Commentators, especially conservationists, rewilders and academics working on land-use transitions, love to use the term ‘abandonment’ when referring to the withdrawal of food production activities from areas of farmland.
But the process of withdrawal isn’t ‘abandonment’ – or at least it should not be, or be seen, as such. It’s re-deployment towards delivering an alternative set of benefits to people and nature.
Following a period of agricultural sprawl (still on-going at pace in parts of the tropics), in some areas farming is actually contracting and converging onto the best and most versatile areas for focused food production. That enables less productive areas to be deployed towards forest re-growth, wetland re-wetting, water attenuation, recreation and biodiversity recovery.
Farmers, land-owners, community land trusts and others should be paid well for delivering these alternative benefits via land- re-deployment.
Natural Areas 
Great, and ‘re-establishment’ not ‘re-introduction’ – let’s get the terminology right. ‘restoration’ would be more accurate than ‘re-introduction’, unless it’s for something that was once introduced and had then died out again. Sorry to go off on a tangent!
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Ha, yes, good point!
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Excellent point! I need to check myself to not use re-introduction as I think you’re right!
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