Welcome to Wild Covenant
This website is in its early stages and will evolve. At present it has been created by me, Simon Leadbeater; involvement will broaden as time goes on.
In our increasingly populous and busy world we urgently need to find ways of ensuring nonhuman animals have the living space to be themselves and to flourish. Unfortunately, however, our encroachment on their natural habitats continues to grow.
The 2019 State of Nature reported that the abundance and distribution of the UK’s wildlife has declined by 60 per cent since 1970. Across the world the situation is even more desperate. The 2022 Living Planet Report documented global wildlife populations plummeting by almost 70 per cent in 50 years. We have somehow slept walked into the calamitous situation whereby humans and our farm animals represent 96 per cent of the whole of the world’s biomass, with wild animals comprising a mere 4 per cent. How could we have let this happen?
Where free roaming animals live, wild places are disappearing at terrifying rates. One estimate suggests that 17,500 ha of wilderness were lost per day between 1990 and 2017.1 Losing their homes inevitably means animals losing their lives. Additionally, “the most important source of wild animal suffering is habitat destruction.”2 Animal suffering is often overlooked when we discuss extinction and species’ declines,3 but it should be much further to the front of our minds.
Wild places are mostly destroyed by their conversion into animal agriculture, but what also degrades animal homes – potentially the equivalent of removing habitat – is us, simply by our presence.
Wild Covenant’s purpose
To establish the first campaign group focusing exclusively on the impact of human disturbance on natural habitats and their denizens, wild animals.
We have two initial objectives. First, to understand how a human presence, by walking, camping, just being there – non-consumptive recreation4 – affects animals and their wellbeing. We have gathered evidence from across the world which demonstrates that invariably our presence in wild habitats has a negative impact on wild animals. Please see our Policy Briefing, a document we intend to regularly update as new research is published.
1Carver, S. (2023). Mapping opportunities for rewilding. In S. Hawkins, L. Convery, S. Carver, & R. Beyers (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Rewilding. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003097822
2Czech, B., (2013), ‘The Imperative of Steady State Economics for Wild Animal Welfare,’ In., Bekoff, M., (Ed), Ignoring Nature no More: The case for compassionate conservation, The University of Chicago Press, p. 171.
3Lam, Paulina. 5 big causes of deforestation and how you can stop it. One green planet. (March 2019). Retrieved from https://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/5-big-causes-of-deforestation-and-how-you-can-stop-it/
4In contrast to hunting or fishing, for example
Second, to explore what we can do about the increasing human intrusion on wild animal spaces. Our solution, in outline, is to envision and develop a Covenant with the Wild and the Art of Ethological Citizenship.
In summary, this has two main components:
1) First, it is to rethink our relationship with nonhuman animals. Our friend Anja Heister’s 2022 book focusing on conservation in America, tells us that we need to move animals from the periphery into the centre of our moral concern, and as such to value them as persons on behalf of whom we can explore political mechanisms in which to make decisions in their best interests. And one of the choices we would make is to leave them space undisturbed by us.
(Photo: Jo Cartmell)
2) The second component of this Covenant, would be to learn the Art of Ethological Citizenship. Ethology is the study of animal behaviour. When we look at animals properly we come to know them better, to understand their needs, and in turn learn to behave better towards them, and also each other.
We have borrowed these ideas from the political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote about how society should be organised, children’s education, and in his last book reflected on walking in nature and studying plants. Rousseau was also advanced in his thinking about animals, so we swapped botany for ethology, and developed his idea of citizens making decisions, so as to benefit every being within the community not just human ones. We hope Jean-Jacques would approve.
Simon’s ethological citizenship apprenticeship
I live with my partner, Toni, on the edge of a woodland in southern England. The inspiration for Wild Covenant does not come from a Swiss philosopher or any great thinker, but rather from the animals I have come to know here. Toni and I bought our woodland in 1999. For many years we used to live a carefree fifteen minutes’ drive away, and blissfully loaded up our dogs into an old Land Rover, drove over to our wood, opened the gates, shut them behind us, unlatched the truck’s rear doors and out bounded our dogs. We would then walk the length and breadth of what we considered our domain.
We moved here in 2015. Living here is not the same as visiting, however. It was if we had crossed some invisible threshold, and we no longer look upon the wood as exclusively ours in quite the same way. We began to observe and listen to what the animals in our woodland were telling us. Their message, above all, said, ‘please leave us alone.’ And for the most part we do. We now mostly confine ourselves to a small section of our wood. In recently years, however, an English campaign has been growing to allow everyone to access all woods and other rural areas, to exercise rights of access which we deny ourselves out of respect for our woodland neighbours.
The right to roam movement
I have taken an interest in the R2R movement for some years. I was invited by Jo Cartmell to write a blog for NearbyWild in 2019, wrote a more extensive article for ECOS in 2021, and in 2022 wrote a commentary on one of the primary mover’s books, Nick Hayes’s The Trespasser’s Companion. Following my attendance at the March 2023 book launch of the Routledge Handbook of Rewilding in Cumbria, I was also invited to attend a seminar at Lancaster University discussing R2R in May 2023 led by the writer Karen Lloyd.
Notwithstanding all of my reading and discussions, the perspective I am developing derives from what our woodland denizens taught me. My later research only confirmed the views I began to form after moving here in 2015. And then I thought, what is to be done? My answer: we need to pledge a Covenant with the Wild.
Sharing not dominating rural landscapes
Unlike Nick Hayes I do not believe public footpaths place “limitations on our wonder,”5 but instead agree with the philosopher Martin Bunzl, who wrote a whole book about walking on a footpath, that “hiking the trail is hiking the surroundings in which it is embedded, not just the trail itself.”6 What Wild Covenant is not about is stopping people enjoying nature, but rather to enhance their experience of the natural world by coming to know it better. We aim to explore innovative forms of access which would enable people to enjoy visiting the countryside without harming the wildlife who live there. What we oppose is the prospect of a ubiquitous human presence, which is what a R2R would inevitably result in.
Wild covenant
A covenant with the wild is simultaneously a wild covenant, promising never-ending discoveries of the nonhuman world and of ourselves, changing and helping us transition towards behaving more morally with regard to animals. We don’t agree with the R2R movement, but that is not our focus. We are for remaking the world by refashioning our relationship with nonhuman animals by bringing them into the protective community of shared moral concern. We aim to develop this idea into a campaign. We hope you will support us.
While our focus begins with England, to quote a contemporary theorist whom Rousseau influenced, Thomas Paine, ‘our country is the world.’
Interested in learning more? Contact me at simon.leadbeater@wildcovenant.com
13th July, 2023
5Hayes, N., (2020), The Book of Trespass: Crossing the lines that divide us, Bloomsbury Circus, London, p. 11.
6Bunzl, M., (2021), Thinking while Walking; Reflections on the Pacific Crest Trail, New York, Perry Street Press, p. 4