The ‘Rewilding’ of a Century-Old Cranberry Bog
Hackman said that The big story of change here — it’s going from dry to wet, essentially,
"The ocean is going to push inland, and it’s lands like this — if we can protect them and re-naturalize them —
that make for good places to receive that water in the future." After more than a year of intensive work, including seven earthen dam removals and a project to rebuild the stream that had not flowed uninterrupted since the 1800s, new life is returning to Tidmarsh after a century of industrial use.
Yet they had no idea, Ms. Davenport said, "what it would take to restore this to a natural, functioning wetland." In Europe, there have been efforts to bring back much older landscapes, called "rewilding."
And in the United States, the 1988 farm bill created incentives for preserving and restoring wetlands on former farmland.
But technological changes enabled more efficient farming to take place elsewhere, including on dry land,
and southeastern Massachusetts is now dotted with struggling cranberry bogs.
For more than a century, this place, called Tidmarsh Farms, was the site of a cranberry bog,
a thick carpet of the fruit’s vines atop a bed of sand with straight water channels.
A conservation organization called Mass Audubon plans to buy much of the property; the town of Plymouth purchased
another section, which still holds part of the disused bog, and said it would restore that, too.