Hi friends,
Welcome to the first ever ‘citizen rewilding’ email! I’m seeing this as an off-shoot (ha ha) of the main creativity-focused email that comes to you all on Wednesdays. It’s free, and will arrive every Friday.
So, what’s this all about then?
When I started this newsletter, I wanted to focus on two things: creativity and empowering people who might be feeling a bit (or a lot) of eco anxiety.
This newsletter is essentially about gardening, and activism, and empowerment, and community. It’s for me, and you, and your friends, to all do alone, or together. It’s about taking the power back into our own hands, and ‘wilding’ the world around us.
I felt it in myself, and heard it in the people around me - at the shop, at work, on the bus, in Instagram messages. Maybe you have these thoughts swirling around in your head too:
‘I’m only one person, what can I do in the face of all of this?’
‘My actions are insignificant when compared to how polluting flight travel is
How can anything I do matter if the fossil fuel companies continue to walk back their climate commitments.
Have we not already past the point of no return?
It’s so easy for the doom and gloom of the news cycle to make us freeze and lose hope in any kind of future for our planet
Thoughts and feelings like these are important and can’t be ignored. But the thing that gets me about them is that they make people freeze. Any normal person would give up hope pretty quickly, right? Why act when there’s nothing you can do? Why act when your efforts are a drop in the ocean?
I’ve always been the kind of person who tries to find the bright side of everything, even with all the existential dread that I all-too-frequently pump out into the internet (sorry!).
I make myself find the bright side, or find optimism, because the alternative is the abyss.
Hope, like creativity, brings people back to life
That’s what I’m trying to do here: to share how and where I find hope in the face of unrelenting climate crises. Because hope is galvanising. Hope breaks you out of the freeze that I mentioned earlier. Hope, like creativity, brings people back to life.
This is where ‘citizen’ or ‘small-scale’ rewilding comes in
Rewilding has gotten a lot of airtime lately, as governments and regions launch projects like reintroducing bison into the UK or wolves back into Belgium. Citizen rewilding is like that, but with a grassroots, ‘guerilla gardening’ edge to it.
I’m sharing concrete ways (that, er, well, don’t involve any concrete actually) that we can take together, no matter where we are in the world, to boost the biodiversity and general wildness of our neighbourhoods on an individual level.
Starting small is the key. Even turning a small patch of garden or unused land into a wildlife haven can make a big difference.
Does it actually make a difference?
I’ll be going into this again, but, short answer: yes!
Initial findings from studies of 24 National Wildlife Federation certified habitats across the country suggest that wildlife gardening, if adopted on a wider scale, can help boost biodiversity: the variety of life that gives ecosystems their resiliency. - NWF.org
Properly managed gardens can replace the habitat lost due to urban development, making urban greenspaces increasingly important as refuges for native biodiversity. Urban gardens boost biodiversity, make cities more sustainable
Scientists have previously found that urban gardens provide an abundant food supply for crucial pollinators. A study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology further promotes this claim, showing that urban gardens have even higher flora diversity than most natural habitats. - How urban gardens support biodiversity by helping crucial pollinators thrive
In a recent paper in the journal Ecology Letters, ecologist Shalene Jha and her colleagues showed that urban gardens can actually boost biodiversity—particularly if residents prioritize planting native species, which attract native insects like bees. - WIRED
Hope IS the thing with feathers
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
Emily Dickinson might have been on to something, because the results of your gardening efforts are very quickly seen. There’s nothing more life-affirming than seeing the influx of butterflies, bees, moths, and all kinds of birds, into the space where there used to be nothing but grass.
Alright. That’s enough reading for one day, right? Next week we’ll be starting in on it, touching further all of this.
See you then!
Much love,
Jessica
Oh, I absolutely love this! 'citizen rewilding' is exactly what we need! 💫