CITIES NEED TO BE WILD
Every other day growing up, my mother would pick us up from school in rural Switzerland and rush us along the Route Suisse bordering Lac Léman to the closest city for our after-school activities. In my memory, the Swiss countryside is always perfectly curated: tidy fields embanked by manicured green road-side grass patches. That block-color roadside rural landscape I was familiar with as a child is now dotted with color thanks to wildflowers.
After nearly a decade working on environmental conservation in Latin America, it is fascinating to experience the growing rewilding movement in Europe. In Latin America, the focus is on preservation and conservation, rather than restoration. In the European context, where nature has been curated by human activity for centuries, chaos is being reintroduced.
The restoration debate in Europe is a complex one I will not delve into here. What I would like to focus on, however, are initiatives helping to restore biodiversity and bring back nature to human psyche.
LETTING NATURE FLOURISH
Rewilding entered the dictionary in 2011. The Oxford Dictionary defines “rewild” as “to restore (an area of land) to its natural uncultivated state.” At a time when biodiversity loss is occurring at a thousand times the normal speed, restoring ecosystems sheds a glimmer of hope for halting losses. The canton and city of Geneva’s campaigns “Ici la nature s’épanouit” (Here Nature Flourishes) and “Urbanature” are excellent examples of urban rewilding.
Traditionally, roadside grass patches and city green areas will be neatly maintained. Overgrowth will be cut down, grasses perceived as weeds eliminated, often controlled using pesticides. Landscaping like this limits plant biodiversity. In contrast, untended grasses allow native wildflowers and grasses to flourish. A diversity of plants draws insects that play important roles in broader ecosystem functions such as pollination, soil aeration, and pest-control.
Launched in 2016, the “Ici la nature s’épanouit” initiative initially responded to the biodiversity law adopted by the Canton of Geneva in 2012. The initiative aims to protect and develop new ecosystems more favorable to biodiversity. Roadsides sites identified as home to rare and protected fauna are only given maintenance once a year during an appropriate season to let nature go wild.
In the City of Geneva itself, the “Urbanature” initiative aims to green urban concrete during the summer months by leaving selected green areas untended and installing temporary green spaces. Beyond improving city aesthetics and serving as rest stops, temporary pots increase plant coverage, creating bio-corridors during a season of high plant and insect activity. The summer installations also serve as trials for longer-term urban “greening” projects.
SHIFTING BASELINES
As much as rewilding is about ecological restoration in the literal sense, it is also about restoring human connection to the natural environment.
“Urbanature” does this successfully with its summer pop-up “L’Escale” - a vegetable / beer garden that immerses visitors in local edible wildflowers and herbs, alongside a live music stage and a microbrew beer bars (that also hands out free edible plant seeds to visitors). “L’Escale” effectively combines various senses to connect the visitor with nature.
As the leading ocean conservation scientist Daniel Pauly explains, ecological restoration suffers from a “shifting baseline syndrome”. Restoration occurs on the premise of restoring an ecosystem back to a certain baseline. That baseline will be based on the individual’s construct and perception of the natural environment. Were it not for my environmental science background, the now “messy” biodiverse roadside might not be culturally acceptable to me as it starkly clashes with my childhood memory of rural Switzerland.
The definition of what is “natural” changes with every generation. What initiatives like “Ici la nature s’épanouit” and “Urbanture” show us is that cultural expectations can be shifted. Nature is chaotic. Wildflowers are beautiful. Let’s reintroduce wilderness back into our cities to cultivate a generation that embraces diversity.
