Holme Fen Peat Fire Exposes Folly of Rewilding Dogma

The catastrophic wildfire that incinerated 657 acres of rare lowland peat habitat at Holme Fen nature reserve this August should be a wake-up call for peatland conservation. Tinder-dry conditions from decades of mis-management allowed the flames to race out of control through the reserve's once-wet peat soils, drawing over 100 firefighters from as far as Devon and London into a grueling month-long battle to subdue the inferno.

While Holme Fen lies in the East Anglian Fens rather than the moors, the extreme fire behavior mimicked the mega-fires we now see devastate mis-managed upland peatlands with grim regularity: racing through desiccated peat and vegetation at unstoppable speeds, resisting control for weeks as hotspots smolder underground, reigniting at the slightest spark. The 20 engines deployed at the peak, shocking for a lowland reserve fire, are resources upland crews can only dream of as they struggle against the same threat across far vaster stretches of moorland.

The common culprit is clear: abandonment of active management has left perilous quantities of combustible fuel blanketing peatlands that were once carefully stewarded to maintain high water tables, healthy peat-building vegetation, and low fire danger. It is a direct result of decades of ill-conceived calls to "rewild" these landscapes by ending managed burning and grazing — a policy Natural England now seeks to enshrine by eliminating these practices across upland peat.

Rewilding advocates claim their hands-off ideology will restore peatlands to a "near-natural state" that magically regulates itself. But as the Holme Fen conflagration lays bare, there is nothing "natural" about the drained, desiccated, fuel-loaded tinderboxes that rewilding creates. A peatland in true "near-natural" condition, regularly burned by lightning strikes, would never have accumulated enough dry peat and vegetation to fuel such an explosive inferno. It is only through systematic fire suppression and intentional fuel buildup that our peatlands have been primed for the fire-storms rewilding threatens to unleash at landscape scale.

A recent Forestry England report on a fire in the New Forest underscores the crucial role active management plays in reversing this dynamic and mitigating severe peat fires. When flames reached an area managed with controlled burns and vegetation cutting, their height plummeted from a 2-3m wall of flame to a mere 30cm flicker, vastly reducing the fire's intensity and rate of spread.

This transformation was no fluke, but a direct result of the careful stewardship the New Forest maintains through managed burning and other tools — as the head of recreation and public affairs at Forestry England noted:

"The control of wildfires is of utmost importance and the creation of firebreaks through controlled burning and other techniques is vital to reducing the fuel load and intensity of wildfires."

Even conservation authorities increasingly recognize this imperative, with Conservation England now advising controlled burns to mitigate severe wildfire risk. Yet Natural England remains in the thrall of rewilding zealotry, barreling ahead with plans to eliminate the managed burns proven to reduce fuel loads and catastrophic fire danger across treasured landscapes like the North York Moors.

The scorched moonscape at Holme Fen is a preview of the fate we court by abandoning yet more peatlands to the rewilding pyre. If we are serious about sparing these precious habitats such wholesale incineration, policymakers must snap out of rewilding dogma and enable land managers to deploy all tools, including controlled burning, to actively manage peatland fuel loads — before another fire-storm erupts beyond hope of control.

The skill and grit of those who finally contained Holme Fen's flames deserve our deepest thanks. But the charred aftermath is a stark warning that continuing to sacrifice peatlands on the altar of hands-off fundamentalism risks unleashing a holocaust no amount of firefighting can stop. Ideology must yield to hard-earned knowledge of how to steward resilient, fire-safe peatlands through active management — in the uplands and lowlands alike. The alternative is a tinderbox time bomb that will detonate in catastrophe after catastrophe until rewilding goes up in smoke.