Rewilding Actions we can take to help halt climate change
Positive things we can do for the planet and why the time to do them is now.
If there was one word in 2020 that brought hope for the future health of people and the planet it was “rewilding”, – thanks to David Attenborough. In his latest documentary film A Life on Our Planet, which Attenborough calls his witness statement, he outlines what a mess man has made of the planet in his lifetime but he also offers an answer to fixing it. If we rewild land and oceans we stand a chance.
“Rewilding the world is simpler than you might think,” says Attenborough. “And the changes we have to make will only benefit ourselves and the generations that follow. A century from now our planet could be a wild place again.”
Now around the globe people have begun to talk about rewilding. Eco fashion brand Maggie Marilyn has even brought a little bit of rewilding to its Auckland store by planting out the exterior in an effort to create more awareness and bring some greenery into the CBD.
Add to that, one of the gifts that COVID-19 brought the world was that it showed us how to slow down and also how quickly the environment can heal when humans get out of the way.
“When we all took a breath we found the world was breathing with us. We suddenly heard the voices of our mountains, our moana, our tūī
and kererū, no longer fighting through the noise and haze,” says Sustainable Business Network (SBN) CEO Rachel Brown. “As we worked to stabilise our systems, nature worked to stabilise hers.”
What is heartening is that despite 2020 being a difficult year, the SBN had a record-breaking 300 entries for its annual awards.
The supreme winner of the 2020 SBN Awards was Tahi, a private conservation retreat in Northland that is a living example of transformation, rejuvenation and commitment to sustainable business. Tahi also won the Restoring Nature Award.
Tahi founder Suzan Craig says watching A Life on Our Planet made her cry and want to plant even more trees. She has pledged to plant one million trees and has so far planted 349,000 on her 780-acre property in Northland.
When she bought the property in 2004 the vision was to restore the land, which was mostly degraded pasture.
Growing up, Craig witnessed the transformation of Tiritiri Matangi from a barren island to what it is today, which gave her the confidence.
Since 2004 the Tahi team, which includes her father, landscape ecologist John Craig, has restored hay fields to wetlands, regenerated the soil by planting mānuka as well as other native species through strategic planting, and restored biodiversity to the land. In 2004 only 14 bird species lived in the area, now there are 71 of which 22 are rare or endangered, including kiwi, which have been reintroduced.
“It’s been planted in a way to encourage birds, who are the main seed spreaders, to come. It’s a sort of an accelerated natural regeneration because of how it was planted and that feeds on itself,” she says.
Tahi’s three-fold approach has been creating a nature sanctuary, running an eco-retreat (see page 102), and growing a global honey business where 100 per cent of profits are reinvested into conservation and community. “We’re an absolute for-profit business but it’s just how we choose to spend the profit,” says Craig.
They have also been monitoring the soil at Tahi and have seen a massive improvement in soil and water quality, as well as increased biodiversity. “Nature starts helping itself and the regenerative
carbon secretion on the land as well gets higher and higher because of the trees. Once you plant them, they really come into their own,” says Craig. “We’ve developed a system called biosphere values, which we talk about on our website. It’s really a roadmap to what you need to consider when you’re reforesting or rewilding. There are some key questions that you need to ask before going ahead.”
That includes what trees to plant. For example, a kauri versus a pine. Pine trees have a faster death rate and also don’t provide a natural habitat for species around it.
Tahi’s win will help elevate what the business is doing nationally and she hopes it will inspire other people to do what
Tahi is doing on whatever scale they can “whether it’s on their balcony or a larger piece of property”. She also hopes that people who book in to stay at Tahi retreat will come away with a real sense of hope for what is possible.
Down the line at Blue Duck Station, Dan and Sandy Steele run a working sheep and cattle farm at Whakahoro though they are now making more money from honey, conservation tourism and tree planting through the Emissions Trading Scheme than farming.
“Conservation is what is most important to us out here,” says Dan.
“It’s looking after Mother Nature.
Blue duck (whio) are a particularly strong indicator species for the health of the environment. We want to keep it wild and show people how we need to protect it. I haven’t got grizzly bears or lions in my wild out here but I’ve got blue duck (whio), kiwi, native bats, diverse plants and insects that haven’t even been identified yet.”
“Biodiversity is the lungs and the kidneys of Mother Earth and we’re putting a lot of it back and rewilding where we can afford to. We’re still running stock but we’re very low stocked – extensive rather than intensive.”
To date, tree-planting efforts at Blue Duck Station over an area of 750 acres have sequestered 30,000 tons of carbon.
The Station at Whakahoro is also on some pretty rugged land on the banks of the Whanganui River where there are many abandoned WWI farms as well as feral cats, stoats, rats, wild pigs, goats, hedgehogs, rabbits and deer running wild through the bush thanks to the earlier pioneering settlers. Blue Duck Station run a pest-trapping programme as well as guided hunting tours for culling the larger herbivores and to also raise awareness about conservation.
“I’ve always been of the belief that the larger herbivores are more manageable as long as we keep the numbers low and they’re not causing irreparable damage to the bush. Deer don’t eat too many kiwis,” he points out. “It’s teaching people about the environmental side of hunting and how natural hunting is when you are part of the environment. You’re not killing for the love of killing. There is a humane side of it, and you’re harvesting the very best wild food on the planet.”
He believes his job is to look after what they’ve have got and to advocate for Mother Nature and to show people how we have got to have a good economy that works with the good ecology.
“I’ve always said that our environment is the backbone of our economy. I believe New Zealand’s job is to look after our environment and have a really good natural economy and be the world capital for health and wellbeing… and show the rest of the world this is how you can live and have a good economy. We can’t affect the pollution in India but we can affect the way they think by providing leadership. And that’s New Zealand’s job on this planet. There’s just no question about that,” says Dan. “We’ve got this huge amount of biodiversity here that has got a huge natural moat around it, and we’ve got to look after all that – our oceans, our land, our rivers – and have a bloody good life.”
“With all of these things there is one overriding principle. Nature is our biggest ally and our greatest inspiration,”
David Attenborough
David Attenborough’s key takeaways for hope and action points
The living world is essentially solar powered. The Earth’s plants capture 3 trillion kilowatt hours of solar energy each day. That’s almost 20 times the energy we need just from sunlight. Imagine if we phase out fossil fuels and ran our world on the eternal energies of nature too, sunlight, wind, water and geothermal. At the turn of the century, Morocco relied on imported oil and gas for almost all of its energy. Today, it generates 40 per cent of its needs at home from a network of renewable power plants including the world’s largest solar farm.
The ocean is a critical ally in our battle to reduce carbon in the atmosphere.
The more diverse it is, the better it does that job. The healthier the marine habitat, the more fish there will be, and the more there will be to eat. Palau is a Pacific Island nation that is reliant on its coral reefs for fish and tourism. When fish stocks began to reduce, the Palauans responded by restricting the fishing practices and banning fishing entirely from many areas. Protected fish populations soon became so healthy they spilt over into the areas open to fishing. As a result, the no-fish zones have increased the catch for local fishermen while at the same time, allowing the reefs to recover. Imagine if we committed to a similar approach across the world.
When it comes to the land, we must radically reduce the area we use to farm
so that we can make space for returning wilderness, and the quickest and most effective way to do that is for us to change our diet. Large carnivores are rare in nature because it takes a lot of prey to support each of them. For every single predator on the Serengeti there are more than 100 prey animals. Whenever we choose a piece of meat, we too are unwittingly demanding a huge expanse of space. The planet can’t support billions of large meat eaters. There just isn’t the space. If we all had a largely plant-based diet we would need only half the land we use at the moment.
The Netherlands is one of the world’s most densely populated countries.
It’s covered with small family-run farms with no room for expansion. So Dutch farmers have become expert at getting the most out of every hectare: raising yields 10-fold in two generations while at the same time using less water, fewer pesticides, less fertiliser, and emitting less carbon. Despite its size The Netherlands is now the world’s second-largest exporter of food. It’s entirely possible for us to apply both low-tech and high-tech solutions to produce much more food for much less land. We can start to produce food in new spaces. Indoors. Within cities. Even in places where there’s no land at all.
Forests are a fundamental component of our planet’s recovery.
They are the best technology nature has for locking away carbon, and they are centres of biodiversity. Again, the two features work together. The wilder and more diverse forests are, the more effective they are at absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. We must immediately halt deforestation everywhere and grow crops like oil palm and soya only on land that was deforested long ago. After all there’s plenty of it. But we can do better than that. A century ago, more than three-quarters of Costa Rica was covered with forest. By the 1980s uncontrolled logging had reduced this to just one-quarter. The government decided it to act, offering grants to landowners to replant native trees. In just 25 years, the forest has returned to cover half of Costa Rica once again. Just imagine if we achieve this on a global scale. The return of the trees would absorb as much as two-thirds of the carbon emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by our activities to date.
This is not about saving our planet. It’s about saving ourselves.
The truth is, with or without us the natural world will rebuild. In the 30 years since the evacuation of Chernobyl, the wild has reclaimed the space. Today the forest has taken over the city. It is a sanctuary for wild animals that are rare elsewhere and powerful evidence that, however grave the mistakes, nature will overcome them. The living world will endure. We humans cannot presume the same.
There is a chance for us to make amends.
To complete our journey of development, manage our impact and once again, become a species in balance with nature. All we need is the will to do so. We now have the opportunity to create the perfect home for ourselves, and restore the rich, healthy, and wonderful world that we inherited.