Extinction rebellion and re-wilding

Abstract

As a warm, but not stifling breeze rolls in through my office window, I am grateful that we are over the hump of this summer and beginning to whisper hello to the flirtations of autumn. Given our annual rainfall and notoriously ‘dismal’ summers here in the UK, it’s a rare thing to wish for summer to be over. Then again, the summer we’ve had here in Europe was also a rare thing. Data provided by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a weather forecast provided on behalf of the EU, showed that the global average temperature for June 2019 was the highest on record for the month. According to the centre, European average temperatures were more than 2C above normal and temperatures were 6-10C above normal over most of France, Germany and northern Spain during the final days of June. France recorded the hottest temperature in the country’s history (45.9C), and major wildfires swept across Spain, where temperatures exceeded 40C. These forecasts are alarming, if not terrifying for us mere mortals. And where do we go with these feelings? Where do we place this personal and collective dread about rising sea levels and stiflingly hot summers, flashfloods and once verdant green, now-desert landscapes? Some people are crippled by the fear, some take to the streets. Greta Thunberg – a Swedish activist – who, at age 15, began protesting outside the Swedish parliament in August 2018 about the need for immediate action to combat climate change, is one of them. Greta sat for two weeks, during her school day, outside parliament with a ‘Skolstrejk för klimatet’ (School Strike for Climate). The more Greta did, the more the world began to take notice of her. My brother, who is based in Seattle, founder of the NGO Planetary Collective and creator of Planetary: a provocative and breath-taking wakeup call that explores our cosmic origins and our future as a species, recently asked me a question over one of our weekly Skype calls. The question made me stop in my tracks. How is it that we need a 16-year old Swedish schoolgirl to wake up to the reality of climate change? He asked. Climate change scientists have been shouting about ‘the facts’ for decades now and yet it takes Greta for the world to start listening, or at-least to cock an ear. My conclusion, (I think, although I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise), is that it’s the raw human element within Greta which has put a fork in the dominant ‘business as usual’ road. It also affirms that statistics and facts and fearmongering through heartless political lobbying does not move people, but people – and their stories – move people. This brings me nicely to one of our book reviews in this issue of Biodiversity. Our Guest Book Reviewer Meredith Root-Bernstein, shares with us her thoughts on Isabella Tree’s Wilding. Winner of the 2019 Richard Jefferies prize for nature writing and chosen by the Smithsonian as one of their top ten science books for 2018, Wilding is an inspiring ‘call to action and an aide-memoire for all the living things we love and almost forgot we had lost’. Meredith, who is a scientist herself, shares how the book – and what it represents – is a reminder that theory is no substitute for observation. You may remember, that Isabella herself wrote The Knepp Wildland project for us back in 2017. Once intensively farmed, since 2012, Knepp has been devoted to a pioneering rewilding project and has seen great successes, including extraordinary increases in wildlife. Extremely rare species like turtle doves, nightingales, peregrine falcons and purple emperor butterflies are now breeding there; highlighting how intelligent farming systems can, and must, support biodiversity rather than (often) eradicating it – as is the case with many industrial farming systems. In Meredith’s other book review of The Life of Plants, she poetically describes how ‘plants don’t just form the structural background on which epiphytes, lichens, mosses, insects, woodpeckers, squirrels and spider monkeys can establish themselves; plants are actively connecting the chemical repositories of the planet, holding ecological processes together’. I agree with Meredith when she writes ‘I know having Coccia as my biology teacher would have made me concentrate a little harder in fifth grade!’ Community perceptions of the human-wildlife conflict: a case study of Old Oyo National Park, Nigeria is an important reminder that when local and/or indigenous communities – especially if they have ancestral ties to that landscape – are included in the conservation efforts of local wildlife, then the chances of that very wildlife being protected, dramatically increase. Habitat use of the Japanese wrinkled frog (Glandirana rugosa) BIODIVERSITY 2019, VOL. 20, NOS. 2–3, 75–76 https://doi.org/10.1080/14888386.2019.1660713