1987 was an interesting year
for me. I had just moved to Sussex and
was carrying out ancient woodland inventories on behalf of the then Nature
Conservancy Council (now Natural England).
And then, overnight on the 15th October, everything changed.
In fact I managed to sleep
through it. Perhaps the most significant
ecological event of the century, and I was asleep! I was living in South Chailey at the time. I
awoke to a strangely quiet day - no traffic, no electricity and not many people
around. I ended up walking to work,
gradually realising that this was a really significant event. The whole of the south eastern corner of
Britain had been hit by the strongest storm that this part of the country had
seen for over 300 years.
The thing that stays in my
mind is the smell of crushed wood.
Freshly cut wood has a certain smell, but it is usually limited to saw
mills or timber yards; you don’t usually notice it hanging across an entire
landscape. Trees were down, roads were blocked, buildings severely damaged and
(often forgotten now) areas were flooded because of the rain that preceded the
storm.
Enormous amounts of damage
had been done, and quite a large number of human tragedies as well. But, alongside this, the 1987 storm was a
fundamental ecological event that deserved proper study.
I was lucky; I was in the
right place at the right time. I
happened to be working for some of the best woodland ecologists in the country
– namely George Peterken and Keith Kirby.
They saw the opportunity and decided to take me away from my normal job
and engage me in work looking at the ecological effects of the storm. A short term contract, and later I was able
to do similar work for the Wildlife Trusts.
And so it was that I was able
to go around some of the most interesting forests and woods in the south east
to research what had actually happened and assess what ecological story this
might be telling us.
Ecologists had for a long
time been looking at how natural disturbance creates diversity in nature. The old idea of nature being stable and
unchanging, that disturbance was a bad thing to be avoided, had been dispelled
a long time ago (even if it still remains in popular myth). Here we had an example of natural disturbance
on a huge scale. This was a rare chance
to see something of how nature works in practice.
The storm was not “damage”
inflicted upon nature. It should not
even be seen as separate from nature at all.
The storm was nature. It was
an inherent, even a required part of nature – a natural process that drives the
way whole ecosystems work. Indeed this
could be just one example of the process of natural disturbance that drives
nature. If we understand that then maybe
we can gain a better insight on how to manage nature, how to encourage our
natural world to look after itself, maybe even gain a better understanding of
our relationship with nature.
30 years later this remains
the case. There is a big story to tell
here – and nobody is telling it. This is
what I aim to do in my next few blogs.
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