[HN Gopher] Monks Wood Wilderness: 60 years ago, scientists let ...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Monks Wood Wilderness: 60 years ago, scientists let a farm field
       rewild
        
       Author : indogooner
       Score  : 39 points
       Date   : 2021-08-01 17:01 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (theconversation.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com)
        
       | chadlavi wrote:
       | The part of Northeastern Connecticut where I grew up has
       | experienced a happenstance version of this. It's a densely wooded
       | area. As a kid, exploring in the woods you'd always find stone
       | walls, old rusted out trucks from the 30s, the foundations of old
       | houses, etc. I assumed the stone walls were from colonial times
       | and that the trucks had been driven deep into the woods and
       | abandoned. It blew my mind when I learned that in fact the whole
       | area had been farmland just 60 or so years before. Those trucks
       | were left to rot in a field. Those stone walls were at the border
       | between fields. And the forest came back pretty quickly and
       | reclaimed it all.
       | 
       | We should do a lot more of this everywhere.
        
       | firstSpeaker wrote:
       | So about 50 years and any farmland can turn into a wild forest
       | again? Aka, the deforestation can be reversed in about 50 years?
        
         | pvaldes wrote:
         | In some cases, yes. Ecosystems are resilient to moderate damage
         | but almost impossible to fix after severe damage.
         | 
         | Normally you will not have a winning combination of very
         | fertile soil, water, forest near to provide recruitment of
         | plants and animals and private land with strictly not allowed
         | arsonists of any kind.
        
         | thatguy0900 wrote:
         | They note that the process is so quick because there was
         | already a large untouched forest next to it. So any
         | deforestation next to a forest can be fixed quickly, but it
         | would have to creep its way inward over a longer time if there
         | was no forest nearby.
        
       | cardamomo wrote:
       | Recently, I've been thinking about "City Country Fingers," a way
       | of integrating urban and agricultural land found in Christopher
       | Alexander's "A Pattern Language." You can read his description of
       | the pattern here:
       | http://iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl003.htm
       | 
       | With the Monks Wood rewilding in mind, I wonder how we could
       | transition urban areas toward a city country finger pattern.
       | Though perhaps there should be three kinds of fingers: city,
       | agriculture, and wilderness. Alexander's "country" is just
       | farmland, though he envisions its recreational use too.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-08-01 23:02 UTC)