Reading Comprehension / Czytanie ze zrozumieniem

Ask most people to picture a national park and they will conjure somewhere empty — a wilderness fenced off from human interference, as in the American model that began with Yellowstone in 1872. Britain’s fifteen national parks work on an entirely different principle, and the difference catches visitors off guard. There is no gate, no entrance fee and no obvious edge. A walker can cross from ordinary countryside into a park without noticing, because the bucolic scene of stone walls, grazing sheep and scattered farmhouses simply continues on both sides of the line.

When the first of them, the Peak District, was designated in 1951, the land was not bought by the state. It stayed in private hands, and it stayed in use. Farms, quarries, villages and roads sit inside the boundaries; hundreds of thousands of people live within Britain’s parks altogether, and the South Downs, the most recent, contains whole market towns. What the designation protects is not an absence of people but a particular relationship between people and landscape — the dry stone walls, hay meadows and grazed uplands that centuries of farming produced. Even the wildest-looking parts are a human product. The bare moors of the Peak District and the open fells of the Lake District were once wooded, and were denuded of their trees by axe, fire and grazing long before anyone thought of protecting them.

This makes them harder to manage than a wilderness. A park authority cannot simply forbid activity; it must negotiate with the farmers, householders and businesses who own the ground. Ostensibly its purpose is to conserve natural beauty, but a great deal of its time goes on planning applications, and the statutory duty to conserve frequently puts the authority at odds with residents who want to extend a barn, convert a shed or build a house for their children. A landowner who goes ahead without permission falls foul of the same planning rules that apply in any English town — with the difference that inside a park they are applied with unusual strictness.

The pressures are mounting. Visitor numbers have climbed steeply since the pandemic, and the honeypot sites — Malham Cove, the Llanberis Path up Snowdon — suffer erosion that costs hundreds of thousands of pounds a year to repair. On a fine bank holiday the car parks at the foot of Snowdon fill early, and photographs of a queue for the summit stretching back along the ridge have become a familiar news story. Rangers now spend much of their time on footpath maintenance rather than wildlife. Meanwhile the ecological picture is bleak: a recent review found that only around a quarter of the protected wildlife sites inside English national parks were in favourable condition.

None of this means the designation is worthless. Planning control has spared the parks the housing estates, retail parks and wind turbines that are common outside them, and they remain the places to which the crowded cities of the Midlands and the north turn for air. But the founding law of 1949 was written to protect views, not ecosystems, and there is a growing feeling that a landscape can look magnificent while being almost empty of life.

Critics argue that the parks have been a victim of their founding compromise, protecting scenery while biodiversity quietly collapsed beneath it. Some conservationists now press for rewilding — letting woodland return, reintroducing species, accepting a messier landscape. Hill farmers, whose families have worked these valleys for generations, hear that as a proposal to erase them, and the two sides have reached an impasse in which every public meeting ends exactly where it began. The argument shows no sign of abating, and the parks’ second century will be shaped by how it resolves.

For most of the twentieth century, Australian fire policy had a single aim: put the fire out. Blazes were emergencies, and emergencies were to be suppressed, with aircraft, bulldozers and thousands of volunteers in yellow overalls. Fire lookouts were built, fire trails were cut through the bush, and a generation of children was taught that a burning forest was always a disaster. That approach now looks to many ecologists like a well-meaning mistake, and the alternative being revived is some fifty thousand years older.

Aboriginal Australians managed country with fire long before Europeans arrived, and the practice — cool burning, cultural burning, or fire-stick farming — bears little resemblance to a bushfire. The burns are lit in the cooler months, early in the day, and they creep rather than race. Flames stay below knee height, and a burn may spend hours smouldering in the leaf litter without ever flaring up. It moves slowly enough that reptiles and small mammals can walk away from it, and patchily enough that unburnt refuges remain within metres of blackened ground. The canopy is never touched. Nothing about the pattern is haphazard: which slope is lit, on which morning and in which wind is decided by people who have read that piece of country all their lives.

What the burning achieves is a reduction in fuel. Leaf litter, fallen bark and dry undergrowth accumulate year after year in country left alone, and eucalyptus leaves are rich in volatile oils that make them exceptionally combustible. It is that accumulated fuel which turns a summer ignition into a crown fire that no equipment can halt. A crown fire burns through the treetops rather than along the ground, throws burning embers kilometres ahead of itself and is beyond the reach of any fire crew. Burning off a portion of the landscape each year, in a mosaic rather than a sweep, leaves a patchwork that a large fire struggles to cross.

In the wake of the 2019–20 season, in which fire consumed many millions of hectares and an estimated three billion animals died or were displaced, the case for change became difficult to dismiss. Some of that summer’s fires merged into a conflagration so vast that it generated its own weather: thunderstorms formed in the smoke columns, and lightning from those storms lit fresh fires far ahead of the front. Several state agencies now fund Indigenous ranger groups to burn on their own country, and the knowledge that underpins the practice — which plants indicate that ground is ready, how the wind behaves in a particular valley — is being passed on again after generations in which it nearly lapsed.

In the savannas of the far north, where the idea has been applied longest, Aboriginal ranger groups now burn early in the dry season across areas the size of small European countries, and are paid for it. Early, cool fires release far less greenhouse gas than the late-season wildfires they prevent; the difference is measured, sold as carbon credits, and the income keeps the rangers in work.

Scaling it up is not straightforward. Cultural burning is slow, labour-intensive and specific to place; the knowledge that works in Arnhem Land does not transfer wholesale to Victoria, where the forests are wetter, the fuel loads heavier and the towns much closer together. Nor is there enough of the knowledge to go round: the elders who hold it are few, and training a new generation of fire practitioners takes years rather than months. Nor does it eliminate risk, and a burn lit on the wrong afternoon can escape as easily as any campfire. But where it has been practised consistently, the evidence points one way: the country burns, as it always has, and it burns less catastrophically.

Stand on the summit of Ben Macdui on a clear day in January and you could be forgiven for thinking you had left Britain altogether. The plateau that stretches away on every side is white, treeless and frozen hard, and the wind cuts through whatever you are wearing. It is a far cry from the Britain of hedgerows and village greens. This is the heart of the Cairngorms, and it is the nearest thing these islands have to the Arctic. At 1,309 metres Ben Macdui is Britain’s second-highest mountain, beaten only by Ben Nevis, and four of the five highest peaks in the country rise from the same great block of granite.

The Cairngorms National Park, designated in 2003 and enlarged in 2010, covers some 4,500 square kilometres of the Scottish Highlands, which makes it the largest national park in the United Kingdom — roughly twice the size of the Lake District. Around 18,000 people live inside it, in towns such as Aviemore, Braemar and Grantown-on-Spey. Two of Scotland’s great salmon rivers, the Spey and the Dee, begin here; the Dee rises on the Braeriach plateau at more than 1,200 metres, higher than the source of any other major river in Britain.

What sets the Cairngorms apart is not height alone but climate. The plateau is the coldest and most inhospitable ground in the country, and the weather station on Cairn Gorm recorded a gust of 173 miles per hour in March 1986, the strongest ever measured in Britain. Snow lies on the exposed tops for much of the year, and in the shaded corries it lingers well into summer. The Sphinx, a patch of snow high on Braeriach, was once so dependable that it melted only a handful of times in the whole of the twentieth century. It has now vanished in most recent summers — a change that scientists put down to a warming climate rather than to chance.

Such conditions support plants and animals found almost nowhere else in Britain. The plateau is tundra in all but name, carpeted with mosses, lichens and dwarf shrubs that hug the ground to escape the wind. Ptarmigan and mountain hares turn white in winter to blend in with the snow, and are so elusive on the winter plateau that walkers can pass within metres of them without knowing; the dotterel, a small wading bird that breeds on the high ground, is one of the few species in which the female is the more brightly coloured sex and leaves the male to sit on the eggs. Since 1952 a herd of reindeer, brought over from Sweden, has roamed free above Glenmore — the only such herd in the British Isles.

Lower down, the mountains are ringed by the largest surviving remnants of the Caledonian forest, the Scots pine woodland that once covered much of the Highlands and now survives only in scattered fragments. These old pinewoods shelter red squirrels and crested tits, and they are the last bastion of the capercaillie, a turkey-sized grouse whose numbers have dwindled so far that fewer than six hundred are thought to remain in the whole of Scotland, most of them here. In 2023 the first Scottish wildcats bred in captivity were released into the park, an attempt to pull Britain’s rarest mammal back from the brink.

The park is not a museum, however. Aviemore is a busy ski resort, the mountain railway on Cairn Gorm carries visitors most of the way to the summit, and walkers, climbers and mountain bikers arrive in their hundreds of thousands every year. Managing that traffic without trampling the plateau’s fragile vegetation, or disturbing the birds that nest on it, is a constant balancing act. The Cairngorms have survived ice ages; whether they can weather the combination of a warming climate and a growing crowd of admirers is the question their keepers must now answer.

Ask a visitor how many seasons Kakadu has and they will probably say two: the Wet and the Dry. Ask the Bininj and Mungguy people, whose ancestors have lived in this corner of Australia’s Northern Territory for tens of thousands of years, and the answer is six. Gudjewg, the monsoon season from roughly January to March, brings storms and floods; Gurrung, in the heat of August and September, leaves the land so parched that the grasses wither and the wetlands shrink to a few muddy pools. Between them lie four other seasons, each announced not by a date on a calendar but by a sign in the country — a particular flower opening, a wind changing direction, a bird arriving.

Kakadu is enormous. At nearly 20,000 square kilometres it is one of Australia’s largest national parks, about half the size of Switzerland, and it takes in almost the entire catchment of the South Alligator River — a river with no alligators in it, named by a British naval surveyor in 1820 who mistook its crocodiles for the American animal. Declared in stages from 1979, the park was placed on the World Heritage list in 1981 and is one of a small number of sites in the world listed for both its natural and its cultural value.

The landscape divides sharply in two. To the east rises the Arnhem Land escarpment, a wall of sandstone some 300 metres high that runs for hundreds of kilometres and over which, in the wet season, the great cascades of Jim Jim and Twin Falls pour. Below it spread the floodplains: a vast, flat expanse that is under water for months at a time and then dries out, leaving billabongs such as Yellow Water where the wildlife of the park gathers to drink. In the late dry season these shrinking pools are teeming with birds — magpie geese in their tens of thousands, jabirus, egrets and brolgas crowding the last of the water. More than a third of all Australia’s bird species have been recorded within the park’s boundaries.

The animal most visitors come to see, and the one they are most warned about, is the saltwater crocodile. The largest living reptile, it can exceed five metres in length, and Kakadu holds several thousand of them. Signs at every waterhole and river crossing spell out the rules: do not swim, do not stand at the water’s edge, do not clean fish near the bank. Rangers survey the popular swimming spots and trap the odd animal, keeping the crocodiles at bay rather than driving them out; the population, once shot almost to extinction for its skin, has recovered so completely since hunting was banned in 1971 that it is now regarded as a conservation success rather than a menace to be eradicated.

Kakadu’s other treasure is painted on its rocks. The galleries at Ubirr and Burrungkuy hold thousands of paintings, some of them thought to be as much as 20,000 years old, making this one of the longest continuous records of human art anywhere. The images change over the millennia: extinct animals such as the thylacine give way to fish painted in the “X-ray” style, showing bones and organs inside the body, and finally to sailing ships and men with guns, recording the first contact with Europeans.

Not everything in the park is ancient. Water buffalo, released from failed settlements in the nineteenth century, trampled the floodplains until a culling programme in the 1980s brought their numbers down. Cane toads, voracious eaters themselves and poisonous to anything that eats them, crossed into Kakadu around 2001 and have devastated the northern quoll. And for four decades the Ranger uranium mine operated within an enclave carved out of the park, an arrangement that many found hard to square with World Heritage status; mining and processing finally ceased in 2021, and the long task of restoring the site has begun. Kakadu, in other words, is not a wilderness frozen in time but a living place, managed jointly by its traditional owners and the Australian government, and still working out how to keep its six seasons turning.

From the air, in the summer of 2023, Lough Neagh looked as though someone had emptied a tin of green paint into it. Satellite images showed swirls of colour spreading across a body of water that, at around 390 square kilometres, is the largest lake in the British Isles — big enough to swallow the whole of Belfast several times over. Along the shore the water lay stagnant, the smell was of putrid vegetation, and warning signs went up at beaches and slipways: keep children and dogs out of the water. Several dogs that were allowed in anyway died.

The culprit was blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, microscopic organisms that have lived in the lough for as long as it has existed. In small numbers they are harmless. Given the right conditions, however, they multiply explosively into a bloom that coats the surface, starves the water beneath of oxygen and releases toxins that can kill fish, birds and mammals. What alarmed scientists in 2023 was not that a bloom had occurred but its sheer scale and persistence: the scourge of that summer lasted from June into the autumn, and it returned the following year.

Three factors came together to produce it. The first and largest is nutrient pollution. Lough Neagh is fed by six rivers draining some of the most intensively farmed land in Northern Ireland. Slurry and fertiliser are spread on the fields, phosphorus leaches out of the soil into the streams, and the streams carry it to the lough; a government assessment attributed the majority of the phosphorus entering the lough to agriculture, with sewage works and household septic tanks making up much of the rest. Phosphorus is food for algae, and the lough has been receiving far more of it than it can absorb for decades.

The second factor is heat. The lough is shallow — its average depth is only about nine metres — and shallow water warms quickly. Its waters are also sluggish, leaving through a single outlet, the Lower Bann, so that whatever enters the lough stays in it for a long time. Records show that it is now measurably warmer than it was in the 1990s, and warmer water favours cyanobacteria over the other organisms that compete with them. The third factor is an invader: the zebra mussel, a small striped shellfish native to eastern Europe, which arrived in the lough in the early 2000s, most likely carried on boats. Zebra mussels filter the water so efficiently that they make it clearer, and clearer water lets sunlight reach deeper, which is precisely what the algae need to thrive.

The consequences reach well beyond the shoreline. Lough Neagh supplies roughly forty per cent of Northern Ireland’s drinking water, which must now be treated more intensively. The blooms have taken their toll on its eel fishery, the largest of its kind in Europe. Sand is dredged commercially from the lake bed, a practice that critics say stirs up nutrients that had settled in the sediment. And the ownership of the bed itself — it belongs not to the public but to an aristocratic family, the Earls of Shaftesbury, whose title to it goes back to a royal grant in the seventeenth century — has become a political issue, with campaigners arguing that a lake so central to the region’s life should not be in private hands.

Fixing Lough Neagh will take decades even if action begins now. Phosphorus already lying in the sediment will keep feeding blooms long after the flow from the fields is cut off, and reducing that flow means changing how thousands of farms operate. A government action plan published in 2024 set out dozens of measures, but environmental groups dismissed it as too timid, pointing out that most of the recommendations were voluntary. The lough, meanwhile, keeps turning green each summer — a very visible reminder that pollution which builds up slowly does not go away quickly.

On 30 September 2024 the operators of Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottinghamshire shut down its last generating unit. It was done unceremoniously: the eight cooling towers that had been a landmark beside the M1 motorway since 1968 simply stopped steaming. But the moment was historic. It ended 142 years of coal-fired electricity in Britain, the country that had invented it — the world’s first coal-fired public power station, long since defunct, opened at Holborn Viaduct in London in 1882 — and made the United Kingdom the first of the G7 group of large economies to give up coal for power entirely.

The speed of the change is what surprises people. As recently as 2012, coal was still generating around two-fifths of Britain’s electricity. In April 2017 the grid ran for a full day without burning any coal at all, the first time that had happened since the Victorian era; during the pandemic lockdown of 2020 it managed more than two months. By the time Ratcliffe closed, coal was on its last legs: its share had shrunk to almost nothing, and the plant was being kept running mainly as a backup for the coldest days of winter.

What filled the gap was, above all, wind. Britain is one of the windiest countries in Europe, with a long coastline and a shallow seabed that suits offshore turbines, and it built them on a scale nobody else in the world matched until China caught up. Hornsea 2, which came fully online in 2022 some 89 kilometres off the Yorkshire coast, has 165 turbines and can generate 1.3 gigawatts, enough for well over a million homes. Dogger Bank, further out in the North Sea, began sending power ashore in 2023 and will be larger still when it is finished. Its turbines stand around 260 metres tall — higher than any building in Britain outside London — and a single rotation of the blades can power an average home for two days. By 2024 wind was supplying roughly a third of the country’s electricity, and in some months more than all the gas-fired stations put together.

Wind is not the whole story. Solar panels now cover roofs and fields across southern England; Scotland’s rivers and lochs have driven hydroelectric turbines for generations, and inside Ben Cruachan, a mountain beside Loch Awe, a cavern hollowed out in the 1960s houses a power station that pumps water uphill when electricity is cheap and lets it run back down through the turbines when demand peaks. Add nuclear power and the electricity imported through cables from France and Norway, and the result is a grid whose carbon emissions per unit of electricity have fallen by well over half since 2012.

There are, however, catches. Wind is intermittent, and on a still, cold evening in January the gas-fired stations that were supposed to be a stopgap still have to fire up to keep the lights on. Building enough batteries and storage to cover those gaps is expensive, and so is the network of new pylons and cables needed to carry electricity from the windy north to the populous south — a network that many of the rural communities in its path are fighting. Britain’s largest power station, Drax in Yorkshire, switched from coal to wood pellets shipped across the Atlantic, and whether burning trees can really be called renewable is a question that divides scientists.

Nor does clean electricity by itself mean a clean country. Electricity accounts for only a fraction of Britain’s energy use; heating homes and running cars still depends overwhelmingly on gas and petrol, and switching those over to heat pumps and electric vehicles will demand a great deal more electricity than the grid produces today. Coal has gone. The harder part of the job — using the wind to replace the oil and gas in everyone’s daily life — is only beginning.