UK Nature and Environment

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Where the wild things are: the untapped potential of our gardens, parks and balconies (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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In my 20s I lived in Manchester, on the sixth floor of a block of council flats just off the A57, or Mancunian (Mancy) Way. A short walk from Manchester Piccadilly station and the city centre, it was grey, noisy and built up. I loved every piece of it – my first stab at adulthood, at living on my own. I painted my bedroom silver and slept on a mattress on the floor, and I grew sweetcorn, tomatoes and courgettes in pots on the balcony. (I was 24 – of course I grew sweetcorn on the balcony.)

I worked and played in the bars and clubs of Manchester’s gay village, and I would walk home in the early hours, keys poking through my clenched fist to protect me from would-be attackers, and I would see hedgehogs.

It never occurred to me that the hedgehogs might be in trouble, that they might not have the best time foraging beneath the ring road, beneath the noise and stench of the city. It occurred to me only that their presence was magical, and that seeing them on the grassy wastelands around my council estate, as I stumbled home from parties and nightclubs, was everything I loved about being alive.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Then there’s the London Resort theme park that was nearly built on Swanscombe peninsula, an area of nationally important grasslands, coastal habitats, scrub and wetlands that not only buffers the coast from erosion but also stores carbon while providing homes for countless rare and threatened species.

I have seen it and mourned it from a very young age – the old gothic houses we used to drive past that had been abandoned and gone wild, before a developer bought them and turned them into flats; the horse paddock at the end of our road that remained for so long while the town grew around it, until it too was lost to a strip of new-build homes.

It’s already hitting the global south: in the Horn of Africa, people are experiencing the longest and most extreme drought on record, causing crops to fail and livestock to die.

In the summer of 2022, UK crops of berries, peas, broad beans and salad leaves were frazzled in the heat and sun, while in winter we had a tomato shortage due to “unseasonal” snow and ice in southern Spain and Morocco.

Crucially, they also link together to form vast corridors that connect other ecosystems (the woodlands, peatlands and other terrestrial systems mentioned above), enabling species to move between them, potentially giving them space to adapt to climate change.

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