22 posts tagged with rewilding.
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Blood, soil, and organic veg
In 1936, Viscount Gerard Wallop, the Earl of Portsmouth, founded the English Array - an insane, neo-feudalist, wildly racist and anti-semitic organisation that hoped to free the King from the constrictions of Parliament, take over the country and re-institute serfdom.
Much like the Nazi Blood and Soil movement, Gerard Wallop and his colleagues were particularly obsessed with the importance of organic farming, leading to the formation of the then far-right Soil Association.
The focus on purity at the expense of scientific rigour in agriculture still affects mainstream ecological discourse today... [more inside]
When Golf Courses Go Wild
Could California Solve Its Water Woes by Flooding Farmland?
In California's Central Valley, 2100 acres of farmland have been changed from farmland into rain-water catchment. It refills the aquifers and prevents floods.
"In addition to these two functions, the restored swamp also sequesters an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to that produced by thousands of gas-powered vehicles. It also provides a haven for migratory birds and other species that have faced the threat of extinction."
We Need to Rewild the Internet
People who care about internet monoculture and control are often told they’re nostalgists harkening back to a pioneer era. It’s fiendishly hard to regenerate an open and competitive infrastructure for younger generations who’ve been raised to assume that two or three platforms, two app stores, two operating systems, two browsers, one cloud/mega-store and a single search engine for the world comprise the internet. (Noema sl) [more inside]
Mary Reynolds: The Other Ark -- Acts of Restorative Kindness
She won the biggest awards in Landscape Gardening, a movie made about her, commissioned for some of the boldest landscaping projects in Ireland. She stopped being a gardener. What happened? “It’s very simple. I looked out onto my garden. A fox ran across, it was probably winter/spring last year, which isn’t that unusual. Then a couple of hares ran after him, and I thought, well that is unusual. And then a family of hedgehogs. Now, they are nocturnal, so I knew something was going on. I went for a wander and it turns out a digger had gone in across the road. It used to be an acre of gorse, bramble, hawthorn, blackthorn, but someone had cleaned out the whole field to replace it with a garden. I stood there in horror – and realized I’d done this many times in my career." [more inside]
Elephant retirement and???
Elephant sanctuary beginning in Portugal. Arguably also a climate-migration project.
The Accidental Activist
“You can’t go through the official channels and make it work.”
As rewilding and the prospect of nature restoring itself has caught the public imagination in recent years, projects have sprung up all over Europe, often led by philanthropists and enthusiastically backed by politicians. But many of these projects have also become entangled in bureaucracy and an intense debate over the scientific practicality of rewilding. Many in the rewilding movement say that political leaders are not doing enough to restore biodiversity — leaving the mavericks with little choice but to act unilaterally and reintroduce species themselves. from The secret movement bringing Europe’s wildlife back from the brink [Coda]
Concrete Thinking
"What’s the most underrated material in the modern world? How about CONCRETE?
Often dismissed as boring, ugly & inert. Concrete is actually surprising, dynamic & incredibly complex. With that in mind here are a few reasons why we need to start talking about concrete" (a Twitter thread from Ed Conway; Threadreader version). [more inside]
Rewild Your Attention
"If you want to have wilder, curiouser thoughts, you have to avoid the industrial monocropping of big-tech feeds. You want an intellectual forest, overgrown with mushrooms and towering weeds and a massive dead log where a family of raccoons has taken up residence." Clive Thompson's "Rewilding Your Attention" (Medium) is a brief reflection on the value of seeking out idiosyncratic content. Time to go for a random walk in the woods.
We need more buzz
The Biodiversity Crisis is as serious a threat to the survival of humanity as the climate crisis, but it gets less publicity these days. Maybe there is some hope? [more inside]
Dingoes: making cattle farms more profitable
Dingoes are considered a non-native wild dog in Western Australia. A giant fence through the country has been designed to prevent dingoes from entering the state. However, studies have shown that they are effective at controlling the feral foxes and cats that are destroying native wildlife. Now pastoralists who have seen massive benefits from allowing dingoes to return to their ranches are campaigning for a broader restoration program.
The End Of Farming?
For decades, the way we farm has been degrading land and destroying wildlife. Now there’s a revolution coming – but is it going to create more problems than it solves? [more inside]
Working With Land
"It's our right to impose ourselves on that land and use that land so it benefits us," Floyd says. "It made sense to turn [the lots] into a community garden because you don't have any fresh food around here." Community gardens beautify urban space, but some seek to transform urban society. (Chicago Reader) Oyster reefs are making a comeback–by protecting coasts from the ravages of climate change (CNBC) “ For birds, soil organisms, small mammals, and bees and butterflies, prairie strips also provide much-needed food and habitat. As the benefits of regenerative practices like these are made increasingly clear, the pressing question has become: What would it take to get more farms to use them?” Planting Native Prairie Could Be a Secret Weapon for Farmers (Civil Eats)
Operating Without Human Intervention
Back To The Land: How “re-wilding” can help turn the tide of climate change (The Nib) A 4.5-million-hectare national park in Chile is being brought back to life by restoring the land to nature. (Al Jazeera) Rewilding complex ecosystems (Science, Harvard summary) Ditch the lawn and rewild your garden (Guardian) Lessons from my neighbor’s rewilded lawn (medium) How can cities rewild? The Depavement movement. Rewilding, previously.
Public, democratic ownership of the commons
“Attacking gentrification is only the beginning of a socialist response. We need to reorient our perspective to embrace land not as an extractive resource to exploit, but a part of our community to nurture, a neighbor to live with in harmony. A Green New Deal gives us the opportunity to push for democratic control of the land through policies such as land banks, community land trusts, and the restoration of Native stewardship. Before we get to how a GND must confront land-use, let’s talk about the origin of land-use policy in the U.S” It Begins With The Land: Land use has been a tool of oppression, but it can also be a tool of our liberation.
MEGAFAUNIZE AMERICAN GRASSLANDS AGAIN
15,000 and more years ago, North America had lions, cheetahs, camels, mammoths, giant sloths[previously], short-faced bears, giant beavers and sabretooth salmon. Barring enormous advances in cloning technology, none[previously] of those magnificent beasts will walk the earth again.
But we can replicate the effects they had on the ecosystem, with Pleistocene Rewilding! [more inside]
But we can replicate the effects they had on the ecosystem, with Pleistocene Rewilding! [more inside]
The cold Locke-Voltaire equations
Leaving populations to boom and bust on their own is currently gruesome in the Netherlands, economically advantageous in Sussex, and contentious where reintroduced Yellowstone bison can be hunted. [more inside]
Letting Mother Nature reclaim prime farmland
The Boys Who Loved Birds
“In this area you should go just behind me,” the stout man says, the th of his this buzzing like a bee. Then, as if to reassure me, he adds, “I’ve been here before, with other colleagues and journalists, and no one died.” I’ve traveled here, to the former Iron Curtain, still studded with the occasional land mine, in pursuit of a love story. It’s an improbable tale about two boys, a friendship, and a passion for birds. Twenty-five years earlier, in 1989, the man in front of me had hatched a plan to transform the former no-man’s land that separated Western Europe from the Eastern Bloc into an eco-corridor running through the heart of Europe. It was a preposterous idea. The Iron Curtain had been just that—a series of steel-reinforced barriers. Electrified fences, razor wire, land mines, trip lines, and machine guns: If it could stop, maim, or kill you, the Soviets put it there. Not exactly “eco.”
The Wild?
Some of the world’s most powerful conservationists are giving up on wilderness. They are making a big mistake [more inside]
The forests blotted out memories of what had gone before.
Accidental Rewilding - In places once thick with farms and cities, human dispossession and war has cleared the ground for nature to return
The forest had entered a cycle Tomaž had not seen before, in which many of the giants had perished. Some had died where they stood, and remained upright, reamed with beetle and woodpecker holes, sprouting hoof fungus and razor strop. They looked as if a whisper of wind could blow them down. Others now stretched across the rocks and craters, sometimes blocking our path, sometimes suspended above our heads. Among the trunks lying on the ground, some were so thick that I could scarcely see over them. Where they had fallen, thickets of saplings crowded into the light. Seeing the profusion of fungus and insect life the dead wood harboured, I was reminded of the old ecologists’ aphorism: there is more life in dead trees than there is in living trees. The tidy-minded forestry so many nations practise deprives many species of their habitats.by George Monbiot [more inside]
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