25 July 2020 | New Scientist | 21Graham Lawton is a staff
writer at New Scientist and
author of This Book Could Save
Your Life. You can follow him
@ grahamlawton
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W
HEN I sat down at my
kitchen table at the tail
end of winter to write
my first column under lockdown,
I didn’t think I would still be there
come midsummer. That piece was
about the health benefits of contact
with nature and how to get them
in a locked-down world.
I was reminded of this last week
during a bike ride with my wife
through the still-quiet streets of
central London. We swung through
St James’s Park and stopped at the
lake to admire the pelicans. The
sun was shining, the water was
clear and the big, ungainly birds
were splendidly alien. It was a
painful reminder of our decision
to cancel a planned holiday to
Greece, and with it the hope of
seeing wild Dalmatian pelicans.
Thankfully, the country I am
stuck in is becoming increasingly
exotic. The pandemic has done
little to slow Britain’s accelerating
rewilding movement. In the past
few months, we have heard that
European bison will soon be
coming to Kent, that pine martens
are making a comeback in England
and that a pair of white storks at
the Knepp Estate in West Sussex
have successfully raised chicks –
the first wild storks to breed in
Britain for more than 500 years.
Two major rewilding projects
have also been announced
during lockdown. Solar power
entrepreneur Jeremy Leggett has
bought a 500-hectare estate in the
Highlands of Scotland to restore
nature there, and farmers in EastThis column appears
monthly. Up next week:
Annalee Newitz
“ Scientists plan to
use animal tracking
from before, during
and after the crisis to
see how our activity
affects them”What I’m reading
Me and White
Supremacy by Layla
Saad, a step-by-step guide
to acknowledging and
confronting your own
complicity in the system
of racial oppression.
What I’m watching
Football, football
and football.
What I’m working on
I’m still on the
pandemic beat.
Graham’s week
Life in the anthropause
The sudden cessation of global activity is showing us the changes
we must make to rewild our planet, says Graham LawtonLetters
Nowhere responded
quickly enough to covid-19,
not even New Zealand p22Culture
A new adaptation of Brave
New World has no lessons
for today’s world p24Culture
What happens when a
pandemic wipes out almost
all of the world’s men? p25Aperture
Twilight skies viewed from
an Australian cave and the
Valley of the Moon p28Anglia are planning to turn over
250,000 hectares of intensively
farmed agricultural land that
could one day support lynx,
beavers and, yes, pelicans.
Rewilding is largely a matter
of humans getting out of the
way and letting nature take
charge. That, of course, has been
happening in spades of late due
to the sudden suspension of life
as we know it – a period that agroup of biologists has proposed
calling the anthropause.
We know that the anthropause
has benefited the environment in
multiple ways, but its impact on
wildlife isn’t yet clear. There have
been anecdotal reports of wild
animals venturing into cities:
jackals in Tel Aviv, pumas in
Santiago, wild boar in Barcelona.
But these are small and temporary
incursions. What lessons can we
learn as we come out of this period
and try to build a better world?
To answer this question,
conservation biologists have set up
an international project called the
COVID-19 Bio-Logging Initiative.
Before the crisis, field biologists
were already fitting wild animals
with bio-loggers, small devicesthat track their movements
and behaviour. The stage was
inadvertently set to discover
the effects of a global cessation
of normal human activity. The
scientists plan to analyse animal
movement and distribution
before, during and after the
anthropause to determine exactly
how human activity affects them,
and then, once life can return to
normal, to apply those lessons to
the global rewilding movement.
“Nobody is asking for humans
to stay in permanent lockdown,
but we may discover that relatively
minor changes to our lifestyles
and transport networks can
potentially have significant
benefits for both ecosystems and
humans,” says Martin Wikelski at
the Max Planck Institute of
Animal Behavior in Radolfzell,
Germany, one of the project’s
leaders. The human benefits
include clearer knowledge of
potentially dangerous human-
wildlife interactions that increase
the risk of viruses jumping
species, according to the scientists.
I like the term anthropause.
It captures the current hiatus in
human domination of the planet,
but also reminds us that the worst
aspects of the Anthropocene
could simply come roaring back.
Rewilding is a quintessentially
Anthropocene project, though it is
often criticised for being more of
an aesthetic than a scientific one.
The pandemic presents a unique
opportunity to put it on a more
secure scientific footing. ❚