I was chatting with a neighbour earlier, and he asked an interesting question that is harder to answer than you might think. He asked me what I understood by ‘rewilding.’ The answer that I came up with distinguished rewilding from mere abandonment. I said that, to me, rewilding means a form of land management with a particular end in mind – essentially recreating an ecological balance with a focus on native species.
I was happy enough with that as an off-the-cuff answer, but then I went for a 10K/6m walk and thought about it some more.
Linguistically, I’m accustomed to hearing ‘rewilding’ used as an active verb – as something that is consciously done to or in an environment. I suppose it could also be used reflexively – the land is in the process of rewilding itself, for example – but I tend to think of that via a process/metaphor of reclamation. That might just be because of my age: it’s the kind of approach used in 1975 by Richard Mabey in The Unofficial Countryside. I don’t think this is semantic hair splitting. My neighbour talked about the period following the retreat of the ice at the end of the last ice age as a form of rewilding, and that is obviously correct on one level. But if we were simply to abandon parts of Scotland for nature to reclaim, for example, the Highlands would be left with a legacy of commercial forestry and invasive species (such as the ubiquitous rhododendron.) It would certainly get wild, but not, I think, in the usual sense of ‘rewilding.’ Of course, there are definitional issues with ‘invasive species’ – some of them have been here a very long time – but the general principle is clear enough, I think.
For me, a rewilded Scotland would not just be about the headline reintroduction of the wolf, the lynx and the beaver, but also about encouraging the growth of Scots Pine, Alder, Aspen, Birch and the Mountain Ash (Rowan), which in turn would attract insects and birds and thus food for apex predators (bird diversity in Scotland is at catastrophically low levels.) In short, I’d be looking to trigger a trophic cascade in the same way that the reappearance of a family of wolves triggered in Yellowstone.
By the way, for those of you who have read Coyote in the Corner, the idea for the Gaia Cascade came from the trophic cascade in Yellowstone. If you haven’t yet read Coyote in the Corner, it is easily available on Amazon and I’ve helpfully provided a link in the immediately preceding sentence.
However.
All of that is in the realm of fantasy if other issues aren’t addressed. Chief amongst those is our relationship with the planet and the horrible things that humans do to a landscape. Dumping of raw sewage into watercourses by profiteering water companies is a recent example here, but it’s only one example amongst many. Go to any beauty spot in Scotland and you will find cars and campervans spilling out of the carpark and SUVs ripping up verges with their tyres. There will be sandwich packets and chocolate wrappers and drinks cans (and face masks) all over the ground. Take a standard path up any Munro within easy distance of the central belt and you’re likely to be walking up an eroded trench formed by the passage of thousands of vibram-soled boots. Our oceans are filling with plastics and emptying of fish. The world’s highest mountains are littered with abandoned tents and equipment and the abandoned bodies of unfortunate climbers.
Sorry: I’m going off on one 🙂
The point I’m getting to is that ‘rewilding’ takes us into all sorts of areas of ethics and public policy that ought to be coherent but aren’t. Restoring ecological balance and triggering a trophic cascade is about more than a few beavers and red kites, it’s about how we approach everything.’ And yes, there’s a link to climate change through the restoration of peat bogs, and reversal of deforestion caused first by man and then by unpredated herbivores. This isn’t about chasing a myth of Eden, it’s fundamental to long-term survival as a species.
As I said, an interesting question that’s harder to answer than you might immediately imagine.
Here’s a 20-minute TED talk by Alan Watson that covers some of the basics in a Scottish context. I note he talks mainly about restoration rather than rewilding.
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