By Simon Fairlie, The Land Magazine
In the face of these pressures there remains a dogged belief amongst many in the farming community that the purpose of agriculture is to produce food. A growing number of consumers are keen to buy high quality local food, produced through sound husbandry (as agroecology used to be called).
By H. Scott Butterfield, T. Rodd Kelsey, Abigail K. Hart, Resilience.org
The term rewilding is being used more broadly these days to refer to restoring diversity, variability, and function so that ecosystems can once again support the full diversity of species and become self-regulating and resilient to climate change.
By Joshua Sterlin, Uneven Earth
There is a growing movement, largely allied with anarchist, radical environmentalist, and decolonial practice, repurposing the term rewilding to be a political and cultural project that is more than merely conservation biology, one that thinks about nature with the people in.
By Lucia Monje-Jelfs, Sustainable Food Trust
The Cull is an award-winning documentary that explores the controversial topic of deer management in the Scottish Highlands, illustrating the complexity of a debate which has been going on for decades.
By Chris Smaje, A Small Farm Future
With a no deal Brexit looming and the Government’s farm subsidy regimen shifting towards payments only for delivering ‘public goods’, it looks like hard times may lie ahead for many commercial farmers in the UK, none more so than for upland livestock farmers.
By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth
Because the film is so compelling and Attenborough such a sympathetic person, viewers may accept all of its statements and arguments. This would, however, be a mistake in my opinion.
By Gaia Foundation staff, Gaia Foundation
In this article our Finnish partners Snowchange announce the launch of a new, world-leading effort to re-wild the Finnish-Russian Koitajoki River System using a combination of science and traditional knowledge. Gaia is proud to be a partner in this exciting project.
By Derek Gow, Resilience.org
If you’re a ‘Beaver Nut’ and realise earnestly just how critical these creatures are to the future well-being of the earth, with a pivotal role in the creation of abundant biodiversity, water provision, purification, flood and drought alleviation, you will pursue beaver advocacy with the kind of tedious zeal generally restricted to deluded members of obscure religious cults.
By Patrick Holden, Sustainable Food Trust
I am firmly of the land sharing community. I take the view that if we are to reverse the relentless decline of biodiversity and natural ecosystems, which I was fortunate enough to witness in abundance as a child before major agricultural intensification took place, we need to change the way we farm.
By Rebecca Hosking, Oxford Real Farming Conference
We should not simply sweep aside farms to make way for wildlife. Instead, we should see agriculture—and ourselves!—as part of nature, and integrate accordingly.
By George Monbiot, The Guardian blog
If there is a formula for the new demagoguery, there must also be a formula for confronting and overturning it. I don’t yet have a complete answer, but I believe there are some strands we can draw together.
By Rob Hopkins, Ben Goldfarb, Rob Hopkins blog
One of the finest books I’ve read recently was ‘Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter’ by Ben Goldfarb. Ben is an American environmental journalist who has taken great interest in this remarkable creature and its ability to, as he put it when we spoke, “help tackle many of our ecological problems if we just get out of the way and let the rodent do the work”.