COMMUNITY INITIATIVE
The objective is to map our progress across the city in the coming months and years as we join up the dots to make a space for nearby nature wherever we live. This work is part of many other projects that have previously been undertaken in and around Dundee – it is after all the greenest city per capita in Scotland already!
The inspiration of this private garden movement is the small project initiated by Russ Avery, a private individual living in Hampshire who launched his own rewilding project with his neighbours on the three streets that form the avenues where he lives. He designed the logo we share in common to help others coordinate their work under the umbrella of the 'rewilding' logo as we help Dundonians celebrate the collective benefit of their projects – whether it be a windowsill or a front garden.
The project aims are simple, to help you share your commitment to wildlife-friendly gardening in the space you have available and map it in a way that shows how our landscape can be joined up to better work for wildlife as an interconnected urban nature reserve.
The Tayside Biodiversity Booklet is a must-read when starting on your wildlife-friendly garden journey. It can help inform your efforts and ensure they are aligned with everyone else's - further information is available in the booklet to help you explore gardening in the local and regional context.
Our world is changing, ever faster as each generation witnesses a world progress through technology, and yet also grow apart – as human directed development diverges from the natural world around it.
The city is the fastest growing habitat on earth, which creates a place for humans to live, work, and play, but also raises concerns over the impact the change brings to the natural world.
Never before has the link between our human system, and the natural ecosystem, underlying and supporting all life on earth, been so critical to balance.
Addressing the gap between our collective actions in the modern increasingly urban world is crucial to avoid having any further negative impact. The compounded actions of more than half (56%), or 4.4 billion, of the urban population who now reside in urban areas - a figure that is projected to continue to increase, with the year 2050 seeing as many as 7 out of 10 people living in cities, are now cause for concern.
Such expansion of the human social system, has been enabled through human ingenuity, and hard work – two qualities we will need to build upon to address the challenge going forward, learning to regenerate the underlying global ecosystem following the unintended but nevertheless detrimental, side effects of the industrial and subsequent technological revolutions since they began in the 1750s.
This is the result of a transition to a globalised economy, away from a predominantly rural, productive agricultural to an increasingly industrial and technological habitation, called urbanisation. One that has undoubtedly contributed to human growth and development but is being questioned for its impact on many symptoms of a strained global modern age.
Urbanisation spurs a unique set of issues to both humans and those organisms that share earth as its home. The promise of jobs and prosperity, among other factors, pulls people to cities. But in cities two of the most pressing problems facing the world today also come together: poverty and environmental degradation.
Both within and outwith cities, there is a need to balance the benefits to a human social system with one that limits the negative impacts of growth, including harvesting free natural resources that have systemically been appropriated over millennia without reparation to the underpinning environment that sustained it.
Currently our cities globally, represent two-thirds of global energy consumption and account for more than 70% of greenhouse gas emissions. Moving towards a post-carbon economy is not only an economic and social imperative for our time but also increasingly is understood as an ecological necessity.
This transition includes exploring a role for, and adopting, nature based-solutions to soften the hard architecture of our cities, adopting, “solutions that are inspired and supported by nature, which are cost-effective, simultaneously provide environmental, social, and economic benefits and help build resilience”.
Reframing a city, as a demonstration of the best of the human social system that thrives, within the limits of the underpinning ecological system that supports all life on earth, is something which is being explored by the University of Dundee Botanic Garden as part of the Urban Releaf project in the heart of our pilot cities, requiring a just transition for people and planet.
If you would like to see your project featured in a future edition of Scotland Grows magazine, please do get in touch to mail@scotlandgrowsmagazine.com - we would love to hear from you!