Ecology

The Joy Of Rewilding

Turning Our Home Into a Wildlife Haven

Photo by Stephan H. on Unsplash

Part of the beauty and the joy of having your own space is being able to use it to benefit others. In a world where new roads, new housing developments and concrete wastelands seem poised to take over every available inch of natural habitat, my wife and I are immensely privileged in owning our own garden space, which we have in large part turned over to Nature in all her glorious wildness.

We live in an area of greenbelt surrounded by arable fields, hedgerows, streams and stands of mature trees. It’s rural enough that buzzards and ravens frequent the skies above and large flocks of pink-footed geese feed in the surrounding fields every winter.

But things are changing.

The blacktop running by our house has gone from a once-quiet country road to a busy, noisy, dangerous main artery linking the nearby motorway on one side with the rapidly-growing urban conurbation on the other.

Every year there seem to be new housing estates spreading like a cancer across the fields to home the mushrooming human population. It seems crazy that people cannot see the glaring unsustainability of the continued unchecked growth of an exponentially expanding population.