environmental Protection
British landowners should leave parts of their property to nature
A typical English landscape
© Blackbeck / Getty Images
An initiative of landowners wants to let the east of England become wild once more – to offer the animals and plants the home they need. Otherwise it looks bleak for the biodiversity of the island.
Back to nature: In Great Britain, an initiative is working to restore large areas of land to their original state and thus offer plants and animals a new home. “Wild East UK” is the name of the alliance that wants to ensure that at least twenty percent of the east of the country is renatured by 2027. Natural meadows and forests are to be restored from intensively used arable land.
There are scientific reasons why the initiative insists on the desired twenty percent: According to calculations, this area is necessary to maintain biodiversity in Great Britain for the future. In total, that would be 250,000 hectares of land that private landowners would have to sacrifice for the conservation project.
England shall go wild once more
Wild East UK has now called on more than a million landowners to give back parts of their property to nature. The initiators are also landowners themselves – they set a good example and stopped using large parts of their land for agriculture. There is no longer fertilizing or ploughing. In a “dream map” the initiative marks the areas that have already been released for renaturation. After all, it is said to be around 7,000 hectares of land that nature can now reclaim.
In order to gain the missing area for environmental protection, however, the activists still have to fight on and do a lot of convincing with the often wealthy or sometimes aristocratic landowners. If you want to support the project, but don’t happen to own large plots of land in the east of England (sigh), you can also support “Wild East UK” financially with donations. on the project’s website you can find all information regarding it. The money is used to buy up land and turn it into near-natural biotopes.
