Hello, and welcome to your almost weekly pulse of public policy. Apologies for the lack of a newsletter last week – I was finishing up some client work to hit a pre-Bank Holiday weekend deadline. On which note, I should probably plug that I’m available for policy work on a freelance basis – see jmkpolicy.co.uk for full details if you haven’t already.
This week I want to explore something I’ve wondered about for a while: rewilding. It’s becoming a more and more common buzzword, but does the substance behind it stack up? And what problem does it solve? Put another way: if rewilding is the answer, what was the question?
Firstly, what is rewilding? It seems fair to define it as allowing, or enabling (more on that later), areas of land to return to a natural state. This means that natural processes govern the area, with flora, fauna and natural processes including, say, flooding, all present as if no human activity had ever taken place there. The term has been around since the early 1990s, and expressed in this way it clearly goes beyond more limited or specific interventions such as planting new areas of forest or reintroducing a particular species. However, it is being used ever more loosely as it gains currency, so that it is sometimes applied, probably wrongly, to more limited schemes of that sort: some even worry that these traditional conservation schemes might fall out of favour if they come to be seen as inferior compared to a “full” rewilding approach. The idea gained particular currency in the UK with George Monbiot’s 2013 book Feral, and he was involved in setting up the charity Rewilding Britain which, unsurprisingly, advocates for further rewilding.
As has already been hinted, the question of what is and what isn’t rewilding is a bit vexed. While in theory it might just mean leaving an area of land to its own devices and letting nature take its course, this often won’t meet the objective: the starting point for nature on that land will be whatever state human activity has left it in, which might mean partially denuded of previous native species, or a habitat for alien species. I didn’t find much material on removing species as part of rewilding (happy to be directed to more in the comments): should green parakeets, muntjac deer and so on be exterminated as part of rewilding, for instance? There is of course a live issue around red and grey squirrels. And what about restoring species that have previously been extirpated? Or managing species whose populations were previously managed by predators that have not yet been reintroduced? In some cases, species may be introduced that are approximations of more traditional but now extinct ones. Rather than letting nature take over, restoring a habitat to its natural state might require extensive and long term human intervention. In which case, is it substantially very different from what might more traditionally be called conservation? For our purposes today we can probably say that it is different, given its aims to create a substantial area of land with a distinct character free of (overt) human influence. But we can also keep in mind that there is a debate to be had about just how distinctly one should view rewilding.
To be frank, we’re not going to get far from that sort of debate at any point in this article, but let’s try not to get too bogged down in it. Maybe it’s useful to ask at this stage what the benefits of rewilding might be. The arguments for it run across a surprisingly broad front. First up is countering greenhouse gas emissions. As we’ve seen previously in Policy Pulse, using vegetation to soak up emissions is fine so long as that carbon remains permanently stored in vegetation, and doesn’t get chucked into the atmosphere a short while later by the vegetation being cleared or mismanaged. But with that caveat, there is some evidence that rewilded land captures more carbon than an equivalent area newly planted with trees. However, the biggest impact from rewilding in this respect can’t come from Britain: restoring the best possible 15% of Brazilian habitats alone has been calculated as capable of sequestering 30 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions from all industrial activity to day.
Where local impacts of rewilding may be more consequential is not slowing climate change, but mitigating the practical effects of it. It could be a component in flood management for instance, by ensuring water works through land more slowly rather than washing quickly downstream. Some more interventionist schemes in this area are perhaps examples of the appropriateness of the term being debatable: is adding new meanders into a previously straightened river “rewilding” as such? Well, maybe. Rewilding may also help to maintain soils (though see Policy Pulse #1 for more on that).
Turning land back over to nature raises the question of what we will do to make up for any produce previously grown on that land: it may still produce some things for human consumption, but certainly not on the same scale as cultivated land. Interestingly, a director at Rewilding Europe advocates turning some land over to rewilding while using the most productive land for industrial farming, abandoning any idea that organic farming can meet the world’s population needs. This is contentious to say the least, as I explored in Policy Pulse #8. While we probably can feed the world’s population by using only the most productive land, how readily we can do so without causing further environmental harms of various kinds is hotly contested. Advocating rewilding on that basis takes it closer to seeming like the crank-ish idea that its sterner critics might accuse it of being.
There are more general environmental goals that rewilding can certainly help with, however: with biodiversity undoubtedly declining quickly, rewilding offers a clear route to expanding and improving habitats, in order to slow and hopefully reverse the slide of many species towards extinction. One might add that it is one approach, and other more traditional conservation approaches can also have their uses, but we would quickly get into a debate about the differences between them if we did.
Perhaps in tension with that aim – or perhaps not – is a further possible goal of rewilding: bringing material benefit for people. This needn’t necessarily be in a commercial sense – flood prevention effects, for example, bring a clear material benefit, but one that is literally downstream of the rewilded area – but there can be a significant element of that. On the Knepp estate in Sussex, one of the most prominent rewilding projects, organic venison is sold from the regularly culled deer, glamping, camping and safaris are all on offer, and to combine the two there is even some big bucks (again, literally) trophy-hunt shooting available. So again we get back into the question of what rewilding is and what it isn’t, though we can ask it in a slightly different way: where do people fit in?
As we’ve seen, people probably have to fit in somewhere. Some sort of judgement has to be made about what form rewilding might take, starting with a decision on whether simply to abandon the land and let nature pick up where man leaves off, or to aim to recreate a specific prior state. Another famous example of this sort of project is the Abernethy National Nature Reserve in Scotland, which is curating and expanding remaining pockets of pine woodland, distinct from more modern, managed pine plantations. The reserve has no less than a 200 year plan to guide it, and despite this being built around a principle of letting natural processes do their work, does not embrace the term “rewilding”.
Another example illustrates the pitfalls that rewilding schemes need to avoid. The Oostvaardersplassen (OVP) project in the Netherlands reintroduced native cattle, horses and deer species, but with the animals unable to move beyond the deignated areas and no apex predators in the food chain, the populations overgrazed the available land, and ended up being regulated by hunger, with up to 30% dying over winter periods. Certainly this was a natural process doing its work, but only because the reintroduced animal population was misaligned with the available food supply.
This sort of risk explains the need for deer culling at Knepp and elsewhere, and brings us to one of the thorniest issues facing some schemes: apex predators. Obviously humans are at the top of the tree, but to enable rewilding using truly natural processes it is necessary to have a natural number of apex predators: proposals to reintroduce the lynx in Kielder Forest were made with this aim, but foundered on local opposition. On the continent, wolves returned to France in 1992 (having only been extirpated in the 1930s, compared to around 700AD for the lynx in Britain) and have caused losses to sheep and goat farmers as their population has expanded: the level at which it should be maintained by human intervention is now a political debate that the President has to get involved in.
Many advocates of rewilding in Britain, including George Monbiot, argue strongly that it should not be done by riding roughshod over local communities: ultimately, the question of where humans fit in has to be worked through, not just ignored. But even then, one quickly gets into matters of taste: Monbiot and others are particularly critical of moorland maintained for sheep farming and/or traditional field sports, and in the latter case it is hard not to suspect that there is an element of class politics that may or may not align with the ecology. Debate rages about both the aesthetic appeal of heather-covered moorland, and the carbon-capturing potential of these (relatively) more modern rural landscapes compared to rewilded versions. These and other controversies have made rewilding a dirty word in many rural circles: landowners and farmers (not necessarily the same people) can be hostile to the very mention of it, for which reason you won’t find the UK’s various agriculture ministries, or the National Trust, using the term prominently.
So, where does that leave rewilding in a policy context? Is it, to answer the less polite version of the question I posed at the start, just a load of hippy nonsense? Well, no: there is clearly a lot more substance here than that, although you can find elements of it if you want to go looking for them. It is perhaps best understood as one tool among several, depending on the problem being addressed. Its definition is a little fuzzy, and arguably overlaps with some other approaches, and it won’t provide the sole answer to anything. But depending on the problem at hand, a rewilding approach may offer a suitable solution, if deployed competently and in partnership with all the people and interests affected. To be fair, that is a copy-and-paste description of any effective policy approach: which probably seals the case that there is certainly a place for rewilding in environmental policy.