance—this cozy and friendly word is used in place of the much harsher word rules—of a carefully elaborated Outdoor Access Code. The Scots are proud to note that their code, even though still a code, is much more people-friendly and confers many more rights than is found in the English CROW legislation of three years earlier.

  And so—as long as you respect the interests of others, you take good care of the environment, and you take responsibility for your own actions—all Scotland, since 2003, is all yours. Every mountain and moorland, every field and forest, every beach and brae, every loch and lake,* every sgurr and scree, is open and available for walking, cycling, swimming, canoeing, horse riding, camping, and climbing. Just no motorized conveyances. Dogs must be kept under firm control—sheep-worrying being a formal term for canine misbehavior for which a dog may be dispatched without benefit of clergy. Otherwise—so long as you do not pass unnecessarily close to a private house nor stray into the garden—the country is almost as open of access as is Lapland, with the added benefit that such cloudberries as you may find—known in Scotland as averin—are yours to keep and eat, since no Lapps with a prior right inhabit the place.

  4

  The World Made Wild Again

  If I breathed the word

  That disappeared all people

  in the world,

  leaving the world

  to the world, would you

  say it? Would you

  sing it out loud?

  —SIMON ARMITAGE, BRITISH POET LAUREATE (2019)

  Protected by triple fences of electrified razor wire, minefields, and booby traps, wafted across by the beams of searchlights and ranging scans from machine-gun nests, and subject to a litany of treaties and cease-fire agreements, a swathe of four hundred square miles of virgin Korean land has been standing empty and undisturbed since the early autumn of 1953. This dystopian creation, the Demilitarized Zone, the four-kilometer-wide DMZ jagging between North Korea and South Korea roughly along the 38th parallel, is rightly seen as a monument to human insanity, and yet unexpectedly, something quite wonderful and uplifting has occurred within. For by a miracle of zoological and botanical accident, constellations of long forgotten plants and animals have returned to live on this strip in grand feral abundance, lured by the perfect serenity of what is otherwise thought to be one of the most dangerous places in the world.

  A living museum of temperate-zone biology has been created inside the 155-mile-long zone. Though it was a barrier specifically designed to separate armies of great ferocity from fighting each other again, it has seen instead a fragile rebirth of natural life, since it is one of the few places on the planet guaranteed to be untroubled by the presence of man. All humankind is forbidden from ever entering the DMZ, and Nature in consequence is gratefully flourishing in the peace.

  A sort of peace, at least. Loudspeakers mounted on hilltops and promontories on both sides of the fences blast unceasingly and at unimaginable volume a deluge of propaganda—anthems, speeches, arias, marching songs, Orwellian announcements of victories or outrages—prompting many human observers and sentries to wear earplugs. But the animals inside the wire, if seen through powerful lenses, seem unconcerned: the red-crowned cranes touch down lightly in the thousand-year-old and now overgrown rice paddies, and peck and strut contentedly and then take off again, in squadron formation, before settling once more for richer pickings nearby. Other birds are equally untroubled: the whitenaped cranes, almost as rare and special, come and go, as do the yellow-throated martens, pheasants and magpies, turtle doves and bulbuls, tits and woodpeckers, all rare in South Korea, but present in what would be (but for the blaring speakers that render them near inaudible) full-throated thousands here. Likewise, the mammals—the Asiatic black bears, the lynx, the Chinese water deer, the goral goats, and the seldom seen Amur leopards, all of them now known to flourish happily in this immense but quite unplanned nature reserve.

  Within the 4-kilometer-wide, 155-kilometer-long expanse of the Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Korea live a varied menagerie of animals and birds, untroubled by human presence, which is forbidden. Red-crowned cranes flourish there.

  The idea of allowing Nature to take over from humankind a tract of landscape and in time to reverse or at least repair the damage done by centuries worth of human activity is not new. As far back as the eighteenth century BCE, the author of The Epic of Gilgamesh bemoans the destruction of the Mesopotamian forests, and wonders in the various texts of this long and highly influential poem* how humankind will ever be able to answer to God for the wounds inflicted on His world. And today, when we read of Nature retaking the land of the DMZ, of how the irradiated and abandoned territory around Chernobyl has reverted to its previously wild state, we enjoy a certain perverse epicaricacy, knowing that the force that was meant to win—Nature, the jungle—did indeed triumph in the end.

  Sometimes it wins so aggressively that it loses, however. Sometime the law of the jungle can prove unpalatably cruel for the humans who chance upon it, preferring their nature to be more pleasing to the eye and mind. Events in a Netherlands experiment initiated in the late 1960s provide an illustration of a collision between well-meaning humans and some of unsettling natural forces that they unleashed.

  An earlier chapter discussed the creation of the Dutch polder known as Flevoland, and the manner in which this land, land never before owned by or settled by anyone, first came to be distributed among those who now own and farm and inhabit it. But not all of Flevoland is populated by humans. A section of 12,500 acres, given the name Oostvaardersplassen, close to the capital of Lelystad, was fenced off in 1968 and deliberately wilded—seeded with such animals and plants as Dutch ecologists thought might mimic the northern European marshland the neighboring landscape once had been. Accordingly a number of breeding pairs of large and wild-living herbivores were brought in—red deer, like those in Sutherland; the small and sturdy Polish Konik horses; and Heck cattle, the tough German-bred animals that were the final result of a failed attempt in the 1920s to breed back to that Holy Grail of cattle-engineering industry, the ur-cow, known as the auroch. Every European wilding project wants an auroch, it seems—they have (or so the literature tells us: the last auroch died in a forest in Poland in the early seventeenth century) a magnificent, near regal affect, somewhat similar to the still living European bison or wisent, but all efforts to re-create them, in a Jurassic Park–like laboratory event, have failed. So in Flevoland, Heck would have to do.

  All went swimmingly at first. The grasses grew, the seabirds flourished, the marshes filled with shorebirds and beasts, and the grazing lands were fully occupied by these newly settled cattle, deer, and horses. There was plenty of contented breeding going on, such that by the winter of 2016, the herbivore population of Oostvaardersplassen had reached a record level of 5230 animals. Passengers on the trains speeding to and from Amsterdam would marvel proudly: a Dutch experiment in wilding, and everywhere there were animals and trees and plants and birds, and all new made on new-made land. The Dutch Serengeti, some called it.

  But then came the winter of 2017, and the cold was exceptional. Wilding means: no man-made intervention, no shelter provided, no feed, no medical help. And so, as the winter wore on and the grass died and the land hardened to iron and the drinking water froze too solid for even the most persistent licking, the animals began to die. In their dying, hungry hysteria, they tore the branches off trees, and the trees began to die as well—such that within weeks passengers on the passing trains would see the bloated carcasses of dead deer and cattle lying on the frozen earth, would see horses in states of dreadful emaciation, their rib cages swollen with hunger, limping like Giger’s monsters from Alien, wandering aimlessly slowly over the blasted landscape of dead and broken trees and scarred earth.

  Sharpshooters were brought in to rid the lingering animals of their misery. Wardens came to shift dead animals from beside the railway lines, to limit public distress. By the time the weather began to turn, four thousand of the creatures had died, and there were huge demonstrations and attempts by fearless people—who had to cross high-speed railway tracks and risk the wrath of the law, for this was a wilding attempt backed by the full majesty of the Dutch government, and woe betide anyone who dared to interfere—to feed the surviving creatures, with four hundred bales of hay brought in illegally one dead of night.

  A few who had initiated the experiment continued to champion it. Visitors were taken to the seashore and shown the swelling amount of birdlife—sea eagles, for instance, always a hit with civilians, as well as lapwings, avocets, shellducks, and bearded tits. The wretched grazing that had so starved the horses and cows was the result not of overpopulation of herbivores but of the mating success of returning geese, who chomped on the grass in vast numbers, getting to it before the mammals. What took place that winter, the authorities said, may have been distasteful to the taxpaying public—and their visible shocked children—but it had happened according to the laws of nature, and not in the way that human-managed wildlife reserves, so well liked by this same public, like to plan. Wilding can be an unlovely business; oversensitive members of the public should maybe stay away.

  In Britain, wilding on a smaller scale has lately developed into such a fascination—or a fad; it is rather too early to tell—that it has become almost chic, widely admired as a reminder that humankind can do something else beside ruin the climate and melt the glaciers and change the weather and generally despoil and pollute the landscape. Wilding is seen as a Good Thing, a means, undertaken by landowners with intelligence and sensitivity, of beating back the tide of ecological disaster that presages, according to a popular book of the same title, the Sixth Extinction, where bees, then insects, then large animals begin to totter, fade, and then vanish altogether, as the world begins to die. Britain is currently going through a period of intense and admirable interest in its surviving wildlife, and books on environmental themes and on individual creatures, sheep to hawks, badgers to capercaillies, are enjoying considerable popularity. In particular, championed most energetically by George Monbiot, a well-respected writer and activist, wilding is seen as a practice likely to help prevent the death of the planet; its practitioners are seen in turn by some as the heroes of the age, our saviors.

  The most public figures in recent history of the wilding movement in Britain are Charles Burrell and Isabella Tree, a couple who for fifteen years ran a somewhat conventional dairy and arable farm at Knepp, their estate a few hours drive south of London. It was in 1987 that the then twenty-three-year-old Burrell inherited the 3500-acre estate—which includes a handsome castle, rendering him, unsurprisingly, an easy target for those class-obsessed Britons who criticize wilding as an activity only for the very wealthy. Together with his young bride he attempted to make a go of farming a variety of crops, beef cattle, sheep, and some 600 dairy cows. But the farm seldom made money; and when in 1999 a visiting arborist told the couple that two spectacularly ancient oaks on the property were being slowly killed by the use of farm pesticides, Burrell and Tree made a profound decision, one freighted with an awful and risky potential: they would sell off all their mechanical equipment, destroy their fertilizer stocks, tear down their internal fences, and let the farm and the creatures and plants on it run wild.

  They would enforce wilding upon their land. They would persuade it, via a host of clever and inventive strategies, to revert to its former and supposedly happier ways. They would engineer the wilding of a corner of southern England that they hitherto managed with so little success. This they would do, among other ways, by bringing in ancient herbivores once more; they would employ the advice of the very same Dutch ecologist, Frans Vera, who had overseen the introduction of Konik horses, Heck cattle, and red deer at Oostvaardersplassen. The pair would then wait some years, trying to manage their original dairy and beef cattle farm within this newly made wilded continuum, and see if in time Nature could do better at Knepp than Burrell and his family and their predecessors had ever managed to do.

  Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree at their 3,500-acre estate at Knepp in southern England, which since 2000 has been a centerpiece of the rewilding movement.

  But unlike the Dutch cold-turkey, take-no-prisoners approach, following the pitiless rules of ecology that distressed so many, some measure of human help was offered to the animals under the Knepp estate’s supervision. Veterinarians visited to monitor the cows’ health. (A herdsman was taken on to search for the cattle who, though more numerous, now had a tendency to hide themselves deep in the new-growth woods and among the thickets and bushes that sprang up on the untended fields.) Supplementary food was on hand in case animals needed it, as they had in Holland. Interestingly, though, the animals required little or no extra food and medicine even when stressed—they seem to self-medicate, adapting to their new and unmanaged circumstances. Some say that since no apex predators, like wolves, have ever been stirred into the mix, to make nature flourish as fully as nature intended, the whole affair is something of a stunt—and the fact that glamping sites and yoga retreats are offered only adds to the skepticism some feel.

  Not a few full-time farmers disapprove of the practice entirely. Sensible management of land, they insist, is far more responsible than its wholesale abandonment. Or even of its controlled abandonment, which a project like Knepp exemplifies. Americans interested in these much publicized European projects point out that wilding-through-abandonment has been going for decades in the eastern states, as farmers in hard and cold places like Vermont and New Hampshire have traveled south and west in search of more congenial environments, in places like Virginia and Missouri and Oregon where they could find bottomland with better soils and fewer plough-destroying rocks.