We’ve pushed nature to the brink, but it may be capable of repairing the damage – provided we step aside and let it go back to doing what it does best. …Abernethy National Nature Reserve includes one of the largest remnants of ancient Caledonian pine woodland. Decades of work by Royal Society for the Protection of Birds Scotland and others is restoring and expanding it. The project, which now has a 200-year plan, is based on carefully encouraging natural processes to flourish, making it perhaps Britain’s most successful example of the ‘rewilding’ concept so far. …In the years since the term ‘rewilding’ was first coined by US environmentalist Dave Foreman, people have struggled to agree on what it means. …The aim of rewilding was to create self-sustaining ecosystems that could return to pre-human levels of biodiversity, but the idea evolved as it spread.

The Congo Basin contains the world’s second-largest rainforest, crucial for regulating the world’s climate. Inside it, a plan to halt the forest’s decline is bearing fruit. …The people of Nkala’s relationship with the forest goes back generations, but in one fundamental way it has recently changed. Under a revolutionary scheme in DR Congo – which is home to the majority of the Congo Basin, the world’s second-largest rainforest – the 300 villagers of Nkala were granted 4,100 hectares of forest in December 2018. For the first time in their history, the community had the legal right to own and manage the forest they live in. Two years on, early signs suggest that community ownership could become a powerful tool in halting the decline of the Congo Basin rainforest, while alleviating poverty in one of the world’s poorest regions. …The Congo Basin contains some 314 million hectares of primary rainforest – the oldest, densest and most ecologically significant kind. 

When Nationals politician John Anderson released a policy called Plantations for Australia: The 2020 Vision back in 1997, he had no idea how nightmarish that vision would turn out to be. Instead of creating thousands of hectares of environmentally friendly native forests and a thriving timber industry, one ASX-listed company has been left with a charred mess and no easy way of cleaning it up. This is a story of some of the worst government decisions in recent history crashing into the extreme heat of the 2019-20 summer. …Then came the fires. …The only options remaining now are to either burn millions of tonnes of trees, or to build the port and ramp up harvesting and trucking, which some say would damage the island’s eco-tourism credentials.

It takes centuries of slow growth for the world’s tallest trees to reach heights far beyond the tops of their surrounding forests. As they stretch for the sky, the giants nurture ever-changing ecosystems of plants and animals. Since 2015, Steven Pearce and Jennifer Sanger, a Tasmanian ­photographer-and-­ecologist duo, have been documenting Earth’s unique and underappreciated behemoths. The pair use rock climbing gear to ascend hundreds of feet from the trees’ roots to their wind-punished crowns. With the help of a homemade dual-camera rig attached to a pulley system, Pearce shoots dozens of photos over several weeks at each site and combines them into massive gigapixel panoramas. The resulting images capture the long-standing beauties before human ­interference can diminish or destroy them.