Recorded history, stretching back a mere 5,500 years, accounts for less than 3% of all humanity. ![]() Rather, the edge of extinction is more often a ‘dull’ one: a slow unravelling of intimately entangled ways of life that begins long before the death of the last individual and continues to ripple forward long afterward.” And, as environmental philosopher Thom van Dooren emphasises in Flight Ways, the loss of a single species does not happen in isolation: “extinction is never a sharp, singular event. 40% of plant species are now endangered, and they may be being lost faster than humans can even discover them, let alone study them. Extinction rates are up to 1000 times greater than natural ‘background’ levels with an estimated 1 million species facing extinction. The delicate mosaic of an estimated 8.7 million interrelating species (of which we have only discovered 1.2 million) is cracking. The essential factor underpinning both species reintroduction and the growth of native flowers is that they both increase the levels of biodiversity. ![]() Reintroducing an entire species into a landscape is one example, but growing wildflowers instead of a lawn in a city garden is another. Though it may sound extensive, rewilding can work at big and small scales. The end goal is a self-sustaining and self-regulatory ecosystem. Coined in the 1990s by environmental advocates, but becoming increasingly mainstream in the 21st century, rewilding puts emphasis on a lack of, or at least very passive, human intervention to achieve ecological restoration. And it’s one that our own actions are putting under threat.Ī growing number of people believe that the only way to stabilise natural ecosystems and preserve biodiversity is through trusting those natural environments to recover themselves through rewilding. From providing medicines, water and food, to stabilising the earth we walk on and the air we breathe, an abundance and variety of animals, plants, bacteria and plankton is an essential component to human survival. Yet biodiversity – the biological variety of all life on Earth – is not a luxury. But there is one characteristic of our planet that is under the same severe threat, yet is far less discussed: biodiversity.ĭespite half of the world’s wildlife being lost in the last 40 years, issues concerning biodiversity have been found to be covered up to eight times less in the media than other problems related to climate change. Carbon emissions are focused on as the main problem, and reaching net zero is the go-to solution. Heatwaves, flooding, extreme weather events and rising sea levels are all well-known consequences of climate change. After 10,000 years of stability, the Earth’s climate is being altered by ever-warming global temperatures. To answer that question, we first have to understand the problem rewilding is solving. But even with its success, there’s a lingering question: can letting nature become wilder really make a dent in the colossal fight to save nature? Underhill Wood is a great example of how effective rewilding can be. Rewilding is the process of trusting the natural environment to recover itself by leaving nature to do its thing, aside from perhaps adding a few helpful interventions (building the lake in Thomson’s case). What Thomson is doing is called rewilding, a term that has become increasingly mainstream in conversations about climate change. The first thing the team did was build a lake, which provides habitat, food and a water source for resident mallard ducks, moorhens, dabchicks, amphibians, grass snakes, dragonflies, kingfishers, herons, mandarin ducks, hobbies and bats – all creatures which haven’t been on the land in many years. ![]() But in the last seven years, Thomson and his team of naturalists, ecologists, and volunteers have transformed Underhill Wood from an area of marshy sedge with a few oak trees to a space humming with biodiversity. “Nature in the UK is in crisis,” Thomson argues, “it’s time we start giving back.” His plan was to return the land, which had been a llama farm and a commercial woodland, to the wilderness, making space for countless species of flora and fauna that had been pushed out of the area over hundreds of years due to farming. Jonathan Thomson had one goal in mind when he purchased 25 acres of English countryside: to turn back time.
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