Ewa Tarsia: Rewilding Spaces

We live in a world surrounded by phenomenal technology, brimming with promises of clean energy, and yet, whatever we do and wherever we go on earth, we leave black footprints and deadly smudges. This project has emerged from – and is energized by – a realization that the natural world that has sustained the human mind is degraded and threatened. Nature is never spent, not even when it is scared and trodden down, but for it to thrive once again, it must be invited back into our living spaces and into our lives.

The Rewilding Spaces project is all about allowing nature to draw on its never-ending potential and to revive in our mids. We need it in our daily lives, and we can bring it back by making some room for specks of wilderness, a scattering of untamed life, in our paved and plastered landscapes. Several years ago, I let nature into my little urban garden and tiny forest behind the fence: now greenery grows there as wild as it wants. It thrives with the abundance of flowers, fruits, herbs; hums with the buzz of insects; rustles with the wind and small animals. I sense its throbbing life and feel its rhythms in my veins, in my heart.

So the Rewilding of Spaces is about the need to rethink, reinvent, and reform our relationship with the natural world. We should welcome back ants, birds, rodents, and racoons because they create healthy ecosystems; we should plant trees and shrubs because they store rainwater, remove pollution, and feed countless species; we should reintroduce meadows of native grasses and weeds, with all their biodiverse energy; and we should abandon monocultures, both in the fields and on our lawns. Above all, we should rewild our urban spaces through biophilic design, embrace city gardens, let greenery climb and live on cement walls.

Humanity has evolved surrounded by untamed nature and as part of it. Nature’s currents still run through us, and we are still an integral part of it. By helping nature heal itself, by rewilding our homes and cities, by seeding nature where we have stamped it out, we ensure our own survival and shape our own future. We need nature’s soothing touch to stay healthy and sane and rooted in the life that had brought us to consciousness. Parts of consciousness we share with natural world, so empathy for all living things is empathy for ourselves.