Scotland is inviting nature to return to abandoned industrial spaces.
The idea of “rewilding” industrial spaces, or turning them back to nature, makes me happy. One often reads about it happening in the UK, but we could do it, too, if we wanted to.
This photo essay in the Guardian is about how, in Scotland, rewilding often happens through benign neglect. Bella Bathurst wrote the text and Murdo MacLeod took the photos.
“Since the idea of rewilding took hold, it has generally been seen as a rural pursuit involving withdrawal from farmland so that animals and vegetation can restore their own ecology. At its most herbivorous, it includes allowing hedgerows or scrub to flourish unchecked. At its most primal, it involves deliberately releasing animals such as beavers or wolves in the belief that the re-entry of a single alpha species brings with it a cascade of ecological benefits. …
“The perception is that it is expensive, far away and often inaccessible. It certainly isn’t something that just anyone can do.
“But what if the wildest places of all were right under our feet? In the forgotten spaces in our cities, rewilding has always happened naturally, land falling under stone and resurging again, concrete lids flipped off before submerging once more. In the margins and the demilitarised zones, the abandoned embankments, the bits we don’t want or the lands already contaminated beyond human tolerance, ecology is thriving.
“In some places – such as the land around the abandoned Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine – plant and insect life has adapted to the extreme conditions: boars have moved in, there is a new radiation-munching fungus and, in the thin strip of no-man’s land between the borders of North and South Korea, leopards and Asiatic black bears have been spotted. …
“In Scotland, the 40-mile strip between Glasgow and Edinburgh has always been mined, for not just coal, but stone, gravel, lead and even gold. After centuries of hard pickings, parts of Lanarkshire and Ayrshire have an upended appearance. What was underground is now on top and what was above has gone below, with buildings and bridges slumped over old drift mines and razor-lined spoil heaps terraced by extraction tracks. Wildfowl nest on lochs made from old coal holes and an orchid called Young’s helleborine, discovered in 1975, favours only the best iron ore. …
“At an explosives factory once owned and operated by the Alfred Nobel Company, [sections] are still in use, but most of the 330-acre site was long ago abandoned. Along the cracks in the old pipelines and through the decaying buildings, it would be quicker to list the native plants that are no longer there than those that are. …
“Public feeling is that big business should be obliged to make good what it has taken, but human attempts to restore land are often amateurish. Planting a few conifers and flinging around a mix of wildflowers may be a quick fix, but sometimes it appears that the best thing to do is nothing. …
“In 1913 the 13th Earl of Home tried to lift local unemployment at Douglas by allowing mining nearby. The mining unseated [his] castle, it was demolished, and the flooded workings (known locally as the Black Hole) are now so patterned with commuting birdlife that it resembles an avian Heathrow. …
“On the other side of the Clyde, between the Erskine Bridge and the old John Brown shipyard, lies what used to be the Beardmore naval construction works in Dalmuir. In the early 20th century it produced munitions, planes, submarines and warships before being converted into a fuel-supply depot and then being gradually abandoned.
“Now a cycle path runs through it, but otherwise there is nothing new here except nature: golden leaves of birch springing from the concrete jetty, hawkweed drifting Ophelia-like in the drowned oil storage tanks, wrens nesting in the rusted embankments, mallards cackling from the blackthorn scrub. …
“Dalmuir is beautiful, dangerous – and almost certainly contaminated. … Halflands like these can be among the most joyous and optimistic places on earth, but they can also carry with them a polluting sense of menace. Finding them means that you may end up meandering across an indeterminate line between a walk in the park and full-scale urban exploration; you explore at your own risk. …
“They also have a habit of vanishing. Brownfield sites tend to be classified as wasteland, and with the pressure on housing, they are first in line for redevelopment. Ardeer is intended for ‘regeneration’ and Dalmuir will shortly be dug up to make way for the Scottish Marine Technology Park, a deepwater ship hoist and a new small-vessel fabrication yard.”
More at the Guardian, here.
Abandoned naval construction works in Dalmuir, Scotland. Explore at your own risk.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 
We see lots of this kind of reclamation in Philadelphia. One area of the city is covered with concrete. There used to be factories, which have been taken down, but the parking lots remain – acres of them. Last I drove by, several years ago, there was lots of grass breaking down the concrete. I expect there are some small trees by now. Along the Delaware River, the old piers have been reclaimed in a number of ways. One of them, that had a lot of green growing, has been helped along to become an oasis reaching into the river. Graffiti Pier is so named because it was totally covered. Rather than reclaim it otherwise, it has been made safe, otherwise untouched.
What a wonderful description! I haven’t been to Philadelphia in years and I feel like I’d like to see these places.
Rewilding, even on contaminated land, gives me hope. Nature is resilient and will spring back, if we give it a chance.
And there are things in Nature that remove contaminants like an annoyed housewife putting things to rights for the umpteenth time. And imagine! There’s “an orchid called Young’s helleborine [that] favours only the best iron ore”!
Earle adds this expertise: “One of my jobs was managing an urban stream restoration grant program for the Department of Water Resources. So many urban waterways were put in a ditch, lined with concrete and used to dump stormwater and street runoff. What we did was fund reconstructing a waterway that had a walking path instead of chain link fencing, meanders and backwaters with wetland vegetation that trapped and digested pollutants, and we only gave grants to projects that involved citizens groups as well as local government agencies. What we found was that when the neighbors and their kids were involved in the restoration work, they would raise hell if the local government didn’t help maintain the corridor. What we also found, by an economic study we hired Professor John Loomis and his graduate student Carol Streinor to do, houses along restored streams, when sold, brought a substantially higher price than same-size houses on unrestored waterways. That meant local governments got higher property taxes that supported their maintenance and other public benefits. As a little family outing, we took our [son] to New Zealand when he finished his service in the Marines. He was studying emergency services work, and we visited Christchurch, which was recovering from an earthquake that damaged much of the city. We took a walk on a creek trail through town and they had pamphlets in little dispensers along the trail. Part of their earthquake recovery was updating the stream channel to include a trail, and the pamphlet cited the Loomis and Streinor publication, as the reason they invested in it.”
By the way, Hannah, my Philadelphia-raised husband says he can definitely picture the locales you’ve described.