The lands they left behind had been well dunged and fertilized by their livestock,* so second-growth woodlands flourished, together with groves of sugar maples that were too old for the wintertime harvesting of their syrup, but would provide fine hardwood for itinerant foresters. Aside from stands of ash and hickory and oak, most of these northern woods were of white pine, and these grew riotously. The untended streams between these stands were soon stopped up by beaver dams, the resulting ponds thick with monarch butterflies and perching birds, the woods a wealth of eagles’ nests, armies of turkeys, promiscuous legions of black bears, coyotes, foxes, owls, porcupines, deer everywhere, and a rich assembly of returned birdlife that may well have been previously kept away by the din of all the threshing machinery and stone-wall building and loud human activity that once marked out a working farm. What many can see today in rural Massachusetts, where I live on a long-abandoned eighteenth-century property, is often classically rewilded land, rich with lurking animals and strange sounds, casually untended and with biological consequences unintended and unimagined.

  It is not only American farmers who have themselves become a migratory species—all across Europe there are abandoned farms, some of their former owners either having moved to better lands or, more usually, having decided that the prodigious challenges of agriculture are simply not for them and so having fled to the cities. The abandonment of their properties—in Spain, Greece, Sicily, Tuscany—has produced similar results on the land to those in New England, though in many places large sporting estates have sprung up, or Britons eager for sunshine have purchased the properties for a song. These latter are obviously not candidates for wilding—but where a reversion to nature has come about as a consequence of harsh commercial or military realities, the outcome is very different from—and is perhaps more genuine than—the well-publicized determination of a group of well-meaning practitioners of what can best be described as rural engineering. Knepp is wilding as theme park: an old Massachusetts property left a century ago by the farming family who built it produces wilding by its own volition, as a consequence of its own abandonment, and not by engineering at all.

  Moreover, ask these same farmer-critics: What of the production of food to meet the dietary requirement of the nation—which is, after all, what farms are for? Is it entirely right and proper to permit for prosperous countries in the north to be fed with food grown by faraway people in Africa or South America who may themselves go hungry—one thinks of the unhappy recent creation of a quinoa monoculture in Peru and Bolivia—to meet the demands of the fashionable in the west—while we indulge in the creation of a non-productive wilderness in Sussex? The argument rages still. Should land be stewarded or left to run as it pleases? The fences came down for the Knepp experiment in 1999, the fences had gone up around the Oostvaardersplassen section of the Flevoland polder thirty years earlier. As to whether either is a success—whatever the “success” of such a venture might mean, beyond the possible creation of instructive spectacles for the nature-hungry visitors—is still too early to be certain of. Few are hurrying to copy the example of this unusual corps of wilding pioneers.

  5

  On Wisdom, Down Under

  My mother and my father taught me a lot, how to look after this land. Riding around this country on horse-back we used to go to many places, burning along the way looking after the land. Times have changed, our country has changed a bit, but I still have good knowledge and it is my time to pass on what I have to my children and grandchildren. My mother and father would say if you look after this country, this country will look after you.

  —VIOLET LAWSON, ABORIGINAL LANDOWNER, KAKADU NATIONAL PARK, NORTHERN TERRITORY, AUSTRALIA (2010)

  Joseph Banks, eighteenth-century gentleman-naturalist and a figure of great wealth and social standing, knew enough about land from his own great Lincolnshire estates to recognize through his telescope that something most peculiar was going on, when he first landed in New South Wales at the end of April 1770.

  Both he and James Cook, the celebrated captain of the ship that had brought him here, HMS Endeavour, remarked on the evidently managed nature of the countryside that spread before them. “The land, tho in general well enough clothed,” wrote Banks in his journal, “appeared in some places bare . . . with trees not very large and . . . separate from each other without the least under wood.” Cook himself remarked later on something even more surprising, especially so to a group of Englishmen who were now twelve thousand miles and two full years’ sailing from home. After an excursion into the countryside, he wrote, “we found it diversified with woods and lawns and marshes; the woods free from underwood of every kind and the trees are at such a distance from one another that the whole country or at least a great part of it might be cultivated without being obliged to cut down a single tree.”

  And to add to the oddity of the situation an expedition member named Sydney Parkinson, whom Banks had employed as his draughtsman and who created hundreds of sensationally beautiful—and scientifically accurate—drawings of plants that his master had discovered,* remarked that from a distance this new land “looked very pleasant and fertile; and the trees, quite free from underwood, appeared like plantations in a gentleman’s park.”

  Clearly these were improvements, and they had been created by human agency. It did not take long to find out who. Endeavour was at the time closing fast on an inlet in the steep cliffs at the edge of the territory known then as New Holland, named for the Dutchmen who had first seen it but never explored it. Crewmen up in the crow’s nest suddenly spotted people—two men with spears and sticks keeping watch from the rocks at the bay’s entrance, a group of four others fishing unconcernedly. Cook turned his vessel, the sails caught the breeze, and in swept his little ship. A group of sailors, the captain leading them, then piled into a pinnace and headed for the shore. There were half a dozen small bark tents on the foreshore, and beside them a group of dark-skinned women tending a fire. The four fishermen Cook’s crew had seen earlier returned and gave the fish to the women.

  Cook sensed this might be a good time for a visit—but was instantly rebuffed, with men armed with spears making an angry run at the visitors. Cook tried to calm then, threw gifts down onto the beach, only leading to more cries of evident hostility. In an attempt to induce—the phrase reeks of imperial hauteur—a change of attitude, Cook had one of his men shoot (lightly!) at the most aggressive of the group—a man who instantly ran off to his tent, dropping a shield as he ran. That shield was brought back to England as a spoil of war, and is now in a museum in Cambridge; descendants of the victim, now known to have been a member of the Gweagal family of Australian aborigines, repeatedly visit Cambridge these days in an attempt to have what they consider a stolen object, returned. Thus far, nothing doing.

  In the end Cook and his crew, accepting that their first contact had been less than a consummate success, gave up the effort, retreated to the ship, and set sail northward along the coast. Inside the Great Barrier Reef they ran into difficulties when their ship almost tore her hull apart on a coral spur. They had to careen her and make repairs—eventually waiting for some seven weeks at the mouth of a stream they named for their craft, the Endeavour River. And the settlement that stands there today is, unsurprisingly, Cooktown.

  The first encounter between Captain James Cook and Australian aboriginals in 1770 was not a happy one, resulting in a skirmish from which this wooden shield was taken, as a spoil of war. It is now displayed in a Cambridge museum, and its owners want it back.

  It was near here that two further matters transpired. James Cook formally claimed the newly found land for England, and named it—the vast entirety of the east coast of what had first been New Holland—New South Wales. And he and his crew made passing good friends with the local aboriginal people—a very different group from the Gweagal down near today’s Sydney, and named the Guugu Yimithir, who proved helpful and supportive during the careening sojourn. These people, Cook and Banks later observed, were impressively diligent in their care for the countryside and took great care with their plantings and their management of the local forests. They evidently had a sophisticated understanding of the natural world and its processes. All of the Englishmen were impressed—though it remains a cruel irony of the expedition that the flattering remarks about the Guugu Yimithir were all excised by the Admiralty from the official report of the venture.

  Doubtlessly, Cook, Banks, and the officers at that point would have been reminded at this of the official advice given to the expedition before it had set out from England two years previously. Their voyage was sponsored by the Royal Society* and the body’s president, the Scottish astronomer James Douglas, fourteenth Earl of Morton, had slipped a vade mecum into Cook’s hand as the ship prepared to depart. Should there be inhabitants of the lands you find, he said,

  they are the natural and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit. No European nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent. Conquest over such people can give no just title; because they could never be the aggressors.

  That James Cook so blatantly disregarded these decidedly non-imperial instructions—first, by seizing the country for the Crown and second, by giving such scant regard to the wishes of the locals—casts an evident blemish on the reputation of the man. In terms of the relationship between white settlers and millions of aboriginals in the colonial and postcolonial years to come, Cook’s actions helped to establish a legacy of cruelty, carelessness, and arrogance that has marked the relations between these two groups to this day. The aboriginal civilization, one of the world’s most ancient, was disregarded for generations, its people reduced in circumstance and stripped of all their dignity.

  Except that every so often, the skills, knowledge, and reverence for the land that characterizes so many aboriginal people in Australia, and which so keenly impressed Joseph Banks and his colleagues at the end of the eighteenth century, reassert themselves, reminding the world of the unusual qualities of an otherwise somewhat overlooked people. These unsung and unremembered qualities came to the fore most recently in early 2020, when much of Australia was consumed by bush fires of unimaginable ferocity and destructiveness. The fires exerted a terrible toll on the psyche of the white Australian people—and it caused them some pause when aboriginal leaders reminded them, and the world beyond, that fire itself was perhaps not so malign a phenomenon. Rather, it was something long employed as a tool of ancient agriculture in the continent’s history, and that perhaps the white settlers could learn a little from those whom legions of white Australians had long dismissed as mere “blackfellas,” when in reality they patently still knew so little about the land on which they had settled. In fact, as Cook and Banks had supposed as long before as 1790, the aboriginals had a profound knowledge of their countryside, and they well knew how to treat with it for the good of all who lived on it.

  Fire, which today seems to be the ruin of modern Australia, has since ancient times been employed to encourage society’s salvation. More than a few times during the devastating midsummer weeks of 2020, with cascading conflagrations propelling southeastern and southern Australia into the world’s headlines, aboriginals would shake their heads in sad bewilderment and mutter that, essentially, we told you so. For they had long practiced the controlled burning of underbrush—the underwood mentioned earlier, whose absence Cook, Banks, and Sydney Parkinson had all noticed two centuries before as unusual—as a means of ensuring that larger fires, whether caused by dry lightning or by carelessness, had less of a chance of spreading, of getting out of hand. What puzzled the native people was that under white supervision so much woodland underbrush had been allowed to grow unchecked—and that in a furiously hot country, where sooner or later fire would be bound to break out and would then, with so much fuel carelessly left around, prove mightily difficult to control.

  Violet Lawson, an aboriginal activist who lives in the small town of Jabiru in the far north of the country, is one of many who teach the practice of what is called stick-burning, to create what are called cold fires in the immense eucalyptus woodlands where she lives. Come springtime and she’ll be out in the woodlands lighting hundreds of fires each week, in small patches, the timing of the burns dictated by the air temperature and the wind direction. She’ll carry a lighted piece of shaggy bark with her—much as a Scottish farmer might carry his fire-lighter to burn off the wild heather up in the Highlands—and every so often she will brush it down to smear the flames onto the grass and so set ablaze small tiles of suitably flammable patches of grass and brush, watching them and tamping them down if they ever seem likely to spread beyond her line of sight. The idea is that the fire will be cool enough to preserve any sensitive plants, yet hot enough to burn off the dead and unnecessary foliage. According to an aboriginal forest ranger nearby, the set fires should tickle, not rage.

  In a way the technique is not too different from the lawn mowing of suburbia—it both keeps down excess untidiness, and it encourages regrowth, in this case by allowing a thin cover of nutrients to blanket the soil on which new blooms of grass seeds will inevitably fall. The technique in this remote and thinly settled part of the country has long been to set small fires cleverly in order to prevent big fires. By contrast the response among the supposedly more sophisticated white inhabitants in the urbanized corners of Australia is simply—and expensively and life threateningly—to wait for big fires to break out and then to marshal small armies of men and machines to join battle with them.

  The Australian government, or more properly some of the more forward-thinking Australian states, have evidently been listening, and in more than a few communities today the use of traditional aboriginal fire techniques are being permitted and even encouraged. This is a profound reversal from earlier colonial attitudes, which actually forbade native burning—early settlers had seen the distant landscapes of their new homeland pockmarked with rising trails of smoke from aboriginal cold fires that had been set deep in the woodlands. They had complained, and had done so with sufficient vehemence to have what they in their ignorance considered a dangerous practice totally banned. Similar Victorian-era bans were also enacted in North and South America, Africa, and in various parts of European-controlled Asia: natives armed with fire were seen as threatening, and skittish Europeans were scared to death by them, not knowing what the fires were for, assuming sinister purpose, and worse.

  Indigenous Australians have long practiced the technique of setting regular and well-controlled “cool fires” to clear underbrush and minimize the likelihood of major conflagrations.

  It is a curious reality that many aboriginals who visit Australia’s southern city suburbs today say that it is they who are scared to death, and by the very opposite—by the existence of the thick and untended woodlands and the unburned stretches of underbrush and high and dry grassland. “I was terrified,” remarked a young indigenous woman who had settled briefly in the dry-country town of Nowra, two hours south of Sydney. “I couldn’t sleep. I told everyone that we need to go home. This place is going to go up, and it is going to be a catastrophe.”

  And indeed, in Nowra, her apprehensions were amply justified. A local newspaper from January 2020 reported on just the kind of catastrophe that the woman had feared, a cruel classic of Australia’s most recent bad fire season. The town was consumed by flame. There were fires raging to the north of the small town. huge fires to the south, flame heights of at least twenty meters rising up on one side of the Shoalhaven River and forty meters on the other, and dozens of smaller fires in areas that hadn’t burned in decades. An evil-looking yellow, greasy-seeming pyro-cumulous cloud rumbled with its self-generated thunder outside. “The southerly is going to hit around nine, 9.30 and unfortunately you’re the ones that will have to deal with it,” the local fire chief was quoted in the paper as saying, trying to explain the situation to anxious townspeople. “What it’s going to do I have no fucking idea.”

  He really did have no idea. The southerly winds hit two hours earlier than expected, roaring through the forest with gusts of more than one hundred kilometers per hour, whipping up dirt and dust and ash and filling everything with smoke. Strike teams rushed here and there, trying to douse fires that sprang up almost at random. At Nowra a firefighter explained what he thought of as strategy: we can’t stop the fire, so we’re just trying to direct it as best we can. Strike teams were sent across the state on Saturday, moved around like chess pieces against an opponent that ignored all the rules. “It’s turned to shit everywhere.”

  But it needn’t have done so.

  An academic paper devoted to the aboriginal practice of controlled burning, and published in 2010, with Jabiru’s Violet Lawson one of the nine authors, made an important point about the attitude of white Australians to the fires that so frequently afflict them. Indigenous peoples have had centuries of experience with fires, she wrote, and they generally should be listened to, their wisdom and knowledge respected and absorbed by those who have long supposed them to be mere primitives.

  Indigenous people generally are all too often generously armed with foresight and wisdom about the management of their lands. One example far away from Australia has been quoted over and again: the Andamanese Islanders, who live remotely and have had little contact with “civilization” in the seas off southeastern India, astonished all by surviving en masse the devastating 2004 tsunami, which killed a quarter of a million people elsewhere. The islanders had weathered the giant waves in large part because their ancient songs, handed down through the generations, had instructed them that when the seawaters suddenly receded, they should run and take to the hills, which they did—and all escaped drowning.