Our Vision
Cincinnati, Ohio will be a city teeming with a vast diversity of life, including humans enmeshed within, reliant upon, caring for, and thriving in this renewed ecosystem.
Why Grow Native Plants
Native plants host a dazzling array of soil organisms, fungi, and insect species. This complex soil ecosystem sequesters carbon, keeping it safely in the ground instead of in our already-overloaded atmosphere. Native plants are also the basis of the food web, feeding insects, birds, and mammals which in turn feed other predatory animals. This incredible diversity of life–which is dependent on native plants–is one of Earth’s key stabilizing systems. Native flora and fauna work together to engineer resilient ecosystems that can better withstand the extremes of our climate. These resilient ecosystems are also more productive, creating more food, cooling our immediate climate, cleaning our air and water, producing humidity and rainfall, retaining groundwater, consuming and filtering waste, and pollinating our food crops. These are all ecosystem services without which we could not live.
Although, introduced or non-native plants from another state or continent may be beautiful, they did not evolve over millennia together with the particular insects, fungi, and animals here to form our local ecosystem. These introduced species do not function as part of a resilient ecosystem, but rather tend to degrade it. Areas dominated by introduced plants—including turf grass lawns–are ecological waste lands which are neither resilient nor productive. Living in a functional ecosystem is a human right. We can all play a small, but incredibly meaningful role in restoring our own area’s ecosystem by planting native species and caring for them on as much land as we can spare.
“There can be no purpose more enspiriting than to begin the age of restoration, reweaving the wondrous diversity of life that still surrounds us.” - E.O. Wilson
Our Mission
Wild City will create a network of rewilding showcases in Northside, from the smallest scale balcony planter to large public spaces. These showcase habitats will serve both as laboratories to test the efficacy of rewilding initiatives and as educational sites to inspire replication of successful trials. Exemplar habitats focus on strategies for rewilding particularly degraded, ignored, and underutilized sites such as alleys, medians, human structures, lawns, dumps, vacant lots, formal and informal communal spaces, neglected waterways, and other liminal, quasi-public spaces.
Wild City aims to create and disseminate replicable models of community-led and community-sustaining rewilding efforts in our urban areas. We will accomplish this by creating a network of hyper-local neighborhood chapters engaged in a combination of native plant propagation, habitat creation and restoration on both private and public lands, conservation efforts in existing wild spaces, and education campaigns aimed at shifting our cultural mindset from an extractive ownership model towards one that sees humans as an integral part of nature.