Book review – Nature’s Ghosts: The World We Lost and How to Bring It Back

9-minute read
keywords: wildlife conservation

Can the environmental and wildlife conservation movements learn from the (distant) past? This turns out to be a fraught question, with many practitioners preferring to preach pragmatism over nostalgia. Journalist and writer Sophie Yeo agrees that there is no turning back time, but this is no reason to ignore history. In Nature’s Ghosts, she mixes several parts reportage with one part nature writing to both criticize different conservation approaches and showcase some really interesting research. Though centred on the UK, she also discusses projects and problems in Europe and the USA, and the book was deservedly shortlisted for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Writing on Global Conservation^[1].

Nature’s Ghosts: The World We Lost and How to Bring It Back, written by Sophie Yeo, published by HarperNorth (a HarperCollins imprint) in May 2024 (hardback, 327 pages)

What unites Yeo’s criticism of current conservation practices is how they ignore the past. For example, the British approach of designating areas with particularly valuable habitat, flora, or fauna as sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) aims to keep these frozen in time. Yeo counters that by resisting the natural dynamism of ecosystems, “these sites, like Peter Pan, may never grow up” (p. 64). EU subsidies as part of the Common Agricultural Policy aimed at enhancing biodiversity in practice have had the opposite effect, as discussed for Romania. They are disbursed on the condition that farmers abandon traditional practices, even though these are far more interwoven with the natural world than the centralised rules imposed by the EU. Fortress conservation, the designation of areas as nature preserves or national parks, has been frequently combined with the forced eviction of Indigenous people from their lands. A recent searing critique exposed its colonialist roots as it pertains especially (though not exclusively) to Africa. It replaces the actual past with a mythical past of virgin wilderness that never existed in the first place. Yeo adds that: “conservation should have never become about displacing people from the land. The wilderness is not a blank slate: until recently, it was our home, our larder, our library” (p. 150).

Yeo is more positive about the track record of rewilding though here the problem of baselines crops up. “The natural world has never experienced one perfect moment of Eden: it has always been a series of novel ecosystems” (p. 66). With nature forever in flux, where do you plant your yardstick? She is critical of the feted Knepp Estate: “whether the land amounts to a genuine approximation of wilderness or a glorified farm remains hotly debated” (pp. 54-55). She feels conflicted by the Carrifran Wildwood project in Scotland that has accelerated its rewilding goals by gathering tree seeds from all over Scotland and Northern England. She likes what she sees but also considers it an example of intense micromanagement: “In many ways, it couldn’t have been a grander monument to human intervention” (p. 72). The Finnish Snowchange Project has the more nuanced aim of integrating humans into the landscape, in this case by supporting traditional small-scale ice fishing. Project leader Tero Mustonen argues that rewilding becomes powerful once you integrate cultural knowledge into it.

Of course, Yeo acknowledges more than once, we cannot turn back time. There are good practical and philosophical reasons for conservationists to be pragmatic and future-oriented. However, “that does not mean that we should treat the past as irrelevant” (p. 5). So, how is the past relevant to conservation today? The second half of Nature’s Ghosts features fascinating research of which I can only discuss a few examples.

“Yeo is more positive about […] rewilding though here the problem of baselines crops up. “The natural world has never experienced one perfect moment of Eden: it has always been a series of novel ecosystems” (p. 66).”

First, the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna. To me, it has become uncontroversial middle ground in this ongoing debate to implicate both climate change and humans. Novel is the notion that humans effectively replaced megafauna as a keystone species, with a new suite of plants and animals becoming dependent on our role in ecosystems (think of the archaeological evidence for forest gardens). The displacement of traditional societies through colonialism has disrupted such relationships, such that rewilding should “reinstate not only the lost ecological functions of megafauna but also people” (p. 136). This is what Mustonen’s Snowchange Project aims for.

Second, shifting baseline syndrome. Originally developed by Daniel Pauly in the context of fisheries, this has become another staple when talking about lessons from the past. Novel is the idea that, with each passing generation, we have not just collectively forgotten how abundant the natural world was, but also how animals used to behave. Ecologists mistakenly assume that an animal’s current habitat is both its preferred habitat and the limits of its tolerance, with conservation boiling down to “wherever an animal lives now, we need more of that habitat”. One example given here is the wild bison in Poland’s Bialowieza Forest. These are not a relic species but refugees: “survivors that have been backed into a corner, making do with what little remains” (p. 170). Indeed, one South African ecologist studying them was puzzled as to “why these European people have cows in the forest” (p. 174). The fact that many plants and animals are more tolerant than we give them credit for is a feeble ray of hope in the ongoing maelstrom of extinction.

Third is how time matters both more and less than we think. On the one hand is the long shadow cast by past human activities. The advent of remote sensing technology in archaeology has e.g. revealed how presumed old-growth forest in France hides the ruins of Roman farms. Amazingly, the soil and plant communities still differ as a result of fertilizer application two millennia ago. One shudders to think what that means for the future legacy of today’s environmental footprint. Will future fossils indeed be technofossils? On the other hand is temporal dispersal. Yeo discusses the many ponds, pools, and puddles that once dotted Britain’s landscape but were backfilled over time. When such ghost ponds are excavated again, their old bottoms contain spores, eggs, and seeds that remain viable centuries later. Many plants and invertebrates can rely on dormancy as a survival strategy to bridge time. Step aside deextinction! This “is scratching back the surface to reveal the real thing” (p. 230).

“we have not just collectively forgotten how abundant the natural world was, but also how animals used to behave.”

Nature’s Ghosts flows over with thought-provoking ideas and Yeo is quick to step in and prevent them from being misinterpreted or hijacked. No, the traditional agricultural practices in Romania or Wales are not blueprints for feeding the world. No, the Finnish Snowchange Project is not “arguing for the revival of a Stone Age lifestyle in North Karelia” (p. 138). No, discussing traditional foraging is “not advocating for the return of a pre-agrarian society” (p. 144), etc. She is well aware that conservation debates have been toxic at times. But it does beg the question, if these are not solutions, then what is?

I have two minor frustrations with Nature’s Ghosts. First, Yeo is reluctant to name the elephant in the room, even if she comes close. When discussing traditional farming methods, she remarks how “fossil fuels enabled us to exceed earth’s natural carrying capacity” (p. 104). When discussing biodiversity loss, she concludes that “so long as humans remain dominant, nature can never return to its primeval abundance” (p. 181) and that “wildlife cannot be restored to prehistoric levels without massive reductions in the human population: the earth will only support so much life” (p. 169). The dreaded O-word is studiously avoided, possibly for fear of getting tarred and feathered. Second, her solution. By no longer seeing landscapes as something sacred (for which she thanks Christianity) we paved the way for today’s relentless extraction. “The trouble is not that the old stories have faded. It is that no new magic has emerged to take their place” (p. 255). Rather than revitalising old beliefs or rituals whose meaning has been lost, she thinks we each need to rewild ourselves and find new symbolic connections with the natural world. If you are of the pragmatic bend that might sound a bit wishy-washy. To my surprise, I actually agree with her. Somewhat. I agree that we are not moved by facts but by stories, so, yes, we do need a new narrative. However, I am rather thinking along the lines of Eileen Crist’s call for an ecological civilization that does not see nature as a mere larder, or Carl Safina’s call to abandon the Platonic dualism that has allowed us to think of ourselves as apart from nature. Abandoning the currently dominant fairytale of endless economic growth will mean a wholesale revision of our socio-economic system, likely involving a period of degrowth towards a steady-state economy. Tall order? Absolutely. Do I expect Yeo to here write the book-length treatment that such big topics need? No, but acknowledging them would have been nice.

Those niggles notwithstanding, Nature’s Ghosts is intriguing, discussing some of the fascinating insights gleaned from studying the past. Yeo has read up on the literature and gone to great lengths to speak to researchers and conservationists first-hand. Given how she combines journalistic flair and evocative writing to explain the relevance of this research, it is easy to see why the Wainwright Prize jury was impressed.

1. ↑ For all my fellow non-UK readers, the Wainwright Prize is an annual UK literary prize that is named in honour of British author, illustrator, and hillwalker Alfred Wainwright (1907–1991). It was first awarded in 2014, split into two categories (UK nature writing and writing on global conservation) in 2020, and saw a third category for children’s books added in 2022. Various sponsors have affixed their names to the prize over the years, resulting most recently in the James Cropper Wainwright Prize.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Nature’s Ghosts