Where the wild things were

Daedalus, Spring 2008 by Parmesan, Camille

Georges Fahre was a forester in late-nineteenth-century France. In the region known as the Cevennes, villages were doing well : the silk and chestnut industries were booming, and shepherds banded together to make the yearly 'transhumance,' bringing thousands of sheep up to the rich pastures of Mont Aigoual in springtime. Life was good too good.

Clearing of the land for pasture and crops had been going on for at least five thousand years, but population booms in the late 17005 greatly overtaxed the land. Clearing and cutting trees for pastureland and firewood had denuded the old forested lands. Whole mountainsides were barren. By 1856, the normal heavy rains of this region caused abnormal floodwaters. When rains came, the now loose soil became mudslides pouring down into the valleys and towns below. Once bountiful fresh springs and clear streams became silted and undrinkable.

"On the 4th of October, 1861," wrote Fabre in his diary, "clouds from the southeast, which had amassed for three days on the high summits of the Aigoual, burst suddenly and poured into the valley such quantities of water and stones that all the roads were cut off and the lands silted up.... On [the] 28th of October 1868, the disaster reoccurred... local people were astonished. Flood water from the Herault [river] had never before been so sudden nor so strong; it reached second stories."

In 1875, the French National Forestry Commission gave Fabre a monumental task: to repair the environmental problems in the Cévennes. Over the next thirty years, Fabre, with the help of botanist Charles Flahaut, restored some 3,500 hectares, reaching 11,800 hectares by the time the Parc de Cévennes was created. To recover a working watershed, these two unintentional environmentalists argued the need to restore the land as it was before the clear-cutting. This was not an easy task: they had to win over angry locals, who feared the loss of pastureland for their sheep. They poured over diaries and interviewed the elderly - the ones who had been there Before. They figured out which hillsides had been beech woods ; which live oak, cherry, and chestnut; which swathed in pines and firs. Flahaut started an arboretum - to experiment with trees from around the world - finding which species would do well in this harsh environment, with its poor soils.

Fabre and Flahaut were ahead of their time. They designed a new forest that included exotic Scots and Black Austrian pines, but they also made an effort to nurture the few remaining stands of native beech forest, as well as the native sweet chestnut and cherry groves. This was not conservation in its strictest sense, but these actions were also far from the response of many modern foresters to similar circumstances : planting acres of a single species of nonnative but fast-growing pine, which culminates in a 'forest' that is devoid of flowers, insects, and birds. Such a sea of green is in reality a biologically sterile wasteland.

It wasn't until one hundred years later that the Cévennes area became a park, officially guiding and limiting activities. When one walks through the Parc de Cévennes now, it appears as wild and untouched as can be. On the hike to the Cascade D'Orgon, one can see Cirque eagles lazily gliding on a spring thermal, seeming to be just enjoying the sheer fun of it after a long cold winter. Peacock and tortoiseshell butterflies bask on the rocks. The beech woods are a fantasy land - all silver gnarled trunks rising from deep copper floors. Later, toward summer, one can spot Cleopatra and speckled wood butterflies flitting from heather to basket-flower to mint to thyme. Only the wild roses are ignored, full of scent but no sweet nectar. Local black honeybees and bumblebees and giant dragonflies join the dance in the air. It appears to be as it always has been.

The Society for Ecological Restoration was founded in 1988 - recognition that many areas had been degraded to the extent that preservation alone would not be enough, that time and energy needed to be put into recreating the landscape and the native biodiversity to restore the system back to health. Fabre and FIahaut's restoration of Cévennes biodiversity might be the first large-scale, successful ecological restoration project. Even now, most restoration projects are miniature compared to the scale of the 'Aigoual Epic' some 130 years ago. Scale, however, is not what is most notable about his project. The mark of these two men was in realizing that man and nature are not separate. Fabre was a visionary for recognizing the dependence of humans on what we now call a 'stable, functioning ecosystem.'

In practice, much of modern society, even now, clings to the misconception that human culture is separate from nature. This fallacy is an overriding theme in many cultures, but it is perhaps most obvious in the urban cultures of industrial nations, where water is well known to come from a tap. Even within the conservation community, this view often unconsciously pervades conservation planning. The catholic nature of this attitude makes for strange bedfellows. Consider a staunch capitalist viewing nature as something to harness and tame to serve Man, alongside an environmentalist viewing nature as a treasure to be preserved for its own sake. Underlying both views is the tacit assumption of nature as something separate from humans - interacting in either positive or negative ways, but acting as separate entities.