I have to agree that official efforts are insufficient both in speed and scale, so I understand the need for civil society rewildering efforts regardless of law. However I’d like to hear from scientists in the field what should and shouldn’t be done, because I am sure that misguided efforts can be destructive too.
Ideally there should be a science-backed civil society guerilla force for rewilding to take the right necessary steps at a time where political action is too motivated by other motives, like protecting various lobbies and financial interests or simply their own asses.
And I am quite fed up with farmers concerns given the huge environmentally destructive force that monoculture and animal farming are to our nature. If our current farming practices are incompatible with wildlife existing, then our farming practices need to change instead of wildlife being pushed to extinction.
Regarding farming, aside from poor farming methods, another sad reality is that a huge number of farmers bought into the cheap fertilizer sludge on the market. The sludge grows well but contains high levels of PFAS (toxic microplastics). Crops have been full of microplastics for decades. The same is true of fields and streams containing local deer and fish populations. If you hunt and eat those animals, you ingest PFAS as well.
In the USA, State and Federal agencies are starting to research the PFAS problem as well as fallout medical effects. Are ingested PFAS a cause for our high rates of cancer or mental health disorders?
As with everything they’re starting to ask for funding and nobody’s quite sure who’s going to pay for it yet.
Thanks for sharing, this was a very enjoyably written article!
Well wildlife is killed/habitat is removed without permission much much more frequently and is immensely more upsetting than this permissionless ‘beaver bombing.’ This was a particularly infuriating example from Aus - the punishment for ‘permissionless’ killing of Eagles - only $60 per eagle and 14 days in jail.
Ecologists have to jump through so many hoops for reveg/rewilding projects (not saying its a bad thing, we have rules for a reason) but it can still feel quite demoralising and frustrating when it hinders work that those with the local, on the ground expertise fully support… makes it hard not to smile when a passionate local takes matters into their own hands for the good of the environment. One of my best frog survey sites was almost certainly started with a bit of ‘guerilla frogging’ on the part of the landholder.
I’m Belgian. A coworker tells me regularly how he he sees beavers in the woods near where he lives (and foxes in his backyard, the man has to be a Disney princess). I had no idea about the secret backstory of the Belgian beavers, but I am delighted it happened.
