The Best Way to Save Nature? More Nature

Avocets, terns and gulls swoop down onto Wallasea Island on England’s eastern coast, searching for food between blades of grass ruffled by the summer sea breeze. Aside from the wind, and the odd chirp or squawk, it’s quiet—the kind of peaceful scene that seems like it’s been going on for centuries. Yet five years ago, these wetlands didn’t exist. The mud the birds have landed on once lay under the streets of central London. In 2015, as part of a railway project, a construction crew scooped more than 3 million metric tons of dirt out from beneath the capital, drove it 50 miles east and piled it onto farmland on the coastline of the county of Essex. In summer 2019, a crane hoisted old heavy machinery out of the water, removing the last vestiges of human interference. Wallasea is the largest restored coastal wetland in Europe, an exemplar of a growing movement to “rewild” land and return it to the way it was before humans began exploiting it millennia ago. It’s good for the birds. But it’s also increasingly understood as crucial for ensuring a world hospitable to people. As water sloshes in and out of Wallasea’s restored mudflats and salt marshes, carbon dioxide that could otherwise escape into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming gets buried. “Bits of decomposing leaves and seaweed come down rivers to the coast,” explains Rob Field, a senior conservation scientist at the Royal Society for the Pr...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Climate 2019 climate change europe Source Type: news