I love the wild biosphere and I want to do everything I can to protect it. And I think there are so many great initiatives out there to do so. But if there’s one thing that’s at the top of my list, it would be to see a world where everyone has access to wild areas to see just how beautiful they are. It’s well known just how beneficial being in green spaces is for people, and if people care and live in mutually beneficial relationships with nature, then they will be all the more inclined to protect it.
The idea reminds me of E. O. Wilson’s “half-earth” proposal, which begs humanity to save fifty percent of all of the earth for wild nature. I am a strong proponent of this idea and I even think it should be higher than fifty percent, although fifty percent is a great start.
Moreover, Wilson’s proposal should apply to cities, too. Every city should have half of its space dedicated to wild areas. These wild areas would consist of parks with a minimal of typical maintenance such as grass cutting, and would consist of mostly native plants and trees. Importantly, the placement of these wild areas would be done so that everyone can get to them safely by walking at most twenty minutes.
This is not impossible for cities, either: roads, buildings, and infrastructure can be built around designated wild areas and such wild areas would be protected for development in perpetuity. And some cities already get pretty close to this. Ottawa, where I was born, has enough green space so that most people can get to one such area without too much trouble, although some of the green spaces are a bit too maintained and don’t have enough truly wild spaces. Other cities are not so lucky, such as São Paulo in Brazil, where there are many population dense neighborhoods which have no local access to green at all. The only option for many to access any wildlife is through driving, and sometimes this is quite impractical. The same is true for many cities in Europe and North America.
Luckily, some cities are already doing what needs to be done, which is to convert land used by humans into land that can be used by all species. Denmark, for instance, has set aside $6.1 billion USD to buy back 15% of farmland and convert it back into forest. This can be done without threatening the food supply. Indeed, according to the USDA, “[i]n the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30-40 percent of the food supply.” A lot of this food is simply thrown away for economic reasons, and we can easily preserve most of it if we tried. They USDA already set a goal of reducing this waste by half by 2050, and if we did this around the world, then we could be much more efficient with our land use and reserve more of it for wildlife.
I’ve seen a lot of efforts to preserve wildlife and reduce our contribution to climate change. Most of them are rather ineffectual or even make the problem worse. But if there’s one thing that is very effective on reducing biospheric degradation, it’s simply restoring the physical biosphere through rewildling. Not only does it give more space for plants and animals and thus give the world a greater capability to reabsorb carbon dioxide, it also puts nature as something to live in rather than something to drive to as some sort of abstract entertainment. And if we can get more people to truly love nature, then we will have a much greater force to fight the evils of destructive global capitalism compared to having a population with nothing else to help them except modern technology.