"We may well have to live side by side with our subtropical southern hemisphere gardens and see them for what they are, as relics of a 19th-century gardening obsession"
I find this perspective more compelling than calling it "rewilding". The word is somewhat novel and loosely defined.
The Rewilding term is definitely mercurial, Isabella Tree (Knepp) in this talk [1] sums this quite poetically by saying it's a term that "rewilds itself".
Alastair Driver (Director of Rewilding Britain) in the same talk summarises it as "The large scale restoration of ecosystems to the point where nature is allowed to take care of itself" though there's obviously many other definitions and perspectives.
I think part of the charm of the term, is the ability to apply it in many contexts, e.g. Rewilding people which would be harder if we narrowed the scope to say just natural habitats and landscapes.
This would also allow me to drag in one of my favourite short pieces on Rewilding - Thinking Like a Mountain by Aldo Leopold.
"The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolfs job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea." [2]
Where I live in the NW rocky mountains we've lost the battle against Tanzi sadly.
People who talk about 'our betters' destroying things, in the Rockies we've ended up with a ton of 'transplanted' plants at our campgrounds (we had enough out of area people introduce poison ivy with their camping gear the parks had a campaign to eliminate it, at least our 'betters' brought something they thought worthwhile not introduce friggen poison ivy) because of lazy/nasty people who can't be bothered to keep their camping gear clean. Our lakes are devastated from non-native species spread by lazy recreational boaters who again can't be bothered to clean up. The 'just living life' type roamers bear quite a bit of blame for the modern spread of damaging non-native species (this coming from a Santa Cruz hippie kid that moved to the mountains).
Come on people, clean your camping/boating gear when going out of your normal area!
There's been numerous attempts at removing invasives, as you point out some successful, some not.
I found this one of New Zealand, which has particularly unique habitats, trying to remove rats (and others) to save 200 bird species to be particularly mind blowing [1].
Having just done a Rewilding course, my position has shifted a bit and I'm now in two minds about both the NZ experiment and ones like you mention. Much as yours and the other comments say lazy people spreading accidently, or historically, more deliberately non-native species at face value seems really destructive.
But as the Rewilding course pointed out, weeds generally thrive in areas of bare earth and similar niches where ecosystems are degraded and often then are outcompeted as part of succession, but during that time can often provide great food sources for say pollinators (e.g. ragwort).
I'm going to make a bit of an uncomfortable leap here and say, does a similar argument apply to invasives? Nature is nothing if not both resourceful and determined and it also (for better or worse) created us. I've yet to see many compelling reasons as for why that happended (from a design perspective), but it has to be said we're nothing if not the ultimate (so far) extension to that, hopping around the planet spreading species everywhere.
Is this, ironically, how nature "addresses" climate change by having the same actors that helped create it, also be the best actors to mitigate it.
If climate change is going to cause such massive disruption to ecosystems, is the human quick spreading of invasives much better at bringing species to places they might now thrive and build future resilience than the slower method non-human forces can manage?
I have to say I don't feel comfortable saying that and I'm not an ecologist, but maybe, bringing this back to the main topic, that's part of a wider Rewilding discussion?
Our median wealth in this country allows us to be so destructive as an unnoticed byproduct of our ridiculous standard and method of living.
Sure, idiots go into the wilderness and cause damage, and the residue from boating "enthusiasts" is terrible, but it's the machine itself that is the problem and those that can do something about it are too busy profiting from it to give a sh_t.
All the problems you describe are real, and they can all be addressed by better seeing through eyes of compassion with a heart tuned to care for others and our mother Earth, herself.
More succinctly, I've heard the saying, "Shit rolls downhill.", as it applies to the qualities of the leader percolating down through the ranks out to the leaf nodes of the culture. Most people are trying to emulate those power-hungry sociopaths, who are nearly always wealthy.
"No more turning away." --Pink Floyd's "On the Turning Away"
This is the closing line of the very nice article.
> The future is in our hands.
It always has been, and always will be.
The problem, as outlined in the article, is that we (the entire human race) have almost always left it in the hands of our "betters", and those wealthy folks have very rarely given a crap about the rest of us, or our beloved mother Earth.
They think that their having wealth makes their every whim and fancy the right and proper thing to do, and, as the article shows, that is far from the truth.
Of course, we peasants have to, ourselves, learn how to truly be better, truly know how to wield power for the benefit of all human beings, out of compassion for all of our children, and our children's children, ...
"Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights." --Peter Tosh
"Love is the truth." --Jack White's song of the same name
you forgot "the victors of War write the history and build their castles", and "cultural forces" including (especially?) those originating among "peasants" .. casting your evolutionary and kind comment as a "peasant" appears to wear a lot of assumptions on the sleeve
Well, when a person doesn't want to believe the truth, they are free to construct whatever reality they choose, based upon what "appears" in their mind's eye.
That is why the truth is so important in this world. To seek the truth requires humility, that being crucial in all aspects of life and is the most essential lesson of Dunning-Kruger's study.
It is precisely my humility that has allowed me to gain some measure of wisdom, which I share honestly and compassionately here.
It's definitely the best and greatest humility I've ever seen, and I believe the amazing wisdom from that humility will serve you well in your political career in 2025!
It takes humility to get to the point where you know that you know. This is the humble side of the Dunning-Kruger pair of result groups: the ones who have reached a level of expertise through good, hard, honest graft; the ones still learning; the ones who tend to underestimate themselves.
But, if I acted like I didn't know -- especially in these parts -- that would be a kind of lie, and I'm sick and tired of lies. That you don't know what I know or agree that I can even know it is to be expected, so fire away!
I don't want to run anything or anyone. I just want everyone to get some 'act right' and help us fix what we can while we can. A world full of callously selfish inertial idiots is not going to help improve anything.
Before the world can change, we have to change, each of us. History is not exactly rife with excellent examples, but things are grinding forward, even in the presense of our flawed cultures.
The more compassion we can add to our ideals, attitudes, and behaviors, the more effectively we can help the people that need it. That those folks' numbers are growing is not due to the presense of caring compassion.
All oppression and misery is accompanied by cruel indifference, however far removed from the brutality.
The first verse of Pink Floyd's "On the Turning Away":
On the turning away
From the pale and downtrodden
And the words they say
Which we won’t understand
“Don’t accept that what’s happening
Is just a case of all the suffering
Or you’ll find that you’re joining in
The turning away”
David Gilmour is an atheist, but his active, compassionate, generous heart informs his charitable life and the beauty of his life and lyrics.
There is a huge problem looking at issues as if our entire lens can only go back 150-200 years. Go back a few more hundred years and the lines between rich and poor man’s intent start to blur—especially in Ireland. If all things were equal in delivery to people you would still see some people live in squalor and some learn towards some more refined practices. It doesn't matter.
What does matter is this insufferably march “forward” into a world where we can’t allow such individual will for any number of reasons, effectively neutering any real cultural development.
I’ll paraphrase David Bowie—we should all be happy just picking nuts but here we are.
There is nobody qualified to take on “all” human beings and decide what is right on such a scale. No matter how many honours one adorns oneself with.
Case in point: the kingdom and culture of England doing what it did in the 13th to 20th centuries through the Isles and beyond. It needed to modernize and “bring prosperity” through the poor, rural, gaelic regions who just couldn’t “get with the times”. One should wonder if those “poor” rural folks were ever hard up or unhappy until armies trounced through burning their homes and spoiling their land in the name of modernity.
The questions we need to ask ourselves take the form of silly platitudes:
What would we really do and care about if we had it all and had no more labour and toil before us?
Culture, love, beauty. Things that dont really cost anything and nobody is really inhibited from enjoying as long as they are creative.
And if we are not creative, then none of the vices or devices in the world will ever save us from continually seeking to “fix” it all.
Keep looking for dividing lines in the external and you’ll always find them. But the problem is in the human heart.
(Ironically, trying to convince wealthy tech bros of that is like diving into an acid pit. I can definitely agree that I don’t want my future in their hands. The poets may be crafty but at least they seek truth)
> Keep looking for dividing lines in the external and you’ll always find them. But the problem is in the human heart.
Yes, the problem is in the human heart, but I'm not in charge of the petrochemical industry that is polluting the planet, nor am I an oppressor causing misery for the poor or folks of other ethnicities or cultures.
History has taught us enough about what other folks are capable of when their hearts are tuned against universal compassion, for me to know whom to keep a careful eye on.
> Culture, love, beauty. Things that dont really cost anything and nobody is really inhibited from enjoying as long as they are creative.
The concepts aren’t absurd, you’re just being hopelessly naïve to think that no one is inhibited from enjoying culture, love, and beauty; in a world with genocide, homophobia, and industrial-scale desertification.
Fun fact, they evolved to fill the niches normally filled by rodents. As such, they were once the most common prey of the native owl ruru/morepork. Life is cool.
> he set about planting the seemingly barren island with Southern Hemisphere exotic species, first by screening the exposed site with plants such as native gorse and then with hedges of Chilean Escalonias and Rhododendron hybrids.
Rhododendron looks pretty but is an absolute plague in Ireland. It grows so big and vast that people sometimes get lost in them.
That looks exactly as situation with pinewood tree which is spread across all Carpathian mountains across eastern Europe. IIRC they are native, at least considering recent times.
It looks nice on its own, resilient miniature of pines, resin produces very nice smell. No issue crossing regular pine forests. The problem is, these inhabit cca solid band in cca 1400-1800m altitude (as in, all mountains in the area normally have them, sometimes big blobs but often uninterrupted). Interestingly I've never saw them in the neighboring Alps.
When coming up close, you realize that either you have pre-cut way through, or you better turn back or find somehow way around. Few times some old hiking path disappeared into it (more like they grew over it), getting 200m through could be easily 1-2h solid effort that left me physically wasted. Also they are rough and destroy even sturdy outdoor clothing easily, and I always have various scratches. Resin will cover you from head to toe, usually not washable from clothes completely.
Suffice to say, I hate it when I encounter them off major hiking trails. Also bears love hiding in them.
I find this perspective more compelling than calling it "rewilding". The word is somewhat novel and loosely defined.
Alastair Driver (Director of Rewilding Britain) in the same talk summarises it as "The large scale restoration of ecosystems to the point where nature is allowed to take care of itself" though there's obviously many other definitions and perspectives.
I think part of the charm of the term, is the ability to apply it in many contexts, e.g. Rewilding people which would be harder if we narrowed the scope to say just natural habitats and landscapes.
This would also allow me to drag in one of my favourite short pieces on Rewilding - Thinking Like a Mountain by Aldo Leopold. "The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolfs job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea." [2]
[1] - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-is-rewilding-with... original source (which didn't work for me) https://www.buzzsprout.com/2156617/episodes/13299588
[2] - https://ia600707.us.archive.org/6/items/ThinkingLikeAMountai...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/18/us/invasive-murder-hornets-ar...
Where I live in the NW rocky mountains we've lost the battle against Tanzi sadly.
People who talk about 'our betters' destroying things, in the Rockies we've ended up with a ton of 'transplanted' plants at our campgrounds (we had enough out of area people introduce poison ivy with their camping gear the parks had a campaign to eliminate it, at least our 'betters' brought something they thought worthwhile not introduce friggen poison ivy) because of lazy/nasty people who can't be bothered to keep their camping gear clean. Our lakes are devastated from non-native species spread by lazy recreational boaters who again can't be bothered to clean up. The 'just living life' type roamers bear quite a bit of blame for the modern spread of damaging non-native species (this coming from a Santa Cruz hippie kid that moved to the mountains).
Come on people, clean your camping/boating gear when going out of your normal area!
I found this one of New Zealand, which has particularly unique habitats, trying to remove rats (and others) to save 200 bird species to be particularly mind blowing [1].
Having just done a Rewilding course, my position has shifted a bit and I'm now in two minds about both the NZ experiment and ones like you mention. Much as yours and the other comments say lazy people spreading accidently, or historically, more deliberately non-native species at face value seems really destructive.
But as the Rewilding course pointed out, weeds generally thrive in areas of bare earth and similar niches where ecosystems are degraded and often then are outcompeted as part of succession, but during that time can often provide great food sources for say pollinators (e.g. ragwort).
I'm going to make a bit of an uncomfortable leap here and say, does a similar argument apply to invasives? Nature is nothing if not both resourceful and determined and it also (for better or worse) created us. I've yet to see many compelling reasons as for why that happended (from a design perspective), but it has to be said we're nothing if not the ultimate (so far) extension to that, hopping around the planet spreading species everywhere.
Is this, ironically, how nature "addresses" climate change by having the same actors that helped create it, also be the best actors to mitigate it. If climate change is going to cause such massive disruption to ecosystems, is the human quick spreading of invasives much better at bringing species to places they might now thrive and build future resilience than the slower method non-human forces can manage?
I have to say I don't feel comfortable saying that and I'm not an ecologist, but maybe, bringing this back to the main topic, that's part of a wider Rewilding discussion?
[1] - https://www.science.org/content/article/new-zealand-s-mind-b...
Sure, idiots go into the wilderness and cause damage, and the residue from boating "enthusiasts" is terrible, but it's the machine itself that is the problem and those that can do something about it are too busy profiting from it to give a sh_t.
All the problems you describe are real, and they can all be addressed by better seeing through eyes of compassion with a heart tuned to care for others and our mother Earth, herself.
More succinctly, I've heard the saying, "Shit rolls downhill.", as it applies to the qualities of the leader percolating down through the ranks out to the leaf nodes of the culture. Most people are trying to emulate those power-hungry sociopaths, who are nearly always wealthy.
"No more turning away." --Pink Floyd's "On the Turning Away"
> The future is in our hands.
It always has been, and always will be.
The problem, as outlined in the article, is that we (the entire human race) have almost always left it in the hands of our "betters", and those wealthy folks have very rarely given a crap about the rest of us, or our beloved mother Earth.
They think that their having wealth makes their every whim and fancy the right and proper thing to do, and, as the article shows, that is far from the truth.
Of course, we peasants have to, ourselves, learn how to truly be better, truly know how to wield power for the benefit of all human beings, out of compassion for all of our children, and our children's children, ...
"Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights." --Peter Tosh
"Love is the truth." --Jack White's song of the same name
That is why the truth is so important in this world. To seek the truth requires humility, that being crucial in all aspects of life and is the most essential lesson of Dunning-Kruger's study.
It is precisely my humility that has allowed me to gain some measure of wisdom, which I share honestly and compassionately here.
But, if I acted like I didn't know -- especially in these parts -- that would be a kind of lie, and I'm sick and tired of lies. That you don't know what I know or agree that I can even know it is to be expected, so fire away!
I don't want to run anything or anyone. I just want everyone to get some 'act right' and help us fix what we can while we can. A world full of callously selfish inertial idiots is not going to help improve anything.
Before the world can change, we have to change, each of us. History is not exactly rife with excellent examples, but things are grinding forward, even in the presense of our flawed cultures.
The more compassion we can add to our ideals, attitudes, and behaviors, the more effectively we can help the people that need it. That those folks' numbers are growing is not due to the presense of caring compassion.
All oppression and misery is accompanied by cruel indifference, however far removed from the brutality.
The first verse of Pink Floyd's "On the Turning Away":
David Gilmour is an atheist, but his active, compassionate, generous heart informs his charitable life and the beauty of his life and lyrics.What does matter is this insufferably march “forward” into a world where we can’t allow such individual will for any number of reasons, effectively neutering any real cultural development.
I’ll paraphrase David Bowie—we should all be happy just picking nuts but here we are.
There is nobody qualified to take on “all” human beings and decide what is right on such a scale. No matter how many honours one adorns oneself with.
Case in point: the kingdom and culture of England doing what it did in the 13th to 20th centuries through the Isles and beyond. It needed to modernize and “bring prosperity” through the poor, rural, gaelic regions who just couldn’t “get with the times”. One should wonder if those “poor” rural folks were ever hard up or unhappy until armies trounced through burning their homes and spoiling their land in the name of modernity.
The questions we need to ask ourselves take the form of silly platitudes:
What would we really do and care about if we had it all and had no more labour and toil before us?
Culture, love, beauty. Things that dont really cost anything and nobody is really inhibited from enjoying as long as they are creative.
And if we are not creative, then none of the vices or devices in the world will ever save us from continually seeking to “fix” it all.
Keep looking for dividing lines in the external and you’ll always find them. But the problem is in the human heart.
(Ironically, trying to convince wealthy tech bros of that is like diving into an acid pit. I can definitely agree that I don’t want my future in their hands. The poets may be crafty but at least they seek truth)
Yes, the problem is in the human heart, but I'm not in charge of the petrochemical industry that is polluting the planet, nor am I an oppressor causing misery for the poor or folks of other ethnicities or cultures.
History has taught us enough about what other folks are capable of when their hearts are tuned against universal compassion, for me to know whom to keep a careful eye on.
> Culture, love, beauty. Things that dont really cost anything and nobody is really inhibited from enjoying as long as they are creative.
I've never read anything so absurd on HN.
Awesome job lads, thanks so much for the empire being able to introduce us to things like this.
Fun fact, they evolved to fill the niches normally filled by rodents. As such, they were once the most common prey of the native owl ruru/morepork. Life is cool.
Rhododendron looks pretty but is an absolute plague in Ireland. It grows so big and vast that people sometimes get lost in them.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-27882358
It looks nice on its own, resilient miniature of pines, resin produces very nice smell. No issue crossing regular pine forests. The problem is, these inhabit cca solid band in cca 1400-1800m altitude (as in, all mountains in the area normally have them, sometimes big blobs but often uninterrupted). Interestingly I've never saw them in the neighboring Alps.
When coming up close, you realize that either you have pre-cut way through, or you better turn back or find somehow way around. Few times some old hiking path disappeared into it (more like they grew over it), getting 200m through could be easily 1-2h solid effort that left me physically wasted. Also they are rough and destroy even sturdy outdoor clothing easily, and I always have various scratches. Resin will cover you from head to toe, usually not washable from clothes completely.
Suffice to say, I hate it when I encounter them off major hiking trails. Also bears love hiding in them.