Positive News · 5 hours ago

How Rewilding Could Help Stop the Spread of Britain’s Wildfires

Britain's landscapes have been shaped by centuries of drainage, burning, and grazing - and in that shaping, they have quietly become more vulnerable to wildfire. Researchers now argue that rewilding, done with care, is part of the answer: restoring bogs, rivers, and native woodlands to make the land wetter, patchier, and harder to burn. The ecologist Oliver Rackham once observed that "English native woods burn like wet asbestos" - a quiet reminder of what has been lost, and what might be recovered. What the science reveals is that the moors so often romanticized as timeless wilderness are in fact a recent creation, and that the path to resilience runs through restoration rather than control. There is something humbling in the recognition that healing a landscape may require less management, not more - and that the creatures and mosses and meandering rivers, given room to return, remember how to protect the land in ways humans forgot they needed.