Rewilding is a more comprehensive approach to ecosystem restoration that addresses multiple issues. It represents an integral philosophy, a holistic science, and a new story.
It is typically defined as large core wilderness lands that are connected by corridors that facilitate the migration of keystone species, like carnivores, which jumpstart nature-based solutions to climate change, species loss, sustainable development, and local resiliency.
Rewilding therefore offers a more effective approach to “infrastructure” that is more cost-efficient than techno-solutions defined by complex supply lines, industrial technology, extractive relations, and invisible violences and injustices.
It further offers opportunities for building community through cooperation, and cultivates a culture of compassion and co-existence through promoting human-nature contact, complexity science, decolonization, and vulnerabilities regarding social and environmental collapse.
Rewilding San Francisco Peninsula:
A Plan for California
- Rewilding is an ecological approach to restoration that links large ecological cores with wildlife corridors to protect and restore keystone species to increase biodiversity.
- Rewilding offers cost effective solutions to larger problems like species extinction, climate change, vulnerable communities, and sustainable development.
- Rewilding is a more sustainable and just approach than industrial green energy projects which rely on long, complex, and vulnerable fossil fuel based infrastructure and supply lines
- Rewilding offers site-specific analysis that incorporates local knowledge and cultural frameworks to ensure long-term success aligned with values that uphold the integrity of land and the communities in them.
- Rewilding mitigates and compensates industries by offsetting and ensuring extractive industries incorporate principles to offset, mitigate, and otherwise restore ecosystems
- Rewilding offers a strategy for ecosystem restoration that is recognized by the international science and political communities as necessary for achieving Sustainability Development Goals, and Millennium Development Goals on time (2030), and constitutes an approach guiding the UN’s Decade of Ecosystem Restoration (2030)
- Rewilding as an ecological philosophy was developed in the West in response to unjust social and historical trends and practices that have lasted for centuries and millennia. It combines insight from conservation biology, eco-psychology, wilderness protection, bioregionalism, indigenous wisdom, and evidence-based policy.
- Recent legislation incentivizing wildlife connectivity projects offers potential to connect critical linkages for wildlife migration while offering easement plans that restore traditional ecological knowledge in land management schemes
- Rewilding offers long-term, sustainable, socio-ecologically just approaches to unite visions, restore ecosystems, sustainable development, and smart growth, with opportunities for investment in nature-based solutions to complex solutions
- The SF Peninsula, Bay Area, and California Coast offers a critical wildlife corridor for the wider region, state, country, continent, and world, that can lead rights of nature legislation; local, state, federal, and international policies and incentives can be used to mobilize rewilding efforts that can generate sustainable models for economic opportunity, local governance, ecological restoration, and cultural resilience.
Top Environmental Issues on the SF Peninsula:
A Nextdoor Coastside Survey over 4 1/4 years
November 2017
- Sea Water Pollution
- Coast Side Air Quality
- San Mateo Government
- Wildlife/Ecosystem Loss
- Trash
- Coastline Erosion
- Chemical Contamination
- Dog Waste
- Light Pollution
- 4 way tie: need up-cycled market, post-holiday clogging, cows, noise pollution, disinformation and ideological hyperbole
August 2020
- Development/Overbuilding (government)
- Ocean/Beach Pollution
- Traffic/Evacuation routes
- 2 way tie: Water (supply/waste) demand and sewer, and Chemical Pollution (government)
- Light pollution
- Air Quality
- Overconsumption
- 2 way tie: coastal erosion/loss of local ecosystem
- Population numbers
- Nothing matters but thoughts that make money
February 2022
- Beach Pollution and Runoff
- Overpopulation
- Plastic Garbage in Ocean
- Human threats to wildlife
- Traffic cars (tie)
- Agricultural Pesticides (tie)
- Noise, Light, Air pollution (tie)
- Wildfire threat/unhealthy forests
- Global warming
- Dredging the harbor
Top Trends
- Ocean/Beach/Water pollution
- Overdevelopment (government assisted)
- Wildlife/habitat loss
- Air quality
- Light/noise pollution
- Lack of government regulation
- Chemical pollution/Agricultural pesticides
- Traffic congestion
- “Predatory capitalism/”Nothing matters but making money”/”business-as-usual”