HOMEbound Nature News - ISSUE 4
Happenings in the Substack Ecosphere || Wisent
This month’s issue of the HOMEbound Nature News is brought to you by the wisent.
Ah! It’s finally time for me to write a species profile for my namesake, the wisent. Known in English as the European bison, wisent is the name given this majestic creature in several tongues. Thus, pronunciation varies, but as for myself, I go with WIZ-int.
Once extinct in the wild, Bison bonasus has made a remarkable comeback on the continent in recent years. Bred in captivity for several decades, the wisent are now thriving in their thousands in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland’s Białowieża Forest, and into the Caucasus and Russia. Other herds are beginning to flourish in the Netherlands’ rewilding areas.
In 2022, a small group of bison were released near Canterbury in the UK as a trial toward rewilding the species in the Isles; another small group was released in central Portugal earlier this year.
It’s an intensively studied species; genetic research is illuminating the wisent’s Pleistocene lineage and relationships among other bison species that once roamed the continent, as well as with the presumed ancestor of modern cattle, the aurochs. As gleaned from the significant shifts in North America’s Yellowstone National Park with the reintroduction of wolves, rewilding large land mammals reorganizes ecosystems. Ongoing studies will undoubtedly reveal fascinating knock-on effects from the return of the wisent to areas that have lacked bison for hundreds, or in some cases, thousands of years.
One initial finding of interest is that a 20-mile square grassland in Romania sequestered an additional 54,000 tons of carbon annually due to the action of its restored, 170-member herd of bison. For context, the emissions of humanity per year is somewhere around 11 billion tons of carbon. Divide that by 54,000 tons, and you’d see that just around 200,000 more of these 20-square-mile grasslands with 170 wisents each would be needed to reach net-zero emissions. It’s a lot of parks to set up, but there are 8 billion of us and counting, so surely we have the manpower for such a job.
Okay, that’s a massive oversimplification and nothing more than a thought experiment, but the large intellects at the Yale School of the Environment have previously done actual work showing that widespread restoration of wildlife and their ecosystems could serve as a powerful natural climate change solution. Restoring marine and land animal populations could get humanity most of the way to the carbon drawdown needed to prevent catastrophic climate change (that is, more catastrophic than it already is).
I don’t love looking at nonhuman lives in terms of their benefit to human society. However, in this case, helping wildlife and ecosystems return to some extent of their former glory may just be enough to save us from ourselves. Certainly the pure technological path of renewable energy, carbon offsets, and unproven carbon-capture machinery will not get us there; more life is actually the answer to the carbon drawdown that must be achieved if much of our planet is to remain habitable for its current denizens, human and nonhuman alike.
As Oswald Schmitz, the study’s lead author says, “Fortunately, we have the technology to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. It’s called nature.”
For more on trophic rewilding as a climate solution, see the following links:
Happenings in the Substack Ecosphere
🌿 Announcements 🌿
Many thanks to all the folks who sent in their items for inclusion in this month’s edition. What great work you are doing. Occasionally, I supplement these listings with items I’ve gleaned from around Substack myself. If I’ve included anyone’s information in error, please send your corrections to ourhome@substack.com so I can update the listing.
A fine Saturday morning it was when the recent edition of Substack Reads appeared in my inbox. Guest-edited by nature writer Bill Davison of Easy By Nature, it was in my unbiased opinion the most contemplative and lusciously real issue of Reads yet. Featuring work by writers in the nature community Antonia Malchik, Jason Anthony, David Knowles, David E. Perry, and Hari Berrow, it soothed my little green heart no end. Reward yourself by spending some time with it.
The Welsh news site Nation.Cymru recently published a piece by Ruth Bradshaw, who writes here on Substack at Stories of Coexistence. It’s about a nature reserve near Ruth’s parents’ home that she visits frequently. From Ruth’s photo above, I’d say that’s quite a beautiful place.
Letter from Gwaith Powdwr, Penrhyndeudraeth
For our Substack Nature family in the UK, Ling Warlow of The Paper Wildflower will be at The Great Northern Craft Fair, Victoria Baths, Manchester 17-20 October. If you are heading that way please do come and say hello! Ling writes about connecting to nature through her creative practice and will be showing her collection of plant dyed paper wildflowers for the first time. When lockdown saw her business cancelled overnight, the daily walk reintroduced her to her childhood passion and she has since made it her mission to encourage others to look closely at our native plants and flowers, get to know them and make that transition from weeds to wildflowers.
Ling also has a collection of wildflower paper craft kits, perfect for beginners, including favourites such as corn poppies, buttercups and bluebells. Not to be missed!
Jesse C. McEntee, PhD, who writes on Substack at Next Adventure, was recently published in the Summer 2024 edition of Backcountry Journal. His piece, “Public Land Parenting” reflects on how exploring public lands with his young children became a parenting strategy and a way to foster a deep appreciation for nature. More info is available at Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, a fantastic U.S. organization that works to preserve public land access for all.
My planned ten days offline stretched to just over a month (it was addictive in the best way possible and I highly recommend it), so I haven’t kept up with Substack Notes as well as I usually do. But I was so pleased to have caught this note from Thomas Winward who writes at Urban Nature Diary, sharing that his film The Birdwatchers won an award at the Greenwich Film Festival. Thomas says: “Through the lens of four inspiring women, The Birdwatchers aims to explore and break down some of the barriers preventing people from accessing nature. This film is a love letter to the world of birds, and a rallying cry for people to protect it.” More information is available here.
Janisse Ray of The Rhizosphere (for Writers) has a new workshop coming up November 2 on the subject of metaphor. Janisse writes: “Of all literary techniques, metaphor is queen. So how to learn to think in terms of metaphor? How to become a metaphor maker & magnet?” More information on how to sign up is available here.
🌱 Welcoming New Substack Nature Listings 🌱
Welcome to the following Substackers, added or updated since our previous issue was published. We are now at over 260 nature-based publications here—what a delight it is to be a part of this force of love and attention for the Earth!
Art & Soil by Katie Spring (United States)
Rachel Goddard - Create with Nature (United Kingdom)
DanaB’s Tell About It by Dana Tanaro Britt (United States)
Naturaleya by Aleya Fraser (Trinidad and Tobago)
SPARRING WITH MOTHER NATURE by Janice Anne Wheeler (United States and Caribbean)
🌲 Books 🌲
Christopher Brown’s new book, A Natural History of Empty Lots, is now available at the usual booksellers. Christopher is a practicing attorney and writes at Field Notes here on Substack; he’s also an acclaimed fiction writer whose books are a genre-bending wonder that’s something like near-future legal-thriller science fiction with an ecological slant. They’re great.
Rosalie Haizlett’s gorgeous, hand-illustrated book Tiny Worlds of the Appalachian Mountains is now available! She shares her art here on Substack at Rosalie Haizlett Illustration.
📚 Find more books written by nature directory authors at Nature’s Bookstack!
🐝 Here’s a little public-service announcement as many readers of this newsletter are gardeners entering autumn in their part of the world who will soon be eyeing their secateurs with some glee. Please consider leaving long stalks for your native stem-nesting bees! While the piece I’m linking is specific to the northeastern U.S., its guidance should be appropriate for most any temperate area. (Any entomologists in the audience can correct me if I’ve got that wrong.)
The right way to leave stems for native bees | Tufts University
And just after publishing this, I happened across biologist and wildlife gardener Dr. Richard Gregson’s guide for a wildlife-friendly autumn garden maintenance regime. He walks, photographs, and writes his two Substacks from near Montreal, Canada.
Autumn Garden — Leave the Litter | 1001 Species
And that’s a wrap for this month!
Please feel free to send me your news items for next month, or any corrections, at: ourhome@substack.com
Happy turning of the seasons…
🌲🦉 Rebecca
🐌 Treat yourself: spend some time at Homecoming, where Julie Gabrielli hosts NatureStack, gathering works of nature writing, interviewing Substackers, and more! It’s always a delight.
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What a great namesake. I would love to see more wisent in the UK. My understanding is that the licences, associated conditions etc are limiting that but hopefully that will change in time. Thanks for mentioning my piece and for all you do for nature writers on Substack. Your dedication is inspiring!
Thank you so much for including my substack! And lovely to read about bison/wisent. I know the area they have been reintroduced to in Kent UK and look forward to going back soon to see their impact.