Nature Bats Last (the good version)
The declarations of a Day, a Month, a Year and sometimes even an entire Decade to rally awareness around a worthy cause are almost always a sign of last ditch desperation. The longer the designated time period, the more lost the cause. Fifty-four years after the first “Earth Day,” we now have “Earth Month” and, sure enough, things aren’t going well.
In 1970, atmospheric carbon levels were 325 parts per million, well below the 350 ppm that Bill McKibben and others have deemed safe. Today, it’s 425 ppm and accelerating.
In 1970, the PET bottle had yet to be invented. (It was patented in 1973.) There was no Great Pacific Garbage Patch to clean up. No need for for “Interceptors” to collect keep staggering amounts of plastic trash from racing out to sea.
In 1970, the plastic shopping bag was still more than a decade away from becoming the poster-product of single-use blight. Ironically, it was originally invented to reduce the need for cut down trees to make paper bags, a cheap, re-usable option.
In 1970, the Apple Macintosh computer was still 14 years in the future and The Age of E-waste was still on the distant horizon.
In 1970, the human population was 3.7 billion. There are now more than twice as many people, all needing and wanting more food, more water, more clothes, more shelter, more stuff.
It is unclear how many more of these “Earth Months” the planet can handle.
According to the UN’s recent Global Resources report, 100 billion metric tons of raw materials—food and fiber crops, lumber, minerals, metals, fossil fuels—are farmed, felled, mined and pumped out of the Earth each year to make all the stuff we need and want. Transformed into materials that will outlast by decades, sometimes centuries, most of it will end up as garbage, much of it within a few months.
Thanks to all the water that has been syphoned from aquifers, the planet has been knocked off its “True North” axis. We did that! Earth is literally on tilt, listing an additional 1.7” each year. Because of us.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that given the least little chance, nature attempts to repair the damage.
The first Earth Day was grounded in Rachel Carson’s warnings of petrochemical apocalypse (a Silent Spring) and the land ethic of ecologist Aldo Leopold. It was a day for cleaning up aluminum cans in parks and lobbying for clean air and water. 1970 also saw the passage of (now weakened) Clean Air Act, which was followed two years later by the Clean Water Act. It was hippies, flower power and Joni Mitchell.
Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
Earth Day was a Pete Seeger sing-along.
Where have all the flowers gone?
Rewilding
Well, there are quite a few at Knepp, a sprawling 3,500 acre “rewilding” project in Sussex, England. Rewilding, or as Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell who inherited the land prefer to call it, “wilding,” is a branch of conservation focused on ecological function rather than the preservation of any specific species. In a world with a rapidly changing climate and a significant, accelerating loss of biodiversity, it isn’t possible to create a perfect replica of what once was.
Ecosystems are shaped by the constant interplay of residents (plants, animals, insects, fungi, microbes; permanent, seasonal, migratory) with weather, nutrient flows, day-length, pollution and climate change.
Even in the best of times with more predictable, less extreme weather and a steady climate, change is a constant. Ecosystems are movies, not snapshots.
These, of course, are not the best of times. So to speed up a return to ecological balance, Tree and Burrell take a pragmatic approach, identifying species able to fill functional niches left vacant by animals no longer in the mix: Longhorn cattle in lieu of extinct aurochs. Exmoor ponies standing in for prehistoric horses. Tamworth pigs as understudies for wild boar (which are illegal to import).
Browsers and grazers keep grasslands and forests healthy. Rooting pigs create muddy wallows. Beavers are in charge of wetlands. Mycelial networks link the world of the soil microbiome to everything above. Insects provide food, pollination, and as vectors of disease, help keep populations of plants and animals in balance.
Knepp isn’t a true wilderness. This isn’t “hands off the wheel,” as Tree likes to say, because there are no top predators to keep populations of herbivores in check. Tree and Burrell have to take on that responsibility, determining how much land is needed to support x number of animals, then culling herds as needed.
They are, as Aldo Leopold put it, “Thinking Like a Mountain.”
This is the 75th anniversary of A Sand County Almanac, which includes Leopold’s famous essay recalling his early days working for the US Forest service in Arizona and New Mexico on how the death of a wolf opened his eyes to an ecological truth:
“…In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy…
…We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean a hunter’s paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view…
…I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades…”
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Knepp may be among the most well-known rewilding projects, but there are many such efforts happening at every scale all over the world.
For the last 30 years, Tomkins Conservation has been working to preserve massive areas of wilderness in South America to turn them into national parks:
Closer to home—literally—is Homegrown National Park, a grassroots movement inspired by the work of entomologist and wildlife ecologist Doug Tallemy:
“... (W)hat if each American landowner converted half of his or her yard to productive native plant communities? Even moderate success could collectively restore some semblance of ecosystem function to more than 20 million acres of what is now ecological wasteland. ”
And then there is Mossy Earth, a UK-based, donor-supported nonprofit with an enthusiastic international following that works on projects from Eastern Europe to the Amazon. Often partnering with local conservation groups, Mossy Earth is fanatical about sharing data and posting videos detailing their progress on YouTube. Here are three to get you started:
Go Wild
In The Book of Wilding: A Practical Guide to Rewilding Big and Small, Tree and Burrell not only explain how they pulled off the miracle that is Knepp, but also provide advice for those of us interested in something similar, if far less ambitious. The meticulously, lovingly researched book is filled with photographs, illustrations, charts and plenty of delightful insights.
Who knew thorny scrub makes a terrific tree nursery? A bluejay drops an acorn in a thicket and those needle-sharp thorns keep squirrels from getting anywhere near it. As the sapling grows, the thorns keep browsers at bay. Then one day you look up and there’s an oak tree, well on its way to becoming a giant oak tree.
My garden near Chicago doesn’t have thorny scrub. But it does have a dense tangle of 80 year-old peonies and flowering bushes that managed to pull off the same trick. Last summer, a self-seeded redbud tree and a companion hackberry poked through the peony leaf nursery. Now both trees are about 12’ tall, with the hackberry poised to leave its friend in the understory dust. They chose a perfect spot, with no overhead wires and plenty of sunshine. This spring they have become a favorite perch for migrating songbirds.
We—the trees and me—couldn’t be more thrilled.
To my garden of planted natives (prairie plants) and naturalized citizens (peonies, lilacs, iris, lilies), rewilding has been added to the mix.
And soon, there will be thousands upon thousands, possibly millions of cicadas, too. For 16 years they have been sipping on tree roots every summer and burrowing beneath shifting frost lines in winter. Now, for their 17th birthday, they are ready to let loose, make a lot of noise and relish for their season in the sun.
When their cicada parents emerged in 2007, atmospheric CO2 levels were 384 ppm. Assuming an identical increase of 41 ppm over the next 17 years, their children will see a full on climate-tipped, overheated world when it’s their turn to party in 2041: 466 ppm.
It will be the same for all the human children born this year, too. Indeed, all the children or descendants of everything born this year.
We can do better for them. Nature can do much better for them.
We all just need to go a little wild.