The Huge Problem With Rewilding...

As someone who does not have the professional education and training to fully develop and maintain an ecosystem, Rewilding to me means: reversing the human imposed impediments on natural systems.
This isn't the right approach for all projects, but simply allowing and helping nature to return to a state that is not radically altered by humans is the goal, imo. My area in the Northern California Central Valley has done lots of allowing wetlands to naturally return to equilibrium by restricting human access and development, which is amazing for biodiversity and quality of life for us living here, but not anywhere near the scale of what can be done in more rural areas with proper rewilding projects that use science to reestablish a lost ecosystem. I think we need more popularity and vocabulary for people to use to advance Nature's return.

We were talking about landscape scale conservation management when I got my first job in the 1980s. It was pretty much a pipe dream. But it was boosted by the work of Vera and others and it morphed into rewilding. I'd agree with your core definition: rewilding is about increasing nature. This might entail keeping grass short and knocking holes in the sward to expose the chalk just below to prevent the local extinction of autumn ladies tresses orchids, eyebrights, kidney vetch (with the small blue butterflies whose caterpillars feed on it) and bastard toadflax on an isolated site. It might be restoring hazel coppice in ancient woodland on a farm with the aim of having it re-cut every 7 years on a commercial basis and advocating for the control of deer browsing. Just standing back from an area of land and doing nothing isn't rewilding. It's doing nothing....

I love this perspective. My biggest problem with the word 'rewilding' has been the 'wild' part. I think for a lot of folks it implies 'no humans', which is of course wrong. Firstly, the value of nature comes from our experience of it, and secondly, there hasn't been an ecosystem void of human management for the last 10,000 years, so it's a moot point, unless the idea is to return to the Pleistocene.

Just no wolves or bears please. I like being able to wild camp and not think about being eaten in the night. Other than that, fill yer boots.

Land management is the perfect way to describe it

I was really pleased when Simon Reeve visited a farmer in Cornwall who introduced beavers to prevent flooding and soil erosion. 2 huge farming issues addressed by working in harmony with nature.

More working with nature, less victorian over engineering

All sounds very Agenda 21/30, Green New Deal, 15 min Cities and Global Depop to me?

To be fair there’s something funny about a man made solution to a man made problem. Nature doesn’t need us, we need to leave it alone. We don’t need to be everywhere and it doesn’t need human touch. I like your videos tho and there’s some great concepts to learn but there’s a real need for human free zones. It doesn’t need to be filmed or took in pictures or be a blog about it.

I acquired a house with 0.75 acres of grass and trees 5 years ago and decided to let much of the grass grow " wild". There was an explosion in mole numbers which prevent me using my mower to make paths as their tunnels and hillocks stand up. My intention was just to use a scythe and a strimmer to cut verges and paths but artrhritis in my spine makes this largely impossible. I have planted several apple and plum trees which have done well but in the last two years these have been attacked by deer with a lot of bark damage. The tops of the trees are now growing out of reach of the deer but they strip the bark off lower down. The rough grass I have now along with the deer visits mean I was twice bitten by ticks last summer and had to have blood tests and antibiotics. Grey squirrels are very damaging also.
A side effect of the long grass has been a massive slug population that damages the veg crops I try to grow in raised beds and even the flowers in pots in the front yard of the house. Tulip and hyacinth bulbs are regularly pillaged by grey squirrels .
The long grass has also resulted in an explosion in woodmice numbers and this despite plenty of tawny owls which I can hear calling loudly when I am sitting in my kitchen. The woodmice invaded my garage and destroyed bulbs before I got them planted and also they destroyed by stored onion crop in the garage.
Worse still is they invade the house daily. After killing twelve in as many days in succession I switched to live traps but I have to drive over the river to release them which is a daily task.
I switched tactics and stuffed all the holes around pipes I could find with wire wool and this has helped but they still come un regularly.
I try to prevent them getting further through the house but still had to deal with one caught by its front leg in a trap in the wee sma hours. As I crept along the corridor to bed in the dark I heard the trap bouncing and rattling about. I managed to get the trap into a bucket and released the mouse out side but its leg was smashed although it scuttled off.

All this spiel is just to prove that nothing is ever simple and I genuinely feel under attack by nature here ! I have a sizeable burn on three sides of the garden here and am dreading the arrival of beavers from the big river at the foot of the garden - that will be the end of my orchard area for sure.

I live in a region near the interior of the european continent. I have been experimenting with wildflowers for years now and some of them are just amazing. They flower through the hottest and driest parts of summer without any watering and they attract so many types of wild animals from insects to birds. I do not know why people call any native wild plant a weed.

The UK context is important. It’s a country the size of the state of Ohio and about a third of the land is upland and not really suitable for productive agriculture and much human settlement. In the rest of it there are 67 million people, with an expanding population. So unsurprisingly it’s not easy finding space for wildlife and choices about what sort of wildlife have to be made

Hello, I just subscribed because I would like to see more about rewinding in gardens. It's something I have tried to do in my garden. My brother also has 2 acres of forest at the back of his property with a creek running through it, and I'd like to learn how to help him manage invasive plants, deer and erosion.

Determine what we need,, areas for sports picknicks, dog walking etc etc what's the dominant traffic? Then determine what is essential and what's not to meet that demand only...The issue is people never seem to value what's available until its removed...so change the script,,, ,there are ways of making woodland environments assessable and useful so increase the diversity of what natural environments are useful to us by attracting people towards woodland environments as well as open spaces,,,,, ,They can have picknick areas and facilities with bins to contain waste.... they can have sculptures and clearing specifically designed to attract people,,, its about making natures natural state something we accept and value equally... Once upon a time a long long time ago woodland environment's gave us a feeling of safety and security they were inviting and nurturing they sheltered us provided for us and changed our body chemistry making us feel healthier and more at ease...Use intelligent design in moderation to change attitudes.....simple!

A civilisation that is designed to be conducive and complimentary to the nature world would look totally different to what we currently have.

Which comes first? Human rights? The animals rights? Or tree rights?

Call me old fashioned but i think we should home ourselves first.

I think "rewilding" is a poor choice of word. Wrong in fact. Why? Because it has several connotations which are nothing to do with the goal. It's a misnomer and as such adds confusion or at least requires a long qualification speech whenever it's used.

Wild = out of control or allowing nature to take its own course. This is not accurate. Anytime man interacts with nature (leaving aside for the moment that man IS a part of nature) it's always with the intention of obtaining a specific result (making more trees, growing food, providing specific species habit etc.) so interventions always need to be viewed with that context ( end result) in mind. Why? Because there is always a trade off - create more woods - lose grasses, support wetland species - lose human foot access, introduce apex predators - lose safety, you name it - figure out the negative trade off.

What we're trying to accomplish is stewardship of nature and natural resources such that we keep an optimum balance between human beings and taking full care to see that nature and our fellow beings are unharmed and have what they need to flourish.

I would like to contribute in rewilding process in my country Poland as well. There is this strange fashion to cut the back yards to sad short lawns which kills all biodiversity and leaves basically no space for nature. Changing this fashion and peoples mindset would be good start to introduce rewilding my and may other countries.

When we moved into our home, the garden looked overgrown and yet there were pockets of some gorgeous plants, but it’s lacked diversity, and similarly with wildlife (it was mainly grass and ivy, with spring bulbs and a few herbs). Six years later, it’s a massive haven for all sorts from the tinniest wrens, chaff/gold finches, ghost newts, toads, frogs to grass snakes, hedgehogs through to solitary bees, ladybirds, dragon flies and all others between, including the occasional fox passing through. We have a very small pond which we can easily net off when the toddlers come round, and it’s used daily by all sorts. The beds are full all year round with a riot of colour from a few trees, bulbs, perennials, shrubs and a few annuals; plus veg dotted here and there. We grow a huge variety of all our own herbs and most of our veg and salads, home here too, as well as on our double sized allotment. I’ve planned the garden beds to support all sorts of wildlife and encourage diversity. The ornamental parts of the garden have only required hand watering twice, once when we planted the plants, and through the drought of 2 yrs ago (mainly for the fruit 🍉 ), plus we collect all our own rain water for the raised veg beds and topping up the pond. It’s taken a lot of energy at the beginning, but when we look out whilst eating, or sitting outside, we have immense satisfaction. It looks stunning (well we think so), and such a change from some others we know who have a mega huge lawn (we have a medium sized one), and slabs, or a few green shrubs in the act of looking minimalistic -boring springs to mind. So many people want an easy to maintain garden and make the mistake of using slabs, stones and rely on colour from annuals. It’s not so, as they have to sweep these huge swathes of dead stone, spend ages feeding their lawns, weeding it and cutting, and leaf blowing the borders, and clean the slime off the stone clippings or pebbles. Their gardens are devoid of bird or wildlife, and hardly any bird song (always from their neighbours), where we have to mow, occasionally dead head the borders, and weed (we don’t feed, just compost), whilst we enjoy the beauty, scents, taste, and ultimately the colours and a choir of bird song. I think it’s a no brainier, and before people judge about the cost, it was negligible as I grew most of the plants from seed, or cuttings, and still swap them today for plants I haven’t got.

We need to make our food production and general living spaces more harmonious, like with permaculture and agroforestry techniques. Right now, human areas are like monuments to anti-nature, it's super weird. They need to become living spaces that produce our needs and cycle our waste.

Like with big monoculture fields. Wide spaced rows of mixed food trees can be placed and normal annual cropping happens in between, perhaps with some nitrogen fixing nurse trees to begin with if the land is very degraded. As the trees grow, you chop\drop to control light and build the "forest" floor. The annual food space diminishes as the perennial food space increases and becomes more abundant. Ernst Gotsch is doing great work on that in Brazil, converting farm equipment to harmonious purpose.

In modern apple orchards they do it all wrong, mutating the trees with heavy pruning trhat greatly increases sucker shoots, requiring more pruning. Apples are an overstory tree, they shouild be allowed to become that because the later stages of that trees life do all sorts of cool things for the animals. Even though apples come from Kazakstan, they have naturalized across the USA without dominating the local ecosystem. Native food webs are super important, but no ecosystem is completely static, there is always change. That doesn't mean go plant honeysuckle or barberry, but I'm also not worried about them because nature will eventually create a balance with them. We've stirred the pot sooo much, I'd be fine with small legit steps, like people getting some percentage of their food directly from the land with their own effort, even if that means harvesting invasive autumn olive. I wonder about the power of invasives to fight desertification. Seems like man-made wasteland forms a feedback loop that makes it hard for it to get better, any sort of robust living systems would be better than that. We may come to a time when we need to forage for survival and we will be very grateful for those hardy allies.

But who knows? Our technological capacity is growing so quickly we might be able to make it all better, but I expect some sort of major collapse first because of the momentum of the way we have now. So many people are still caught up in the hollow shine of status and ownership, they simply don't care. They will care when they realize they need the living world to survive. It's true right now, butnthe entire system is built to keep people separate from their food. We need natural food gardens everywhere so that we can leave the wilds as places to regenerate and take lightly from. I don't believe in fullyt setting aside nature like some art piece. We are animals, we are meant to meet our needs from the wilds, but most people are too far removed from the mindset needed to do it harmoniously. A major collapsw would whet the appetite to understand nature again, fueled by actual need, like in all of human history. That was the foundation of truly sustainable ways of being, need.

Kill Your Lawn!

Well that's what Tony Santoro says.

AKA Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't

Sometimes he gives some practical demonstrations of how.

I agree about the matter of scale. The thing is that "scale scales". (Yes, I know that's semantic jibberish, but it hints at a potential meaning all the same.) Take one person killing his lawn. You'll probably find that at least ten butterflies are given a better chance in life by this. Now if three do, and they're neighbours, they might put hedgehog tunnels through the fences so that now there's an apex predator to eat some of the butterflies. (But there are 30 of them, so there's plenty to spare.)

Telling people what they must do with their assets is an intrusion. Sharing and perhaps incentivizing a vision is another matter. How many folks supporting rewilding have actually worked to own land? I'd like to see the great plains support 20 million bison again, perhaps see a forest growing from the coast of Maine to Northern Rockies. The compensation required makes it somewhat unlikely.

The definition of rewinding needs to address if or not non-native species are included in rewinding.

You can increase biodiversity easily if you release a bunch of non-native or invasive species but this is probably not a good thing to do.

Populations are naturally declining, but unfortunately is the unbalance between riches and poor which creates empty buildings (read secondary houses) for the former and small crowded always more expensive spaces or no homes for the latter (most of the world population) 😐
Creating livable and more sustainable cities and towns which are connected to each others. 🔄
Agree with you on most part 🌿

Should I be afraid if a wolf or coyote approaches me in an apparently non-hostile way?

In Denmark, rewilding has been framed, by the political right, as animal abuse. When most Danes hear the word rewilding they automatically think about the Mols lab, which is a Danish rewilding initiative that has garnered strong opposition due to the animals, allegedly, being abused. The nature-part is completely overshadowed by the animal-abuse-frame.

> These animals, however, are species that are used to being wild in other countries and their genes are optimized for the rewilding project they inhabit.

For those in the US wanting to do more for biodiversity at home check out Doug Tallamy and beHomegrown National Park

The huge problem with rewilding is we fecking live here.

In the US, "rewilding" has somewhat of a negative connotation in many circles, given it is primarily associated with Pleistocene rewilding, which has well-documented negative impacts on the landscape here. "Ecological restoration" is the preferred term.

A bit of a shame IMO, "rewilding" rolls off the tongue better and has an air of almost mysticism to it.

Doing my small part.

Years ago Blackpool council allowed unusable football fields rewild. They cut paths along desire lines that had developed. Butterflies, other insects, swallows and other birds. Local families bringing little picnics and enjoying the grasses. But, Like in other places, there were the complaints. As these were the noisier and slightly better off locals they got their way. The grasses were returned to the green desert. So sad.

we need a debate those of us who see nature as a vital part of our lives everywhere we look its there around us both protecting and delighting in her grace and power we have a need to improve ourselves establish nature zones outside every city or town offer buisness tax incentives to grow trees , wetlands, tourist sites bring home native animals that add diversity , wonder and excitment we only need to want this let nature live wild and free this is the right way to be

Coount me in, I want live in a tree house with my parrots :)

"increasing nature/biodiversity" is perhaps a bit of a broad definition that doesn't address the ambiguity of rewilding's definition that leads to these challenges of different interpretations. You could say that traditional conservation has this goal also. What is interesting is the HOW we achieve that goal. Theres lots of good academic work looking at the definitions of rewilding in its focus on reinstating ecosystem processes so that humans dont need to manage so much. You could extend this view to examine how to rewild food production by exploring farming practices that intervene less (fertilisers, ploughing etc) to allow natural processes to play a bigger role (natural predators of pests, companion planting etc).

first we need to tax every type of pollution ! and tax the super rich. this - and the new economy- will make re-wilding more sensible, affordable and even happen on its own.

Beautiful. Because you and we are agents in Rewilding.

When the U. S. created Shenandoah National Park, they thought that rewilding meant removing the Scots-Irish who lived in those mountains. So they did. Hillbillies were considered subhuman, so these Scots-Irish were taken from their land, institutionalized and “spayed or neutered” for eugenics reasons.

Those balds, the fields where the Scots-Irish had lived, had been open prairie and grassland for thousands of years, burned by the Native Americans who had been the original hillbillies, and of course once they were removed, the balds closed up.

The result: a substantial drop in biodiversity. The humans had been gardeners of this wild landscape, promoting diversity, and promoting a deeper and more complex web of ecological interaction.

The old London Bridge added habitat diversity to the Thames. Native Brazilians made their rainforest more diverse by slash & burn. Today’s Rewilding is the latest in an ancient tradition of humans improving a landscape with our agency.

Much respect for covering this. It’s a revolutionary notion.

There ARE a lot of conflicting opinionS and thoughtS (plural)

I don't really think thinking rewinding in scale of your garden helps. What you want is some ecosystems, small and large patches of forest and nature. With cities for example it's really good idea to have small forests all around, they act as natural separators and background. Also sound barriers and makes air better.
While I'm all for having a lot of wild nature, I actually think having your own home property managed just makes sense. Ofc, it's pretty different if you have huge property somewhere on countryside. Overall, manage stuff that you want to manage to look orderly and nice, and leave everything else wild.

Naturing

Lack of habitat is an indicator of overpopulation. Yet, the UK is taking on immigrants as fast as possible. This policy has consequences.
You can't import 1+ million people per year and expect there to be no effect on the environment.

Found this channel cause I was looking into the difference between rewilding projects. Have been a contributor to Mossy Earth but also found Project Wild just today. Really makes me think of just how many rewilding projects there are

Good definition.
I would add, rewilding nature is most important to do in areas people temporarily use for resources, than abandon.
Example, mining operations (both underwater and on land), deforestation, mono-cultured areas, or demolition areas.

Every town & city parks department has dozens to hundreds of acres of lawns that get mowed too short, too often. School districts as well. Tell them to mow higher and mow less often! Allow some fields to return to meadow with no mowing. Use the savings from fuel & labor to help prune healthy trees, fell sick & struggling trees in forests, and to mulch a portion of that dead timber and spread those woodchips over sandy & eroding soil. I want to found an "eco consulting service" because flashy greenwash marketing is maybe the only thing these mower-heads (and the people in charge) will listen to.

The most absurd lie is that rewilding is filling areas with domesticated livestock to serve human consumption. When you can make people believe absurdities, you can make them commit atrocities.

You dumped in a huge question, right in the first words. "This is just another form of land management." In otherwords, more "business as usual." Life is river. It flows. We are chucking rocks in that river. One thing I learned, building dams as a kid, the water will always build up till it washes our dam away. So, we've been through "conservation", now we are into "rewilding" . . . but sooner or later we are going to have to arrive at the end game. If we want this planet to carry on supporting us, we need to let go of at least half of it, and allow "life" to get on with doing it's thing, even if one day, that does not involve "us" - well, the surest way to go extinct, is to carry on ripping up the planet for cash. At this point, people will howl at me. But I leave them with one last question. There are gut worms that live up the chicken's bottom. Surely the chicken would be happier without them, but it is warm and wet, and there is food up there, and life evolved a creature to live in that. Rewilding may be a nice "management" tool, but we need to start asking what life is doing on this planet, or we will fail. What do we do about the gut worms up the chicken's bottom? Why did "life" put them there? Discuss . . . soon.

In south africa conservation and allowing nature to do her thing are the same thing.

Thanks a lot for your excellent videos. It's a lot of time and effort and the content is definitely very high quality. That said, I feel the need to react strongly to this episode. How could the arithmetic of rewilding work with small scale individual initiatives? For instance, the 23 million gardens are only 433000 hectares, or 4330 km^2 - less than 1.8 % of the total area of the UK. Just your glorious British golf courses dwarf that. Also, patches of "wilderness" aren't really "wilderness" because they are isolated and don't allow for the exchanges necessary for actual wilderness to develop. Finally, globally, over 50% of habitable land is allocated to agriculture, and over 20% to forestry - both numbers growing at a rate that is far superior to any small scale rewilding effort. If we want your grand children to have a chance to enjoy any reasonable patch of wilderness, we definitely need radical changes in society. Tiptoeing around the biggest offenders and pushing the responsibility on the shoulder of a few willing individuals isn't going to be effective enough - far from it.

A Pole Shift might have to come first, and then the settling in of the Rewilding! Lord knows where we might end up!

Loving your content here in the USA!

I bought an 3 acre property in Alberta, Canada. My future garden will be as wild as my past ones have been. But I'm building the house now, the garden is 3 years in the future. But I already do the most important thing in that respect: Talking with the neighbors in order to soften them up. They seem to spend whole days on tractor like machines grooming the "lawn". Watching them they seem to be in a state of trance when doing this idiotic work. Back in Germany people would call me out to the authorities and threaten me with the courts for such crimes as converting the prescribed front lawn into garden beds, having some frogs in a pond, etc. They would count the dandelions in my beds. Very important to bribe people around you into just accepting you and a little bit of nature.