Out Come the Wolves

  Dundreggan rewilding estate, Scottish Highlands. Picture my own (2016) Time, and especially timescales, though human inventions, are a challenge in rewilding theory. In order to imagine a future for a rewilded area, no matter the size or intention, we need to tweak our preset inclinations toward timescales that represents a single human generation, or even worse, the unnatural square number- fifty years, a century. Our imagining of time through what we experience in a lifetime, or that we learn from our immediate predecessors, creates a ‘shifting baseline,’ where the baseline of which we expect a natural habitat to be flourishing degrades over time because humans will think of the safe or healthy moment to be one from their experience; someone might be shocked to see one fish swimming in a river when they used to see ten when they were younger, but ten generations before there might have been hundreds of fish. Rewilding requires us to think on a scale not in the history of human