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The new normal

Through the pandemic, one term got punched around a lot: ‘the new normal’.

Seeing people with face masks everywhere, bumping elbows to say Hi, or bringing your kid to a Zoom call – things very untypical for my environment just a year ago became very normal.

We adapt to change and accept our new surroundings pretty quickly. It’s in our nature that things become normal.

The same happens to how we think nature should look like. Short grass on pastures. Ploughed arable land. Field after field of corn or cereals.

This is what we learned to perceive as ‚normal‘ during the last decades, over the last generations. We can’t remember how beautiful, diverse and abundant the world around us was. How the forests and grasslands looked like.

But we need these positive pictures. We need to work towards an inspiring image to shape our actions, our connections, and our culture for a transformative change.

One of these positive images is seeing cows graze in high grasses – like at Gut Haidehof.

Shouldn’t this be normal (again)?

I talked to Nick from Rewilding Futures a couple of weeks ago. She would love to record a drone flight over Dartmoor and then add with computer graphics plants, trees, animals into it – to show how amazing this could look like if we managed the land in nature’s way.

To give people something positive to crave for.

Next time you take a walk, maybe ask yourself: “How would nature have looked like 2000 years ago? And how could it be again for generations to come?”

Also, it’s pretty hard for me to believe that I once owned more than 500 DVDs and smoking in restaurants was absolutely normal.

Cows grazing in a paddock with high grasses 1

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