Conservation's feral companion: rewilding
Conservation's feral companion: rewilding
Nature's plan to take on the climate fight
Simple climate action // I S S U E # 4 7 // R E W I L D I N G
When I studied environmental science in graduate school, I remember being asked if wild places still exist. Of course, I thought. I had seen them, hiked in them, lost myself there too many times to count. Wilderness, I believed at the time, was nature in its pristine state, defined chiefly by our own species’ absence.
Boy was I wrong. Wilderness, as I knew it then, doesn’t truly exist. And perhaps it never really did. Humans have been redesigning their environment as long as they have wielded stone axes or lit fires (skills our ancestors likely mastered at least a million years ago). But for millennia, our numbers were so modest nature still ran the show.
Things began to change about 7,000 years ago. That’s when the spread of agriculture, and the ensuing deforestation, began transforming the atmosphere. Farmers in China’s rice paddies, and woodcutters in European forests, left their signature in tiny air bubbles frozen in Antarctic ice. Air trapped in those ice cores shows rising concentrations of methane and carbon dioxide, heat-trapping gases slowly warming our planet. Those rising concentrations have only continued—and accelerated—through today.
So this week we’re exploring rewilding. The idea of restoring land to its “original” state is one way to cool the climate. Our writer Erik Ness will show us how humanity is putting land back into nature’s hands. Some efforts merely liberate backyards from the tyranny of the lawnmower. Others rank among the most ambitious conservation projects ever attempted, such as the 3.2-million-acre America Prairie Reserve, potentially the largest nature reserve in the contiguous US. All of these could help store billions of tons of carbon in soils and trees.
Join us this month as Erik will take us on a journey to understand how rewilding the planet (and your own patch of grass) is a key to a better climate. Enjoy.
Michael Coren
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Want to see the results from last week’s poll? Here’s your reported comfort levels with a green funeral after we explored its intersection with climate in July: 🌱💀⚱️⚰️
Yes, definitely. ✅: 33%
Maybe. It might take some time for me to process the idea, but the seed has been planted. 🌱: 11%
How to rewild a home (planet)
Becoming “intelligent tinkerers” in our own ecosystem
By Erik Ness
Like many Americans, I was an ecological engineer before I became a teenager: it was my job to mow the lawn.
Our scruffy field, just shy of three acres in the Finger Lakes region of New York, hosted picnics, softball games, a horse (briefly), and a rotating gang of free-range kids. Cutting the lawn took three to four hours on a stamped metal seat pulled behind a puttering Gravely mower. Those hours taught me a lot about daydreaming, and about swallows’ trajectories as they ambushed grasshoppers fleeing my advance.
While mowing the lawn made me an ecological engineer, it didn’t make me a particularly good one. And I was not alone. America devotes a kingdom to its patchwork of actual and wannabe Kentucky bluegrass: 40 million acres, four times the land we allocate to growing corn. While lawns are voracious consumers of water, fuel, fertilizer, and pesticides, they're a biodiversity graveyard. All those swallows and grasshoppers provided a false sense of ecological security. A lawn isn’t exactly a dead landscape, but it’s a 2-dimensional mono-crop with a slender ecological resume.
“Grass is the worst choice,” says University of Delaware entomology professor Doug Tallamy. “The only thing worse is cement.” To restore some of this biodiversity (and soil carbon), Tallamy, the author of Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard, proposes that everybody replace half of their lawn with native plants. “It's not a total solution, but it will help. As you're rebuilding biodiversity,” he says, you’re “going to sequester a lot more carbon.”
Biodiversity, biodiversity, biodiversity
We’re living through a biodiversity crisis as severe and dangerous as the climate crisis. Old battles over snail darters and spotted owls seem quaint compared to recent alarms: Scientists warn of “insect apocalypse” and the “amphibian extinction crisis” and the “staggering” loss of birds and forest. The very nature we need is shrinking even as we look towards nature-based climate solutions like storing carbon in forests and grasslands. Every species lost or ecosystem invaded frays the safety net further. As famed ecological thinker Aldo Leopold wrote about biodiversity, “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
Once a niche enterprise, restoration ecology—and its feral companion rewilding—are gaining in influence. The movement traces its roots back to Leopold and his colleagues who began building the science of ecological restoration in 1933 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Arboretum. What began with the world’s first prairie restoration now has practitioners worldwide in practically every imaginable ecosystem. If you buy into international declarations, we just entered the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration this year.
Rewilding is the hip younger cousin of restoration. The brainchild of Dave Foreman, who founded the direct action environmental group Earth First, rewilding is less about the technical details of restoring a particular patch of prairie, and more about rebuilding landscapes on the scale of the Great Plains—wolves and grizzlies included. Giving keystone predators and ecological engineers room to roam is critical for rewilding. There is even a serious community devoted to Pleistocene rewilding, with a moonshot goal of restoring extinct Siberian megafauna such as mastodons.
But you don’t need an apex predator to turn your backyard into a biodiversity backer. Planting an oak tree or a handful of native species isn’t technically restoration or rewilding, but that hardly matters. Because as you open your property to a wider range of all species you’re contributing to both. Different ecosystems store carbon at different rates and in different ways, and trying to emulate native habitat is the best way to support ecosystem services like pollination, water storage, and carbon sequestration. Whether you call that restoration or rewilding may depend on your mood, your day, and if you have a 10-year-old to keep you focused.
A bend in the creek
In 1974, the small town of Honeoye Falls, near Rochester, New York, needed a physician. My father, Dave Ness—Doctor Dave, as many townsfolk came to call him—was searching for a rural practice close enough to Rochester that my mother could finish her medical training. The office in Honeoye Falls was attached to a spacious 1838 house that had served as a hospital during the Great Depression. But the clincher sprawled out back: nearly 3 acres of field, framed by a line of willow and cottonwood bordering Honeoye Creek.
The creek traced a wide arc around our field, just upstream of the town’s postcard-perfect falls. In the winter, ice jams flooded the meadows so it was in no danger of being developed. Before Europeans came, it was probably forest or perhaps a sedge meadow, and the soil is mostly too thin to cultivate. “That'll be probably enough to keep me interested and busy,” my dad recalled to me, 47 years later. “Busy” was a moving target that began with gardening and progressed to tree planting and then to harvesting firewood. But he certainly never imagined he’d spend the better part of his 78th summer removing 15 dump trucks full of invasive species.
We can't be certain what was here before the settlers’ axe and plow. This history matters because landscape is fluid. You need to define your target. This region of New York was not trackless wilderness before Europeans arrived. Thousands of acres were under cultivation, producing corn, squash, and beans for the O-non-dowa-gah, the Seneca Nation. Warm-season grasslands were likely maintained by fire.
Just two miles north, on another wide bend of Honeoye Creek, 4,000 Seneca lived in the town of Totiakton. It was sacked during a 1687 campaign by French forces consolidating the lucrative fur trade. Eliminating the beaver from much of North America would set off a profound series of changes across the continent. Wetlands dried up or were drained, then put to the plow. The soil was rich in organic carbon, which helped produce bumper crops. It also released masses of stored carbon into the air.
With the Seneca dispersed and the beaver extirpated, the Finger Lakes became an agricultural frontier. People like my father have choices when they think about restoration. The mosaic of hedge, woodland, and pasture of 100 years ago is bucolic and bounteous. You could also try to rewind to the days of the Seneca. “There are different points of restoration in both time and function that you could aim for,” explains Whitney Carleton, a restoration specialist in New York’s Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation (OPRHP). Both are more balanced than the invasive landscape now creeping across the landscape. Wholesale restoration isn’t possible, but what kind of rewilding might better support native species?
Restoring the food web
In 2000, Doug Tallamy wanted to restore the land surrounding his new home in southeastern Pennsylvania. The acres had once been mowed for hay. When mowing stopped, plant life—particularly invasives—exploded. “By the time we moved in, the whole 10 acres looked like Sleeping Beauty's castle,” says Tallamy. “It was just one giant tangle of Asian plants.”
Trained as an entomologist, Tallamy looks for insects by finding plant damage, then turning over a few leaves to catch a glimpse of the critters responsible. But when Tallamy went looking for insects in 2000, he didn't find many. That might make the gardener happy for her ornamental plant. It doesn’t help the bird looking to feed its young. That’s when Tallamy began to realize the kind of damage that invasive plant species were inflicting on many ecosystem processes.
You probably know that monarch butterflies need to feed on milkweed. This kind of specialization is driven by evolution, and is true for 90% of insects. Through habit, carelessness, and design, human-dominated landscapes are ruled by non-native plants. In one study of three national parks in the West, scientists found at least one invasive plant in 82% of their test plots. Never mind your hostas.
“You've got this runaway invasive plant problem, displacing the native plants that support insects. You've got all of the non-native ornamental plants,” he says. Block by block, subdivision by subdivision, it adds up to massive scale ecological disruption. It takes thousands of caterpillars to support a clutch of bird chicks. “No wonder we've got three billion fewer breeding birds than we used to have,” says Tallamy.
Invasion
Not long after Tallamy began his research on invasives and the food web, my father looked out into his own field and was stunned to see a huge, blooming edifice—three or four entwined multiflora rose. They'd snuck in, and exploded without him noticing. The East Asian native was so big he had to use an earthmover to remove it.
In the 1980s, when my father lost his mowing team to college, sections of the field gradually reverted to meadow. “It's more a refuge for myself and for other wildlife,” he says. He planted some birch and pine, trying to remake a piece of the north woods he loves. The birch died and only some of the evergreens thrived. He began a small orchard and planted black locust to fuel a wood stove. He planted white oak and black cherry.
Walking in his field has now become a daily part of my father’s spiritual practice, and he saw deer return after decades of absence—a novelty, then quickly a nuisance. Each new round of trees had to be protected by chicken wire cages. Tulip poplars sprouted inside his garden fence, and he transplanted them creekside inside fenced enclosures.
The image of that multiflora rose lingered until he read Tallamy’s book and began to realize how completely the invaders had infiltrated his refuge. “I realized that the focus should be on native species,” he says. “To make sure that I'm thinking in terms of what would be a productive ecosystem in terms of energy flow.” He discovered invasive honeysuckle too, and realized how damaging the invasion could be: nothing else could grow. They didn't even feed the deer, increasing the browsing pressure on the remaining native trees.
In 2019 he planted 50 more trees, and in 2020 another 40. And when the pandemic locked him down, he channeled his energy into the field. All through the summer he and his helper Brad Bandemer cut and cleared, loading dump truck after dump truck. Fifteen to be exact. At times he looked like Hercules. Other times he looked like Sisyphus.
An accidental restoration
To see what one landowner might accomplish largely by accident, I asked Whitney Carleton, the restoration specialist with the New York’s parks office, to visit Honeoye Falls. Ecological restoration sounds daunting and precise, but what happens when a landowner—driven by his love of trees and his need to work outside—plants a grove here and lets the hedge overflow the lawn there?
We wanted her insight on the native landscape—what restoration ecologists call ‘reference ecosystems’. The report card was mixed. As my father feared, he has a few more invasive species to worry about—particularly buckthorn. What he thought was a nice natural stand of pin cherry is at least partly an invasive shrub that feeds junk food to birds when they need sturdier food for the coming winter. Predictably, he’s got garlic mustard and dame’s rocket. But he also has native sedges, wild strawberry, and surprisingly healthy hemlock—usually the first thing on winter deer menus and often infested with hemlock woolly adelgid.
And Carleton was delighted to find basswood. Seneca lore is full of vague references to white flowers in spring like basswood and wild strawberry. “There's just a lot of love for all of the early white flowering things,” she says, pointing to a basswood in bloom. “That's a really wonderful one for you to have. I would absolutely encourage any basswood you could.”
She particularly appreciated that my dad planted trees first. “It's fun to see the evolution of your thought process,” says Carleton as we neared the end of our circuit. “I wholeheartedly believe that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the next best time is today. You've started with the part that takes the longest amount of time, which is fantastic.”
The next chapter starts in autumn. Honeoye Falls rewrote its code to allow deer archery, and thinning that herd should also help native plants. Indeed, the 100-year arc of deer in the US—from near extirpation to overpopulation—is a good reminder that the natural cycles of Earth have longer memories than we do. Actions we took centuries ago—like suppressing the beaver and plowing the frontier—are culminating now. Conversely, actions we take now—like planting an oak and replacing half of your lawn with something more ecologically attuned—help the climate now and long into the future.
If that sounds too easy, Tallamy insists that if you’re just getting started you can probably plant an acorn and call it a year. Oaks are keystone plants, capable of supporting a huge range of native insects.
Now that his oaks are taller and the invasives are under control, Tallamy has been recording the return of native moth species to his property. The last time we talked, the count was up to 1,158 species.
“The degree to which we've restored ecosystem function at our house has been a real motivating factor,” he says “We can put it back, and that's what excites me. That's what makes me want to address the global insect decline and biodiversity loss. It's a global problem, but it's got a grassroots solution. Everybody can fix their little piece of the earth. And you might not put rhinoceroses back on your property, but you can do an awful lot with the right plants.”
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Hothouse is a weekly climate action newsletter edited by Mike Coren, Jemima Kiss, and Cadence Bambenek. Everything we publish is free to read — your donations fund our writers and artists.
