Does forgetting to cut your lawn for weeks on end count as rewilding? What about *not* hazing the coyotes that I regularly see biking home from school? In thinking about how to support more ecological integrity in urban spaces, I feel like there’s a whole bunch of everyday things that we can not intervene in to protect natural systems around us.
I have a few colleagues and neighbours who are rewilding their lawns, which sometimes causes neighbourhood conflict (because the grass looks "messy"). But this is something we know promotes fantastic bird and insect biodiversity compared with Kentucky Bluegrass monocultures. It’s great to see certain parks in Vancouver do this too – the NW Marine Drive hill I bike past every day has a lovely wildflower meadow situation going on where a few years ago, it was just patchy bare grass.
I want to see more cities and marks organizations engage on this. Our votes in municipal elections, and our own actions in the places we live, to promote increased ecological integrity in the places in which we live.
@CoSphere #UnleashValues
Hi Declan, thank you for sharing this take on rewilding! Personally, a garden with wild flowers, weeds, bees and butterflies is the more beautiful thing a garden could be. It's a shame that we've been shown that golf-green lawns are what gardens should be. I'm glad there's real action being taken here and I hope to see more gardens like this in the future!