It's time to start returning vanished native animals to Britain, says John Vesty

John Vesty说，是时候让那些消失了的本土动物回归英国了

There is a poem, written around 598 AD, which describes hunting a mystery animal called a llewyn. But what was it? Nothing seemed to fit, until 2006, when an animal bone, dating from around the same period, was found in the Kinsey Cave in northern England. Until this discovery,the lynx - a large spotted cat with tasselled ears - was presumed to have died out in Britain at least 6,000 years ago, before the inhabitant of these islands took up farming. But the 2006 find, together with three others in Yorkshire and Scotland, is compelling evidence that the lynx and the mysterious llewyn were ,in fact one and the same animal. If this is so, it would bring forward the tassel-eared cat's estimated extinction date by roughly 5,000 years.

有一首大约写于公元5卵年的诗描述了猎捕一种叫做llewyn的神秘动物。那是一种什么样的动物呢?似乎没有一种动物与描述相符，直到2006年，在英格兰北部的名叫金赛的洞穴里发现了一块大约可以追溯到同一时期的动物骨絡。在此之前，猞猁-一种耳朵上有流苏状毛、全身有斑点的猫科动物-一度被认为至少在6000年前就已经在英国灭绝，那时岛上的居民还没有开始农耕生活。但是2006年的这项发现，再加上约克郡和苏格兰其 他三处的发现，强有力地证明了猞猁和神秘的llewyn实际是同一种动物。如果情况真是如此，那么这种流苏状耳朵的大型猫科动物的灭绝时间应该推迟到大约5000年前。

However, this is not quite the last glimpse of the animal in British culture. A 9th-Century stone cross from the Isle of Eigg shows, alongside the deer, boar and aurochs pursued by a mounted hunter, a speckled cat with tasselled ears. Were it not for the animal's backside having worn away with time, we could have been certain, as the lynx's stubby tail is unmistakable. But even without this key feature, it's hard to see what else the creature could have been. The lynx is now becoming the totemic animal of a movement that is transforming British environmentalism: rewilding.

然而，这不是这种动物在英伦文化中的最后一瞥。Eigg岛的一座9世纪的石制十字架上表明，一名骑马的猎手所追逐的除了鹿、野猪和野牛之外，还有一只大型猫科动物，长着流苏状耳朵，身上有斑点。如果不是因为这只动物的背部因为年份久远而模糊不清的话， 我们就可以十分肯定，因为它又短又粗的尾部错不了。但是即便没有这些关键点，也很难说这是什么别的动物.猞猁现在正逐渐成为一场运动的图腾，这场运动正在改变英国的环保主义：野化。

Rewilding means the mass restoration of damaged ecosystems. It involves letting trees return to places that have been denuded, allowing parts of the seabed to recover from trawling and dredging,permitting rivers to flow freely again.Above all, it means bringing back missing species. One of the most striking findings of modern ecology is that ecosystems without large predators behave in completely different ways from those that retain them. Some of them drive dynamic processes that resonate through the whole food chain,creating niches for hundreds of species that might other else struggle to survive. The killers turn out to be bringers of life.

野化意味着大规模恢复被破坏的生态环境。其中包括让树木回到那些被砍光的地方，使一些海床远离拖网和渔船的骚扰，让河流再次自由地流淌。重要的是，让一些消失的物种回归。现代生态学中最令人惊叹的一个发现是：有和没有大型捕食动物的两种生态系统其表现完全不同。一些捕食动物驱动着能影响整个食物链的动态进程，给那些原本挣扎生存的物种创造出生存空间。杀手最终其实是生命的使者。

Such findings present a big challenge to British conservation, which has often selected arbitrary assemblages of plants and animals and sought, at great effort and expense, to prevent them from changing. It has tried to preserve the living world as if it were a jar of pick, letting nothing in and nothing out, keeping nature in a state of arrested development. But ecosystems are not merely collections of species; they are also the dynamic and ever-shifting relationships between them. And this dynamism often depends on large predators.

这些发现挑战了英国的物种保护工作，人们通常只是随机选取一些植物和动物，花费巨大的精力和财力去阻止它们变化。这是在尝试着把一个活生生的世界当作一罐泡菜去保护，严禁进出，把环境控制在一个不变的环境内。但是，生态系统不仅仅是物种的简单集合，还包括物种间动态的和不断变化的关系。而这种动态变化通常依赖于大型捕食动物。

At sea the potential is even greater:by protecting large areas from commercial fishing, we could once more see what 18th-century literature describes: vast shoals of fish being chased by fin and sperm whales, with in sight of the English shore. This policy would also greatly boost catches in the surrounding seas; the fishing industry`S insistence on scouring every inch of seabed, leaving no breeding reserves, could not be more damaging to its own interests.

在海洋方面的保护潜力甚至更大：通过保护大片的海域不受商业捕撥的侵扰，我们可以看到18世纪文学作品中的描述：从英国的海滩远眺，长须鲸和抹香鲸追逐着大批的鱼群。这个政策还会极大地提高周边海域的捕鱼量;捕鱼业一直坚持搜刮着每一寸海床、不留下任何繁殖余地，没有比这样更加损害自己利益的方法了。

Rewilding is a rare example of an environmental movement in which campaigners articulate what they are for rather than only what they are against. One of the reasons why the enthusiasm for rewilding is spreading so quickly in Britain is that it helps to create a more inspiring vision than the green movement`s usual promise of `Follow us and the world will be slightly less awful than it would otherwise have been.`

对于环境保护运动来说，野化运动很特别，因为其参与者们明确表达了赞同什么而不是仅仅表达反对什么。人们对于野化运动的热情之所以在英国迅速传播，原因之一在于它帮助人们创造一个振奋人心的前景，而不像其他的环保运动通常承诺的那样“跟着我们这 样做，世界就不会像本来的样子那样糟糕”。

The lynx presents no threat to human beings: there is no known instance of one preying on people. It is a specialist predator of roe deer, a species that has exploded in Britain in recent decades, holding back, by intensive browsing, attempts to re-establish forests. It will also winkle out sika deer: an exotic species that is almost impossible for human beings to control, as it hides in impenetrable plantations of young trees.The attempt to reintroduce this predator marries well with the aim of bringing.forests back to parts of our bare and barren uplands. The lynx requires deep cover, and as such presents little risk to sheep and other livestock, which are supposed, as a condition of farm subsidies, to be kept out of the woods.

猞猁对人类没有任何的威胁：没有任何关于猞猁袭击人类的记载。它专门捕猎狍子，而狍子近几十年来在英国呈爆炸式增长，它们大量啃食植被，破坏了人们恢复森林的努力。猞猁也能消灭梅花鹿，这种外来物种人类几乎很难控制，因为它藏身于无法穿行的小树林中。尝试重新引进猞猁这种大型捕食动物与我们要在荒芜之地恢复森林的目标相契合。猞猁需要生活在幽深的丛林中，因此对于羊群及其他的牲畜几乎不构成什么危险，因为后者作为畜牧动物，一般生活在远离丛林的地方。

On a recent trip to the Cairngorm Mountains, I heard several conservationists suggest that the lynx could be reintroduced there within 20 years. If trees return to the bare hills elsewhere in Britain, the big cats could soon follow. There is nothing extraordinary about these proposals, seen from the perspective of anywhere else in Europe. The lynx has now been reintroduced to the Jura Mountains, the Alps, the Vosges in eastern France and the Harz mountains in Germany, and has re-established itself in many more places. The European population has tripled since 1970 to roughly 10,000. As with wolves, bears, beavers, boar , bison, moose and many other species, the lynx has been able to spread as farming has left the hills and people discover that it is more lucrative to protect charismatic wildlife than to hunt it, as tourists will pay for the chance to see it. Large-scale rewilding is happening almost everywhere - except Britain.

在最近去Caringorm的路程中，我听很多环保主义者说，在20年内猞猁就能引进到自然环境中。如果英国的其他荒芜地区的植被得到覆盖，那么这种大型猫科动物很快就能随之而来。从欧洲其他国家的角度来看，这些提议并非不同寻常。猞猁现在已经被重新放回了侏罗山脉、阿尔卑斯山脉、法国东部的孚日山脉和德国的哈茨山脉，并且在其他地方重获新生。1970年以来，猞猁的数量已经翻了3倍，达到了约10000只。与狼、熊、河狸、 野猪、野牛、驼鹿和许多其它物种一样，猞猁会随着农耕活动退出山区而不断扩散，而且人们发现保护这种有魅力的野生动物比猎捕它们更加有利可图，因为游客会为参观这些动物而掏钱。大规模的野化运动正遍地开花-除了英国。

Here, attitudes are just beginning to change.Conservationists are starting to accept that the old preservation-jar model is failing, even on its own terms. Already, projects such as Trees for Life in the Highlands provide a hint of what might be coming. An organisation is being set up that will seek to catalyse the rewilding of land and sea across Britain, its aim being to reintroduce that rarest of species to British ecosystems: hope.