There have been plenty of people giving their views on the role rewilding has played in the recent spate of wildfires and I am not going to add to them. What has been interesting, however, is to see how advocates have again been refining their definition of what rewilding is in an increasingly desperate attempt to deflect criticism. According to arch rewilder, Ben Goldsmith, critics like the Countryside Alliance are “wilfully misunderstanding what rewilding is” by conflating land abandonment with rewilding. An interesting claim, but one that is difficult to land given the ever-changing definition of what rewilding actually is.
This shape-shifting has been a constant factor since the term was first introduced around 1990. The first major academic paper to promote the concept appeared in 1998 and envisaged rewilding as a conservation method based on the concept of 'cores, corridors, and carnivores'. The problem was that across much of the world the idea of reintroducing large carnivores was wholly impractical and deeply unpopular.
There is a reason that wolves appear so frequently in children’s literature and it is not because they are cuddly. A large part of the rewilding world, especially in the UK, therefore started denying large carnivores. If you raise the question of wolves in a debate about rewilding you will now be told that large carnivores are a just a scare story and not central to the concept.
Initially, one of the other key principles of rewilding was that the removal of human intervention would allow natural processes to repair ecosystems and return them to a natural equilibrium. This too became increasingly challenging. In particular the project at Oostvaardersplassen in Holland - which had been lauded as a model by rewilders across the world - crashed into a huge dose of reality. In the winter of 2017/18 over 3,000 deer, cattle and horses died on the 15,000 acre reserve, most of them, emaciated and barely alive, were shot at the point of starvation. This was not the first time large numbers of herbivores had died at Oostvaardersplassen, but it was the last as public opinion turned decisively against the policy of management by starvation.
Whilst animal welfare was the tipping point issue the reserve was failing at a conservation level too. The carcass strewn land had been grazed to the ground by starving animals which had destroyed the very habitats that Oostvaardersplassen had been designated as a nature reserve for, before the rewilders had intervened. By 2016, 22 rare bird species previously present on the reserve had disappeared. Oostvaardersplassen is now actively managed. Herbivores are culled or removed when the population gets too large, they are fed when they are hungry and trees are being planted to repair the habitat. In fact, Oostvaardersplassen has become the first post-rewilding landscape and is all the better for that.
There are many brilliant conservation projects operating under the increasingly broad label of rewilding, but that does not make the term necessarily useful. In fact, as I have written many times before, the language used by some of the advocates of rewilding is actually a barrier to engaging many farmers and land managers in conservation and ecosystem repair. To borrow Clement Atlee’s famous line, a period of silence on their part would be welcome.