In southeastern England, an organization called WildEast is creating cracks in the human-dominated landscape, encouraging landowners to let nature run wild again on 20 percent of whatever gardens, farms, or vacant lots they control—they’re at 20,000 acres so far. In the southeastern Netherlands, as this story from our Dutch edition explains, the countryside is crisscrossed by ancient sunken lanes that had long been neglected, even used to dump old cars or appliances—but turn out to be refuges for badgers, bats, and beetles, and various rare plants. And in the United States too, as Emma Marris writes in this month’s cover story, the idea is catching on that “we need to do conservation everywhere.” That means not just in national parks, but in abandoned strip mines in Virginia and in downtown Yonkers, New York.

“We all need to take personal responsibility for whatever space we’ve got,” one of the founders of Britain’s WildEast, Hugh Somerleyton, told Nat Geo’s Tristan McConnell. “Ordinary people doing ordinary things, that’s where the power lies.”

Related: Learn the secrets to becoming an ‘arbonaut’

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