Rewilding, taking the traditional view, conjures up certain images. A caramel flash of a Lynx to a backdrop of Scots Pine. Herds of Tauros, rumbling across Portugal. Maybe even elephants, reintroduced into Europe, as some suggest is needed. 1
Sit 100 people in a room and ask them to define Rewilding. You’ll hear some overlap, some of these
common themes, but you’ll most likely have 100 different answers recited back at you.
It is widely accepted that in the UK, our landscapes are denuded. Our hairy, tusked, and hooved
stewards are largely extinct, as are the shifting worlds they created. An absence of life hangs heavy
on our country, the silence deafening. We have, for all intents and purposes, domesticated our lands,
cheating them of their essential wildness.
And in the tandem with this, is something little talked about. A domestication of ourselves.
Like our landscapes, perhaps our minds, bodies, and even cities are denuded? Cheated of an
essential wildness.
Technology moves faster than biology, and despite feeling detached (or even worse superior) to
nature, the modern-day human has been around for an eye-blink in deep time.
In 2016, a study at Nagoya University took images of several animals and blurred each into a grey
smear. Stage by stage, they then unblurred each, and asked a group of pupils when they could
identify each creature. Remarkably, snakes were identified first across the board. 2 An evolutionary
hack, programmed for when we had to forage on the ground?
In Britain we also have an infatuation with the big, black, cat. Theories that Puma and Pantha are
roaming wild in our countryside. However, decades of military searches on, it’s clear these are false. 3
So, why are some people still so insistent that they’re there? That they’re being stalked by an invisible
predator.
Well, perhaps they are. Perhaps there is a big black cat, but in their minds. Stalking the shadows of a
predator, an evolutionary paranoia. As Author George Monbiot says: “maybe, we are ecologically
bored”.
Our own brains are calling out to be rewilded, but so is our land. And by that, I don’t mean fortress
conservation, the notion of “humans here, and nature over there somewhere”. Like Beavers and
Boars, we are ecosystem engineers, an integral part of the modern-day ecosystem. If anything, we’re
too good at it!
Even in the 21 st Century, people unintentionally steward the land for good. Urban gardens have been
shown to be more biodiverse than surrounding landscapes. 4 In some seabird colonies, locals provide
an anti-predator service, deterring certain predators; affording others respite. 5 In the Bronze Age,
when farming was prevalent, pollen cores reveal it was in fact the most biodiverse period in recent
history, due to the ways humans and livestock managed the land. 6
So, when we talk about rewilding, we should refer not only to the glens and scrublands, the bleak
tundras, and bustling wood pastures. Our gardens, cities and farms can also be rewilded, with us as
the ecosystem engineers, to get things started at least.
Such that a mycelial body nurtures the subterranean world of a woodland, which in turn provides it
with a suitable habitat, we as human beings must nurture our anthropogenic world back to health, so
that it can provide us with the habitat we need. To rewild our surroundings, we must first allow our
surroundings to rewild ourselves. The ultimate Symbiosis.
If this topic interests you and you’d like to get involved, you can find out more/get in touch with the
Symbiosis project here: (watch this space)
References:
1. Wells, H., Ward, N. and D. Crego. (2023) Rewilding: Conservationists want to let elephants loose in
Europe – here’s what could happen, theconservation.com. Available at:
https://theconversation.com/rewilding-conservationists-want-to-let-elephants-loose-in-europe-heres-
what-could-happen-168212 (Accessed: 03 March 2024).
2. Neuroscience News. (2016, November 8). Humans recognize partially obscured snakes more
easily than other animals. https://neurosciencenews.com/snake-recognition-vision-5460/
3. Monbiot, G. (2014). The never-spotted leopard. In Feral (p. pg. 49-61). essay, Penguin.
4. World Economic Forum. (2021, February 21). Why urban gardens are a lifeline for the world’s
pollinators. www.weforum.org. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/02/urban-gardens-pollinators-
biodiversity-nectar-
study/#:~:text=Our%20findings%20suggest%20that%20urban%20landscapes%20are%20hotspots,th
e%20farmland%20and%20nature%20reserve%20sites%20we%20measured.
5. Unknown. (2022, July 17th). Word of mouth from ornithological conservationist. Thetford; The
Global Birdfair 2022.
6. Woodbridge , D. J. (2023). Biodiversity and land-use change in the British Isles. University of
Plymouth. https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/centre-for-research-in-environment-and-society-
ceres/biodiversity-and-human-land-use-change-in-the-british-isles