Hello October - the recycling month

NWT Ambassador Nick Acheson shares his appreciation for October's role in our environment - and the vital need for rewilding to continue.

Hello October - spider-scribbled month of mould and mulch, stealer of sunshine, bringer of the brents - I had not thought to see you here so soon. I was not ready for your sad, abundant hedgerows, haunted by the dying chirps of dark bush-crickets, your blackberries turned to pap. It was not time for redwings, fizzing in my sky by night, nor drakes back in their bottle-headed finery, whistling next spring's secrets to their ducks under my open window. Still open, just.

But here you are, October. We had best be friends. I should open my heart to fieldfares' disapproving tuts, and to the lisp of yellow-browed warblers among your sycamores' fading, sooty-spotted leaves. I will embrace you; thank you for the life you give: the life in death.

You are, October, the recycling month, nourisher of soils and gentle warden of our water. In your gathering darkness and your damp decay, mycelia work, bacteria and woodlice: taking spring's brash bounty, summer's wealth; meekly restoring them to earth. Without October there could be no April. Without your rot, no buds, nor blooms, nor butterflies. October, thank you.

Three years ago, as October brought a cruelly searing summer to its end, I asked whether 2018 would be the year in which we all woke up to the brutal threat of human-induced climate change. Here I am again - among October's wet and kindly warmth - asking whether in 2021 we will wake up, rise up, and act.

Greece, Turkey, Germany, Belgium, China, India, Madagascar, the United States and Canada: in every one of these countries - and many more - human lives have been lost in 2021 as a direct result of climate change caused by our grotesque emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases.

Ditches in the Bure Marshes by Richard Osbourne

But what has this to do with Norfolk? The answer is that Norfolk's damp Octobers make us soil. When Norfolk Wildlife Trust was formed, almost a hundred years ago in 1926, our founders were concerned - acutely so - by the rapid loss of habitat and what we now term biodiversity across the Norfolk landscape and beyond. But they could not have conceived that, in just a century, we would so radically alter the atmosphere and destroy the wild on such a scale that the very biosphere - and our existence - would be threatened.

Nonetheless, the prescient action that they took in 1926 - to lock land all over Norfolk into management for wildlife - was perhaps the most powerful thing they could have done to tackle climate change. Soils, it transpires, are among the most important stores of carbon on the planet, second only to the oceans. The soils which hold most carbon - broadly speaking - are those with the longest history without disturbance; those with hundreds, if not thousands, of years of interaction between plants, fungi, bacteria, animals, rain, groundwater and the bedrock. The best soils at storing carbon - therefore - are often those which are also most significant for biodiversity: those which Sydney Long and his friends earmarked for conservation in 1926, and which Norfolk Wildlife Trust and our conservation allies have been purchasing and protecting ever since.

There is a new buzzword in conservation: rewilding. The term is used to mean many things, but at its core it means allowing land which has been farmed, heavily grazed or otherwise intensively managed to become wilder again. It means letting natural processes return where they have been stalled. As a result, it means more biodiversity, better water management, and soils which - spared the destructive burden of the plough - store carbon more effectively.

Some in conservation claim that rewilding is something new. But this is far from true. Just like our fellow conservation NGOs, at Norfolk Wildlife Trust we have been rewilding land for decades. Between 1989 and 1992 we painstakingly bought Foxley Wood, acre by acre, block by block, and removed commercially-planted conifers, allowing native broad-leaved woodland to return, and with it - miraculously - every ancient woodland plant recorded there in the eighteenth century.

Roydon Common by Neal Trafankowski

At Upton Broad and Marshes we have likewise purchased grazing marshes - field by field - between the reserve and the River Bure. Once in our care we have made these marshes wetter, wilder, changing the grazing regime to favour breeding waders and rare plants and invertebrates in the ditches.

Between Cley and Salthouse we bought a private shoot, removed decades of toxic lead lying in the mud, and made the marshes wild again: for avocets, marsh harriers, wintering brent geese and summer's warblers and waders. Around Roydon Common we have purchased farmland, restored spring-fed wetlands and allowed low nutrient grassland to return. At Thompson Common we have just secured a large area of arable land which - with time, research and care - will again become Brecks grassland and priceless spring-fed pingos.

We have been rewilding all along. Historically, our motivations for rewilding have been twofold: to buffer our existing nature reserves and to connect them - through corridors of rewilded land - with one another, allowing wild species and their genes to flow across the landscape. In 2021, however, as we begin rewilding Mere Farm next to Thompson Common, we are acutely aware how significant this is in tackling climate change. Grassland, scrub and wetlands - just what our new land at Thompson will with time become - store carbon greatly better than arable fields.

Few can have failed to grieve this year, as ancient forests burned, towns flooded and streets were jammed with floating cars. Few can have dodged anxiety. For we have gravely harmed the environment of our only planetary home. So we must act: and it is clear we cannot divorce restoring our environment from conserving biodiversity. They are the same. At Norfolk Wildlife Trust - thanks to the prescience of our founders - we have been locking carbon in soils and habitats for a century. And this October, as mild rain and falling leaves make soil, we thank you for enabling us to act - ever more boldly, widely and ambitiously - to help our planet heal.

Header image: Autumn at Foxley Wood by John Waller