This week, I’m joined by William Rowlandson, writer, academic and environmental campaigner, to explore our complicated relationship with the natural world. We discuss what it really means for something to be wild, how the language we use shapes our understanding of nature, and why even the smallest, overlooked corners of the landscape deserve our attention and protection. Along the way, we question where humans fit within the natural world, and whether the boundaries we draw between ourselves and nature make any sense at all.
Benny’s Insect of the Week: Marmalade Hoverfly
Links
Wyld of the Woodling by William Rowlandson
If you enjoyed this week’s episode with William Rowlandson, you might also enjoy these episodes from the archives:
Episode 376: From Rewilding to Renaturing with James Canton
Writer James Canton explores the difference between rewilding and renaturing, drawing on his own experience of transforming a two-acre patch of land in North Essex into a haven for wildlife. It’s a thoughtful companion to William’s discussion of what it means to be wild, how we interact with the landscape and the importance of recognising the value of the natural world around us.
Episode 370: Remembering Our Nature with Brigit Anna McNeill
Writer, naturalist and herbalist Brigit Anna McNeill explores what it means to reconnect with the natural world and rediscover our place within it. Drawing on plants, folklore, herbalism and her own experiences, Brigit reflects on the relationship between human and natural worlds, making this a particularly fitting companion to William’s questioning of the boundaries we place between ourselves and nature.
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Here is the transcript based on the provided file:
Sarah Wilson: This is the Roots and All podcast, and I’m your host, Sarah Wilson. Join me as I talk about all aspects of gardening with some of the top horticulturists from around the world.
This week I’m joined by William Rollinson—writer, academic, and environmental campaigner—to explore our complicated relationship with the natural world. We discuss what it really means for something to be wild, how the language we use shapes our understanding of nature, and why even the smallest, overlooked corners of the landscape deserve our attention and protection.
Along the way, we question where humans fit within the natural world, and whether the boundaries we draw between ourselves and nature make any sense at all.
William Rollinson: So, I live in Canterbury. I’ve lived here for, um, over 20 years, and I’m involved in a great number of different projects. Um, some of which are campaign groups to, um, protect the land from development, um, especially unnecessary development, which a lot of it is, um, and to promote biodiversity, to promote the, uh, the conservation of the natural land.
Um, and I have been able, even though I work in arts and humanities and in languages in particular, I’ve been over a number of years, I’ve been incorporating, um, more and more concerns around, uh, the environment and ecology and conservation, and the history of environmentalism, into, uh, the cultural, uh, aspects of what we teach and, uh, what I teach and what we study here at the university and into my research.
Um, so I’m very involved. I’d say I’ve I’ve got my hands very much sort of in the dirt. Um, I’m involved in a great number of different sort of, you know, active, um, active projects with the land.
Um, and then that then prompted me with the this strange relationship I had with this particular novel, it prompted me to embark on a three-day pilgrimage, of which this book that I’ve published is day one—and there are two more books in the series, um, yet to come out—um, which are explorations of the land, but explorations of the land in which the past and the present and the future are all in, um, sort of interactive layers.
Uh, so the questions of land contestation over land rights, um, we’re looking all the way back into ancient times, looking back into Roman times, Norman times, medieval times, but we’re looking forward into the time of where the novel is set,Ridley Walker, which, for those of you who know, um, is 2,400-something years in the future, and after a nuclear catastrophe, which is, um, in our time, as it is, it’s actually near the end of the 20th century. Um, so the question of land,the question of the recovery of the land, the question of the different species, animal, vegetable, um, fungi that are living in the land, um, 2,000 years after this, this disaster, I’m I’m riddling with these questions, um, in my exploration, um, as recounted in the book.
Sarah Wilson: That explains why it’s day one then. I guessed there might be more to follow.
You write in one particular part of it that what you’re talking about—and this is in quotes—”collapses into wordplay.” And a lot of your explorations of terms and concepts do collapse into wordplay. So there’s this whole idea of the language that we’re applying to nature and landscapes and ecology. And I think that by playing with the words, you’re questioning the sort of meaning, or the meaning as we see it at this moment in time. Is that a fair assessment? Have I picked that up correctly?
William Rollinson: Oh, entirely, entirely. I I adore playing with language. I see language like I see the land. Um, there’s a word which I find very interesting, which is palimpsest. And palimpsest is when a tablet is inscribed and then over-inscribed and over-inscribed, and it’s a very common word that’s, um, sorry, it’s a word that’s got quite a lot of currency within, um, sort of literary discourse because people talk about, um, a book that’s got multiple layers in it as a palimpsest.
And I look at the land as a palimpsest. So, one of the things which I do in the book is, is explores—I just mentioned sort of explore the history of the land as we can see it written in the landscape: in the mounds and the furrows and the folds,and the burrows and the, um, the escarpments, and whether those be geological formations at the end of the last ice age, or whether they be human formations from whenever it might be, from whichever century.
And the same obviously is true with language: that every word that we use, um, is itself cultural history. And because I am blessed to own the, um, Oxford English Dictionary—the compact Oxford English Dictionary, which is, um, so compact that you need a dic—you need a magnifying glass to read it—um, each word in the English language, words that you’d have no idea even existed, um, are listed and explored in great, great etymological, uh, detail in the dictionary.
And I love it. I absolutely adore it, taking any word at all. It could be a word that we use all the time: our culture, or nature, or land, or the earth, or place names, or people’s names, um, and just exploring where those words come from,seeing how far back they go, see how they jump and turn across cultures, across geographies, through time—some of which go back all the way back to the early, early pre-Latin, pre-Greek, proto-Indo-European. And I find that absolutely fascinating, because by doing so, by exploring language, we can explore, obviously, how ideas are formed, and how ideas germinate and blossom and grow, um, over centuries, over millennia, through generations, of, of use.
And, and of course then that’s linked with how the author Russell Hoban, who’s the author of the book Ridley Walker, how he constructs the language of the characters of East Kent 2,400-something years in the future, which in itself shows tremendous creativity. And it also shows two millennia of adaptation and transformation of their language. And it’s a fascinating exploration to do. So I’m looking back in time, I’m looking at the present, and I’m looking at the future, both linguistically and, uh, geographically.
Sarah Wilson: I’ve just picked up on the Ridley Walker reference, which maybe I’m overthinking it, but I think that you’re quite a Ridley Walker, but because you’re unraveling riddles as you go.
So, funnily enough, when you were talking about the past and the present and the future on the landscape, I actually made a note of the word palimpsest, so that was quite apt.
But I think language is one of the places where we do separate ourselves from nature, and it is one of those barriers because we try and use it to describe experiences and things sometimes which we can’t explain or can’t put into words adequately. And I think that you play with that idea of us being part of nature and apart from nature. But we are,obviously, very much linked to nature and part of it.
Why do you think that we have constantly tried to separate ourselves from it as a species?
William Rollinson: Oh, my goodness, that’s such a huge question. It’s one of the most fascinating stories that I, uh, I play with, and I use this in class a lot. I’ve I’ve done this many times before when I’ve asked the class, we’ve, you know, used it as an exercise to explore that very question: What is nature?
And in order to address the question, What is nature?, inevitably, I mean, I mean, always, the definition of nature is set against that which is not nature. And that which is not nature is inevitably that which is human, that which is artificial,that which is synthetic, that which is created by humans.
And the more you explore it, the more arbitrary it becomes, and the more confusing and confused it becomes. Because the ultimate, the bottom line, as we all know, is that we are nature, and because we are nature, so everything that we do and everything that we create and everything that we produce, even our toxic waste and our effluent, it’s all natural as well.
And that’s a very, very interesting riddle to explore, because if we were to say everything is natural, then we could say that glyphosate is natural. We could say that, um, the contamination of the rivers and the air and the land is natural. We could say that all the destructive tendencies of ourselves is perfectly natural.
Now, although that’s true enough, of course, we can’t use that, therefore, as a justification for it. So, therefore, we do necessarily retreat back into that division. And the division being that there are, uh, there are, there are aspects of us, of human culture, um, whether it be our, you know, the things that we create or whether it be ourselves, which are not natural. And therefore, there’s no, there’s no bottom line, really. It’s a really fascinating area to explore.
Um, etymologically, nature refers to that which is born. So, it’s related to, uh, nascent and native. It’s cognate with, um,the various different Latin derivatives from to be born. So, therefore, that which is natural is that which is becomes into being. So, therefore, everything is natural.
There is no answer to this, because what it is, it’s, it’s a mode of exploration, and it’s a mode of exploration into what is and what isn’t natural. And that’s what I I spend quite a lot of time in the book exploring that very question.
Sarah Wilson: And there’s a lot of examples where you point out things that are just being things and just doing what it is they do, and it’s something we can’t fully comprehend, because as humans, we actually, most of the time, are not just being; we tend to be doing and scheming, thinking, planning. And that, I think, is maybe one distinction that I see between us and what is nature. But then again, maybe I just don’t understand how those things are being and living their lives in a conscious way. Maybe we just don’t have the capacity to understand that.
William Rollinson: No, we don’t. And, you know, this goes back so, so far. Um, this goes back to early theology and, you know, the church fathers of 15, 1,600 years ago, um, exploring the question of what is it that makes humans human, what is it that sets humans apart.
I’ve explored this through philosophies and theologies and, and all sorts of different epistemologies and ways of approaching the world, um, all the way through to the present, um, in terms of, Is there something unique to the to the human condition? Is there something that sets us apart? Whether it be our opposable thumbs, or our intellect, or our curiosity, or our capacity for tool use, or even our cosmic spirituality, or whatever it is that people explore, is there something that sets us apart? And in, and in that respect, if there is something that sets us apart, how do we, how do we feature within the natural world and how do we feature within some divine scheme?
Of course, I have no answer to that, and anyone who, who offers an answer is just offering another layer to the riddle and not giving a definitive answer, because as far as I’m concerned, there is no definitive answer.
But one of the, one of the lovely little expressions I’ve I’ve picked up is from Dennis McKenna, who is a biologist,ethnobotanist, and, uh, brother of Terence McKenna. And he, his basic position is, We’re curious monkeys. And we are curious monkeys. And as curious monkeys, we do have this habit, as you say, we, we have this habit of, of prising and poking and manipulating and moving and synthesizing and moving things around. And in so doing, we create novel, we create novel molecules, we create novel, uh, products, we create novel things in the world, but in so doing, we are also quite destructive.
And it’s that question that, again, as I say, there is no answer, um, but that the fact that there’s no answer doesn’t mean it’s not a very interesting way a line of inquiry to explore. Um, you know, What is it that makes humans different? And if we do, if there is an aspect to us which is, and I’ll put it in inverted commas, unnatural or not natural, what is that? Um, How do we explore that? How do we, how do we try and isolate that particular aspect of ourselves? It’s a fascinating question.
Sarah Wilson: It is, and I think that your book throws up lots of questions that there are just no answers to. And one of the things that I wanted to unpack was the idea of wild, which because the general consensus, I think, is that there are very, very few places on Earth that have not been touched by human hands, or in some way disturbed. So, therefore, is anything truly wild, or is wild just another category that we’ve imposed on nature, you know, and is it actually an impossible thing to define or achieve?
William Rollinson: Oh, everything you’ve just said, all of that together. Those, those questions are not mutually exclusive at all. It’s very difficult to say is there any part of the earth that isn’t, uh, touched by man, um, because we might be trying to explore the most remote parts of the earth, whether it be, you know, Antarctica or the Mariana Trench, or some mountain peak, um, or the depth of some, some jungle. But it might also be just, you know, the little gaps between the flagstones. It could be a neglected corner of a forgotten abandoned building. Um, it could be behind your fridge. It could be underneath your sink. It could be those little dusty corners.
Um, it’s impossible to, to sort of define a particular location that is necessarily wild if, by wild, we are retreating to that distinction between the natural and the unnatural. So, therefore, if wild means not human, then it means the same as natural, and therefore, what is it?
But certainly I explore wild. I mean, the whole book is an exploration of wild, and in fact, all three books—the other two are not yet released, of course—but all three books are an exploration of wild, and I’m looking at wild from every angle you can possibly imagine.
And one of the, one of the, the ways in which I’ve been exploring wild here in East Kent, where I live, is specifically that,is to look in the little corners that you might overlook as you’re walking down the path or cycling along the track, the little nooks and crannies where you can see abundant, rich, diverse ecosystems that form in a very short period of time, and are bustling and busy and beautiful.
And yet, at the same time, as we’ve seen, as we can see when you get the big big diggers in and you start tarmacking everything and building whatever it might be that you’re building, we can see how those little niches are very vulnerable.They can be cleared away in a, in a, in a flash.
Those places are wild. My exploration within the book and within all three books is that is to explore the wild, um, not as the most remote parts of this earth, so not going off into the jungle, not heading up the mountain peaks. Instead, I’m looking at the little nooks and crannies, the neglected corners, um, very close to the road, close to the rail, close to the track, close to the bicycle path, close to the path, close to a building. Those, those little places where you can see rich and abundant and bustling and busy ecosystems. Um, but also exploring how vulnerable they are, how they can be cleared out with the scrape of a digger, and how, um, what has built up as a complex system can be, uh, eradicated in the blink of an eye.
And therefore, my sense is that there’s we should be looking at modes of protection of all these different places, not just those which are considered to be nature reserves or SSSIs. But, um, this is one of the reasons that I’m, I’m, I’m concerned,for example, about the use of the word brownfield, because brownfield, by its own sort of internal definition, implies that it can it’s automatically ripe for development. But of course, as we know, there are many brownfield sites which have been re-establishing themselves through some, um, as it were, accidental rewiring and a very vibrant and diverse ecosystems,and even if they’re only, uh, a decade in the making from when that land was abandoned, um, so I would consider those places to be wild.
Now, at the same time, and, uh, this is where I was sort of I’m just going when we were interrupted just now. Um, I, uh, I also explore the use of the word wild specifically to refer to human behavior, and when wild is used to refer to human behavior, it is in every respect used negatively. So it’s to refer to somebody who’s unruly and, uh, unwilled and anarchic,to somebody who doesn’t, um, adhere to rules, to somebody who is disobedient, to somebody who is savage, to somebody who is, um, insolent.
And as I explore within the book, we have seen, uh, a sort of a, a process, um, going for hundreds of years whereby cultures, um, are denigrated and labeled as savage or wild, and in so, in that respect, then they can be civilized, and the act of civilization is itself, as I sort of explore as a riddle, the act of civilization can be a very savage and wild and brutal act.
So it’s a, it’s a flip. You’ll see that the wild is when we’re looking at natural places and ecosystems, wild is something to to be celebrated, but when it comes to humans, we can see wild is something to be that is so often denigrated. And it’s a, it’s a strange riddle, and again, as I’ve been exploring with the word nature and natural and unnatural, it’s not, it’s not a question that has an answer, instead it’s a, it’s a series of questions that lead to further exploration.
Sarah Wilson: Well, I went to a conference recently and chaired a panel with a writer, somebody who worked in multi-species justice, and somebody who works about microorganisms. And the upshot of the panel discussion was that it’s very difficult now to know kind of where we begin and end, and to know what we’re doing is right, and how we tend to impose our will on other things and think we’re doing it in the name of good. And, you know, there’s this whole blowing of boundaries between what we’ve always thought was us and them, and actually it’s not the case on so many levels.
And one of my questions that I thought of when I was reading the book was, you know, are we living through an ecological crisis, or is it something more fundamental? And that is, it’s a crisis in how we understand our place in the world. And I think that our place in the world is, is shifting, and we’re in a lot of ways not really able to process it quickly enough.
William Rollinson: Oh, my goodness, yes. Oh, I mean, again, you present two questions which are not mutually exclusive. We are in an ecological crisis. Um, of course we are. We’re we’re looking at species loss of, of at an alarming rate, um, to the degree that, uh, the word, um, extinction is used, um, to describe the processes that are taking place.
So, yes, we are in an ecological crisis. But we are also, as you say, and I totally, totally, um, understand this and I’ve been exploring this, we are in a, let’s call it a philosophical crisis. And the philosophical crisis is trying to understand what constitutes the sovereign individual, trying to understand what constitutes, um, an individual being as separate from his or her surroundings.
Now, of course, this is the crisis, the crisis is when we explore the borders, when we explore the boundaries, when we explore what constitutes each one of us as an individual sovereign, uh, self-reflexive, autonomous self, we find there is no boundary, there are no borders.
And a good example, I mean, these are well-known these examples, but a good example, obviously, is the fact that we have millions upon millions upon millions of bacteria, um, living within our digestion, um, that do not share our DNA.They are separate organisms. And yet at the same time, they inhabit us. We are their, um, habitat, and therefore we live in a symbiotic relationship with them, um, to the degree that an author whom I’ve been reading now with great, great attention and I’m, I’m, I’m enthralled by her work, is the biologist, um, Lynn Margulis, who at one stage was married to Carl Sagan and, um, uh, worked on the Gaia theory back in the 1960s with James Lovelock.
Um, you know, she explores micro, uh, microorganisms, bacteria, and other, um, tiny, tiny, tiny single-cellular life forms.And, uh, she sees that they are the ones who really are in control. Um, they are the ones who really drive evolutionary history. They drive the biosphere, and indeed at one stage she kind of quips that all we are, big lumbering mammals, are just vehicles for bacteria to get from one place to another.
So here we have that situation of trying to, trying to establish if we are self-contained individual units standing in an environment which is separate to us, fine, okay, so draw the line between us and our environment. Find that boundary, find that, that barrier that separates you from your environment, there is not.
We move seamlessly and fluidly, as does every single organism within the biosphere. Um, so therefore we are—and, and an expression which I do like to use: we are all just fruiting body of the great mycelial network. Um, we come into existence, we inhabit this land, moving around like a mushroom for a brief period of time, you know, be it a few decades,be it up to 80 or 90 years, and then we just slip back into the environment and all the molecules that constitute our organism return to the earth and then are reconstituted in different organisms and in different ways.
Um, we are not separate, and it’s a truly awesome, uh, position to really explore, um, that we do not have that, that, that sense of firm boundary between ourselves and every other species and every other part of the environment.
Sarah Wilson: I think your book embodies that really, because you go between where you go into the wordplay, and that’s the kind of bit where it all just dissolves and there are no boundaries, there’s no kind of real meaning in the way that we know it. And then you bring it back to actually then you make a very strong point. It’s like a iron fist in a velvet glove.All of a sudden you kind of almost punch the reader in the face and go, “Well, yeah, that’s fine, we’re good with that boundary-less stuff, that ethereal part of it, but actually then when we come back to reality, we have this framework within which we live, and there are these very real problems, and there are just bits of it which are very impactful.” And I think you call it in, in the book, The Rage Against the Unspeakable.
And I was going to ask you, you know, sometimes we are quite polite and we do dance around these issues, but should we actually be raging more than we are? You know, is that productive, or is there a time and place for it?
William Rollinson: Oh, I tend to rage. I have a great habit of raging and, uh, yeah, shaking my fist at the heavens and,um, calling out some great abuses that I see, um, and calling it out for what it is.
Um, no, I do, I really do. I do. I mean, this is something Russell Hoban, the author of Ridley Walker, who obviously paid a lot of attention because he, he did for the writing of the book, but obviously it was very meaningful to him. He paid a lot of attention to, uh, nuclear threat and what would, what would, what would be the likelihood of a, you know, what would happen in the case of a nuclear catastrophe.
And he exposed it for what it is, which is the most absurd thing you can possibly imagine. There is nothing more stupid that humans can possibly do than develop a mechanism for destroying the earth. I mean, it’s just, it’s just, it’s staggering in its stupidity.
And he, exactly that. He says, we all polite about it, we, you know, we, we, we say isn’t it awful, but we don’t do anything about it. But of course, what can you do about it? And sometimes rage can be, um, uh, undirected, and rage can just be an explosion of energy. But sometimes, and this is something that I do, you know, try and identify and try and find some way of, of, of coordinating.
If that rage can be an energy that is directed towards a particular objective that can be achievable, then it can be very productive. Um, and even if that rage can be the motivation to read an environmental impact assessment or a sustainability appraisal, or the transport plan for a development, or to attend a council meeting and present for three minutes on a particular issue, sometimes it can be channeled into something which seems very bland and very bureaucratic. And yet sometimes that’s the best approach.
Sometimes sitting on a road is just going to piss people off and not achieve any objectives. And actually, sometimes writing one’s own report that is then, uh, circulated to counselors or ministers or whoever it might be, um, or responding to a consultation that might be in that particular respect, um, the most appropriate course of action.
Um, and sometimes the rage, um, the sheer indignation at the, at the, at the devastation that could be caused by a particular project, it’s that rage that can be the the fuel within that particular bureaucratic response.
So it is a, yeah, I, I, I see, I think of rage in all its different ways, and obviously sometimes that rage can be, um,uncontrolled and violent, and, uh, maybe it can achieve the wrong objectives, but rage is something which by its own nature is, is kind of uncontrollable. Controlled rage is not really rage, is it? Controlled rage is a different emotion. Rage is when it bubbles over, and rage is when it spills out, and it’s a, you know, there’s neither good nor bad rage. It’s just, it’s, it’s just what it is. It’s an energy, it’s a force.
Sarah Wilson: My last question is a bit of a funny one, but I think you’re a perfect person to answer it, actually. You mentioned a word in relation to our native flora and fauna, which I seized upon because there’s a lot of debate in the horticultural world about the use of native to describe flora and fauna that have been here—and again, it’s arguable, but,you know, maybe since the last ice age. And you used the word autochthonous, and I spoke to someone who works with fossils, and I said, “Could you use that?” And she said, “We do use it, but we wouldn’t use it in the context of plants.” Because I thought, “Oh my god, there’s this term, it’s not loaded with connotations of colonialism and all the rest of it, and I thought this is a perfect word.” But then from a scientific point of view, this person I spoke to thought it wasn’t suitable.But I wondered from a language point of view, do you think it could be an alternative word that we could use?
William Rollinson: Before I answer that, can I just inquire as to why that person you were speaking to said that the word is not appropriate?
Sarah Wilson: I think because she was viewing it and her field, they would view it more as kind of of the Earth, and I suppose because she works with rocks, she saw it in that context. So, I don’t want to put words in her mouth, but I think it was more used in the context of that rock is indigenous to that environment.
William Rollinson: Okay, indigenous is a different word. Now, indigenous has many ramifications, and it’s in fact indigenous is encoded with it by the United Nations when it comes to people. So, I avoid the use of indigenous unless I’m really referring to, uh, cultures who are, as, you know, self-identified as, as, as indigenous.
Autochthonous to me carries weight, and it carries weight because a, it looks fairly scientific, I mean, that’s not that I’m,I’m searching for that, but it does avoid some of those connotations with the word native.
Um, but it’s a, it itself, and again, you’ll see that I’m dancing around all these subjects because I see them as riddles without an answer. Um, but if we were to look across the landscape and to try and identify only the species, be they plant,fungi, or animal—if we were to identify only the species which are autochthonous and bio-autochthonous, we are referring to the fact that they, um, as it were, they, they, they self-propagated at the end of the last ice age, or following the end of the last ice age, we’d be reducing ourselves to quite a small number of species.
When it comes to trees, we’d be, you know, maybe two dozen trees, that’s it. Um, you know, the row, I mean, we know those trees, the oak and the ash and the willow and, well, not all willows, um, the row and, and so forth, and certain, um,mushrooms and certain animals.
But it’s a fairly meaningless exercise to prioritize, um, species that, that, that, that, uh, were self-propagating at the end of the last ice age. Um, and let’s take a really classic example here: all around me here in East Kent are sweet chestnut.Sweet chestnut are the, make up the, the, the bulk of most of the woodlands around here. Now, sweet chestnut is only, you know, it’s only been here since, I mean, there were probably sweet chestnut from post—not the Roman times, but certainly post-Norman times.
Likewise, the weeping willow. Weeping willow we think of as an iconic, um, river species, uh, all over England and Britain. And yet the weeping willow is not autochthonous.
So, the question is not so much what is and what isn’t autochthonous. The question therefore comes down to what is and what isn’t invasive. But once again, when we’re looking at an invasive, it becomes very, very difficult. There are some species that we know are invasive because they do prevent other species, you know, they’re not from this land. They were imported at a particular time, and they cause environmental destruction—now, damage.
So, for example, I was walking along the Thames in West London only a couple of months ago, and we saw lots of Himalayan balsam. Now, we can see the impact of Himalayan balsam, and I know that lots of people, lots of groups are trying to, you know, eradicate it because of the impact. And we can see that the same with rhododendron, we can see it with all sorts of different things.
But really, when you explore what really invasive species are or aren’t, you could argue that a weeping willow is invasive,because where the weeping willow has, you know, colonized along the river bank, so the alder or the gray willow or some other riverine species is no longer, you know, its niche has been, has been removed.
So, all these words, whether it’s native, whether it’s, um, autochthonous, or whether it’s invasive, they’re very problematic,and they need to be used always contextually, and they always need to be used with a certain, uh, flexibility to understand what it is that we, you know, what it is that we’re working with and the implications of the term.
So, I’m sorry that I didn’t give a definitive answer to that, because there is no definitive answer, um, and there is no perfect word, because there is no perfect scenario, because if we were dealing only with autochthonous species, we would be dealing with the British Isles as it was in the Paleolithic, and we’re not there.
Sarah Wilson: Okay. Thank you. Well, yes, no, that’s not helped me at all. [Laughs] I was like, “Yay, you found the perfect term.“
All I would say is, in terms of invertebrates, that the ones that are here after the ice age, kind of onwards, are more useful as food plants and from a wildlife gardening perspective, you know, they have more uses to invertebrates, so, yeah, that’s all I would say on that point.
William Rollinson: No, no, I would agree with you, and the same is true, because I, you know, I’m something of an arboriculturist, um, uh, I pay, I you know, I pay particular attention to autochthonous tree species here, um, you know,looking at their cultural dynamics, looking at their role in different, you know, in food, in carpentry, in house building, in,in, in all sorts, you know, in the hedgerows and the woodlands. And those autochthonous trees I do pay particular attention to, whilst at the same time seeing something like a foxglove tree or a tulip tree or a, um, I don’t know, a strawberry tree, which are all lovely trees, I don’t pay the same amount of attention to them because I don’t—or the eucalyptus, or the blue gum, or any other—I’m just listing lots of non-autochthonous trees there, sorry. But I, I, I tend not to prioritize them, I tend not, uh, to, to give such, uh, cultural attention to, specifically because they are not autochthonous.
So I agree with you that the, you know, there is a, there is a value, there is a, there is some kind of hierarchy of values, but they should never be held onto slavishly, um, and we should never consider a non-autochthonous to be second-rate, or we shouldn’t de-prioritize them to the degree that we don’t care for them.
Sarah Wilson: Thanks to William for joining me to explore our relationship with the natural world and to question some of the boundaries we’ve placed between ourselves and nature.
If you enjoyed today’s episode, you might also like Episode 376, From Rewilding to Renaturing with James Canton, and Episode 370, Remembering Our Nature with Bridget Anne Neal. You’ll find links to both in the show notes, and as always, thank you for listening.
Next up is Benny with his Insect of the Week.
Benny: The marmalade hoverfly. Scientific name: Episyrphus balteatus.
So my insect of the week is a very distinct hoverfly. I think it’s probably the easiest one to identify. There are a few that visually are very unique and easy when you get your eye in. It’s kind of got mostly orange body with black markings, and it’s got two horizontal black bands, or two or three, and I think that makes it quite unique in itself.
Marmalade hoverfly: one of these kind of quite funny names, quite a good connector for showing children. My son knows this one.
It is one of the aphidophage species, so the larvae, the developing young, they eat aphids. So some hoverflies will develop in water, have like an aquatic larval stage, and some will have like a terrestrial land-based aphid-eating stage. So this is kind of part of that group.
Um, quite a few different species of aphid it’ll consume, often on low herbige or tree foliage or shrubs. And it is quite a generalist in terms of the flower types it will visit and pollinate. Uh, the males are known to be very fine hoverers,according to Stephen Falk, which is a nice descriptor, and they can form loose swarms in some dappled woodland.
So a really nice species, and they are on the wing at the minute still. Now, one thing I was going to mention is they’re part of this incredible migration between the UK and Ireland and mainland Europe. A piece of research that came out from Roger Morris and Stuart Ball amongst others, 2018—was it 2019?—about mass seasonal migrations of hoverflies. They estimate between 1 and 4 billion hoverflies migrate into and out of Southern Britain each year. It’s an unbelievable kind of journey they’re making. Thousands of miles. They’ve clocked, um, hoverfly migration over the Pyrenees. Once again,millions to billions of insects going over these places, um, each year.
The migrant hoverflies provide pest control by consuming 3 to 10 trillion aphids. So this is a hugely important group,really, really valuable. So obviously that’s unbelievable pollination services. But if you also think about something that I read in the paper was they’re moving pollen between mainland Europe and the UK and Ireland. So that to and from might be aiding climate adaptation within plant genetics. So that’s just a mind-blowing thing.
Hoverflies obviously very underrated. They’ve got a bit more airtime these days. Bees and honeybees typically take all the limelight, but there’s so much more going on that hopefully you’ve started to understand from the Insect of the Weekamongst other places. But I would urge you to kind of have a look at a picture of the marmalade hoverfly if you haven’t already become familiar with it. They are still on the wing at the minute, and you may get a record before the deepest part of winter when we don’t see very much at all. So please do always record your sightings on iRecord and iNaturalist apps.
Sarah Wilson: You can download or listen to the podcast direct from the website: rootsandall.co.uk.
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