Rewilding

When Golf Courses Go Wild

October 26, 2024 Josh Kozelj, The Tyee. Create! Canada, Environment, Housing, Public Spaces, Rewilding

In the fields beside a suburban lake on Vancouver Island, relics from a past life are hidden in plain sight. The land, formerly the home of a nine-hole golf course for more than 50 years, is no longer doused with water every day or mowed at 4 a.m. — yet remnants of its former state still exist. A sand trap now serves as a children’s play pit, littered with Tonka trucks and toys. The fairway, once cut to under an inch, has grass up to shin height and rows of flowers. Old golf greens have been turned into campgrounds. The transformation is par for the course, says Jason Cole, co-CEO of Power to Be, a registered charity that took over the property in Saanich, B.C., seven years ago from a couple who wanted to lease their roughly 80 acres of land.

The Case For Returning Disaster-Prone Areas Back To Nature

September 29, 2024 Jonathan Rosenbloom, Next City. Create! climate crisis, Development, Rewilding, sacrifice zone

This week there were three wildfires burning within 100 miles of Los Angeles. Sadly, this isn’t breaking news; it’s the opening salvo of California’s new reality. Each year, wildfires trigger a predictable sequence of events: the fires burn, homeowners flee, firefighters battle the blazes often to catastrophic loss and, once the ash settles, people rush to rebuild grander homes, frequently in the exact same spots and typically directly or indirectly funded by taxpayer dollars. Despite the increase in frequency and intensity of wildfires and other natural disasters, people continue to be drawn to high-risk areas.

Re-Farming And The Right To Plant

June 18, 2024 Chris Smaje, Resilience. Create! Environment, Farming, Land Conservation, Rewilding

The word ‘rewilding’ has had its day and now needs to slip gracefully into retirement. That, at any rate, is the polite suggestion I’m going to make in this post, which is the last in my recent mini-series on ‘wrecked’ land and what to do about it. It’s not that, for the most part, I object to a lot of the practical activities that are done in the name of rewilding by conservationists, land managers, farmers, ecologists and so on. In that sense, I agree with most of what Ian Carter says in this recent article, except for his concluding remarks endorsing the term. I got to thinking about this when I gave a Q&A talk recently and made a flippantly negative reference to the term while making the case for low-impact, peopled, agrarian landscapes.

Letting Your Grass Grow Wild Boosts Butterfly Numbers

April 23, 2024 Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, EcoWatch. Create! Butterflies, Environment, Rewilding, United Kingdom (UK)

Have you ever noticed that meadows of long grass seem to be teeming with butterflies, bumble bees, beetles, crickets and other insects? Meanwhile, short-cropped, bright green lawns appear devoid of critters in comparison. A six-year study of butterfly sightings in 600 gardens in the United Kingdom has confirmed that letting your lawn grow wild can significantly increase butterfly and moth numbers. “Nature is in crisis; 80% of butterflies have declined since the 1970s, so we need to take action now to protect them. We wanted to be able to give tried and tested gardening advice that will benefit butterflies as we know lots of people want to help.

Rewilding Could Help Limit Warming Beyond 1.5°C

March 29, 2023 Paige Bennett, Ecowatch. Create! Animals, climate crisis, Conservation, Rewilding

It’s no secret that preserving and restoring wilderness areas is good for ecosystems, but a new study has pinpointed another major benefit to rewilding. According to the study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, rewilding, or preserving and restoring wildlife and wilderness areas, could improve natural carbon sinks in ecosystems, therefore boosting natural methods of carbon capture and helping the world limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Scientists studied nine wildlife species for the study: marine fish, whales, sharks, gray wolves, wildebeest, sea otters, musk oxen, African forest elephants and American bison.

Land Change, Failures Of Omission, And The Renaturing Of Climate

October 5, 2022 Rob Lewis, Resilience. Create! climate crisis, Environment, Land Change, Rewilding

Land change is a scientific term you’re not likely to hear in mainstream climate conversation, which is a shame, because what it refers to, the climatic effects of human damage to living landscapes, is a big part of the climate crisis. I talk in greater detail about land change and how it got left out of the climate narrative in an earlier Resilience piece, called Putting the Land Back in Climate. Here, I want to consider the effects of this omission, not only in the practical terms of climate policy, but in terms less definitive. What does it mean to our treatment of the land that it’s gotten left out of our picture of climate? Or another way of putting it: how does not knowing that our local landscapes hydrate, cool and stabilize our climates affect our relationship with those landscapes, or lack thereof?

Solidarity Across Species

September 24, 2020 Astra Taylor and Sunaura Taylor, Dissent Magazine. Organize! Development, Meat, Rewilding, wildlife

We are animals. While human beings often repress this basic fact, the novel coronavirus has revealed our connection to and dependence on the well-being of other creatures. In various ways, our disregard for other species led to and worsened this pandemic. To mount an adequate response—and to prevent future disasters—we need to start taking animals into consideration. Like countless fearsome diseases, including Ebola and AIDS, COVID-19 is zoonotic in origin, meaning it jumped from one species to another (likely from bats to humans).

Pennsylvania Initiative To Convert Lawns Into Meadows, Forests

May 13, 2020 Ad Crable, Bay Journal. Create! Environment, Pennsylvania, Rewilding, Water

Well-shorn lawns are still the norm on the grounds of parks, schools, churches, hospitals, business parks and neighborhoods. While better than exposed bare earth, such swaths of green are still environmental minefields. Rain flushes dog poop, pesticides, fungicides and other chemicals from those grassy surfaces into local streams. The springtime spreading of fertilizer to keep grass thick and green is a troublesome source of nutrients that are harmful to the Chesapeake Bay. Close-cropped grass grows from compacted dirt that doesn’t soak up much stormwater. The short, monoculture grass has no wildlife value. The army of lawnmowers needed to keep the grass cut to socially acceptable length emits air pollution at three times the rate of automobiles. And keeping everything a tidy green eats up mowing dollars that could be better spent on the missions of churches, schools and the like.

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