If there’s no use (as some people have told me), Live it up!
Or if you are looking forward to the Apocalypse or Doomsday consciously—or not, for religious or political reasons and/or mental issues, depression or whatever—then you are doing fine.
But if you are looking for some reason to hope, you might be interested in Mossy Earth. They are a group of people that restore and rewild degraded habitats to bring back diverse ecosystems in many places around the world.
We Created a Lake is Mossy Earth’s project to take an abandoned quarry in Portugal which already provided habitat for birds, fish, amphibians and insects and make it better by building a series of ponds, some temporary according to rainfall, in order to create the shallow waters and moist areas that some creatures need to be able to procreate: frogs, for example, that can get away from the predatory fish in the lake, but maybe not from the great heron—but that’s the point.
Among the many things I like ME for, they are economical: the estimated cost for this project in dollars is $39,090.42. When you see what they can do for this amount, it’s astounding.
(An eDNA test is taken by sampling the water and collecting all the DNA in it in order to get a rough sample of what is there. The baseline is what is present before their intervention and the follow up is after creating the new areas.)
They also show results, both positive and negative.
For example, in Our Forest, they explain that the first technique they used for seeding the kelp (as explained in an earlier video Bringing Back the Last Kelp Forests of Europe) did not work. That is another side to their economy of means, to start small and see what works. Then they show the second technique, starting the kelp on small stones—Watch the video to see what happens. Also to see their old car, makeshift lab, their rented van, their small motorized raft.
Their data and methods are completely open to anyone else who might want to use them. That’s important and doesn’t always happen, leading to the same failed experiments being repeated by other groups.
Kelp forests, by the way, store carbon and provide the right cover for little fish. The kelp has been called “the cradle of the ocean” and they are rebuilding them in the areas off the European coast that they used to thrive in before the trawling of the ocean floor and agricultural runoff turned the seas barren.
Price for the kelp forest ongoing through 2020- 2023—$95,011.77.
Reviving a River
One of the most important things they do is riparian restoration. When rivers and streams are straightened out their channels become deeper, they flow faster causing flooding downstream, obviously a problem these days. In this project in Scotland, the group is building a series of “beaver dams” by hand to slow the water. There are no beavers in the area to do it, and no trees either, so they are also planting trees. The first film is a study of the area and the second (see below) is the construction of the dams.
The group started in the UK and has now found partners and projects all over the world. Some of the partners are countries but in this video it is a farmer who misses the wildlife on his farm. He is giving up some of his planting area which will be flooded by the dams.
They are a small organization but they do a lot. Other projects include restoring oyster beds, helping out squirrels, lemurs, vultures, bison, eagles, the lesser blind mole rat, newts, kites, cleaning caves (see below), a wide range of forests—you get the picture.
They are not a charity or an NGO, rich people cannot contribute to avoid paying taxes and cannot control the projects—what a novel idea! I love Mossy Earth!
(To read more about their funding strategies, see below.)
I’m not suggesting that you join and contribute, just that you try watching the videos to experience how beautiful the world can be.
Have you noticed that NYC has been rewilded too? Native plants in all the city parks, The High Line, The Oyster project, The Bronx River Restoration Project, the gardens in Battery Park, also my garden, my backyard, the pots on our street and on our steps. When a butterfly visits, joy!
—CNQ
We Built Fake Beaver Dams to Rewild this Dead River
for Mossy Earth’s analysis of rewilding in the US