Guerillas in the mist

Like I said, I shared my guerilla conservation idea with my fellow volunteers.

Dave's response was, "It's been done." He was thinking of the other gorillas.

Anyway, we worked out our misunderstanding and it was clearly inspiring.

The fire was a smoky affair and that led to some strange sights. The sun was orange through the smoke, warming the light shining into the dark woodland. And we worked on in the mist.

I've been thinking a lot more about rewilding. And how... and how I don't like purists.

When Europeans got to California they described it as a Garden of Eden. A wilderness of magnificent biodiversity. What they failed to realise was that the richness had been generated by the Native Americans. Now, in the deep past there were rather more megafauna there and it might have been as biodiverse then, with the huge creatures as ecosystem engineers, but in their absence, the particular tribes in the area had taken on that role. It involved hydrology, burning and harvesting. And hunting too, I suppose.

With the loss of their ministrations, California dried out and dries out ever more now there are so many people and climate change too to contend with.

You leave California now and it will not recover for many millennia. But - and they have seen this happen in tiny pockets of land - start managing like the Native Americans did and the biodiversity comes back.

This is not to assume that the earth "needs" us. What it is to say is that we have done so much damage that, it seems, the least we can do is assist in the restoration - which we actually can do. It would be a form of reparation.

People have this idea of wilderness and how nature doesn't need us. But we are part of nature. We have just hugely overplayed our role. Drop it back to ecosystem engineers, and we'd be as useful and as much a part of nature as beavers.

That's what I want. Not to walk away. Not to turn aside.