Rewilding

Historical development

Dave Foreman coined the term. Michael Soulé and Reed Noss gave it scientific content in “Rewilding and Biodiversity” (1998), which proposed the “three Cs”: cores, corridors and carnivores. The return of wolves to Yellowstone in 1995 became its emblem, and the subject of a large literature on trophic cascades.

In Europe a distinct movement grew up, focused more on processes and on grazing animals. It drew on Frans Vera’s work on grazing and the Oostvaardersplassen experiment in the Netherlands, on Rewilding Europe (2011), and on the Knepp estate in England, rewilded from 2001 and described in Isabella Tree’s Wilding (2018). George Monbiot’s Feral (2013) made it popular in Britain. “Pleistocene rewilding” (Donlan and colleagues, 2005) proposed bringing in stand-ins for extinct megafauna, and Jens-Christian Svenning and colleagues formalised “trophic rewilding”.

Rewilding has entered European and British policy and the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. It has drawn opposition from farmers, hunters and some conservationists.

Principal claims

• Ecosystems with their full set of species, large animals especially, are more resilient, more diverse and better at regulating themselves than managed ones.
• Conservation should restore processes and let the results unfold, instead of holding ecosystems in fixed states.
• Large areas and connections between them are needed. Abandoned and marginal land offers the chance.
• Bringing back predators and grazing animals can take over the work of human management, such as culling, mowing and burning.
• Rewilding can renew people’s relationship with wild nature and offer a living to replace marginal farming.

Policy implications

Rewilders support reintroducing species such as wolves, lynx, beavers, bison and other large grazers. They want core areas protected and linked by corridors, and farm subsidies redirected toward rewilding on marginal land. They favour less management in reserves, dam removal and river restoration, measures for living alongside wildlife with compensation for lost livestock, and nature tourism.

Internal disagreements

Rewilders disagree about passive as against active rewilding, and about whether to aim at a historical baseline, such as the Pleistocene or the time before farming, or at processes alone. They differ on people: some exclude farming and residents and others include them. They argue over using domestic breeds as stand-ins for extinct species, and over the welfare of free-ranging herds, which became a controversy at the Oostvaardersplassen.

Criticisms and controversies

Farmers and rural communities see rewilding as abandoning land and as a threat to their livelihoods and culture. Some conservationists argue that it loses the species of managed, semi-natural habitats, and that its results are unpredictable. Animal welfare critics objected to animals starving at the Oostvaardersplassen. Political ecologists note that rewilding has displaced herders and depends on wealthy landowners. Indigenous critics see the European idea of “wild” as one more erasure of human history.

Supporters point to the gains for biodiversity at Knepp and elsewhere, and argue that without rewilding, marginal land will be either farmed more intensively or abandoned with no plan.

Relationships to other traditions

Rewilding is the restorative successor to wilderness preservation and a more dynamic relative of restoration conservation, with trophic rewilding as its scientific core. It shares compassionate conservation’s preference for predators over culling by people, but clashes with it over animal welfare. It is the main opponent of agrarian conservatism’s managed countryside, and of land-sharing farming on marginal land. It meets ecomodernism on sparing land and ecological engineering on restoring processes.