Rewilding is making wildfires worse

A public sector, captured by green ideology, has proven itself a poor steward of the natural environment

This year will go down in history as the year of the wildfire, here and on the Continent.

Net zero zealots will ensure that the historical narrative is all about climate change. But that isn’t the whole story.

Fires will always break out. There are so many causes, from natural ones such as lightning to broken glass in the undergrowth, from careless barbecues and firework displays, to outright arson.

The issue is whether they burn out of control, and how easy it is to contain them. That depends on the fuel load – a doubling in the quantity of dry vegetation quadruples the intensity of the fire, which may then go down into the peat. It also depends on the design of the landscape – whether there are adequate fire breaks.

In Southern Europe they are realising that wildfires have been raging through areas that were once grazed but have since been abandoned by an ageing population no longer content to be peasant farmers. 

Formerly it was an offence in many countries for landowners not to maintain fire breaks by spraying. Now, under pressure from Greens, the rules have been relaxed in many areas, and chickens are coming home to roost with their wings on fire.

In the UK, similar issues are playing out with a devastating fire that has consumed thousands of acres still burning after three weeks in the Cairngorms National Park, and a smaller one on National Trust land on Dunwich Heath in Suffolk.

I have chosen these two examples deliberately. There’s a pattern here. Reading through news reports on recent major wildfires, it appears to me that they are much more common on land managed by a charity or non-governmental organisation (NGO) than on land in private ownership. If it is in a National Park, the jeopardy seems to rise still further.

The policy of blocking drains and hoping that a wetter landscape will be fire resistant, rather than managing vegetation by rotational burning – has a track record of failing, not just here but around the world.

Rewilders cite the New Forest as an example of where this “re-wet and walk away” tactic works, but the Forestry Commission does actually carry out controlled burning there to protect their assets.

The problem is ideological. The absence of human intervention is a core tenet of the rewilding philosophy espoused by the conservation industry. And, if the red grouse is involved, the prevention of controlled burning under licence on private moorland becomes a battle in the culture wars.

It’s nuts because, although our managed heather moorland is an artificial landscape, it is vital for the last surviving populations of our most vulnerable birds, such as the curlew.

The alternative – Molinia grass, rank heather and bracken, which are responsible for the fuel load in many wild fires – is no good for anything. Birds such as the lapwing have been shown to need tightly cropped “lawns” grazed by sheep on which to nest, where they can see predators approaching and mob them.

Molinia grass is much more likely to catch fire than heather. And, of course, if it all goes up in smoke, the very things the environmentalists say they want – biodiversity and carbon removed from the atmosphere – suffer catastrophically.

Local communities, council fire-and-rescue budgets and many vulnerable species are the victims of this blinkered and increasingly tin-eared ideology.

I am far from anti-wilding. I practise it myself. But there is a balance. In the uplands it is entirely reasonable to want to move towards a mosaic of different habitats: managed heather, bilberry and sphagnum moss moorland where plant succession is arrested by fire every decade or so to maintain it, blanket bog and natural forest with Scots Pine, birch, rowan and juniper.

Private landowners in the Highlands have actually been doing it safely and sensibly for years. They have deer-fenced-off small areas, allowed the trees to regenerate then taken the fence down and done it again somewhere else.

But the charities and NGOs, which have often acquired land with taxpayers’ money, and don’t wish to have any deer, sheep or grouse, have attempted to do it all at once at landscape scale with disastrous results.

We can’t go on like this. The National Trust and other conservation charities are advertising for donations in the wake of the wildfires to “repair” land. They should be held accountable and fined if the management is found to have been negligent.

They should also have to pay compensation to their neighbours for damage, and wage bills for those putting the fire out.