Section 5.b. "Smaller-Scale Rewilding: A Practical Guide to Restoring Nature in Your Own Space"
'Comparing Smaller-Scale Rewilding with Other Rewilding Initiatives' - the latest section of LettsSafari's guide to smaller-scale rewilding.
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Comparisons with Other Rewilding Initiatives
It’s useful to compare LettsSafari’s smaller-scale focus with both similar and contrasting initiatives:
Knepp Estate (England, 3,500 acres): Knepp is a famous rewilding project on a large estate that went from intensive agriculture to free-roaming grazing. While much bigger than LettsSafari’s parks, it shares some principles: using grazing animals, letting scrub and trees regenerate, and tremendous biodiversity bounce-back (Nightingales and turtle doves breeding, purple emperor butterflies thriving, and more).
Knepp helped popularise larger-scale rewilding in the UK. The difference is scale and public access - Knepp is a private estate with public access and safari tours, whereas LettsSafari’s parks (though membership-based) are smaller, private and more numerous. One could say LettsSafari is trying to create many “mini-Knepps” across the country, accessible via a subscription model to fund them. Both emphasise process over targets (e.g., let grazing dynamics shape the land rather than planting specific numbers of each plant).
WildEast (Eastern England initiative): WildEast is a movement aiming to return 20% of East Anglia to nature. It encourages farmers, businesses, schools, and homeowners to pledge land to wildness. This is very much aligned with smaller-scale rewilding in spirit: it’s a collective mosaic approach, where lots of small contributions add up. LettsSafari’s push for many individuals to rewild gardens or companies to engage employees in rewilding is akin to WildEast’s pledge concept. The difference is WildEast is a regional goal with broad coalition, whereas LettsSafari is an organisation with specific projects and membership, but philosophically they complement each other - both seeking mass participation and landscape connectivity through many pieces.
Urban Rewilding projects worldwide: Many cities have started things like community gardens turned to mini-forests (e.g., New York’s community gardens being managed more wild, Singapore’s pocket parks). LettsSafari took pride in being “one of the first to develop the concept of urban rewilding” and seeing it take off globally. While urban greening isn’t new, applying rewilding (with minimal management, native ecology focus) in cities is relatively recent.
How to Design Your LettsSafari Garden
Safari gardens are the future. A future that embraces rewilding and wildlife gardening - creating places that restore our depleted biodiversity. Spaces that remove carbon and clean the air. Havens for wildlife and nature. Here’s a simple blueprint for designing your very own LettsSafari garden.
Initiatives like the Miyawaki forests (tiny densely planted native forests in cities like in India, Japan, etc.) produce quick forest patches even in 100 m². These share goals with smaller-scale rewilding: creating biodiversity hotspots in limited spaces. LettsSafari hasn’t specifically mentioned Miyawaki, but their approach to planting small woodlots in parks and the biodomes concept rhyme with that - it’s all about intensively jump-starting habitat in small areas.
Comparison to Traditional Conservation (e.g., nature reserves): Traditional reserves often manage habitats intensively (e.g., cutting reedbeds, grazing specific compartments to preserve certain species). Smaller-scale rewilding tends to lean more on letting nature decide the outcome within the small site (with light management like introduction of grazers or periodic cut).
One might compare a small rewilding site to a meticulously managed garden-like reserve of similar size. The rewilding site might have more uncontrolled elements (maybe it gets scrubbier or more ragwort comes up than a managed reserve might allow). Each has merits: a managed reserve might maintain a rare orchid by weeding competitors, whereas a rewilded patch might not favour that one orchid but could support a broader array of common species with less effort.
Possibly a blend is optimal: certain small sites could be half “rewilded” and half managed for a specific goal (like a wildflower meadow of specific composition). LettsSafari’s stance is that rewilding is solving climate and biodiversity holistically, rather than focusing on one target species. So, a comparison here is purpose: smaller-scale rewilding is often about maximising ecosystem services and overall diversity (plus enjoyment) rather than single-species conservation.
Creating a Wildflower Area in Your Safari Garden
Many of you will want to add a mini wildflower meadow to your LettsSafari garden. Wild flower and wild grasses remove carbon, attract wildlife, naturally regenerate and look amazing. Plus, it will bring a bit of the ‘wild’ into your life!
Financial/Structural model: LettsSafari uses a subscription membership to fund projects - a novel approach, essentially a crowd-funded rewilding scheme, with promises like “for every 10,000 subscribers we create a new park”. This model can be compared to NGO or government funding of reserves. The advantage of the membership model is engaging people directly - they feel part of it, get updates, and more. It’s like adopting-an-acre concept but scaled.
If sustainable, it could allow rapid replication of small parks because funds come from many small donors motivated by climate action desire. It’s somewhat like The Conservation Volunteers (TCV) in the UK, who do small urban nature improvements with volunteers, except LettsSafari pairs digital engagement with on-the-ground work by a professional team.
“Small rewilding isn’t a replacement for large wilderness rewilding - it’s complementary.”
What smaller-scale rewilding can’t do (alone): It’s worth noting that some ecological processes are hard on tiny areas. For instance, reintroducing top predators like wolves or lynx isn’t feasible in a 50-acre park or 1-acre garden - so those trophic cascades can’t be replicated fully. Large roaming herds (wild horses, buffalo) also need more space. Thus, small rewilding isn’t a replacement for large wilderness rewilding - it’s complementary.
It excels in fragmented landscapes (like farmland or urban) where big reserves are absent, stitching green threads through human habitat. Large rewilding projects often aim to help species that need big ranges (e.g., wolves, eagles). Small projects focus on species that can thrive in small patches (invertebrates, amphibians, small mammals and grazers, many songbirds). However, collectively, as seen with the pine marten example, a network of small wild sites can support the return of larger species regionally, by acting as stepping stones or breeding pockets.
Example of a Tiny Project: There’s a famous tiny rewilding example: Moyenne Island in Seychelles (24 acres). One man (Brendon Grimshaw) rewilded it, planting thousands of trees and releasing Aldabra giant tortoises. It became the world’s smallest national park. This parallels what LettsSafari espouses: one dedicated person can transform a small area, and it can get official recognition and protection due to its wildlife richness. Moyenne now is lush and supports hundreds of birds and 50+ tortoises. This case study illustrates that even an island or isolated patch, if managed as wild, can be a biodiversity ark - which is encouraging for those who only have small areas to work with.
Moyenne Island - A Smaller-Scale Rewilding Paradise
Moyenne Island, a tiny 25-acre jewel in the Seychelles archipelago, stands as a testament to the vision and determination of Brendon Grimshaw, a British newspaper editor living and working in Kenya who moved to the Seychelles and turned the once-abandoned island into a thriving ecosystem. Acquired in 1962 for £8,000, Grimshaw spent four decades rewildin…
Social Aspect: Some small rewilding initiatives like community rewilding projects emphasise engaging local people (e.g., The Wildlife Trust’s Living Landscapes or community woods). LettsSafari’s model does involve community via membership and volunteer events (including members-only tree planting and visit days). But, more uniquely LettsSafari is developing an online community model to help foster learning and wider inputs at a significantly larger scale.
A crucial lesson from such cases is that people take pride and ownership in this movement and their spaces, which helps them endure. A nature reserve might be remote and unknown to the public, but a rewilded community orchard is seen, loved, and defended by locals.
In comparing approaches, we see that smaller-scale rewilding is characterised by low barriers to entry (anyone can do a piece), scalability by replication, and integration with human life (often happening in lived-in and virtual landscapes, not behind fences).
Its power lies in numbers and networks, whereas large-scale rewilding’s power lies in contiguous space and intact processes. Both are needed to heal biodiversity - and indeed smaller sites can buffer and connect big ones. But beyond that, smaller-scale rewilding managed correctly, can become a mass-market movement.
END - Section 5.c. coming next week: ‘Practical Lessons and Takeaways’.
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