Positive News · 8 hours ago

Why Ukraine Is Rewilding in the Heat of War

In the semi-arid grasslands of southwestern Ukraine, within earshot of missile strikes, conservationists are returning wild donkeys, horses, and buffalo to a steppe that hasn't heard their ancient sounds in two centuries - and in doing so, are rebuilding something more than an ecosystem. Rewilding Ukraine's work in the Tarutino Steppe is at once practical and quietly radical: the reintroduced kulan reduce wildfire risk from exploding mines, enrich depleted soils, and sequester carbon, while the organization brings war veterans into rewilded landscapes as part of PTSD recovery and gathers Ukrainian and Romanian schoolchildren at the Danube Delta to learn what it means to tend a living world. "I genuinely love nature and I feel deeply connected to this landscape," says local volunteer Petro Hramatik, whose words carry the particular weight of someone who has chosen to stay close to what he loves even as the ground around him is mined. In the spring of 2022, a kulan foal - the first born wild in 200 years - stumbled to its feet on the Tarutino Steppe after a punishing winter, making history in the middle of a war that was making its own kind of history. That an act of restoration could continue, and even bear new life, under such conditions says something worth sitting with about where human beings choose to place their hope.