Squirrels

They have become a little less shy. Or more hungry.

This one was particularly amenable!

While I was at the Reserve volunteering, I was thinking about the plants that we extract because they "take over" - and the same is maybe true of the "invasive species" or the idea that there are "too many" deer and so on.

What I thought was that we fuck things up a lot through extraction, habitat destruction, monocultures and so on and so forth. The only free-living species that can live there may be what we call "weeds" or "pests" or what have you. But they are the only ones who can move in.... then they start the process of succession. They are the pioneers who re-begin the turning of a human-controlled system into a more-than-human one. They are like the emergency services. Now, they may well have negative impacts on plants or animals that we "like" or consider "rare", "native", "endangered"... but the reason they are rare or endangered is because we have made the place such that they cannot inhabit it well. the emergency services come in as a starting point of redeveloping back to freedom. It would - were the process allowed to go on for 50, 100, 300 years - be a different freedom, but it would in the end be a rich freedom and able to survive without our intervention.

That's what I believe. I guess that is radical rewilding without the reintroductions... No, not quite... to happen as it is intended to happen by the earth-beings, the plants and animals need free movement. They need "open borders". They need radical freedom.