Nature’s Contribution

From the stile

In words: the wood stands dark on both sides of the stile. Out in front, a wetland with reeds and a low barn with a ramp to its door lies to the west, by the trees; three white hoop houses stand in the next field; in the middle distance, rows of dark solar panels on posts catch a line of sun along their tops, with sheep grazing underneath; to the east there is a red barn, rows of trees with crops between them, and corn; and at the far east the ground is speckled all over with flowers of every colour. Cloud shadows lie across the fields, one over the hoop houses, one over the flowers and one on the fields nearest the stile, softer at the edges than anything else in the picture.

What this land is for

Ryan’s brief for this land was a paper: “Balancing land use for conservation, agriculture, and renewable energy”, in Nature Communications this year. It divides each country’s land between wildlife and the things people need from land, food and power among them, and compares three ways of planning it: putting development first, putting nature first, and planning for both at once. Planning for both at once is the one this land is built on, and the paper is plain about why somebody has to:

Our analysis suggests that if increased demand for food and energy is met without co-locating sectors, it is not possible to meet conservation and development goals.

Co-locating means more than one use on the same ground, and most of this land does that. The panels stand over peppers and sheep, the farm grows trees, crops and animals in the same fields, the cannabis grows among the plants that grow well beside it, and the chaos gardens are flowers and food at once:

For example, solar and wind power can be co-located with each other (Deshmukh et al.⁷⁴) and with agriculture (Maguire et al.⁷⁵, Ravi et al.⁷⁶, and Miskin et al.⁷⁷), with the opportunity to improve yields (Hernandez et al.⁷⁸).

And some of it is not shared at all. The sanctuary’s preserve is left to whatever lives there, because the paper is just as plain that sharing ground is not the whole answer for wildlife:

The limited literature that is available on biodiversity outcomes in shared-use landscapes suggests that biodiversity can fare poorly (Rehling et al.⁸³ and Phalan et al.⁸⁴).

So the land does both, on purpose: some of it shared, some of it left alone, and all of it planned together, which is the paper’s own summing up.

Our findings underscore the need to conserve critical areas for nature, reduce land demand for food and energy, and intentionally coordinate land use across sectors.

It is a story, and the paper is careful about how far its own maps go, so we are too: nothing on this land is a model of anywhere real, or a plan for anybody’s field.

Given these and other constraints when using global data for analyses, we do not recommend using the results from our global analysis directly for local land-use planning.

The name comes from the same paper. Among the things its conservation targets protect are what it calls nature’s contributions to people: clean water, pollination, shelter from the sea, somewhere to be outside. Out here the contributions run every way, people to land as well as land to people, and the table below says where each one goes.

What goes where

Every place out here gives something to another, and most of what the land grows goes to the street, through the honesty box on the street or the café in the farm’s old dairy. The sun powers all of it: the solar farm runs the land and much of the street, and every place out here has panels and a battery of its own as well, so none of them goes dark if another does. Cannabis leaves only through licensed dispensaries, never through the honesty box, because a box nobody watches cannot ask anybody’s age. And nothing leaves the sanctuary but its manure: its residents are not stock.