Rewilding – what’s lost is lost and gone forever

‘Rewilding’ seeks to rediscover lost natural processes, large or small, on land and sea. Beyond that, a more precise definition is elusive.

For some, ‘rewilding’ is a nostalgic plea for a return to a world unspoilt by human touch, one with which we are “out of tune”, to borrow the poet William Wordsworth’s metaphor.

Recreating the world that existed at the end of the last ice age (global population four million versus eight billion today) is not without its problems. The late James Lovelock – an outstanding physicist with impressive environmental credentials – put it this way:

“We must remember that reducing CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere to 180 parts per million (ppm), as some have recommended, may not lead to a pre-industrial paradise, but to a new ice age. Is this what they want?”

For reference, CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere today are around 420ppm.

Even a shorter journey back in time, to the pre-dawn of the Industrial Revolution (one billion inhabitants and 280 ppm), is problematic. Life then was “nasty, brutish and short” – to quote the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Even if we wished to revisit it, complex systems like the biosphere do not admit easy reversibility in time – the evolutionary clock only ticks forward, some would say thankfully.

For others, rewilding is about restoring ecosystems that have decayed or disappeared in specific areas, by re-establishing native plants or lost species.

The textbook case is the re-introduction of wolves into the Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s, easing strains associated with the elk herd. This brought positive cascade effects throughout that ecosystem, encouraging the recovery of biodiversity.

Examples exist closer to home. A Cornish charity has launched a rewilding project involving everything from marsh butterflies on Helman Tor to long-snouted seahorses in the seagrass at St. Austell Bay. Highlands Rewilding, a private limited company founded by social entrepreneur, Jeremy Leggett, is committed to nature recovery and community prosperity in the Scottish Highlands (the ‘and’ is important – emphasising that some rewilding ventures integrate humanity into projects).

Schemes are not only the domain of country life. Closer to concrete, a diverse set of institutions, including London’s Wildlife Trust, Amazon’s Right Now Climate Fund, the Mayor of London and various councils, are supporting a set of rewilding projects across the capital.

Overall then, rewilding is a very broad term. Why does it not enjoy universal support?

There are nuanced arguments here. One is that a subset of rewilding schemes ignore…er…us! Some rewilding seems to yearn for a world without humans, or at least as few as possible. Even where our species is acknowledged, the framing as ‘humanity versus the rest of the biosphere’ is unfortunate.

We are embedded in nature, all eight billion of us – there is no escaping that.

The good news is that to forget about you and me need not be the template for rewilding, as we have already seen. A positive aspect to Highland Rewilding is that it puts human communities at the centre of the challenge.

A more salient critique of rewilding is the observation that it can only form a part – not the whole – of a holistic human approach to nature. Science and economics have indispensable roles to play also, a point well elucidated in the Dasgupta Review*.

The context is that nature does not appear to care much about us – it is just as liable to mete out destruction and pain every bit as much as beauty and pleasure. As the economist Dieter Helm puts it** “only we care”.

So, we need to tread carefully with this friend and foe, making positive use of the technologies that our brains (gifts of nature!) have discovered and developed over human history.

This implies a forward-looking exercise for our imaginations, to ensure sufficient biosphere resilience while creating options for an inevitably uncertain future.

The goal is to vouchsafe humanity’s survival, rather than to rediscover its past. Ultimately, this is an issue in risk management, involving complex economic trade-offs.

Rewilding has a role to play in a portfolio of strategies to ensure this objective. But we need much more. We cannot delegate the environmental challenge only to a set of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ rewilding projects.

The ‘more’ includes continuing frontier research in our universities to discover effective ways for a frail humanity to inch forward in harmony with nature. Moreover, a priority now is ‘capital maintenance’, a theme embracing the natural capital assets embedded in nature itself, and also much of society’s core physical infrastructure.

The Dubliners’ melody: The town I loved so well, to which the title of this blog refers, reminds us that some things are gone forever. But the lyrics also confirm that all is not broken and the power of humanity when “hearts are set on tomorrow.”

As in Derry, so too with the environment. A focus on the future and our legacy is what matters now – in rewilding, and much else.

Further reading:
*The Economics of Biodiversity: the Dasgupta Review (HM Treasury)
**Legacy: Dieter Helm. Cambridge University Press