Rewilding Forecasting .... Continued
Artwork by Geraldine Wharry
“There is a level of humility and a relinquishing of power over nature”
About Rewilding Forecasting as a principle. First, it starts with a story.
My father and I are in the kitchen.
Dad’s cooking, I’m exploring the bookshelf. I’ve recently turned 18.
His book on biodynamic farming is in my hands as I’m flipping through pages. It’s 1994. I ask Dad to explain the principles of biodynamic farming.
Why is it that fertilising land with cow dung during a full moon makes for much higher yields than industrial farming? And how come nobody knows about this?
Dad is training and working at a biodynamic farm in the south of France, ahead of getting his organic farming certification.
He won’t become a full-time farmer but will continue to work the land, as he did as a farm boy in Suffolk. He’ll also continue making experimental films and have a retrospective 28 years later.
Fast track to May 2020. I wake up to bird songs every day coming from the gardens outside my bedroom in Kensal Green. It is an extremely sunny spring. Animals and nature seem to have taken over the London cityscape.
The world is being rewilded.
Jeannie my senior New York street cat is always on my bed. I sit in the sun to amp up my vitamin D, do my everyday breathing exercises to heal my lungs. 4 weeks in bed with COVID-19 will do that to you.
But strangely it’s a gift. I am forced to slow down.
On the first weekend I make it out of my apartment I go on a date. June 27th, 2020. I meet Saul. Last week he proposed, and I said yes.
I never forget my father’s teachings on regenerative farming and art. Meeting Saul, the experience of London being rewilded.
Exactly 2 years ago today, on November 10th, 2021, I write about my ideas on ‘Rewilding Trend Forecasting’, following my first foresight exploration on this in March.
Back to wild nature. Why Rewilding Forecasting?
The solution is in nature, it always is. How does Rewilding create a breakthrough for future forecasting?
The key to our survival can be found in our care and reintroduction of Nature in every aspect of our lives, work, and processes.
My former assistant Emily Zafar had a beautiful way of interpreting rewilding in the context of creativity:
We allow for a wilderness of inspiration to bloom.
Starter Recipe for Rewilding Forecasting
First: Harness uncertainty as a cultural strategy. See nature as our quantum guide as we imagine better futures through unstable times. Futuring means freeing ourselves from pre-ordained ways of thinking. Wildness and lack of human control imply the possibility of surprises but can lead to new auditing and accountability approaches.
Second: Step away from the hypercycle of trends we are in. Hype confuses trend virality with trend validity. What I call ‘performative futurity’ or ‘trend washing’ hurts a positive future foresight agenda. A bit like greenwashing hurts the sustainable fashion agenda.
Third: Nurture original, diverse, humanised and mutually beneficial futures thinking. Like Biodiversity. This helps mitigate homogenization, monoculture, and intelligentsia echo chambers.
Back to wild Nature. What is Rewilding?
Rewilding is a conservation method to give control back to Nature, an action that unfolds through time, aimed at restoring and protecting natural processes and wilderness areas. The concept of rewilding or allowing nature to recover freely has been around since the 1990s but is now gaining wider traction.
Humans often other Nature. We forget our place in the animal and natural world, and how interconnected we all are. Everything is always changing everything else.
To attempt to preserve a place, to freeze it in time, is bound to fail. It resembles how we obsess over trend predictions in a quest for certainty.
Rewilding is increasingly affecting art, design, wellness, architecture, and infrastructures as well as systems thinking and philosophical approaches to society. The journal Nature in October 2020 stated ecosystem restoration as a priority for stabilising the global climate. Environmentalists, urban planners, charities, and non-profit organisations are overseeing rewilding programmes around the world.
Pioneers of Rewilding
Here are some of the visionaries who have inspired my research and development of Rewilding Forecasting. I have purposely excluded projects and voices in Biomimicry, Transition design and regenerative Leadership to only focus on Rewilding here.
David Foreman: American environmentalist and author, co-founder of Earth First!
Isabella Tree: British travel journalist and author of Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British farm.
Nan Fairbrother: English writer and lecturer on landscape and land use, Member of the UK Institute of Landscape Architects, now the Landscape Institute.
Julia Watson: Designer and author of Lo-TEK, principal and founder of Julia Watson Studio and Co-Founder of a Future Studio.
Ken Yeang: Architect, ecologist, planner, and author from Malaysia, best known for his ecological architecture and eco masterplans.
Duncan Wakes-Miller: author of Feral marketing and rewilding applied to human engagement for a rebalancing of the natural order.
Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe: authors of Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery, on the evolution of Rewilding, its benefits, and challenges.
Rewilding Forecasting is part of the World Building Framework I created and teach. Find out more at www.therendatelier.com.
If you’d like to read Part 1 which I wrote in 2021 click here.
By Geraldine Wharry
