The millionaire rewilding the countryside, one farm at a time
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/05/the-millionaire-rewilding-the-countryside-one-farm-at-a-time
This rewilding example is in the UK, but this is something that we need to do in the US as well. In the US we have fields where the land is too steep, like the sides of river valleys, and should never have been cleared for farming. Lots of marginal farmland prone to annual flooding along rivers. Also, reclaiming abandoned surface mines.
There was a lot of talk about planting trees to fight climate change prior to Covid, which seems to have been forgotten. We need to get back to figuring out how to do this. And it will require a plan from the government to do it.
Seen quite a few projects like this by wealthy and poor people across the globe who simply make it their purpose in life. Saw an older chap in Asia (I think) who wasn't from money but had enough to scrape by and had done similar with dozens of acres of land over decades. Impressive stuff.
Twenty-eight years ago or so I was in a second growth rainforest in Costa Rica, about thirty years before that the entire area was clear cut for farming. The biodiversity was amazing. I'm no biologist, but there is no way I'd be able to tell.
Much of New England (VT, NH) was cleared for farming in the 1700's and 1800's. All those "mysterious" dry stone walls that run through what are now forests once separated cleared fields. Farming was largely abandoned there once canals and railroads opened up areas for farming that didn't have so many boulders. Anyway it's a good example of rewilding.
> rainforest
It's amazing how fast tropical rainforests can heal themselves.
My cousin livers in a cottage on this estate:
https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/rewilding-projects/knepp-castle-estate
I get lovely little David Attenborough style videos of the deer and other wildlife on his morning walks.
You don't see many tractors on it.
> cousin
That is a really cool place Rupert.
I get a kick that pigs, ponies and long horn cattle are acting as proxies for prehistoric herd animals. Yeah in Britain you have to decide what slice of time you want to emulate.
Quote from: Brad on September 06, 2021, 09:55:45 AM
Much of New England (VT, NH)
There's a really cool set of trails up by the Waterbury Reservoir in Vermont that actually takes you through an old village. To the unitiated eye, you might think you're hiking through old-growth hardwood forest that had never been cut... until you get to the cemetery. There's a grave there from someone who died in the early 1900s who was 102 years old. She basically lived most of the 19th century in this little mountain hamlet. Then the railroads came in and prices dropped so these mountain farms could not survive (it was fear of the same that kept the Swiss from joining the EU).
https://vtstateparks.com/littleriver.html
In the National Parks and other public lands (which in itself is a thorny term), there is a reckoning with the "rewilding" of these lands, achieved by conquest and ejection of the people who lived there. There is a lot of baggage in the terms "wilderness" and "wild" and "nature" and "natural" that hails from late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Romanticism and its success Transcendentalism (so Rousseau, Emmerson, Thoreau and ultimately Muir). It basically saw no role in "wild" places for the people who had inhabited them for thousands of years and portrayed them in writing as vast, empty spaces.
Thus the Blackfeet were promised hunting rights as long as the land was "public land," but they lost half their hunting grounds when Glacier National Park was created (which from a legislative and legal perspective stopped being "public lands" and became "federal lands" and thus the courts ruled that the Blackfeet had no right to enter the park).
You can say similar things about the poor white people who lived in what is now the Adirondack State Park (Karl Jacoby has a nice book, "Crimes against Nature," about the invention of the crime of poaching in America and how that was all tied up to, essentially, rewilding northern New York for very wealthy hunters at the expense of the people who lived there who quickly went from upstanding residents to criminals overnight).
So in my mind, ideas of "wild" and "wilderness" and "nature" have become very complex since the naive days when I came to Yosemite and saw an open space that had been set aside for future generations as a wild place.
>but this is something that we need to do in the US as well.
Government will pay you to put in a pollinator plot. As well as CRP.
Call to make Scotland the world's first rewilding nation - as nature recovery project launches | HeraldScotland
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/homenews/19601815.call-make-scotland-worlds-first-rewilding-nation---nature-recovery-project-launches/
> Scotland
This is cool. I should know this but I don't: I assume large parts of Scotland were forested in past centuries?
Quote from: Brad on September 24, 2021, 07:06:16 PM
This is cool. I should know this but I don't: I assume large parts of Scotland were forested in past centuries?
I guess so, a friend has spent some weeks in the past planting trees up there in hippy volumes with a team trying to replace what I think he called the Caledonian Forest
>Caledonian Forest Easy kw
What is left of the Old Caledonian Forest - and can it be saved? | The Scotsman
https://www.scotsman.com/news/environment/what-left-old-caledonian-forest-and-can-it-be-saved-1483241
QuoteCaledonian Forest Easy kw
If I looked it up you would be bored :)
Actually I do have a bit more to add. My sister in Law we went to see recently, was showing us parts of the Cairngorm national park where they are trying to let the forest come back naturally. In the 1980s and 1990, they were planting big blocks of single type trees, and you can still see the squares of forest today.
The approach now (Last 20 years or more) is to let the trees come back more naturally. The downside is time... it takes ages for them to grow. If you go up Meall a Bhuachaille (I cannot pronounce it) you can see the mountain ash, willow and various firs that are effectively rewilding the hillside. The higher you go of couse the smaller the trees. To help this, deer have been removed from the hill, as they eat the trees.
Busy beavers: up close with Cornwall's furry eco-warriors
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2021/nov/16/busy-beavers-up-close-with-cornwall-furry-eco-warriors
Scotland's beaver population doubles to 1,000 in three years - BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-58158296
Uh oh (http://th3core.com/talk/water-coolerextra/exponential-growth), that's a million beavers by 2050 ;-)
Which doesn't sound like that many... I wonder what the original population was.
A couple of weeks ago, I saw a map showing their spread across EU. Pretty much every country had been recolonized.
By the beginning of the 20th century the decline had been reversed with legal protection. European beavers have now been restored to over 24 nations where they were formerly extinct. They are currently estimated to number around 639,000 individuals in mainland Europe.
Beaver Reintroductions in Europe | BACE
https://beaversinengland.com/reintroductions/beaver-reintroductions-in-europe/
Tasmanian Devil returns to Australian mainland
https://wildark.org/journals/tasmanian-devils-return-to-mainland-australia-for-first-time-in-3000-years/
Reforestation:
Croatia's seed-scattering drones replant forests hurt by fire
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/croatia-s-seed-scattering-drones-replant-forests-hurt-by-fire/ar-AAQOcD9
UK: Farmers and landowners to bid for funds to 'rewild' countryside
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/farmers-george-eustice-government-norfolk-england-b975143.html
>We need to get back to figuring out how to do this. And it will require a plan from the government to do it.
You mean like CRP that started in 1985?
https://www.fsa.usda.gov/programs-and-services/conservation-programs/conservation-reserve-program/
> CRP
Sort of only bigger and longer term. If you are going to plant forest you need really long contracts. Also not only focused on agriculture but yes that too.
Researchers Restore Scotland's Peat Bogs - Neatorama
https://www.neatorama.com/2022/01/10/Researchers-Restore-Scotland-s-Peat-Bogs/
>> peat
Interesting. I just started reading the Kindle free sample of this:
Swamplands. Tundra Beavers, Quaking Bogs, and the Improbable World of Peat
https://islandpress.org/books/swamplands
Despite the smell and sometimes knee-high muck, I really enjoyed exploring the peat bogs in Ireland.
PS - the longer Guardian article is worth a read
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/04/dank-ancient-and-quite-fantastic-scotland-peat-bogs-breathe-again-aoe
Seychelles' Bird Island was once covered in coconut groves. When a local bought the island, he took it in a different direction – one that's turned it into a home for 500,000 birds.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220302-seychelles-bird-island-a-paradise-with-too-many-palm-trees
Scotland's forests are the largest they have been for 900 years The share of Scotland that is forested has increased from 6 percent a century ago to around 18 per cent today
https://www.newstatesman.com/chart-of-the-day/2022/04/scotlands-forests-are-the-largest-they-have-been-for-900-years
Breaking forest news: Vermont
Foresters hope 'assisted migration' will preserve landscapes as the climate changes
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1098828128/foresters-assisted-migration-preserve-landscapes-climate-change
QuoteOne variety of red spruce, especially chosen for its origins in the mountains of West Virginia, will become a test
I remember years ago reading that the climate of Vermont in 2100 was expected to be similar to Virginia or Maryland in 1900.
Also about 20 years ago, I was talking to one of my father's old Air Guard pilot buddies who had started a very successful business selling maple syrup and other VT products. He had ended up on the board of some maple research lab and he said they were worried about a future in which sugar maples couldn't grow in Vermont. Most maple syrup production is in Canada already, but VT is the largest US producer and it's pretty important culturally.
Meanwhile, in this neck of the woods (so to speak), they are looking at assisted migration of sequoia trees, though it's not clear where they would go. They do know that thousands of years ago, when the climate was different, they had a much wider range and it looks like there's a good chance they will not survive the next couple hundred years (I think we lost 10% of the total just last year or the year before and we're talking about trees that take a thousand years to replace). So even with assisted migration, we might have a period of centuries upon centuries without truly giant sequoias or with very small numbers of them.
>assisted migration
I found that part interesting because I've been thinking about how tree and crop ranges will change with the climate. At least Vermont is experimenting with it.
Locally, my town is going to be doing some sort of nature restoration to about 60 acres of woodlots, tree-lines and long abandoned farm fields. We've engaged a local non-profit that does this sort of thing and I'm waiting for their survey report and recommendations. I know part of it will be the removal of invasive species but I'm curious as to whether they recommend active planting of trees in the abandoned fields or letting nature re-wild that acreage.
EU seeks to halve use of pesticides, heal nature with landmark laws
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/eu-seeks-heal-bring-back-nature-with-landmark-law-2022-06-22/
Only 3% of England under nature protection - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-63301703
https://theconversation.com/monks-wood-wilderness-60-years-ago-scientists-let-a-farm-field-rewild-heres-what-happened-163406
Nice study. This is the best way so long as you are adjacent to a natural woodland.
https://anglotopia.net/british-news/conservationists-set-to-begin-creating-englands-largest-native-woodland/
We've got parking lots with more trees than England.
"At around 13% forest cover in 2015, the UK is one of the least densely forested countries in Europe (Table 9.1, Figure 9.1). This compares with 38% for the EU as a whole and 31% worldwide."
https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/statistics/forestry-statistics/forestry-statistics-2018/international-forestry-3/forest-cover-international-comparisons/
US: Where will trees move in the future, by species.
https://observablehq.com/@climatelab/where-will-trees-move-in-the-future?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template
Source:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2023/tree-species-climate-change-north-shift/?itid=ap_harrystevens
Why replanted forests don't create the same ecosystem as old-growth, natural forests.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/134ies7/why_replanted_forrests_dont_create_the_same/
QuoteUK is one of the least densely forested countries in Europe
Probably as we are also one of the most densely populated.
How restoring rivers' natural curves can prevent flooding
https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20240918-how-restoring-rivers-natural-curves-can-prevent-flooding
South Africa Tackles Invasives to Protect Land and Water | World Resources Institute
https://www.wri.org/insights/south-africa-fighting-back-against-invasive-plants
How 12,000 Tonnes of Dumped Orange Peel Grew Into a Landscape Nobody Expected to Find
https://www.sciencealert.com/how-12-000-tonnes-of-dumped-orange-peel-produced-something-nobody-imagined
Cool story!
I hope they repeat this experiment someday. It's a win-win sort of solution.