Rewilding the World with Hannah Lewis
Sustainability advocates say that cities hold lots of promise due to their density, yet we refer to these spaces as “concrete jungles.” This isn’t a new term either. Upton Sinclair wrote about the concrete jungle in his novel “The Jungle” in 1949. Bob Marley has a song titled Concrete Jungle, and Joni Mitchell sings about paving over paradise to put up a parking lot in Big Yellow Taxi. This is why it’s refreshing to learn about a growing movement to rewild our cities and rewrite the urban jungle narrative.
On a recent episode of The Regenerative Real Estate Podcast, author Hannah Lewis talks about her new book called “The Mini-Forest Revolution: Using the Miyawaki Method to Rapidly Rewild the World” which focuses on stories about how people are using a specific technique to regenerate degraded landscapes from backyards to parks.
Hannah is a writer by trade whose work is at the intersection of people, nature, and conservation. When she was living abroad in France during COVID with her family, she first learned about mini-forests that were sprouting up across Europe.
With genuine curiosity as her guide, she learned that these forests were different. Not only did they help increase the biodiversity within a city, help to cool off urban heat islands, establish wildlife and pollinator corridors, and sequester carbon, but they also brought communities together.
Upon doing further research, Hannah learned that these mini-forests were based upon a scientific method developed by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki using a process which uses knowledge of ancient tree species and their particular guilds to springboard forest regeneration at a rate five times faster than conventional forestry methods.
However these mini-forests aren’t just popping up in Europe. Hannah found stories from across the globe, from rural to urban where communities were coming together transform empty lots, parks, schools, and degraded land into thriving ecological environments.
“Hannah Lewis describes a gift to a despairing world…There may be no single climate solution that has a greater breadth of benefits than mini-forests…[and] can be done by everyone everywhere.” —Paul Hawken
