How can we rewild the Earth at scale?

From global targets to backyard projects

This is a guest post by

Spencer R. Scott

, author of

As If We Were Staying

. It is part of Terraform, an essay collection about the future of our planet. Support the project by collecting the digital or print edition 👇🏻

At work, I think at the scale of the planet. The nonprofit I work for, One Earth, helped create the Global Safety Net—a composite of global datasets that identifies the 50.4% of Earth’s land that must be conserved to reverse biodiversity loss and stabilize our climate. But at home, in the shower, I fret over our few acres.

The growing tips of our native Ceanothus saplings were nibbled off last night. Their lilac pom poms mawed in half, too. I suppose I’m glad the deer are enjoying their native foods, but I ache like a parent, anxious to give my baby plants a fighting chance to re-populate. I worry over the clear blue sky. Is it my imagination, or are there fewer birds than there were last spring? My suspicion simmers into an accusatory ire leveled at the stray black cat I’ve seen prowling the garden. I plan a drive to Forgotten Felines to pick up a humane trap. As much as I love cats, I can’t condone the free reign of their ecological terror.

I worry over a bugless meadow. I want more butterflies. I’ll even take the flies. Certain ones anyway. I want a healthy delegation of the 1600 species of native California bees with their buff black bodies, fly-like disguises, or furry stout abdomens. I need more time, to plant more pollinator plants, to home more insects, to feed more birds. I want the Laguna to refill, the Herons to return, the Coho salmon to try their luck through a maze of spearing beaks. I want the beavers to slow the floodwaters, otters to hold hands in the river, and Tule elk to reclaim the pastureland that was once their foraging grounds.

These aren’t just nostalgic longings for a charismatic Earth, although they are that, too. After all, I was born into a world of declining abundance. Population sizes of wildlife have declined on average by 73% since the 1970s. I look around and see a world unraveling. Thinning out. Emptying. The promise of an enjoyable future, of any future, slips from my grasp.

We live in an ever-hollowing husk that threatens to crumble if we don’t reverse course. Beyond nostalgia, my activism seems so uncomplicated, so simple. I don’t want to live in the crumbling. I don’t want to live in the frayed end of a rope we hang ourselves by. I want to see the recuperation of the world. I want to see the planet refill with the million species that humans have put at risk of extinction. The fullness of the world—the beaver, otter, salmon of it all—are the hallmarks of a healthy, robust ecosystem that I can rely on into my future and the future of the generations beyond me.

I see a world that has lost much of its resilience. The web of life that sustains us is thinning and breaking. I want that resilience rebuilt, reconnected node by node. We seem to have settled on calling this “Rewilding”, but the concept of “wild” has long been compromised by the Western myths of separation.

Because Western conservationists, including some of its champions like John Muir, have had a long history of separation: Between what is wild and what is human, it must be said that when we seek to protect or conserve 50% of Earth, that doesn’t mean that it needs to be uninhabited by humans. The most biodiverse areas on the planet have been co-inhabited and stewarded by the Indigenous Communities that have lived there for millennia, often shaping and enriching the biodiversity and health of the area.

This insight—that humans can actively help “wild” areas thrive—was explored in Wilderness and the American Mind and more recently in the runaway hit, Braiding Sweetgrass. This concept opened a paradigm shifting window for many Western readers who had either been raised under the language and worldview of separation between human and nature. Others, hardened by despair, had furthered this divide by adopting the belief that humans are inherently a virus on the Earth. This insight of possible cooperation shows us that humans are not innately doomed. We are shaped by our “software”, our ideology, our cosmology, and, at the most fundamental level, our ecological literacy. We can behave like a virus, or like a keystone species. The choice is in our culture, in our education and relation to the world.

It is ecological literacy that we must rebuild if we are to successfully rewild the Earth and rebuild its resilience. And because almost all cases of “rewilding” are ultimately about building and honoring relationships—layers of interlocking dependencies, human to human, human to non-human, non-human to non-human—it can also be thought of as Re-Relationshiping.

Three years of progress at Solar Punk Farms.

Five years ago, my husband and I started Solar Punk Farms, and have been busy since transforming a dirt lot into a biodiverse experiment in agroecology. Our farm is part land regeneration project and part climate education hub where our community can gather, learn, and most importantly have a little fun. The through line of our experiment in regeneration has been the centrality and importance of relationships. Not just between us and our local ecosystem, but amidst our local town of Guerneville and the friends and conspirators across the Bay Area that constitute a growing culture of people dedicated to protecting and restoring the ecological splendor of this slice of Earth.

We are lucky to live amongst the redwoods. They’re about as charismatic as a plant can get, and lend themselves easily to protection. Or so one might think. They are a plant so spectacular, Gold Rush colonists went through the effort to “skin alive” the 328-foot tall Mother of the Forest in Calaveras, California so it could be reassembled at The Crystal Palace in London. That’s a lot to haul over 5,000 miles in 1856. In London, the exhibit was a runaway success, but back in Calaveras Grove, the Mother of the Forest died in a few years without the protection of its bark.

The respect of these giants, is somehow, not a given. Our town began as a logging town, eventually earning the name Stumptown because that’s all that was left. At my most graceful, I would say the settlers that decimated these forests were simply ecologically illiterate. They believed God had made the natural world an unlimited well for them to draw from. They couldn’t build a relationship because they couldn’t conceive of interdependence—only a world where every arrow pointed from resource to extractor. I don’t want the unraveling of the world to get a chance to teach its ultimate lesson: That we are at the mercy of this web, not the other way around. We must learn to change course before we are forced to.

2000 acres of new parks along the Russian River. (Link)

The big news in my local community recently was the county’s purchase, with the help of the Save The Redwoods League, of 500+ acres to create a new park in the Monte Rio Redwoods and a promise to add 1500+ acres to connect 20 miles of forest along the Russian River all the way out to the Pacific coast. I dream of a future where more and more of the local map turns that hopeful shade of protected green.

According to The Global Safety Net, even my progressive state of California needs to protect twice as much land as it currently does to safeguard our biodiversity and carbon sequestering forests, some 52 million more acres. It’s easy to build a relationship with my backyard—the land I tend with my own hands. But how do we build relationships with 52 million acres let alone 50% of the Earth? If land is ultimately protected by relationships, what is the point of a depersonalized global map from scientists halfway across the planet?

It’s important to note that the Monte Rio purchase was not protected by the summation of individual efforts but rather occurred in the context of a local culture that viewed this as a wise use of funds. Sonoma county residents’ personal relationships to the redwoods informed the priorities of our larger collectives.

A snapshot of the Global Safety Net. Areas of the terrestrial realm where increased conservation action is needed to protect biodiversity and store carbon. Image credit: Globaia

The Global Safety Net wasn’t designed to be prescriptive. It was created as a tool for prioritization—a guidepost for global collectives to allocate resources where they can have the greatest impact. Since biodiversity is not evenly distributed around the globe, certain ecosystems are home to an array of rare species, or carbon-rich peatlands and forests that warrant a little extra attention.

This reality is what the Global Safety Net calls a “common but differentiated” approach: Each country is encouraged to protect land in proportion to its biodiversity. For example, Portugal’s target, reflecting its long-developed history, is 23% (94% of which is already protected). Meanwhile, Guyana, home to rich biodiversity, has a target of 91%, only 10% of which is currently designated as protected. It’s neither fair nor realistic to expect countries like Guyana to meet these targets without international support that can counterbalance global forces that apply pressure to develop, urbanize, or extract resources from these areas.

Like any safety net, this one is a failsafe, a floor, not a ceiling. It may sound callous to say some places are more “important” to our global goals than others, and while that may be true under certain parameters, there are more considerations on-the-ground. While highly developed countries may not qualify for the same global funding, there is always value in restoring, protecting, and building relationships with our ecosystems.

It must also be said that any global framework risks replicating the dynamics of colonialism—where Global North institutions use environmentalism as a pretext to control ecologically rich lands in the Global South, even as they’ve depleted their own. Ultimately, global funds should not impose, but rather support people and places where there is already local will. The Global Safety Net’s purpose should be to direct resources to where they’re most needed, not control decisions.

This conversation is often best seen through the rights and sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples. Some conservationists still cling to the outdated (and wrong) notion that nature must be emptied of humans to be protected. The Global Safety Net challenges this assumption by drawing attention to the fact that Indigenous lands cover 37% of the “priority areas” on the map. This is unsurprising given the fact that Indigenous Peoples govern and steward 39% of Earth’s most ecologically intact lands, while making up only 6.2% of the global population.

Given this dynamic, it is clear that setting aside land for conservation is not the only or even the best way to protect biodiversity. The Global Safety Net recognizes not just these conventional “protected areas” but also “Other Effective Conservation Measures” (OECMs), which is the laughably clinical term for how Indigenous Peoples or local communities govern and co-exist with their wealth of biodiversity.

The global view leads us back to the primacy of the local. One of the most effective strategies for protecting ecosystems vital to biodiversity and climate stability is to support the people who already live in deep, interdependent relationship with them.

In the language of academic conservationism, these stewards are often grouped under the term Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs). It’s another clinical term that is nonetheless helpful in understanding how relationships form the basis of environmental protection. A “Local Community” is defined, not just as a group living in proximity, but a group organized around a shared intergenerational ethic, built around shared livelihoods, cultural identities, languages, worldviews, institutions, governance systems, and ecological knowledge situated in place.

For non-indigenous people, the definition of a “Local Community” provides a clear roadmap for what it takes to become a culture that stewards the web it relies on. It is clear we must protect and empower Indigenous and local communities where they already maintain deep, place-based relationships. But we also must foster new Local Communities by cultivating a shared ecological identity, intergenerational thinking, and cultural practices rooted in place.

If it is now clear that the world is protected, stewarded, and thrives under the care of people rooted to place, it should also be clear that these relationships extend beyond the land itself. A local community is not just defined by its relation to place, but by the quality of its relationships within it: To neighbors, traditions, livelihoods and shared institutions.

For my husband and I, what started out as a land regeneration project, slowly revealed itself to be about relationships more broadly. What started as a garden became a community center. We spend equal amounts of time planting native pollinator plants as we do, hosting volunteer events, community festivals, intergenerational brunches, field trips, and plain old parties. In a world shattered by commodification, automation, and individualistic ideals that have only left us lonely and disconnected, our most important work has been that ever-nebulous concept of community building, which can largely be defined as a quality and consistency of presence and care. We worry not only how are we showing up for our community in times of need, but how do we celebrate together? How do we meet regularly, share stories, share lives, share pasts and most essentially, futures. How do we connect, connect, connect?

In our effort to rewild the planet, it may begin in our backyards with our connection to the Ceanothus bloom, the buff black bees, and the otters twisting through the river. But we must remember that those connections are inseparable from our relationships with each other. With our neighbors, with the barista and barkeep, the familiar faces we see at festivals, and the new ones we meet at a town hall.

In a web that is breaking node by node, that is thinning and emptying out, we have to weave in every direction, pull all the threads closer and closer. Our work begins and ends in the richness of our relationships.