#669: Can Britain become wild again?

A film which was made a few years ago, and is now available to view on YouTube.

Hope Rewilded is a documentary exploring rewilding in Britain — what it means, why it matters, and whether giving nature the freedom to recover could help reverse the dramatic decline of our wildlife.

Across Britain, landscapes that have been shaped and depleted over generations are being given the chance to recover. Species are returning, habitats are regenerating and people are beginning to rethink what our countryside could look like. 

But what does it really mean to rewild a country like Britain? 

How much nature have we lost? 

What should we bring back? 

And how wild are we prepared to let Britain become? 

Hope Rewilded explores these questions through some of the people at the forefront of rewilding, conservation and nature recovery in Britain. Featuring interviews with: 

George Monbiot — environmental journalist, author and campaigner, and co-founder of Rewilding Britain. His books include Feral, an influential exploration of rewilding and ecological restoration. 

Isabella Tree — award-winning author and co-owner of the Knepp Estate in West Sussex, home to one of Britain’s best-known rewilding projects. She is the author of Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm. 

Simon Roper — zoologist, conservationist and co-founder and Director of Ambios, an organisation working in nature recovery, conservation training and species reintroductions. 

Prof. Alastair Driver — ecologist and leading UK rewilding specialist, former Director of Rewilding Britain and former National Conservation Manager for the Environment Agency, with more than four decades of experience in conservation and nature recovery. 

At its heart, Hope Rewilded is not simply a film about what Britain has lost. It is about what we could get back. What happens when we give nature another chance?

#647: Mary Oliver

The poetry of Mary Oliver has come up a few times in recent weeks.

This poem was mentioned a few times.

Are you familiar with her work?

What other poems are potentially relevant for a perspective on the natural world?

#352: Solastalgia

Solastalgia was mentioned in the Guardian last year in a piece by Damien Gayle.

It's a word I've been familiar with for a while now, as it's a feeling I have had often in the last decade in particular as extreme weather has become more common, and local environments have shown signs of changing, and not always in a good way.

It was used in a piece back in 2016 by Robert MacFarlane who described its origins in the writing of Glenn Albrecht.

The context was the impact of coal mining on the surrounding area.

Solastalgia can be defined as: the “distress produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment”.

On the VeryWell website, there is also a suggestion that:

"When the places that matter most to us—our homes, our lands, and our communities—are disrupted, changed, or threatened, we may also sustain a less visible but no less damaging impact that is carried with us emotionally"

Here's a TED talk with Albrecht talking about the term:

And a BBC Futures piece on the idea.

It also points out quite rightly that other cultures have similar words or expressions, and that they probably predate ours given the various despoilation of the world by colonisation...

Solastalgia is not just a first-world concept. Sri Warsini, a researcher at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia is looking into instances of solastalgia that occur in developing countries such as Indonesia, following natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, finding that the loss of housing, livestock and farmland, and the ongoing danger of living in a disaster-prone area, challenge a person’s sense of place and identity and can lead to depression.

This field—the life it contains & sustains—will soon be gone. Today chirping grasshoppers, twittering goldfinches, a vole’s squeak; pretty grasses, swirling. I got to know this land; to it I let myself attach meaning & importance. But I can’t protect it, so must face up to loss. pic.twitter.com/T9wXXMdNpR

— James Gilbert (@jamesgilbertmr) September 25, 2023

#276: James Bradley on our collective futures

 

A powerful piece by James Bradley.

The storm that is upon us will leave nobody untouched. Surviving it demands we build a world that treats everybody — human and non-human — as worthy of life and possibility.

"The anthropologist and philosopher Deborah Bird Rose, who died in 2018, wrote of the impossibility of bridging the gap between our limited ability to affect what is taking place around ourselves and the cost of facing it.

Yet she also recognised that to turn our backs to it was also to turn our backs on ourselves. “To face others is to become a witness, and to experience our incapacity in this position.” It is also an ethical imperative, a way to “remain true to the lives within which ours are entangled, whether or not we can effect great change”."

#154: Natural History Reading List: #12: Professor Mark Maslin's guide to saving the world

One of the aspects of the blog will be to showcase people whose work should form part of any lesson thinking, or whose books should be on a reading list. The creation of that reading list will also be part of the work I will do, along with others.

Mark Maslin writes regular pieces for newspapers and works for UCL.

He is well worth following on Twitter.

His book here is of particular value as it is very easy to digest. 

It starts with a useful summary of the Earth.

I turned it into a short video for our Year 4 students to start their unit on the Earth. There are chapters on various earth systems which are important to consider when teaching about how the interconnections between nature are easily disrupted.

There is a need for some hopeful messages in the teaching this specification given the deluge of negative stories which seem to be developing every day. These will need to be part of the thinking.