The ‘Rewilding’ of a Century-Old Cranberry Bog<br />Hackman said that The big story of change here — it’s going from dry to wet, essentially,<br />"The ocean is going to push inland, and it’s lands like this — if we can protect them and re-naturalize them —<br />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.<br />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."<br />And in the United States, the 1988 farm bill created incentives for preserving and restoring wetlands on former farmland.<br />But technological changes enabled more efficient farming to take place elsewhere, including on dry land,<br />and southeastern Massachusetts is now dotted with struggling cranberry bogs.<br />For more than a century, this place, called Tidmarsh Farms, was the site of a cranberry bog,<br />a thick carpet of the fruit’s vines atop a bed of sand with straight water channels.<br />A conservation organization called Mass Audubon plans to buy much of the property; the town of Plymouth purchased<br />another section, which still holds part of the disused bog, and said it would restore that, too.
