"Our job is to give nature a helping hand"

Rewilding, letting the land heal itself and getting out of nature's way

“Our job is to give nature a helping hand, not to actually replace nature or think we know better.”

This is a quote from Tim Smit, director of the Eden Project. In a previous post, I wrote about the importance of co-creating with nature. Christiana Soderberg (who writes a deeply thoughtful and deeply felt Substack on the importance of care) commented, ‘I'm also intrigued by how much faster and more efficiently we could find solutions to our many problems if we got our advice from the natural kingdom who of course is wise beyond our years...’

This got me thinking about a previous blog post I had written on the subject of rewilding - and specifically rewilding which is not tightly managed by humans but which gives nature the space to heal itself. To quote from the previous blog:

Tim Smit was asked if the Eden Project would be interested in taking over the management of a parcel of rainforest in Costa Rica. Thirty years ago, it was degraded farmland. It was then bought by the former owner who said, “I want the birds to shit it back to life” and fenced off the 10,000 acres for 20 years. The birds did their job and the land is now burgeoning with diverse plant and animal life, including ocelots, puma and jaguars. And what was once an arid region, with people fighting over water rights, now has four rivers running through it, 365 days a year. The local people also now have the opportunity to create livelihoods in the rainforest, growing cacao in the shade of the trees.

In this instance, and many others, humans have damaged the land - but the land can heal itself, if it is given the space to do so.

Leaving the land completely to its own devices is not the only approach. More active human intervention can be beneficial. One of the examples that I came across in my research for the book is the work of Ernest Götsch in Brazil, who has inspired others, including Carlos and Henny who are working on healing the land at Terra Booma, also in Brazil. To quote an excerpt from my book-in-progress:

Terra Booma

I am walking with Carlos and Henny in what they call ‘their lab’. Terra Booma is not a lab in the indoors, white-coated sense of the word. And there is not a chemical in sight. But it is a place of observation and experimentation. It is a farm where, for the past three years, Carlos has been planting according to agro-forestry principles, listening to the results and learning. Banana trees are planted amongst eucalyptus. Lines of tuft-top pineapples grow at the foot of the trees. Sunflowers hold their yellow faces to the mother sun. Butterflies flit between the plants. I feel the peacefulness and harmony growing here, the plants working together. The large drooping leaves of the banana provide shade to smaller plants. The fluttering leaves of the young eucalyptus will fall to the ground and provide organic matter to enrich the soil. The ground cover plants hug the earth and help the system to be self-sustaining, locking in moisture and also enriching the soil.

Carlos has dark brown eyes and bouncy dark curls, held down by a pointed straw hat. He was studying agriculture when he first came across the work of Ernest Götsch, the pioneer of syntropic agriculture, also known as successional agroforestry. “Ernest was saying the complete opposite of what we were being taught, but his approach made so much more sense to me.” Carlos started researching more into Ernest’s work, and then went to study with him.

Ernest Götsch’s method starts with regenerating the soil. Much of what is classified as sustainable agriculture is based on substituting inputs which are harmful to the environment with more sustainable inputs, for example chemical fertilisers are replaced with organic ones, or pesticides are replaced with natural solutions. Syntropic agriculture is not based on better replacements, operating within the same system, which ‘combat the consequences of the lack of adequate conditions for healthy plant growth.^⁠’ It is a fundamentally different approach. It is described as process-based agriculture, rather than input-based. “We follow the natural way,” says Carlos. “We observe what happens with natural vegetation, and we mix our planting in the same way.”

Carlos describes how when Ernest first arrived at his farm in Bahia, Brazil, in the early 1980s, the land was completed degraded - it had been cleared for intensive logging and then abandoned, nothing grew, and the water sources had dried up. Its name was ‘Fugidos da Terra Seca’, which translates as ‘Escaped into Dry Land.’ Now there are 17 springs flowing and Ernest grows the finest cacao in Brazil, which fetches four times the price of conventional products.

A thriving agro-forestry garden at Terra Booma where once there was just land degraded by cattle grazing

In both cases, in Costa Rica and Brazil (both through the work of Ernest Götsch in Bahia and at Terra Booma), the land has been healed through people listening to what the land requires and either leaving nature to heal or itself, or working with nature in a loving and caring way. Although the work at Terra Booma and at Ernest farm’s is not strictly rewilding, it is farming which heals and achieves many of the same outcomes of rewilding.

It’s been estimated that approximately 30% of land needs to be rewilded, if the world is to avoid the worst effects of climate breakdown and halt biodiversity loss. And the world and the land needs this to be done in a way that listens to the land, and co-creates with it, rather than imposing human will upon it. When are we going to start to listen?