🏞️ What is rewilding?

Last year, the world's first-ever rewilding center opened in Scotland.

The Dundreggan Rewilding Center is located on a 10,000-acre estate near Loch Ness.

It hosts forest tours, seminars, and workshops to educate visitors about:

• ancient forests

• local wildlife

• & other parts of the complex ecosystem they play a part in

The Center also serves as a tree nursery where up to 100,000 saplings are planted each year.

Those trees are then planted elsewhere across the Scottish highlands, bringing trees like the Scottish pine back to areas where it hadn’t grown for generations. (See this Gaelic-language map of the Caledonian forest surrounding the rewilding center)

Scottish ecologist Michael Durrance, an expert on the region’s natural flora and fauna, said of the rewilding project:

What is Rewilding?

The goal of rewilding is to breathe new life into ecosystems and foster biological diversity by reversing some of the effects humanity has had on nature.

Rewilding is not just about protecting wildlife and planting trees.

It's about restoring entire ecosystems to their natural, self-sustaining glory.

The related concept of Ecosystem restoration has been defined as:

Check out these before-and-after photos of a once-overgrazed Scottish glen that was rewilded over the past 25 years:

Most rewilders share the same goals, but there are still open questions about how to achieve them.

For example:

• How actively involved should humans be in the rewilding process? 

  • Some rewilders think that we should let nature take control, while others believe that human interventions are a necessary response to ecological destruction created by human action.

• Should we try to preserve the historical integrity of specific ecosystems?

  • Or, should we let introduce new flora and fauna and let them develop in new directions?

Cocaine hippos and other megafauna

(I promise this is related to rewilding.)

In related news, the Colombian government is trying to figure out what to do with “cocaine hippos.”🦛

Infamous Colombian narcotrafficker Pablo Escobar famously brought African hippopotamuses to his ranch in the 1980s.

A few of them escaped in the early 1990s.

Now, about 160 of their descendants are creating problems across Colombia.

While some argue that the hippos are disrupting local ecosystems, a 2020 study argued that the hippos bear similarities to giant pre-historic beasts that lived in Colombia until they went extinct 10,000 years ago.

Megafauna like this, largely hunted out of existence by pre-historic humans, play an important role in ecosystems. 

One scientific paper about megafauna even called them “ecological engineers.” (see the chart below to see the role played by megafauna in natural ecosystems)

Rewilders like Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell, who wrote The Book of Wilding: A Practical Guide to Rewilding, Big and Small, are big advocates of these big beasts.

Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell, the authors of the Book of Wilding, have turned their estate in southern England into a rewilding laboratory.

As part of their goal of reintroducing megafauna into the English countryside, the pair have allowed Old English longhorn cattle to roam their pastures.

Their rewilding project seems to be working.

Rare nightingales and purple emperor butterflies now breed on the estate.

White storks, which hadn't been seen in England for over 600 years, nest above the chimney of Knepp castle.

But wait, there’s more:

If you want to learn more about rewilding, check out:

• the essay “What Rewilding Means” in the MIT Technology Review

• an article about the rewilding of Knepp estate here

• a CNN article about rewilding abandoned golf courses in the U.S.

• the new online Rewilding Magazine

Or, you can watch one of the coolest videos on YouTube to see how rewilding actually changes ecosystems:

ART OF THE DAY

Twilight by John Atkinson Grimshaw. Oil on canvas, 1871.