<
https://news.mongabay.com/2023/08/from-debt-to-diversity-a-journey-of-rewilding-carbon-capture-and-hope/>
"It’s the sort of June day that British summers should be made of, but rarely
are. Pink flower-flecked brambles proliferate in knurled mounds, scattered
across 3,500 sun-soaked acres of West Sussex scrubland audibly humming with
bees. Curvy-horned cows chew rhythmically under shady old oaks among billowing
stands of pussywillow and hawthorn. The birdsong is unreal. A thrush sends
liquid top notes out across air punctuated by the raucous melody of a feathered
orchestra. And above it all, a stork wheels.
If it weren’t for the plastic tags in the cows’ ears and the overhead drone of
occasional passenger planes, we could be 600 years ago. That’s about the last
time storks nested wild in England, Isabella Tree told me. A writer, farmer and
owner of the Knepp Estate, Tree strides across this magnificently disheveled
landscape crafted by herself and her husband, Charles Burrell.
Rewind 23 years and this place was a debt-ridden, subsidy-dependent farm, its
already poor soil made worse by intensive agricultural practices. There were
certainly no storks.
But Tree and Burrell have helped nature reestablish its course at Knepp since
then, in a process known as rewilding. Reintroducing white storks (
Ciconia
ciconia) is merely the icing on the cake. Fencing has been ripped down, large
mammals introduced, drains smashed, even a river rewiggled. Reintroduced
beavers have masterminded a whole new wetland.
Now the place is thriving. Harvest mice (
Micromys minutus), hedgehogs
(
Erinaceus europaeus) and hobby falcons (
Falco subbuteo), dormice
(
Muscardinus avellanarius), dung beetles and dingy skipper butterflies
(
Erynnis tages), among many others, have established themselves here. Surveys
have found an astounding 1,800 invertebrates species (almost 10% of the U.K.’s
known vertebrates)."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-school-meals-transit-us-ecuador-conservation/>
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
