Comment by nephihaha
4 hours ago
This is the rewilding narrative. It's essentially misanthropic and benefits the rich and government agencies. In response, people are supposed to be shoved into cities and out of the countryside. We should be looking at ways that cities and suburban areas can be made more friendly to wildlife (other than the likes of pigeon, mice and rats etc) Humanity's future is co-operation with nature, not creating massive safari parks for rich people and quangos. Even at somewhere like the Chernobyl exclusion zone it is obvious that nature has not fully reverted to its previous state, since it contends with human artefacts and contamination at every step.
At this stage rewilding is a matter of establishing lifeboats for what little remains before it completely disappears, not wiping the landscape clean.
You can't put the full measure of ecological complexity into a small cage in a zoo.
Have to push back on the "people shoved into cities" narrative. It just sounds like the conspiracy theories around "15 minutes cities" all over again.
An example of rewilding on its wikipedia page is "wildlife-friendly overpasses and underpasses". That's literally going the "making areas more friendly to wildlife" route.
When it comes to 15-minute cities there's all these conspiracies, but then you look behind it and it's just about allowing economic liberty to build taller and allow more commercial uses like doctors, daycares, and corner stores in residential neighborhoods, and restrict free government subsidized street parking.
It's good to be viligant, okay? And if any policies come up that are shoving people into cities, feel free to protest. But until then, a lot of the policies are actually exactly the "being more friendly to wildlife" that you're asking for and not shoving people into cities.
> In response, people are supposed to be shoved into cities and out of the countryside.
Both Ukraine and Russia have plenty of rural landscape. Neither government is trying to shove people into cities against their own will. Occasionally villages try to attract younger people, but those dont really wanna.
(But in both countries, urban people rarely move to villages due to lack of employment opportunities and do move to cities to get jobs.)