Out Come the Wolves

Longhorn Cattle Grazing at Knepp Estate, West Sussex, 2017 (Photo Author's Own)             Rewilding at its core is letting nature ‘get on with it.’ Much conservation & land management involves a huge amount of human meddling and intrusion and tends to maintain a ‘wilderness’ that is merely traditionally and aesthetically accepted. Nature has all of the necessary components in-built, but humans have altered these workings to the point that certain essential species have become extinct or extirpated (total removal of a species from an area) from countries that now have an impoverished wilderness. If we reintroduce some of these species we could spark a chain reaction that enriches wildlands. The most heavily cited success is the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1994. (Farquhar) The wolves keep deer numbers in check by hunting the slowest and weakest of the herd, and keep them on t...

Picture taken from the Wildlife Trust Myself and other environmental-leftist thinkers will have been cornered into a strange position in the previous few months; agreeing with a proposal that infamous tory politician Michael Gove has put backing behind. Indeed, as environmental secretary, he has been saying many of the ‘right things’ when it comes to environment, sustainability & their future in Britain. Gove has recently given his backing to the proposal for the reintroduction of  beavers to the Forest of Dean where they have been absent for four hundred years.             Elsewhere in the West country, the Devon Wildlife trust has been conducting a heavily monitored trial release of beavers in the River Otter since 2015. These are just a few of the voices clamouring for beaver reintroduction to the united kingdom, amidst calls for other reintroductions, many of them much less timid creatures as the beaver...

One of the things many conservationists, especially those involved in rewilding, in Scotland (or Britain in general) seem to turn to is the links between ancient British history and language and the wilderness that has since been drastically extirpated from the Isles. A consideration for the Celtic history of Britain can be found in texts such as George Monbiot's writings including his book Feral, which brought rewilding into British popular consciousness, and other texts that often highlight the plight of the Scottish or Welsh when faced with clearance and industrialised agricultural change. Organsiations similarly discuss the Celtic nature to Britain's wilderness, whether they are management trusts such as the Woodland trust, or rewilding organisations such as the Cambrian Wildwood project in Wales, or Trees for Life operating in Scotland. Many organisations have settled on exploring a particular era of linguistic history in the British Isles, namely the Brythonic (asides...