Nature Fights Back

Pearl Band 18

NATURE FIGHTS BACK

Nature Fights Back

Nature Fights Back

This book is about rewilding: how nature fights back even when it appears to have been wiped out. Learn how farmland grows back into forest, deserted cities turn into wilderness, and life appears on volcanoes which erupt from the sea.

An information book collins.co.uk/collinsbigcat

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Simon Chapman 21/10/2021 17:56

Nature Fights Back Contents Introduction

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1 Rewilding damaged habitats

6

2 Natural disasters and extinction events

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3 Human threats to nature

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4 People helping the natural world

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5 Nature fights back

72

Glossary

76

Rewilding

78 Written by Simon Chapman

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Introduction Around the world, wild nature is in crisis. Forests are being cut down. Oceans are being polluted. The climate is changing. And nearly all of this is the fault of the human race.

But extinctions of animals and plants are nothing new.

Life has existed on Earth for 4,000 million years and several times natural disasters have killed nearly all of it. The most recent of these “extinction events” was 66 million years ago when a comet impact wiped out the dinosaurs and many other whole animal families.

Afterwards, Earth recovered. Over time, new species evolved and around 200,000 years ago, homo sapiens (humans, like us) came to exist. Humans started affecting other life on the planet by hunting and farming. This has been going on for the past 10,000 years – since the end of the last ice age. This is a blink of an eye in the history of life on Earth.

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But the human race does not have to cause the next extinction event. When nature is left alone, species come back to damaged habitats; this is called “rewilding”.

In 2020, during the coronavirus lockdowns when there was less traffic and less pollution, wildlife moved into urban spaces. Meadow flowers grew up on roadside verges that were left uncut and bees arrived to pollinate them. Across the world, people saw (and often filmed) animals walking along their city streets, from deer in Japan and elephants in India to jackass penguins in Cape Town, South Africa.

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No species has ever had the power to change nature as much as our own, and we can change things for the better.

We can conserve resources and produce less pollution.

We can preserve natural habitats and help other areas go back to nature. We can help nature fight back.

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1 Rewilding damaged habitats The DMZ minefields and watchtowers – nature returns to a war zone Picture the scene: a strip of land, four kilometres wide, that runs west to east for 250 kilometres over rugged mountains from one coast to another. Both sides of the strip are edged with high barbed wire fences. There are watchtowers with machine guns and bunkers full of armed troops every few hundred metres. The land between the two armies is peppered with landmines and covered by heavy guns hidden in the countryside behind. No one goes in here anymore. To enter means death.

This is the DMZ (“Dee-Em-Zee”), the so-called Demilitarised Zone between the borders of North Korea and South Korea in East Asia. The two countries went to war in 1950 and, when that war ended, it was agreed that there should be some land between them which nobody was allowed to enter. Since then, that narrow band has been left alone. No one has built roads over it or farmed it.

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It has gone wild. Forests have grown and wetlands have flooded as vegetation has clogged waterways. In the sea to either side of the Korean peninsula, marine habitats have thrived. The whole area has become an accidental wildlife paradise.

North Korea Pyongyang

Seoul

South Korea

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white-naped cranes

Amur leopard

Most obvious of the new residents are long-legged birds called cranes. These use the new marshes as winter stopovers to feed on insects, frogs and plant roots during their yearly journey from north-eastern China and Mongolia. The 1.3 metre-tall white-naped crane is the most abundant kind. There are also increasing numbers of the bigger and ultra-rare redcrowned crane. In Korean culture, cranes represent good fortune and long life. The red-crowned crane was nearing extinction until new areas of habitat opened up for it in the DMZ.

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Pearl Band 18

NATURE FIGHTS BACK

Nature Fights Back

Nature Fights Back

This book is about rewilding: how nature fights back even when it appears to have been wiped out. Learn how farmland grows back into forest, deserted cities turn into wilderness, and life appears on volcanoes which erupt from the sea.

An information book collins.co.uk/collinsbigcat

24619_Cover.indd 1

Simon Chapman 21/10/2021 17:56