The Butternut Creek Nature Reserve is a project to rewild a 150-acre farm property purchased near Moose Creek, ON. It will promote ecological diversity, habitat restoration, climate resiliency, and reforestation in the area.

Located on the traditional, overlapping territories of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, including the Five Nations of the St. Lawrence watershed, as well as the Huron-Wendat and Algonquin Anishinaabe Peoples of the Ottawa River Valley, the the site was colonized by the Johnsons around the time of Confederation. After being cleared of its maple, hemlock, and cedar woods, the fertile land supported a Aryshire dairy farm and later crop farming. In the 1980’s it was purchased by Richard Warnock, a hydraulics engineer with a farming background, and his wife Jean who ran it as a Welsh pony breeding operation while allowing some parts of the farm to slowly return to nature. Now the plan is to actively continue the re-wilding of the property, using human intervention to optimize habitat development and biodiversity, while working a significant portion of the property as a farm.

Along the way we’ll be exploring some of the issues around land-sharing and land-sparing as well as working through questions such as

• how do we showcase the “ecological services” provided by this property in a natural state. Environmental services (air, water, natural space for people), and also services to promote biodiversity.
• what economic activities are compatible with these goals? How does our not-for-profit operation generate revenues to sustain the project?