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...

It’s only been two years since I became a vegetarian, and for me it was very easy; although I ate meat, I never saw it as very important, and my upbringing didn’t hinge much cultural importance to it. As I began cooking more I began eating meat less, which was expensive and not always easily storable or usable, and fairly often bland. My partner has been a vegetarian most of her life so it made a lot of sense to just slip into it and stop eating meat in the winter of 2016.             The breaking point for me was a few lines and descriptions in J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, which I was studying at the time as part of my Literature undergraduate degree. Through the titular character, Coetzee elaborates that meat producing systems are factories of death, emerging from the Chicago slaughtering pits of the early 20 th century that specialised in toning the efficiency of killing, where men spent their working hours clubbing...

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...

These are some texts that I read while studying Environment, Development & Policy at the university of Sussex that I feel helped formulate my own ideas on rewilding as a conservation strategy. There are definitely more out there that are explicitly about rewilding, but I feel these helped me form my own personal opinion. To follow up, the works of Franz Vera, Sergey Zimov, David Foreman, Josh Donlan et al. and Mauro Galetti have helped form some of the earlier writings on rewilding. Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding - George Monbiot The first text on rewilding I read. I was turned on to Feral by a piece written by Monbiot in the Guardian, which I think was an adapted excerpt in the run-up to the books launch. Monbiot has written fairly extensively on environment and society, with a previous book, HEAT, focussing on climate change. This book offers an extensive and emotive look at rewilding in a holistic British landscape, selecting areas o...