What Measure is a Meadow?

We live in an age of afforestation. The trend of the last many millennia has been one of reduced forest-cover, of slash-and-burn, the opening of farmland, and the gradual depletion of the world’s woodlands. Even today, this process is only gaining speed, with the rapid decimation of the great southern rainforests in the Amazon, Congo, and Borneo. Yet a new trend has arisen to counter it—a movement not merely to halt the march of deforestation, but to undo it. Between innovative organisations such as Trees for Life in Scotland, global drives by the UN and WWF and even viral crowd-funding initiatives like Team Trees, tree-planting is very much in vogue. As with any new trend or movement, it has not been without its critics. Many ecologically-minded people—myself included—have pointed out that the overwhelming focus on tree-planting in afforestation is somewhat ill conceived. In most places, such projects could be done both more cheaply and organically by simply letting nature take its course, and the trees reseed themselves from nearby woods.

Yet there is another concern, a deeper one. Not so much a criticism of afforestation itself, as of the overwhelming focus put upon it. Every winner begets a loser, and unfortunately, the momentous push for forests has been at the expense of the world’s other ecosystems. Most notable among the discontents would have to be the partridges, butterflies, lapwings, and many other inhabitants of the meadowlands. As popular as woodland-replanting is, just as forgotten is meadow-restoration. In Britain, 97% of meadows have been lost in the last century, whilst 99% of America’s tall-grass prairies have been put to plough. In Denmark, wood-pastures, that pastoral mirror of the African savanna, once constituted 3% of the nation’s land-area—130,000 hectares. Today, there are few remnants larger than 10 hectares. Corresponding to this decline has been the unsurprising collapse of meadow-birds, insects, wildflowers, and every other species dependent on the sun-licked grass. In terms of gains and losses, Europe at least is a more forested continent now than it was a century ago, but certainly not more meadowed.

Figure 1. A meadow in spring

Terms of use: This image is licensed under a creative commons Attribution 2.0 Generic. It is attributed to Enneafive. The image is unedited and the original can be found here

Why is it, then, that the overwhelming emphasis of discussion has been on the world’s woodlands, and not its grasslands—ecosystems which to this day cover vast spans of the globe and maintain the great majority of the world’s remaining large animals? Indeed, up along the extinction of the mammoth and the sabretooth, the decline of the world’s grasslands and savannas could be one of the great stories of the last 50,000 years. Before many of Europe’s primeval forests were primeval savannas, ecosystems so lost that we have forgotten even their disappearance. It is a topic which I briefly touch upon in the first part of my series on Europe, and which I hope eventually to grant it’s own article, in part precisely due to how forgotten it is.

I will stress, before continuing, that I am not calling for a halt in afforestation-schemes. I disagree with the manner in which many, probably most of them are carried out, but not the idea. Deforestation is still a great issue, and we are in need of more woodland, just as much as grassland. However, I wish for a moment of reflection, not to halt the efforts of restoration and rewilding, but to augment and broaden their scope. A very large part of the issue at hand seems to me, not so much a failing of policy, as of language and worldview. Strong statements require strong underpinnings, so allow me to explain.

The initial inspiration for this post was a tweet by writer and conservationist Miles King on twitter. He pointed out that, despite the loss of three quarters of the world’s grasslands—as opposed to “only” two thirds of forests—there is no word for open habitats equivalent to “deforestation”. Indeed, the closest word is “cultivation”, but that term, for one, need not refer to grassland, and, secondly, is positively charged, which is only more to the point. I believe the world’s meadowlands are victims of a paradigm of discourse. To invoke an unlikely reference, we might look at Foucault’s concept of discourses. As per Weedon, 1987,

“[Discourses are] ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and relations between them. Discourses are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning. They constitute the 'nature' of the body, unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern”

Now, I do not wish to imply that grasslands are a victim of linguistic power, exerted by the social capital of woodlands. That would be quite silly. But the idea of discourses of knowledge is, I think, very apt. To put it simply: In the prevailing modern discourse, woodlands are a “thing”, a place, a concrete instance of nature. Fields, meanwhile, are just that—empty fields. They are essentially holes, voids left by the deforestation of centuries past, waiting to be filled. A meadow is the absence of a forest. We see this sort of mentality many places, not merely in the semantics of the aforementioned term; “field” can mean “grassland”, but it can also mean “an empty place”. Consider, for instance, last year’s story of the Cumbrian farmer who, following the advice of the Woodland Trust, covered an ancient hay-meadow in saplings. Now, I do not here blame the farmer—he was merely acting upon expert advice—and I of course believe the Trust when they say it was a mistake. Yet the fact that it could even happen, and the fact that the near destruction of this ancient meadow was the result of a ruling by the Woodland Trust, is very telling. Time and again, we see instances of meadows and pasturelands being viewed as mere fallow land, waiting to be put to use. This has been the crux of the debate regarding the area of Amager Fælled, just south of Copenhagen; an area of centuries-old pastureland, one of the largest remaining on Zealand, which developers have slowly been chipping away at for decades. Developers do of course occasionally knock down ancient holts and copses, but doing so is far rarer, and invariably provokes stronger reactions. We are much-used to the sight of protesters tied to tree-trunks. The image of braid-haired hippies waltzing about ancient meadows, warding off tractors, is rather less stereotypical.

In response to the semantic void, pointed out by King in his tweet, I proposed a term, “decampation”, from the Latin “campus”—field. King pointed out, however, that this term refers to cultivated fields, and himself proposed some derivation of “pratum”, the proper Latin word for a wild field or prairie. From this we derived “depration”, “depratumation” or perhaps “depratation”—none of them, to my ears, quite as catchy as “deforestation”, but all distinctly more audible than the silence of the present non-word. The way we speak about things matters, and arguably more important yet are the things which we don’t speak about at all. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is the idea that language in some way moulds our thoughts, and while the “strong” version of the position—the notion that language may constrict, even control our thoughts, a la 1984—is broadly repudiated, weaker forms are not. We are more likely to discuss things we have terms for, and, inversely, we are more likely to create terms for things we care about. In this sense, grasslands are likely victims of a double neglect; an initial apathy, which later becomes semantically self-reinforcing. What precise term we might raise to address this neglect, I cannot dictate (though I lean towards King’s depration), yet raise one we ought, if we wish to better secure the future of our fields and our meadowlands.