RE:IGNITE The Natural World
As part of our trilogy to support community co-creation in the city, thirty seven of us came together to RE:IGNITE Wolverhampton, building on our earlier RE:IMAGINE session a few weeks earlier. At the previous session, people had identified seven themes that they were interested in putting energy into developing further. We shared examples of how similar ideas have been ignited around the world, and in themed breakout rooms, sparked ideas for how we can make this happen in Wolverhampton. This blog is part of a series sharing what happened in each room.
During the Covid-19 lockdown, the world seemingly fell back in love with the natural world as we reconnected with life’s simple pleasures. You couldn’t walk out of your front door without tripping over someone cooing over a butterfly or marvelling at a chaffinch. But as restrictions have gradually lifted, people have increasingly reverted to their old patterns of behaviour. Maybe now, we thought, would be a perfect time to rekindle this love affair and create some natural magic of our own right here in Wolverhampton.
There are plenty of people doing similar things across the nation and the rest of the world. Take rewilding, for example. Rewilding is about restoring eco-systems so nature can take care of itself. More typically it’s conducted at scale over a large area, but this would not be feasible in most parts of Wolverhampton. However, we invited people to consider a network of gardens across a neighbourhood that had been partially or wholly rewilded. This could result in twice as many birds in gardens or almost thirty times as many hedgehogs, and let’s face it, who doesn’t like a hedgehog?
Since our session, the Staffordshire Wildlife Trust has produced a handy free guide on rewilding your garden, which is bound to be of interest.
Then there are insect corridors — a network of wild flower pathways that could help to reverse the sad decline of so many of our important pollinators like bees, wasps, saw flies and ants.
Since 1979, the population of these insects has halved due to modern agricultural methods and out of town developments, sweeping away land that was previously full of wild flowers.
Finally, we presented an idea about community orchards. These are simply a collection of fruit trees that are shared by communities and grown in publicly accessible places so that people can simply help themselves to delicious, healthy, fresh fruit. So, they’re great for people but they’re also brilliant for the birds and insects.
These ideas were just our suggestion and in the breakout rooms, the ideas just kept on flowing, so much so that we ran out of time. There was a lot of love for vertical gardens, a great way to grow things in restricted space.
Our innovators suggested that these would be easy to create by salvaging pallets from skips and recycling plastic bottles to construct them. Jim told us that in Singapore vertical gardens are a frequent sight on the top floor of multi-storey car parks.
Our creatives also wanted to see widespread tree and wild flower planting. Lisa and Kate both wanted to see networks of wild flower pathways throughout the city and for this sort of thinking to be incorporated into future urban developments in the city.
Andrea was keen on a citywide community composting scheme along the lines of the one developed in California. She also recommended that we watch the film ‘Kiss the Ground’ about soil quality, if we get the chance.
Sajida also thought that we could learn a lot from elsewhere, signposting us to Willowbrook Farm in Oxford, which specialises in bio-diversity.
It’s true to say that WE left this get-together in high spirits and a state of great excitement. We can hardly wait to start working with everyone to explore these ideas in further detail and see what might be possible in our city.
