Excellent article. Besides all the rewilding initiatives you write about, what we also desperately need is a change in culture and how we imagine our landscapes. Here in Scotland, hills clad in heather and dotted by countless sheep have become part of a romantic picture book image. We get huge numbers of tourists coming here every year, marvelling at a perceived wilderness that is in fact a huge ecological desert. And this idea has taken hold among most who live here too because we can’t remember a time when our uplands were blanket bogs or forests teeming with life, and were led to believe that sheep farming and grouse shooting are economic pillars that can neither be challenged nor replaced. I really do believe that rewilding will become an unstoppable force when enough people are able to imagine what a wild landscape looks and sounds like, and that it’s a reciprocal relationship that protects humans too.
I have imagined that we produce diaorammas of how things really looked at different times past, and put them in every local museum , showing us how we have lost memory of our own home landscapes. Might be a good job for AI, backed up by local historians.
As a researcher working in climate and carbon removal, I really appreciate this perspective. We often talk about “fighting” climate impacts with increasingly complex technologies, while overlooking the resilience already built into natural systems. Restoring wetlands, healthy soils and biodiversity isn’t just conservation, it’s climate adaptation, carbon storage, and wildfire prevention working together. 🌱
The most complex tech is nature! We just don’t understand that it is so advanced that once liberated from our meddling, it will operate for thousands of years without any further effort. That is what “advanced tech” could never imagine!
Great call to arms here Ben! It's a matter of national security at this point. People are finally starting to see that nature works when left alone. I work in the water sector and would love to see us invest in capturing and storing water over the year in our wetlands.
Spot on Ben. I’m in Indonesia which has 30 years of evidence about the damage caused by draining peat, and the benefits of rewetting it. The country is currently suffering another upsurge in land fires, as El Niño kicks in, with schools closed to protect children from the smog. It’s the drained peat lands of Kalimantan that are burning not the rewetted ones. They stand out as islands of resilience.
The do the same in California. The try to blame a wilderness that evolved with fire for fires and not the round up drying up areas, dams, fake reforestry projects that have no biodiversity no do the plant the redwoods that evolved with fire. Many of our native plants are actually fire resistant. They keep wanting to blame nature instead of fossil fuels.
Rewilding is the best defense against it all. Thank you for this excellent article. Whether you're in Kansas or Saddleworth, it comes down to whether or not disinformation from the meat industry is allowed to vanquish common sense and scientific reason.
"It hasn’t gone unnoticed that it rained in Britain pretty much continuously from Christmas to Easter".
Well, i'd say that memory has been completely erased from memory by the focus on 'the heat', including wildfires.
Forest/ land management should be paramount and water storage should be high on the list. I don't think many storage facilities were added in the last 50 years. All in all cripling infrastructure doesn't help either.
thank you for sharing this excellent article. In Italy too many people say that rewilding the landscape is the cause of fires and natural disasters... no, it's not: it's poor management, wrong choices and environment exploitation that cause disasters, not the restoration of original environments.
We do need to ‘rewild’ everywhere but we must do so in collaboration with local people and farming, not creating isolated islands. Our small scale textile producing farm is situated in the heart of a rewilded estate, exploring the synergies between production of useful goods and reparative ecosystems.
I am not familiar with the specifics of the history of landscape scale fire in the UK, but here in Australia the landscape has evolved with fire and more appropriately timed fire is an important part of the equation. Using moisture gradients is also part of the right time fire approach, without block burning, the Country tells where you where the fire is required. So fire management is a very nuanced conversation in its own right and that is before you even add the climate change aspect where landscapes are significantly changing and what we once knew about the way the land and fire behaves is probably much changed. As another commenter said, let's have a conversation.
While the end state of rewilding would result in a successfully resilient increase in biodiversity, it seems that in many locations the interim period of change has not been managed well. Particularly in an era of climate change. Reports have stated many of the fires in Scotland were able to grow as the firebreaks provided by the roads were no longer present as they were allowed to grow over. There also seems to be a large burden of management on the landowners to maintain the firebreaks within the parks. And with foresty and land Scotland having a no fire fighting policy, you can understand the frustration. The end state makes sense, the getting there seems to be the hard part.
Excellent article. Besides all the rewilding initiatives you write about, what we also desperately need is a change in culture and how we imagine our landscapes. Here in Scotland, hills clad in heather and dotted by countless sheep have become part of a romantic picture book image. We get huge numbers of tourists coming here every year, marvelling at a perceived wilderness that is in fact a huge ecological desert. And this idea has taken hold among most who live here too because we can’t remember a time when our uplands were blanket bogs or forests teeming with life, and were led to believe that sheep farming and grouse shooting are economic pillars that can neither be challenged nor replaced. I really do believe that rewilding will become an unstoppable force when enough people are able to imagine what a wild landscape looks and sounds like, and that it’s a reciprocal relationship that protects humans too.
I have imagined that we produce diaorammas of how things really looked at different times past, and put them in every local museum , showing us how we have lost memory of our own home landscapes. Might be a good job for AI, backed up by local historians.
As a researcher working in climate and carbon removal, I really appreciate this perspective. We often talk about “fighting” climate impacts with increasingly complex technologies, while overlooking the resilience already built into natural systems. Restoring wetlands, healthy soils and biodiversity isn’t just conservation, it’s climate adaptation, carbon storage, and wildfire prevention working together. 🌱
The most complex tech is nature! We just don’t understand that it is so advanced that once liberated from our meddling, it will operate for thousands of years without any further effort. That is what “advanced tech” could never imagine!
I totally agree
Great call to arms here Ben! It's a matter of national security at this point. People are finally starting to see that nature works when left alone. I work in the water sector and would love to see us invest in capturing and storing water over the year in our wetlands.
Spot on Ben. I’m in Indonesia which has 30 years of evidence about the damage caused by draining peat, and the benefits of rewetting it. The country is currently suffering another upsurge in land fires, as El Niño kicks in, with schools closed to protect children from the smog. It’s the drained peat lands of Kalimantan that are burning not the rewetted ones. They stand out as islands of resilience.
The do the same in California. The try to blame a wilderness that evolved with fire for fires and not the round up drying up areas, dams, fake reforestry projects that have no biodiversity no do the plant the redwoods that evolved with fire. Many of our native plants are actually fire resistant. They keep wanting to blame nature instead of fossil fuels.
So wise Ben. As ever this is your time. Hope reason can prevail in this ever increasing chaos x
Rewilding is the best defense against it all. Thank you for this excellent article. Whether you're in Kansas or Saddleworth, it comes down to whether or not disinformation from the meat industry is allowed to vanquish common sense and scientific reason.
"It hasn’t gone unnoticed that it rained in Britain pretty much continuously from Christmas to Easter".
Well, i'd say that memory has been completely erased from memory by the focus on 'the heat', including wildfires.
Forest/ land management should be paramount and water storage should be high on the list. I don't think many storage facilities were added in the last 50 years. All in all cripling infrastructure doesn't help either.
Interesting !!!! Thank you
Brilliant
The tolerant have become intolerant of intolerance.
thank you for sharing this excellent article. In Italy too many people say that rewilding the landscape is the cause of fires and natural disasters... no, it's not: it's poor management, wrong choices and environment exploitation that cause disasters, not the restoration of original environments.
We do need to ‘rewild’ everywhere but we must do so in collaboration with local people and farming, not creating isolated islands. Our small scale textile producing farm is situated in the heart of a rewilded estate, exploring the synergies between production of useful goods and reparative ecosystems.
I am not familiar with the specifics of the history of landscape scale fire in the UK, but here in Australia the landscape has evolved with fire and more appropriately timed fire is an important part of the equation. Using moisture gradients is also part of the right time fire approach, without block burning, the Country tells where you where the fire is required. So fire management is a very nuanced conversation in its own right and that is before you even add the climate change aspect where landscapes are significantly changing and what we once knew about the way the land and fire behaves is probably much changed. As another commenter said, let's have a conversation.
Brilliant article - we need to keep the conversation alive .
While the end state of rewilding would result in a successfully resilient increase in biodiversity, it seems that in many locations the interim period of change has not been managed well. Particularly in an era of climate change. Reports have stated many of the fires in Scotland were able to grow as the firebreaks provided by the roads were no longer present as they were allowed to grow over. There also seems to be a large burden of management on the landowners to maintain the firebreaks within the parks. And with foresty and land Scotland having a no fire fighting policy, you can understand the frustration. The end state makes sense, the getting there seems to be the hard part.