Setting: The Case for Rewilding
Singer-songwriter and UN Ambassador Ellie Goulding makes the case for rewilding the spaces we live in—and ourselves. Snippet:
We know that for clean water, you need healthy forests; to balance carbon, you need healthy seas and peat bogs, mangroves and seagrass. Nature isn’t just nice scenery. We are nature – and we depend on it.
In Karachi, Pakistan, architect and activist Tariq Qaiser is desperate to save an island he sees as a ”terrestrial incarnation of Abdullah Shah Ghazi, the patron Sufi saint of Karachi, who protects the city from storms, disease, and hunger.”
In my own back yard for the last two years, I have refrained from mowing during the month of May. Last year it was a bit of a mess. The grass grew knee-high. Dandelions and buttercups blazed trails at will. The neighbours surely wondered if we’d lost our minds. This year, the grass was nearly shoulder high for a smallish adult. A child could have been lost in it. But look what happened. At the end of May, a daisy flung itself up. Then another and another. Grasses went to glorious seed.
Birds arrived. They found places to nest, so hidden I have yet to find one, but I know they’re there. Ellie Goulding was right when she said:
there’s a you-shaped hole in ecological activism. It’s not separate from you, it’s part of you.
Like songwriters, words are the only instruments I have. But what could happen if I began to be more thoughtful about my words as well as my actions? If I rewilded my settings, in narrative as well as in life? Is there a story here? Of course there is, and it’s up to peoplekind to determine how it ends.
We know children will listen. The TIME article about Qaiser and his drive to save the island mentions a child on a group tour of a mangrove exhibit in a fancy new Karachi museum, who asked, about the mangroves:
“Why are they in here, and not out there?” By in here, she meant the soaring glass atrium of Karachi’s newly opened MagnifiScience Centre, where the high-tech centerpiece is the living mangrove exhibit—complete with real trees, live fish, plastic crabs, and an accelerated tidal ebb and flow maintained by underground water pumps.
But Out there is the rest of the world, where the grownups have the power. And grownups are the ones who buy the books for children. Will it be any use? Well, what are the options? Let the island go? Keep the lawn tidy and starve the birds? You tell me.
