Natural, sustainable and utterly beneficial
At the stroke of a pen, our States could mandate that every field boundary across Jersey has to be left three, four or five meters wide
In response to the climate emergency recently declared by the States of Jersey, we are going to have to severely reduce our carbon-emitting activities over the next ten years. Even so, we will not achieve zero emissions. What the emergency demands of us is net-zero emissions by 2030. This means that, for whatever small carbon pollution we are still creating by then, we must have in place local carbon sinks to bring the carbon back out of the atmosphere.
Carbon sinks sequester carbon. In other words, they lay it down for safekeeping in a permanent way, where it does no harm, day after day. People have imagined huge clanking, whirring machines smashing carbon into solid blocks that can be stored in deep mines. That is nonsense. The best places to sequester carbon are where it always was before mankind’s industrial interventions. Simply put, these are the soil, the forests, the oceans and the sea.
Rewilding the land and the sea has two major benefits in addition to their massive capacity for carbon sequestration. Without our chemical and mechanical attacks, simply left alone — to be, to breed and to breath — rewilded spaces provide marvellous environments for wildlife of every type to flourish. Secondly, not only is this wildlife part of nature’s carbon sink, but it is a vital source of physical, mental and emotional health, both to us humans, and within itself.
The cat, dog, hedgehog and squirrel videos all over social media are not there for nothing: we have an enormous capacity for joy from observing our furred, feathered and crawling relatives enjoying life as much as we could. Without them, our lives become harsh and bereft, even a meaningless struggle of greed and spite. Forest bathing is a thing in Japan, and feeding squirrels in parks is big in London. For us and our children, there’s much more to come than feeding the pigeons in the Royal Square.
At the stroke of a pen, our States could mandate that every field boundary across Jersey has to be left three, four or five meters wide.
These natural rewilding areas would instantly become an island-wide network of wildlife corridors. Organic matter would build into the soil. Native wild plants, fungus and invertebrates would colonise the ground. And native shrubs, bushes and trees could be planted or would quickly self-seed.
Carbon would be sequestered in a natural, sustainable and utterly beneficial way.
This article first appeared in the Jersey Evening Post on 6 June 2019
