COMMENT
REWILDING: IS IT ALL JUST A CELEBRITY CULT?
In July, four bison were released in Kent. But is rewilding the best way to boost biodiversity?
Rewilding is all the rage. Landowners are exhorted to rewild farmland, moorland and mountains, while governments are asked to commit to rewilding policies. During No-Mow May (a wonderful initiative) people talked of roadside verges being rewilded. And there’s a thriving ecosystem of books, blogs and websites urging homeowners to rewild their gardens, which seems uncannily similar to ‘gardening for wildlife’.
In fact, much of what is called rewilding is a rebrand of something we already had. When the Aspinall Foundation announced a plan to move elephants from a zoo in Kent to Kenya, the venture wasn’t called ‘translocation’ or ‘captive-release’ or ‘reintroduction’.
No, these elephants were to be ‘rewilded’.
Rewilding makes intuitive sense if we take a big picture view of it. The basic idea is that humans have converted land that was once wilderness into some other form of land-use. Rewilding aims to restore land to the way it would be if we weren’t around. This wild state, it is presumed, supported a more diverse and functionally complex ecosystem.
We have converted – dewilded, if you like – great swathes of land across the planet for various uses.
You live in one such land use (residential). Perhaps you went to the shop (commercial) earlier via a road (transportation) to buy bread (agricultural). Maybe you’re reading this on your phone: that requires power (energy generation), materials (mining) and manufacturing (industrial). All of these types of land could be rewilded.
Whatever land you rewild, there are many fundamental questions to ask. When are you rewilding to – pre-Industrial Revolution, pre-agricultural, prehuman? If you rewild your patch to emulate this ‘lost’ ecosystem, how will it fit within the broader landscape with all its other land-uses? Are you sure your rewilded patch will actually support more biodiversity? How much management are you willing to do to convert the land to this new state, and maintain it? Will you reintroduce species that have been lost?
It is this last question that tends to attract the most headlines. This is especially the case when the reintroduced species are predators, like wolves or lynx, both of whose reintroduction to the UK has been suggested. Recently, another species came into the rewilding spotlight, with headlines proclaiming that “Bison are back in the UK”.
European bison nearly went extinct, but thanks to some serious conservation efforts they are recovering well, and a small herd has been released in Kent.
‘Rewilding bison’ conjures up images of huge herbivores roaming across the landscape, but the reality is somewhat different. A handful of animals will be living behind a fence in a woodland where visitors will be able to go to see them. Another fact that detracts somewhat from the rewilding conceit is the fact that European bison never lived in the UK. They aren’t ‘back’ and haven’t been ‘rewilded’ because they were never here. The species in the UK was the extinct Pleistocene wood bison.
Rewilding is undeniably exciting. It taps into the thought that we are a scourge on the planet and that the best way to change that is to remove us, and let nature take its course. Rewilding projects seem grand and noble, attracting headlines, celebrity endorsement and funding. Surely, then, rewilding is good conservation?
“We need to make sure rewilding doesn’t become a hammer that makes every conservation problem a nail”
Well, maybe it is sometimes, but there are more than a few problems. First, most conservation isn’t glamorous, exciting or especially attractive to celebrities, journalists or funders. Rewilding tends to hog the limelight, and that can leave many other ventures, with proven success, woefully overlooked.
A second problem with rewilding is more fundamental.
In the developed world, rewilding tends to focus on agricultural or other non-residential land. It is natural for us to view the wider world in the same way. The late biologist Edward Osborne Wilson, for example, suggested putting aside half the world for wildlife. That sounds easy: I can see plenty of land that could be rewilded from the window of my home. But then, I eat food produced through intensive agriculture that I bought at a supermarket. In many parts of the world, people live very differently: they rely on a closer connection to the land, and sometimes that connection goes back for thousands of years. Land that we see as potential rewilded wilderness, they call home.
Rewilding can work, certainly, and is likely to be an important part of our planetary recovery toolkit.
But we need to make sure rewilding doesn’t become a hammer that makes every conservation problem a nail. If conservation is to work well, we need more than one tool. That means we need to think much harder about how we can share the land we use to live, with the biodiversity we need to survive.
(@AdamHartScience) Adam is a biologist, entomologist and broadcaster who frequently appears on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service.