The Wild Imperative: Examining arguments for rewilding in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Rewilding has grown into a major land-use strategy now being adopted by governments and environmental NGOs and often wealthy individuals. Increasingly it is presented as the best or only option to address major Anthropocene challenges, yet critiques of the concept and practice remain common. This review brings together political ecology, archaeology, history, art, literature and popular non-fiction illustrating how rewilding, knowingly or not, draws on different bodies of knowledge ranging from ecological science to historical literature. We focus on how the knowledge drawn from these different disciplines is utilised to justify not only specific programmes of rewilding, but also the concept more broadly. These justifications, we argue, have coalesced into what we term the “Wild Imperative.” We describe some of the problems associated with the “Wild Imperative” and potential solutions to them in order to encourage both a greater diversity of perspectives and self-critical reflection for rewilding science and practice.

Introduction

Rewilding has gained popularity as a biodiversity conservation concept and as a nature-based solution intended to address an array of Anthropocene challenges, particularly declines in biodiversity. This is evident in academic discourse (e.g. Perino et al., 2019), popular scientific literature (e.g. Tree, 2018) and increasingly in national and international policy (e.g. Carver et al., 2021). Despite fierce debate over the definition of the term (e.g. Jørgensen, 2013; Prior and Ward, 2016), it is being applied to a broad range of initiatives globally. The idea of rewilding has gained significant purchase among environmental groups, especially NGOs, who use the word to describe various projects they have begun, wish to reinvigorate or rebrand or aim to commence (cf. Hayward et al., 2019). Rewilding has become a major force in biological conservation and a land-use in its own right in the Anthropocene.

Alongside its rise in popularity, various justifications and arguments for rewilding have proliferated which to date have mostly escaped scrutiny, with deference to the compelling theory of the concept with growing, but still limited, body of scientific evidence for rewilding outcomes (Hart et al., 2023). A quarter century ago, Angermeier (2000) set out what he termed a “Natural Imperative” for conservation biologists which included refining concepts like ecological integrity that emphasised the importance of “natural” ecosystem states along a spectrum of natural to anthropogenic. In this multidisciplinary critical review, we lay out how many proponents of rewilding tend to create a comparable “Wild Imperative” for visions and approaches to rewilding. We further suggest that this “Wild Imperative” can justify or obscure problematic and unclear aims and methods for biological conservation practices.

We define rewilding as the suite biological conservation practices, programmes, projects and initiatives that are being promoted or labelled as “rewilding” or “wilding.” Given that the term has been variously adopted and adapted, we argue this is the most pragmatic approach to achieve our aim. That aim is to unpick the multi-disciplinary intellectual foundation of rewilding. This piece does not aim to entirely overcome the critiques of and challenges to rewilding (or parallel challenges in biological conservation and restoration more widely), which are now so broad and contextually specific that they will elude any single solution. Nor is our aim to demonstrate a quantitative result that rewilding is good or bad. Rather, we present different disciplinary perspectives arguing that justifications for rewilding, or formulations of the “Wild Imperative,” can fail to acknowledge local ways of knowing, valuing and interacting with nature; may use evidence of the past to support its implementation thereby uncritically establishing inappropriate or non-sensical baselines; can ignore the intellectual history upon which its arguments stand contributing to poor integration with local communities; and may employ problematic cultural imaginaries of a world (or places) without humans. This article situates rewilding as a socio-cultural phenomenon, entangled with wider political-economic transitions and ideas about what nature is and how it should be managed (Fletcher et al., 2021; Marino and Fry, 2025). Charting how the Wild Imperative is created, its epistemological and ontological underpinnings are essential first moves to understanding how rewilding intersects the wider-world, most prominently people and their societies/histories illustrating as well how this occurs often beyond scientific literature.

To do this, we present four disciplinary perspectives in discrete sections; political ecology as “Wild Places,” archaeology and palaeoecology as “Wild Pasts,” history and literature as “Wild Senses” and art and popular non-fiction as “Wild Abandonment.” These disciplines have been selected as they are among the most common disciplinary perspectives invoked by rewilding proponents and are related through their mostly human-centred perspectives. We argue it is important to consider these together, as we do below, as any given rewilding programme and its justification is near certain to cut across multiple disciplines – in other words handling multivocality is inevitable for rewilding. However, we emphasise that these are not the only disciplines that rewilding proponents and practitioners draw upon creating the “Wild Imperative” which range across scientific and humanities scholarship including law, philosophy, economics, human health and nutrition, climate science and numerous others. To be successful, rewilding must navigate multivocal and multidisciplinary landscapes and domains to be a viable approach in addressing Anthropocene biodiversity loss and other challenges of the 21st century and beyond.

Wild Places: Exploring the social, economic and political geographies of rewilding as conservation practice

Notwithstanding ongoing debates about its merits and rationale, rewilding has captured the imagination of people across the world. This is evident from the increasing use of the term “rewilding” to describe a range of initiatives and projects, of all shapes and sizes across the world. The diversity has solidified into different rewilding approaches, including passive rewilding (minimising human intervention), agri-wilding (making farms more biodiverse), which all share certain overlap with ecological restoration, see elaborated by Corlett (2016). In this section, we draw on the field of political ecology to examine how different contexts have shaped how rewilding is interpreted, how it is operationalised (the contents of the “rewilding toolbox”), the stated rationale and its engagement with people inhabiting the targeted area. We focus on two models of rewilding that has been most dominant in practice and in the literature and that are based on different intellectual traditions and ideas of nature; the Three Cs Rewilding and Pragmatic Rewilding (also described by Jepson et al., 2018; Root-Bernstein et al., 2017). While we treat them as distinct, many projects incorporate ideas from both models. In comparing the approaches and their application to different social, geographic and political contexts, we demonstrate how the main challenge for rewilding lies not within the ecological sciences, but rather with how preconceived rewilding ideas clash with alternative ways of knowing and valuing nature, and how the concept is used to maintain or escalate existing conservation approaches.

Neo-protectionist rewilding: Restoring the three Cs

Rewilding’s origins and rationale were influenced by Deep Ecology and the North American wilderness movement (Fisher and Carver, 2022; Johns et al., 2019; Jørgensen, 2013). As observed by Cronon (1996: 1), this movement was based on a perceived moral obligation, an imperative, to defend “the last remaining place where civilization [. . .] has not fully infected the earth.” This created a reverence for nature that was considered untouched by humans. Rewilding became a vehicle to restore and expand these “wild frontiers,” building on the national park movement which has been gathering momentum since the establishment of Yellowstone National Park in the United States in 1872 (Marris, 2011). This movement was propelled by the trophic cascades attributed to the reintroduction of wolves to the park in 1995, referring to the conjectured interplay between wolves, elk, beavers, vegetation and stream hydrology (Ripple and Beschta, 2012).

The legacy of these ideas is manifested in North America’s distinct “3Cs” toolbox, Core areas, Corridors and Carnivores, which emphasises “self-willed/natural” ecosystem function without human interference (Noss et al., 1996; Soulé and Noss, 1998). Projects typically involve buying adjoining lands, declaring protected areas, and/or reintroducing emblematic species (e.g. bison and wolves), usually harking back to pre-Columbian baselines (Fisher and Carver, 2022; Corlett, 2016; Wuerthner, 2015). Notable examples include the American Prairie Reserve, Montana and the Heartland Ranch Nature Preserve, Colorado (https://southernplains.org/; Belsky, 2011). The model implies that the wild is separated as much as possible from human society, becoming places where people ideally are visitors and not residents. This represents a growing neo-protectionist trend within conservation, wherein proponents double down on protected areas as a solution to the biodiversity crisis. The most radical proposal is “nature needs half/half-earth” (https://natureneedshalf.org/), implying human-nature separation at an unprecedented scale (discussed in depth by Büscher and Fletcher, 2020; Schleicher et al., 2019). Whilst no country has adopted this proposal, its arguments are partly mirrored in international agreements to protect 30% of global land and water by 2030 (Target 3, Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), 2022). However, after critiques of the fortress conservation model and its neo-colonial connotations (see Brockington et al., 2008; Ward, 2019) and growing recognition of the role of Indigenous and local peoples in safeguarding biodiversity (IPBES, 2022), rewilding projects are increasingly partnering with Indigenous groups with overlapping conservation interests, such as the restoration of buffalo and condors in the US (Shamon et al., 2022). Other communities, such as European-origin farmers and ranchers in North America, are less often seen as legitimate land custodians in rewilding initiatives, presumably because their practices are considered drivers of wilderness decline. For instance, US rewilders have called on the government to revoke grazing rights so that livestock can be replaced with wild counterparts and to facilitate the reintroduction/expansion of carnivores (e.g. Ripple et al., 2022). The perceived imposition of external conservation ideas and potentially dangerous wildlife (for people, domestic animals and/or livelihoods) on rural communities, which are ubiquitous side-effects of such proposals, have become a major driver of conservation conflicts (Madden and McQuinn, 2014; Sullivan, 2021). Some initiatives (e.g. the American Prairie Reserve) have therefore started engaging with rangers, but disputes over land and introduced or expanding species remain (Schmidt, 2024). Additionally, the evidence and generalisability of predator-induced trophic cascades (such as those in Yellowstone) have increasingly been challenged, with growing evidence that the effects have been overstated to justify conservation and rewilding agendas (Allen et al., 2017; Ciucci et al., 2020; Comley et al., 2020). Such “wishful thinking” may further undermine public trust in rewilding and increases the risk of social backlash when promised benefits, such as the control of wild ungulates, fail to materialise (Blossey and Hare, 2022; Mech, 2012).

Concerns notwithstanding, the 3Cs and trophic cascades rationale have been influential, forming the basis of advocacy and initiatives across the world. A strong emphasis within this advocacy, and, according to Jepson and Blythe (2020), a key to its success, is the emphasis on hope and action. While success within the traditional conservation movement constitutes, for instance, maintaining a minimum population or preventing losses, the rewilding approach often yields visible and relatively quick gains quickly (e.g. animals introduced, trees planted) producing positive news, public engagement and investment that can be harnessed by rewilding organisations. Many of the leading organisations are from the US, including Re:wild (https://www.rewild.org/) and the Global Rewilding Alliance, an umbrella group of organisations across 70 countries (https://wild.org/). The latter is behind the World Rewilding Day, which celebrates the movement on March 20th every year, including through virtual events to share knowledge, skills and connections. Another example is Tompkins Conservation, the organisation behind the largest rewilding initiatives in South America. Starting in the 1990s, they acquired land in the Chilean Patagonia and the Argentine Iberá, which they set out to make “ecologically complete” by restoring habitats and species that had disappeared within recent decades. The lands were then to be donated to those countries in return for affording them national park status (Zamboni et al., 2017). However, on a continent with such a deep, and arguably ongoing colonial history, and where Indigenous peoples have an increasingly recognised standing as environmental custodians (Dawson et al., 2021; Pascual et al., 2022), the rationale of restoring wilderness separate from people was politically and socially unpalatable (Root-Bernstein et al., 2017). Tompkins Conservation rewilding ideas and “Gringo” team were thus fiercely resisted at both local and national levels (see Holmes, 2014; Jimenez, 2022), which led them to re-frame the purpose of their imperative under the rubric “Full Nature.” Compared with the North American model, Full Nature is more explicitly geared towards regional economic development, including commodification of the charismatic species and scenery (re)created by rewilding. As phrased by Jimenez (2022), “just like other people produce livestock, we produce nature.” Tompkins Conservation projects also featured the restoration of local heritage, specifically the elements that were deemed compatible with ecotourism, thus “touching both hearts and pockets” of local stakeholders (Pettersson and de Carvalho, 2021). This reframing of rewilding as both an imperative and a vehicle for economic growth and cultural revitalisation, used in both public campaigns and private lobbying, proved to be the key to generating buy-in from regional and national authorities fulfilling the organisation’s goals. The parks were declared in 2018, and most of the land changed hands from to Chile and Argentina respectively. The Iberá National Park (around 160,000 ha) has since been repopulated by jaguars and several other charismatic species, driving greater levels of tourism and associated local income generation (Figure 1). Tompkins Conservation are consequently considered some of the most successful rewilding projects in the world (Jepson and Blythe, 2020; Royte, 2017). However, the metrics used to assess this may be questioned (Büscher, 2014). A general problem within conservation, manifested also within Tomkin’s projects, is that increases in a species population or tourism revenue are relatively easy to measure and so become indicators of success, whilst the impact on culture, emotions and the level of conflict is difficult to quantify and thus tends to be overlooked (Zhang et al., 2023).

Figure 1.

South American jaguar (Panthera onca) is a key predator species for rewilding in Iberá. Photograph, CC BY-ND 2.0. Tambako the Jaguar.

Other rewilding initiatives are more clearly a case of old wine in a new bottle: a rebranding of existing conservation and capitalist agendas, which alleviate the symptoms but generally fail to address the underlying causes of biodiversity loss and human-wildlife conflicts (i.e. resource inequality; Carmenta et al., 2023). There are examples of such projects in Africa, where neoliberal conservation strategies and market-based instruments have become increasingly prevalent since the 1970s (Lorimer, 2015; Ochieng et al., 2023). The most prominent example is game ranching, which has converted large expanses of southern Africa from farm- and rangelands to enclosed reserves for observation and/or sport hunting. South Africa has more than 10,000 such private game farms, and 25% of private land in Namibia is dedicated to wildlife-related activities (Jimenez, 2022; Palfrey et al., 2022). The combined “territorialisation” of wild spaces with the commodification of wildlife has rendered southern Africa a frontrunner of megafauna reintroduction, including lions, cheetahs and elephants (Hoogendoorn et al., 2019; Igoe and Brockington, 2007). In recent years, these activities have been increasingly branded as rewilding, for instance by the Peace Parks Foundation (https://www.peaceparks.org/rewilding-africa/) and in accounts of how Africa’s “last wild places” are being saved through ecotourism and anti-poaching operations (see e.g. Fowlds and Spence, 2022; National Geographic, n.d.). Hoogendoorn et al. (2019) demonstrated rewilding was seen by owners as a way to diversify their income and increase resilience faced with the risks of diseases, drought, labour costs and unreliable agricultural markets. While the development has benefitted local wildlife and the people who own or are employed by the industry, political ecologists have shown that the promised win-wins and green development outcomes for surrounding communities have often failed to materialise. Worse, these initiatives have generated unforeseen perverse outcomes. These include the perpetuation of exclusive and carbon-intensive forms of tourism, the concentration of land/game ownership and income in the hands of elites and foreign enterprises, as well as growing militarisation and human rights abuses in the name of saving wildlife (Duffy, 2014; Ochieng et al., 2023; Sullivan, 2023). A recent example is the forced eviction of Masaai people in Tanzania to make way for game reserves and eco-lodges (McQue, 2022). Another example is the relocation of >250 elephants from om Liwonde National Park to Kasungu National Park in Malawi to “help restore habitats and alleviate human wildlife conflict” (https://www.africanparks.org/campaign/elephants-move), “working closely with local communities” and “leading to improved employment opportunities” (https://www.ifaw.org/uk/journal/elephants-thrive-in-malawi-one-year-after-mass-translocation), a narrative which enabled the organisation to raise more the $120 million from donors (Høgh, 2025). However, in a recent lawsuit, the surrounding community members claim that the managers failed to consult them and undertake necessary precautions, resulting in extensive crop and property damage and the death of at least 12 local people (Smith, 2025). The above examples illustrate the risk that rewilding, similar to other concepts (e.g. sustainability), is coopted to justify land- and resource grabbing at the expense of local and Indigenous rights and livelihoods (Büscher and Fletcher, 2020; Goldman, 2020; Ochieng et al., 2023).

Pragmatic rewilding: Innovation and taxon replacements in novel ecosystems

While rewilders more or less agree on an idealised (if still imagined) pre-Columbian “preferred state” for rewilding in the Americas, this is not the case in Europe. Here, widespread farming and forestry management systems have developed over thousands of years, making it harder to reach consensus and justify particular ecological baselines. This absence of an obvious “before and after” point has given rise to a different rewilding model, one which is less focused on reversing human influence. This is partly because many “historic” human-created habitats, such as open pastures sustained by livestock grazing, provide a plethora of highly valued habitats and ecosystem services, including recreation, food production, pollination and wildfire prevention. Yet as the practice of free-range pastoralism is gradually outcompeted by intensive agriculture and urban lifestyles, large swaths of these grasslands are becoming abandoned (Krauß and Olwig, 2018; Leal Filho et al., 2017). This has been seen as an opportunity for rewilding and given rise to an imperative to sustain Europe’s mosaic landscapes through wild ungulates and their domestic or feral equivalents (Navarro and Pereira, 2012; Recio et al., 2020), which has become the main tool in the European rewilding toolbox.

This strand of rewilding emerged from experiments by ecologist Frans Vera on the Dutch 5000-hectare Oostvaardersplassen reserve, beginning in the 1980s, which is often referred to as proof that that large densities of wild(ed) grazers can suppress forest recruitment, and thus that parts of Europe may have had “Serengeti-like” features in the past (see Jepson and Blythe, 2020; Lorimer and Driessen, 2014). However, since the introduced animals, for example, horses and deer, were (and continue to be) enclosed and lack natural predation, it resulted in extremely high stocking densities with subsequent resource depletion and starvation among the animals. This in turn caused public outrage and calls for compassionate conservation, wherein the suffering of individual animals is considered (see Kopina et al., 2019; Marris, 2011; Wallach et al., 2018). These issues notwithstanding, Vera’s work paved the way for a string of initiatives focused on maintaining grasslands through wild or semi-wild grazers, such as the Eriksberg Safari park in Sweden (https://www.eriksberg.se/djuren-floran), many of which have yielded significant gains for local biodiversity (Svenning et al., 2015). The model has gained traction beyond Europe, with projects including the introduction of non-native tortoises to provide grazing and seed dispersal on Mauritius (Falcón and Hansen, 2018) through to Pleistocene Park in Siberia, where, since the 1980s, a range of animals (including bison and sheep) have been introduced to recreate the “Mammoth steppe” (Jepson and Blythe, 2020; Pettorelli et al., 2019).

Similar to their American counterparts, European rewilding initiatives are struggling with local resistance and perceptions of them as a threat to rural communities and ways of life, despite the use of domestic species (in addition to wild ones) for grassland management. Among the most influential players in Europe is Rewilding Europe, a Dutch NGO established in 2011. The organisation is affiliated with 10 of the continent’s largest and most emblematic rewilding areas, including the Danube Delta in Romania and the Portuguese Coa Valley (https://rewildingeurope.com/). A part of the organisation’s success has been its well-designed campaigning and evocative narratives about Europe’s countryside. The abandonment of traditional agriculture is framed as inevitable, engendering a terra nullius ripe for “wildlife comeback” and “rewilding enterprise” based on ecotourism and carbon offsetting, which are prominent tools to fund and justify European rewilding projects. Their approach echoes neo-protectionist rewilding, but is (in their own words) more attuned to “the role of people, and their cultural and economic connections to the land” (https://rewildingeurope.com/rewilding-principles/). Yet many rural residents do not consider their way of life obsolete or in need of alternative livelihoods, buy-out and management by external (often elite) actors (Holmes et al., 2022; Lécuyer et al., 2022). Conversely, grassroots groups and scholars (e.g. efncp.org; Plieninger et al., 2019; Torres-Miralles et al., 2022) are calling for increased support of traditional farming systems to maintain open landscapes, bio-cultural diversity, and societal wellbeing, as well as sustainable food production. Paradoxically, the same arguments often are used to justify rewilding, which is backed by strong advocacy from conservation NGOs and often feature more charismatic species (e.g. Recio et al., 2020). This can make it difficult for pastoralism advocates, as well as other alternative ideas of how and what nature should be restored, to compete with rewilding organisations for public attention and funding (Marino and Fry, 2025; Pettersson et al., 2023; Schmitz et al., 2021). This is exacerbated by de-localised land-use governance and a pervasive lack of distinction between sustainable and unsustainable farming systems, which undermines biologically and culturally important uses of nature (see Scoones, 2023). A clear example is the updated European Common Agricultural Policy, which, despite its aims of favour extensive systems, continues to favour intensification of farming (Nori, 2022; Pe’er et al., 2019) and the EU 2030 Biodiversity Strategy, which emphasises strict site protection over integrated approaches (Iordăchescu, 2022). Both schemes also endorse the restoration and coexistence with megafauna, including wolves (The European Commission, 2021), which benefits rewilding agendas while disproportionally burdening small-scale farmers in marginal areas (Duckett et al., 2022; Pettersson et al., 2021). In conjunction, these dynamics have created a widespread view of rewilding and the maintenance of traditional uses and livelihoods as an either-or policy choice on the countryside (PASTRES, 2022; Recio et al., 2020).

Placing the Wild Imperative

Rewilding is now firmly established as a land-use contender across the world, particularly in rural areas, where it continues to be haunted by its association to wilderness ideals. This is manifested in branding of rewilding as a new form of green-cloaked colonialism and an existential threat to pre-existing rural cultures (Lécuyer et al., 2022; Linnell and Cretois, 2018). Some suggest that this challenge can be overcome by expanding the definition of rewilding to encompass schemes that combine ecological restoration and sustainable food production (e.g. Thomas et al., 2022), including planting flowers strips and hedgerows on farms. However, such “domestication” of the term, especially prevalent in Europe, has been resisted and disregarded as a “rewilding greenwash” by purist rewilders (e.g. Convery and Carver, 2021). Yet the plasticity of the term and its applicability to existing restoration practices have been preconditions of the success of rewilding as an imperative, especially in contexts outside of its North American origins. Thus, due to the growing momentum of the rewilding movement, in all its diversity, containing the term and its uses to a particular definition appears to be a lost cause.

Ecosystems across the planet, and especially those that have experienced megafauna extinctions, have been fundamentally altered by human influence for the entire Holocene (Ellis et al., 2021). However, the Wild Imperative is framed, whether that be letting nature lead, recreating, innovating or improving nature, rewilding is ultimately a land-use strategy, and one among many possible and equally (un)natural pathways to address biodiversity loss (Leach et al., 2010; Lorimer, 2015). This means that rewilding is, and has always been, about human values; “letting go” is a management decision like any other. Examining the operationalisation of these two rewilding models, which are commonly blended in practice, reveals the deeply intertwined nature of science and politics in wildlife management, that have become entangled in the history and geopolitical context of rewilding itself (Belsky, 2011; Marris, 2011; Sullivan, 2021). As expressed by Sullivan (2021: 206) “the fundamental challenge of conservation today is not determining how we can do this work scientifically, but rather how we should do it politically. [. . .] doing so responsibly means acknowledging the limits of science in dictating what that future should look like.”

Wild Pasts: Using archaeology and palaeoecology in pursuit of rewilding

One of the key appeals of rewilding is its connection to the past. Rewilding positions itself as a means to redress what is widely agreed to have been human induced disruption to ecosystems with negative consequences for both human and non-human life. Reductions in human influence are conversely viewed positively and rewilding proponents frequently diagram this explicitly (Carver et al., 2021). This framing of rewilding is invariably informed, directly and indirectly, by a sense of the past when little to no anthropogenic influence in any given landscape is thought to have existed. Such framing necessarily draws the palaeosciences, specifically archaeology and palaeoecology, into rewilding debates. Understanding human impacts on environments, and how environments frame and impact human societies, is central to rewilding efforts and justification for rewilding is often sought in archaeological and palaeoecological evidence for past conditions. Below we detail these methodologies, some of the problems that have arisen, and potential avenues to better utilise the past for rewilding initiatives.

Unsettled palaeo science

Chief among the ways in which archaeology and palaeoecology have been invoked to support rewilding is to explain what rewilding hopes to achieve – in essence addressing the question, “rewilding to what state?.” Rewilding programmes that involve the re-introduction of extirpated species (e.g. Bakker and Svenning, 2018; Schowanek et al., 2021), introduction of proxy species for extinct or extirpated species (e.g. Gordon et al., 2021) and de-extinction efforts (e.g. Rocchetti et al., 2022) aim to restore taxonomically (reintroductions) or functionally (proxies) similar ecosystems to ones that existed at some point in the past. Past conditions of particular species are identified and then returned via rewilding. In almost all such cases, the explicit reason for bringing these species back into particular landscapes is to address the deleterious effects of humans on non-human life.

To illustrate this, we can look to calls for reintroducing megafauna, especially large herbivores, which frequently invoke archaeological evidence for the Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene “overkill” hypothesis (e.g. Berti and Svenning, 2020). It is widely accepted as an ecological fact that such extinctions and extirpations were the direct result of human hunter-gatherer societies (Nagaoka et al., 2018). However, this is far from settled archaeological science. Key questions remain regarding specific locations, given the current state of evidence for chronology, taphonomy and correlation/causation of these extinctions in the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene (e.g. Grayson et al., 2021; Louys et al., 2021; Stewart et al., 2021). This goes to the heart of many rewilding initiatives that point to injustices inflicted by humans onto non-humans to rationalise their interventions. Such justifications are easy to ignore because they rest on a common trope about the behaviour of ancient humans – that human presence is always negative for biodiversity (Nagaoka et al., 2018). If proponents of rewilding are looking to the past to find wrongs to right, greater focus (and funding) on the archaeological and palaeoecological dimensions of any particular case is likely to be required.

A to Z and nothing in between

Other instances exist where the role of humans in the extinction or extirpation of species is not in doubt or where other human-driven changes in land-use have undoubtedly resulted in wider declines in biodiversity, reduced habitat connectivity and increased disturbance or negative pressures on a range of other ecological indicators. From an archaeological perspective, rewilding in such examples rests on a firmer evidential foundation. Nevertheless, the complex historical trajectories of these places are often overlooked in favour of distilling history into simplistic causes and effects, which can be reversed with rewilding. Such a rigid view of landscape change over long periods of time obfuscates the social and economic reasons for how and why such human-induced changes occurred. This simplified history then impedes what and how rewilding might address the problems created by past human influence on habitats and species.

Taking some Scottish rewilding programmes as an example, we can see where archaeological and palaeoecological evidence is used to justify rewilding. There is good evidence that intensely grazed and fire-managed upland moorland and blanket peats in the present have negative consequences for ecosystem services ranging from biodiversity loss to income inequalities (e.g. Zu Ermgassen et al., 2018). It is also evident that human-driven reductions in forest cover and increases in livestock grazing have occurred since the Neolithic period (c. 6000 years before present – Edwards et al., 2019). Rewilding initiatives in Scotland frequently combine variations of these two pieces of evidence to argue for massive reductions in grazing (primarily of deer kept for shooting and heavily subsidised sheep), reduced fire management regimes, and the planting and natural regeneration of tree species (see Hetherington, 2021 for overview and Brown et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2021). However, such justifications ignore some 4500 years of intervening human and ecological history, which have a bearing on the trajectory of current and future land-use, including rewilding.

Throughout the past c. 4500 years, the upland landscapes of Scotland operated as dynamic pastoral socio-ecological systems. This history is responsible for much of its current biodiversity, landscape character and wider ecosystem services for which these landscapes are highly valued (Glass et al., 2013). These primarily pastoral systems are archaeologically attested since the Bronze Age in Scotland (beginning c. 4500 years ago – Halliday, 2021). This land-use differed from the large, enclosed paddock system for sheep and, latterly, deer which was introduced through the 19th century and is mostly maintained today (e.g. Orr, 1982; Turnock, 1977). Rather, these earlier systems were based on transhumance, the movement of people and their animals around and through landscapes at catchment and wider scales (Figure 2). Nowhere in Scotland is this pattern of sheep and cattle husbandry still in use at such scale following the Improvement period (c. AD 1750–1850), key tenets of which were to sweep away perceived inefficiencies in farming practices and expand private land ownership. Transhumance, which involved the movement of people and animals across the landscape, was anathema to the logic of land improvement and enclosure, which sought control of agricultural labour as well as the land itself. Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, people were removed from the Scottish Highlands known more generally as “The Clearances” (see Devine, 2018; Richards, 2000; inter alia).

Figure 2.

Map showing 7000+ shieling hut sites recorded in Scotland and their relationship to NatureScot’s identification of Wild Land Areas (NatureScot, 2020) and two major estates actively being rewilded. Sheilings are small structures, usually built of stone and turf, for seasonal residence of shepherds, often used for dairying, during summer grazing in upland locations. These recorded examples primarily date from c. AD 1400–1800 (Dixon, 2018).

It is striking, then, that to “right the wrongs” of over-grazed uplands in Scotland, many rewilding proponents have set about acquiring large estates and removing sheep and deer populations to support afforestation of native woodland species. These practices are not limited to government natural heritage agencies or environmental NGOs. Private individuals, corporations and investment companies are now buying up land with the intention of rewilding (Hetherington, 2021). Rewilding has thus come to be driven by a small group of new (and old) landowners who usually reside far away from the areas affected. Parallels between “improvers” of the past and “rewilders” of the present have been widely observed by the popular press as well as by scholars (see Olwig, 2016). Certain rewilding programmes in Scotland have begun to address issues of dispossession and alienation from the land through greater local community involvement and ownership (Martin et al., 2021). Yet, many aspects of the A→Z problem remain, drawing a straight line through the past, usually from a very distant point in time to the present to create justification for rewilding. This is not unique to Scotland. Rewilders have tended to neglect indigenous influences on North American landscapes because they have made similar A→Z use of archaeological and palaeoecological evidence. Ignoring these intervening complex, non-linear and dynamic archaeological, historical and palaeoecological evidence bases in service to simplistic narratives of the past, is at best a strawman, and at worst a cover for enacting or continuing dispossession and other social injustices.

Pick n’ mix the past

Some rewilding proponents have tried to shift the conceptual framework for rewilding away from restoring past states towards “self-willed” nature. The proponents of this approach in rewilding place greater emphasis on ecological function and processes rather than fixating on an idealised state of a rewilded landscape. Yet, understanding what constitutes no human interference in natural processes still requires an imagined state that necessarily invokes conceptions of the past. Translating this into practice is illustrated by a quote from the owner of the Knepp estate, Sussex, England: “You cannot recreate the past. What you’re doing is learning from the past but creating something new” (Dempsey, 2021: 14). To do this, rewilding proponents often draw on multiple strands of historical, palaeoecological and archaeological evidence without a coherent or consistent chronological order. For instance, the Knepp Estate has invoked both Pleistocene (i.e. the Vera hypothesis) and medieval land management evidence as the foundation of their project to establish light-touch woodland management (Tree, 2018; cf. Jørgensen, 2015; see Wild Senses section for further discussion). Yet, the socio-ecological systems in the Pleistocene looked nothing like those in the medieval period, even if they both resulted in certain types of ecological conditions the Knepp rewilding project now highly values (i.e. large herbivore grazing in mosaics of grasslands and woodlands).

Compounding this issue of chronological integrity is that the evidence is usually more complex than reported. Many rewilding programmes in western and northern Britain aim to reinstate closed-canopy oak and hazel-dominated temperate rainforests. These programmes point to pre-Neolithic (before c. 6000 years ago) conditions and fragments of apparently remnant examples that have persisted until today (Shrubsole, 2022; cf. Fyfe et al., 2013). However, these fragments of “pristine” temperate rainforest are in fact remnants of an industrial landscape of highly managed coppiced woodland for charcoal production usually destined for the iron smelting industry which flourished on the west coast of Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries (e.g. Hazell et al., 2017). Furthermore, while woodland clearance and grazing are clearly implicated in the decline of forest cover in this region from the beginning of the Neolithic, this process is not well understood and there are hints that the process was highly localised and non-linear (Edwards et al., 2019: 204).

In both cases, multiple points in time are highlighted because they have the biodiversity that the rewilding campaigners want to see. Some ignore the role of humans in these landscapes or choose to only look at part of the socio-ecological whole. This muddies the waters about what should be present ecologically, especially around human influence on those ecological conditions which are reified through rewilding. Pick n’ mixing the evidence of the past is thus potentially problematic in that it tends to frame human activity in a way that presumes a negative, typically inevitable, influence on biodiversity or shines a light on only part of human influences on biodiversity. In both cases it often overstates the archaeological and palaeoecological certainty of how things were, such evidence is rarely, if ever, so unequivocal. The overall result of the pick n’ mix approach is to use evidence of the past as a fait accompli. Decisions are made by those pursuing rewilding and a justification is created from any interpretation of archaeological or palaeoecological evidence that supports aspects of that decision.

Despite this, it might be the most useful (if necessarily arbitrary) way to use the past for rewilding. Selecting archaeologically and palaeoecologically attested features or processes for rewilding can be compared to experimental archaeology. Indeed, many influential rewilding projects have conceived of themselves as experiments (e.g. Knepp and Oostvarderplassen). However, there is value in going further in centring the archaeological component of rewilding from a theoretical stance. Experimental archaeology is the deliberate attempt to recreate a past process known from material remains to learn more about that process (see Mathieu, 2002 for overview). An archaeological experiment needs clear aims and ways of measuring outcomes (Outram, 2008). Such requirements are increasingly recognised within rewilding initiatives (e.g. Segar et al., 2022). Experimental archaeology also models ways of assessing a limited and biased dataset which is categorical or self-evident by opening this dataset to a range of possible interpretations for how and why it came to be. This includes not only the scientific experiment itself and its results but also the experience and connections through time of people, places and materials (see Gearey et al., 2019).

Through this experimental archaeological lens, rewilding can more usefully take the “pick n’ mix” approach to archaeological and palaeoecological evidence (cf. Lorimer and Driessen, 2014). For example, after establishing that such past ecological conditions existed in their location, a rewilding project aiming to reintroduce large herbivore grazing in a woodland/grassland mosaic (e.g. medieval woodland management in southern England) would be able to experimentally assess the types of management and the degree of human influence required to create the ecological conditions attested from records of the past. Rather than beginning with the premise that such a past ecological condition is preferred, if presented as a question to be tested through an experiment, allows for a more robust debate around whether it is or is not desirable and bakes-in the open-ended uncertainty of rewilding. It can also promote multivocality in interpretation and recommendations for future directions. This centres the role people played, and continue play, in socio-ecological systems, rather than uncritically asserting that past ecological conditions are needed without understanding (or even acknowledging) the wider socio-ecological systems that underpinned them. Such self-critical analysis when using evidence of the past is important, and it is essential to remain honest that archaeology or palaeoecology cannot identify “how things should be,” just how they were, probably or maybe – there is rarely certainty to be found in the records of the past. Imagining a future where archaeologists and palaeoecologists study the “Rewilding Age,” a key question will be how uncertain evidence of the past was used to set out an imperative for programmes of rewilding.

Wild senses: Examining the “wild” in historical context

Whether or not it is informed by past ecological conditions, rewilding is built on fantasy. No matter how robust its empirical underpinning, any rewilding project is aiming to create or restore environments which do not currently exist. Those environments necessarily live more in the imagination than in indices of ecological integrity, trophic cascades, biodiversity or species-richness. We should acknowledge, therefore, how far the “wild” or the “rewilded” are cultural, perceptual, even phenomenological, categories and how far they exist as or within representation. Indeed if, as Foreman et al. (1991) maintained in one of the first publications to celebrate “rewilding,” “wilderness” is contingent upon the absence of Homo sapiens, then for almost all of humanity it can ever only be present in the mind, on the page, the screen, or the image, because by definition we are not there or at least western cultures and people are not there (see also Fisher and Carver, 2022).

Moreover, assertions that rewilding is a moral and cultural imperative generally require the wild to be conjured up in a compelling fashion, so that the apprehension of, and desire for, this image impels us to action – to rewild. Consequently, in order to understand the various formulations of rewilding, their intellectual underpinnings and cultural articulation, it is important to look attentively at the language and imagery which is used to marshal support for its implementation and to evoke its existence. We ask: what tune is the wizard-behind-the-curtain playing? What stories do they tell? How are human senses implicated and deployed in them?

Early formations of “wild”

The importance of the North American origin of rewilding is difficult to overstate. Much has been made of the US Wilderness Act (1964) and the way its drafter, Howard Zahniser, executive director of The Wilderness Society, contrasted between “those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape” and wilderness “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Zahniser and earlier wilderness activists like John Muir were particularly drawn to landscapes redolent of the sublime – vast mountains, dramatic prospects, grand forests (Cronon, 1996). Many contemporary rewilding charities use this visual language. The Wildlands Network, for instance, selects mountain prospects, noble moose and views from elevated vantage-points ( https://wildlandsnetwork.org/where-we-work , 28 Apr 2023) in order to present “Where We Work” in North America; its introductory video is bathed in a golden sunrise reminiscent of the 19th-century painter, Frederick Church ( https://wildlandsnetwork.org/ , 28 Apr 2023; Barringer, 2002). The rewilding foundation, Tompkins Conservation, may be focused on Argentina and Chile rather than Canada and the USA, but it employs a similar pictorial language ( https://www.tompkinsconservation.org/index.php ).

Comparable rhetorical moves can be found in much earlier accounts of the “wild.” This taste for a particular wildness can be traced back to Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose 19th-century writing brought together and popularised transcendental philosophy, individualism and natural history. The transcendentalist movement, which was concentrated in parts of New England in the early to mid-19th century, promoted self-sufficiency and the “simple life” of living in nature and viewed urban society as corrupting the moral purity of the individual. Much like unitarianism, from which it branched off, transcendentalism advanced the belief that the divine could be found in everyday experiences of nature. In many ways, “wilderness” and “rewilding,” like the transcendental imagination, hinge on the Rousseauvian fantasy of the solitary walker, whose self-interested pursuit of spiritual, divine, or therapeutic experience depends on excluding others from the natural world.

However, some of the richest and most influential sources of writing on this subject can be found in earlier and less-well known texts, notably the popular works of Romantic unitarian writers in late 18th-century Britain. By far the most significant amongst them is the children’s writer and poet Anna Laetitia Barbauld, who developed a philosophy based on sensory experiences with nature that is now recognised as a form of early psychology (Wharton, 2018). For instance, in her devotional poem “An Address to the Deity,” written in the 1770s, Barbauld conveys how divine knowledge might be derived by, quite literally, reading nature (Wharton, 2012: 535–550).

[. . .] GOD is seen in all, and all in GOD.

I read his awful name, emblazon’d high

With golden letter on th’ illumin’d sky;

Nor less the mystic characters I see

Wrought in each flower, inscrib’d on every tree. (McCarthy and Kraft, 1994).

Through such sensory experiences, readers’ minds might be similarly “inscrib’d” with God’s teachings. Sensory connections with nature had the potential not only to improve individuals’ moral understanding but also to spread out into society and improve the world. Many of Barbauld’s young readers subsequently promoted similar ideas in their own poetry, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Likewise, many 18th- and 19th-century agricultural improvers harnessed the natural language of unitarian and deist moral improvement in their arguments for land enclosure, wetland drainage, and timber plantations in Britain and across the expanding empire. Ironically, these are often the very land-uses which rewilding seeks to reverse, but, as described below, much rewilding literature shares or reproduces many of the same ideas.

Tracing the “wild” in rewilding

Recent popular literature celebrating rewilding and advocating various forms of wild living, often knowingly or unknowingly, taps into these historic unitarian, Romantic and transcendental intellectual legacies. In the UK books written by authors and journalists like Robert Macfarlane, Isabella Tree and George Monbiot have popularised rewilding as a recognised term, ecological policy, personal ontology and lifestyle choice. Many of these writers are regularly cited in scientific journals, which has made them important forces in the rewilding movement. Much of these books’ appeal lies in the ways they relate the abstracted practices of rewilding to the human, and to the authors themselves in particular. Clues about this rhetorical approach are given in Tree and Monbiot’s subtitles: “The return of nature to a British farm,” and “rewilding the land, sea and human life,” respectively. Both writers adopt the familiar formats of memoir and travel writing, that of the role of a distanced observer who immerses themselves in their environment and relays their emotional responses and reflections to the reader. Though Tree and Monbiot offer very different versions of rewilding, entwined with starkly divergent politics, both authors invoke intense experiences in key passages of their books. In popular non-fiction these techniques are hardly unusual, but in the context of rewilding, placing such importance on how individuals feel about nature imposes, or perhaps reveals, a Lockean morality about the nonhuman. If rewilding is about making humans feel good, how does this inform which species, habitats, and topographies are favoured by rewilders?

To examine just one aspect of Tree’s (2018) Wilding, we find recurring references to the turtle dove, which flits about the book as a measure of the success or failure of her attempts to rewild her and her husband, Sir Charles Burrell’s, land, the Knepp Estate in West Sussex. The turtle dove is not only present at Knepp, but also transports them to childhood memories of West Africa and Christmas in England in the 1960s. The turtle dove’s sonic presence on the Knepp Estate has the effect of immersing Tree and her husband in their own reanimated memories. The result is the blurring of an idealised natural history with personal nostalgia. Like the ancestral property the turtle dove inhabits, the birds in Wilding seem to belong to Tree and Burrell as physical incarnations of the estate’s past and their own inheritance. Indeed, we are first introduced to the turtle doves at Knepp shortly after a potted history of the estate, which takes us from its establishment in the 12th century, through to its acquisition by the Burrell family in the 18th century, followed by a more recent natural history from the mid-twentieth century onwards. In effect, this timeline naturalises inherited rights to large swathes of England. The book also frames the story of rewilding on this estate according to conventions reminiscent of a 1950s British Ealing comedy: national government and its experts (notably men from the ministry of agriculture) impose inappropriate over-simple state systems with disastrous environmental consequences (and equally dire financial ones for the estate); these are only surmounted and healed when local knowledge is respected and traditional management reintroduced. For Tree, the presence of turtle doves at Knepp also becomes a means of combating the perceived loss of “the stuff of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Spenser” as well as childhoods spent on the backend of British imperialism. They represent the repossession of a past that can only be retained by strengthening the ties of a private landowner to their ancestral home. This narrative thus offers a very particular answer to the question of whose pasts (and when in those pasts – see above) are restored through rewilding.

The harmonious socio-environmental relations of the wild Knepp estate are frequently evoked through the non-visual, in a manner that echoes how Romantic unitarian thought valorised the non-visual, highlighting how smelling flowers or touching the bark of trees, instilled divine messages contained within nature. The “gentle burbling” of the turtle doves is Wilding’s refrain. It is invoked both as an immediately perceptible marker of ecological richness and as a sonic connection to a personal past that is threatened by the bird’s declining numbers in those regions. As in Silent Spring, birdsong is used to convey the amplitude of the non-human world (Carson, 1962[2000]). This kind of multisensorial imaginary can be found in numerous other accounts of wild nature well into the 21st century. For example, Wild Kingdom (Moss, 2017: 2), where a distinctly vanilla version of wild living by the naturalist and BBC presenter, Stephen Moss, describes his new home in rural Somerset where the air resounds to the calling of cuckoos, and the buzzing of dragonflies.

Similarly sensory passages feature in many other accounts of European encounters with the wild, where the effect is unsettling rather than familiar and bucolic. The very first vignette in Wild Isles, the book of the BBC TV series, lingers not only on the spectacle of Orcas hunting off the Shetland archipelago, but on the “pungent fishy smell” of “dead seal” that “drifts across the waves” in their wake. Feral opens with the environmental journalist George Monbiot putting a grub in his mouth; its taste and texture “like alpine butter” (Monbiot, 2013: 1) set him off on a queasily Proustian journey to a memory of travelling through the Amazon rainforest via his digestive tract. He recalls running through a forest searching for a missing colleague, observing Yanomami women perform spiritual healing on the sick, before restoring his energy with a similar “creamy” grub. By eating the grub, Monbiot develops a taste for nature, for the thrill of imminent danger, for indigenous people, their healthcare and food. Though he is aware that his own London life with access to western medicine and freedom from state persecution, protects him from many of the dangers Yanomami face, Monbiot nevertheless associates his memories of the Amazon with a wilder, healthier existence. As such, his desire to rewild human life manifests as a desire for human and ecological diversity. Much like the William Butler Yeats poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree, which he quotes at the beginning of the book, Monbiot’s rewilding fantasy romanticises the trope of masculine individuals alienated by modernity, bravely and singularly returning to nature. What Monbiot chalks up as “ecological boredom” (Monbiot, 11), stems from a dissatisfaction with the tedium of mid-life: looking after his daughter, his home and running merely for fitness. Unlike Tree, he does not seek to reform or reinforce those markers of Western modernity, like property ownership; if anything he wishes to overcome them. However, by seeking freedom in nostalgia for a wild, subaltern landscape Monbiot follows in the footsteps of many Romantic improvers who came before him, finding himself, just as they did, back in England and trapped between the ruins of industrialised agriculture and a crumbling aristocratic state.

Again, we can point to historical parallels in the kinds of imagery and messaging. Monbiot’s (2013) Feral parallels London’s (1903[2011]) Call of the Wild, where the hero overcomes by returning to “nature.” Seeking to convey how the canine protagonist, Buck, came to approach wolves’ way of inhabiting the landscape, London depicted Buck’s first response to their call and his delight in “the fat earth smells” of the “black soil,” before finally he gained a knowledge of the forest “not by sight, or sound, or smell, but by some other and subtler sense.” (London, 1903[2011]: 74, 81). This returns us to that late 19th century North American crystallisation of much of what we think of as the “wild,” a sensory experience in which, typically solo males, seek to improve themselves (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

A sled dog team approaching the scales at Chilkoot Pass on the Alaskan/Canadian border in c. 1898, taken by Asahel Curtis. The historical context of Jack London’s Call of the Wild also underlines how “wild” and “wildness” is situational and contextual. While the Yukon region of Canada is one less obviously impacted by human influence, during the period of London’s novel, was undergoing significant human-induced change as part of the Klondike Gold Rush (see Morse, 2003). Image, public domain. University of Washington Libraries. https://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/digital/collection/curtis/id/1910/rec/240.

Making a historical and sensorial “Wild” imperative

Monbiot, Tree and others link the therapeutic power of the “wild” to personal and ecological health. Many rewilding advocates echo the suggestion that being in the wild is a distinctive being-in-the-world. In many accounts, there is a slippage between healing the natural world and healing human society or the individual. Kerr’s (2022) Wilder concludes its eclectic ragbag of conservation stories with “Recovering the Wild Heart,” a chapter which is everything the title suggests. Claire Dunn goes further, calling for a “human rewilding movement . . . seeking to restore balance and vitality in our inner ecosystems.” (Dunn, 2021: 17). Such claims and such stories echo a late-19th-century style of thinking – John Muir invoked the “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people” looking to “get rid of rust and disease” in the wilderness (Muir, 1901). Conveying wildness by enumerating and extolling the virtues of multiple sensory registers is to adapt a common rhetorical and literary technique. Many authors have imparted “vividness” to key scenes or episodes by listing smells, sounds, texture and even taste (popular historians often do this e.g. Schama, 1999: 311–322; for a critique Jenner, 2011: 335–337). But in accounts of rewilding this multi-sensory enumeration is commonly a way by which to instantiate the rich and stimulating plenitude of the wild in contrast to the sensorial impoverishment and terminal boredom of modern urban culture. It is in this sensorial space that rewilders use, knowingly or not, unitarian, transcendental and romantic ideals to create a “wild imperative.” Rewilding has 18th-century enlightenment and 19th-century romantic thinking at its core. Recognition that calls for rewilding seem at times to reinvent long-established and (to say the least) politically complex claims about the power of nature misses an opportunity to face the Anthropocene head on. Historical perspective on the ideas and intellectual trajectories of the underpinning arguments for rewilding can help address that.

Wild abandonment: Exploring human controlled versus self-willed wilderness

In addition to the sensory experience of “wild” places, rewilding is driven equally by fantasies of human absence and there is a growing body of research investigating places devoid of humans with the explicit goal of supporting aspects of rewilding. Conservation research on rewilding abandoned spaces such as agricultural farmland (Frei et al., 2020; Kiziridis et al., 2022; Navarro and Pereira, 2015) has revealed the extent to which biophysical and socioeconomic factors have contributed to shifts in land use over the last several decades. As these lands fall into “ruin” they become a “safe haven” for a wide range of species. In European contexts, abandoned agricultural areas have seen increased populations of mammals such as deer, beaver, eagles, bears and wolves, to name a few examples. But to equate the abandonment of these sites with a fundamental cessation of human activity is perhaps misguided. We live, after all, in the epoch of the Anthropocene, in which human influence is redistributable and reconstituted, but never entirely removed. The wild imperative, as it is expressed in art, literature and popular non-fiction, combines representations of persistent anthropogenic presence with idealised visions of unconditional absence (a “world without humans”). The link between sites of human-led disaster and imaginings of vitally biodiverse futures too often harbours a commitment to a human that is redeemed, remade and recentred in a “wildness” that appears only at first to exceed it.

In this section, we explore rewilding as a site of deliberate (passive or active) human intervention. However, our purpose in exploring rewilding as a form of accidental abandonment or purposeful withdrawal is to show how the meaning of rewilding is, first and foremost, fundamentally built upon anthropocentric value systems. In other words, the concept of rewilding is deeply imbricated within the human and its histories, cultural representations, and emotional ties. Our critique of rewilding visions (as portrayed in art, literature, environmental nonfiction, and popular documentaries) illuminates how human presence and intention are already enmeshed within the very definition of rewilding and therefore deserve close attention.

A world without humans

Abandoned spaces serve to pilot a world without humans: an experimental insight into what it might be like for the planet to be emptied of the human species, allowing for uninhibited ecological flourishing and the remaking of the “wild.” In the documentary film A Life On Our Planet, noted naturalist and BBC broadcaster Sir David Attenborough goes so far as to imagine that nonhuman life does not require humans to save endangered species or to protect fragile ecosystems. “The truth is,” Attenborough sagely admonishes his viewers, “with or without us, the natural world will rebuild” (A Life On Our Planet 2020; 1:14:18-19). Following this statement, the film cuts to footage of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ), an area of roughly 2600 km² surrounding the site of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant that has been rendered uninhabitable since the Chornobyl nuclear reactor disaster in 1986. While it remains one of the most radioactively contaminated sites in the world, the CEZ is also touted as an example of an “accidental” rewilding success story. Amidst the crumbling facades of the power plant itself, the sagging roofs and rotting floorboards of homes abruptly abandoned, and the peeling plaster and paint of school buildings, Chornobyl is a sanctuary for new life. Herds of endangered Przewalski’s horses roam here; foxes pad in and out of the skeletons of buildings; tree frogs lay their eggs in shallow pools. For Attenborough and for the scientists studying post-nuclear ecological recovery, the rewilded CEZ paints an impactful and emotive portrait of nature’s resilience in the wake of human technological disaster (cf. Thomas, 2017).

As a vital case study in more-than-human, and even post-human, ecological functioning, Chornobyl exemplifies what cultural and environmental geographers Jonathon Turnbull, Adam Searle and Sandra Jasper theorise as “ecologies of emptiness” (Turnbull et al., 2021). Indeed, rewilding sites like the CEZ are the focal point of intense scientific debate about how, and to what extent, the absence of humans impacts nonhuman habitats in ways that countermand the ongoing harms posed by radiation. Turnbull et al. (2021) write that “one side of the debate suggests that radiation-induced damage can be found under every stone you turn over (Brown, 2019; Mousseau, 2016), whilst the other side suggests that wildlife is now abundant, healthy and thriving in the Zone (see Orizaola, 2019).” This lack of consensus among perceptions of whether life is thriving in post-disaster geographies – even if, in reality some species are thriving while others have declined – highlights the tension underpinning imaginaries of abandonment and their value for rewilding. It is understood that recommending a reduction in people in any given place in order to pursue rewilding is likely to be provocative at a minimum if not highly controversial (Martin et al., 2021). Yet the ecological potential of emptiness as seen in places like Chornobyl remains deeply attractive to some rewilding proponents–allowing spaces like the CEZ to become emblems for an imperative driven by a desire for a literally post-human world.

The self-annihilatory impulse that frames the desired absence of humans in cultural imaginaries of the Anthropocene offers an important lens through which to examine abandonment rewilding. In her award-winning book Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape, Scottish non-fiction writer Cal Flyn insists that “we are in the midst of a huge, self-directed experiment in rewilding. Because abandonment is rewilding, in a very pure sense, as humans draw back and nature reclaims what once was hers” (Flyn, 2021). Flyn’s field trips to formerly extractive industrial sites like The Five Sisters in West Lothian, Scotland and the CEZ illuminate how landscapes rebound as they become emptied of humans, which are often negatively figured as interlopers or marauding pilferers of natural resources. This negative post-human imaginary has an impact on attitudes towards conservation goals. For Flyn, abandonment is positively associated with a lack of industrial-capital interest, or a resignation of invested management. Abandoned sites in particular offer humanity a moment of reckoning by reminding us of “the value of holding off from some of our most invasive, interventionist methods of conservation” (Flyn, 2021). Abandonment rewilding is perhaps, Flyn implies approvingly, not even conservation at all.

The spectre of human extinction conjured by Flyn’s narrative finds as much basis in fiction as it does in the ruinous spaces that her book inhabits (Figure 4). In addition to the post-apocalyptic worlds of J.G. Ballard and the weird ecologies of Jeff VanderMeer and China Miéville (Turnbull et al., 2022), abandonment recalls the broader discourse that the ecocritic Greg Garrard terms “disanthropy”: a mode of representation that seeks to imagine human absence unconditionally. Unlike the literary figure of the misanthrope, often pathologised as suffering a form of self-hatred (Tyler, 2014) and in need of therapy (see above), disanthropy gestures to the “inhumanly deep” temporalities engaged by abandonment imaginaries (Garrard, 2012). Here, as Garrard illustrates with reference to Weisman’s (2007) popular science book The World Without Us, the conceit is a future in which the human perspective is displaced entirely by that of a disanthropic planet on which life has flourished anew; a world not only absent of humans but also one that is no longer imagined, constructed or projected for humans. How far can abandonment rewilding take us towards such a reconfiguration of the future’s capacity to mean? It is important to reckon with how planetary meaning is “made” without humans, especially in light of the turn many rewilding proponents have suggested with respect to the role of people within rewilded landscapes (e.g. Wynne-Jones et al., 2020)

Figure 4.

Young tree grows in abandoned Prypiat apartment, 12th June 2019, Hotel Polissya, Prypiat, Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. We gratefully acknowledge the use of the image taken by Jonathon Turnbull.

Islands of Abandonment draws our attention to the images of the erupting Soufrière Hills volcano on the Caribbean island of Montserrat and the apocalyptic phantasmagoria of algal blooms in California’s inland Salton Sea, which produce feelings of planetary indifference. But the place of the human in these abandonment imaginaries is not tied exclusively to the persistence of anthropogenic presence in the form of radiation, toxicity and everlasting waste, nor to the novel ecosystems that prosper through and despite these anthropic aftereffects. Rather, there persists a revelatory fantasy that sees the human reconstituted, perhaps unexpectedly, within the “Lazarus-like revival” promised through its own relinquishment of conservational control (Flyn, 2021). The wild imperative, and the role of humans in a post-human world, is created here by Flyn through establishing for people a chance at redemption (or to act as saviour) for our greatest disasters and tragedies. These narratives of eco-catastrophe and tragedy are powerful environmental storytelling templates (Heise, 2016) that hold culture and conservation in a dynamic feedback loop. In other words, cultural narratives that outline human withdrawal from at least those spaces can result in an acceptance that “nature” will overcome our mistakes, and perhaps even our original sin (see Wild Pasts section discussion linking human activity to presumed negative influence).

A world without conservation management

The disanthropic imaginaries that are created in wider artistic expression are parallelled in the notion of conservation management withdrawal. The imagined world-without-humans and those locations where abandoned locales have formed natural experiments facilitate a desire for minimal intervention in conservation biology in order to restore habitats and ecological relationships (applied with a flexibility and openness to what exactly the outcomes might be). In their study of rewilding practices that boost ecological complexity, Fernández et al. (2017) outline conservation objectives according to “intensity of intervention” that maps onto an historical baseline extending from the Anthropocene back in time to the Pleistocene (see Fernández et al., 2017: Figure 1). Passive and active intervention appear on the “intensity of intervention” scale with the rewilding of wolves marking a passive intervention for Anthropocene restoration baselines and the reintroduction of the woolly mammoth marking an active intervention for Pleistocene restoration baselines. The impact of reintroductions of species like the woolly mammoth are still open to speculation, but overall less intensive initiatives presumably tend to result in favourable outcomes. Yet however successful some rewilding initiatives might be, Fernández et al. (2017) argue that:

the debate on rewilding needs to recognize that costs, ecological uncertainties, and conservation conflicts are closely linked to these two gradients [baselines and management intensities], ranging from a relatively safe “proximate” area for self-reestablishment of recently degraded communities, to the high uncertainties and a large amount of resources required to create communities resembling those that went extinct millennia ago.

All conservation initiatives require some level of intervention. Precisely how effective these interventions are in producing favourable outcomes is something that depends upon human and nonhuman interactions in particular and situated habitats.

Abandonment rewilding, in Fernández et al.’s (2017) framework, is among the most proximate and least intensive or risky type of practice. This perception is undoubtedly driving much of the fervour, especially in Europe, for abandonment rewilding of formerly agriculturally managed land (e.g. Carver, 2019; Pereira and Navarro, 2015). However, abandonment of such land often generates heated controversy in practice compared to some species introductions or proxy species introductions (although we note that species introductions may cause major controversies themselves). In addition to historical and cultural associations to “productive land” (see Source 2 Sea), perhaps part of the controversy around abandonment rewilding is that even the most passive intensity of intervention still comes with uncertainties even where that is not the explicit goal. This is because animals themselves have their own autonomous agencies. This is captured by the term auto-rewilding, defined by anthropologist Anna Tsing as “the rewilding activities of animals themselves, [along with] plants and other organisms” (Tsing, 2017: 6). Without auto-rewilding, Tsing writes, “our disturbed landscapes would be thin and bare, devoid of organisms except those we put there” (Tsing, 2017). The idea of auto-rewilding has captured the emotions and imaginations of environmentally-minded public audiences and conservationists who are grappling with the outsized shadow of human influence and intervention in today’s ecological crises. We can solve our problems without much traditional conservation “work” if we can embrace uncertainty.

Here lies a seductive quality of the Wild Imperative: by abstracting humans out of the equation, drawing on notions of abandoned localities and recognising the agency of non-humans we might absolve our sins or indeed forgive others. Since the term “Anthropocene” moved into scientific and now popular usage, how much and how little intervention in conservation management depends upon what kind of “wild” is produced. It is here, in the casted shadow of post-human abandonment, that we contemplate the future of the “wild,” and of rewilding as abandonment.

The Wild Imperative in the Anthropocene

Projections of climate change impacts before and beyond 2100 CE show that 40%–80% of land may host novel ecosystems, and that entire biomes may radically change or disappear due its effects, even under the higher climate mitigation scenarios (Allen et al., 2025; Ordonez et al., 2024). Rewilding, like all approaches to conservation management that hinge on geographically fixed locations, ecosystems and historical baselines, will face challenges under such rapid and dynamic change (Ordonez and Gill, 2024). The danger here is that rewilding becomes only reactive, responding in part to the inherent auto-rewilding that occurs as species move rapidly and evolve new configurations, and relocating desirable and at-risk species to more habitable emergent ecosystems and biomes. This reactive process may persist for decades or centuries until a more stable Earth system state is achieved.

Set within this context, we have outlined various ways in which justifications for rewilding have been constructed. The “Wild Imperative” thus describes the rhetorical strategies which have set up rewilding and its associated practices as the preeminent solution for the loss of biodiversity and other Anthropocene challenges like climate change. It is easy to appreciate the “Wild Imperative’s seductive appeal: given the pace of change in the Anthropocene, a solution that can be implemented at scale is highly desirable This appeal has also contributed to the understanding and promotion of rewilding as a social movement (Jepson, 2022) and moral cause (Jørgensen, 2013). The sense that rewilding rights the wrongs of our collective past and thus provides salvation is clear from the examples we have explored above. The “Wild Imperative” has been successful in swaying public opinion, at least in the UK, where a 2021 poll put support for rewilding at around 80% across all demographics (YouGov, 2021). However, there is a danger in uncritically setting rewilding up as the only or the best and moral course of action. This has already developed reactionary views (e.g. Jones, 2025). Better understanding of the ontological and epistemological foundations for rewilding is required and this will come from disciplines beyond ecology.

Our perspectives reiterate how rewilding is primarily about what people want to see in a given place. The great challenge for rewilding is not how well it re-establishes past ecosystems and their complexity, or whether it creates something entirely new yet has desired functional and diversity traits, but rather how to gain support for it among the communities it affects, local people, but also governments, their nature agencies and environmental NGOs. This is now recognised by many rewilding scientists and practitioners (e.g. Dotson and Pereira, 2022; Pereira et al., 2024), yet, discussions in these areas rarely go beyond consideration of rewilding science and social science directed at understanding how people feel about rewilding.

Should we rewild? Where do we rewild and who does that impact? What do we want to rewild to or what “natural” processes do we want to see? And finally, who gets to make the above judgement calls and how? Developing convincing answers to these questions remains the challenge of rewilding, not simply gathering people’s perspectives on them. The first step to addressing this challenge is to understand how answers to those questions have been addressed previously which we have identified across four disciplines and labelled as the Wild Imperative. Answering these questions requires greater diversity of thinking and context-specific approaches cutting across all relevant sciences and humanities – typically in parallel. This review is a move in that direction. It has highlighted some potential ways forward, stemming from a human-centred perspective. These include treating rewilding as an archaeological experiment where fidelity to past ecological conditions is important, examining whether one should move the justification for rewilding beyond Romantic ideals, and exploring how focusing on how nature benefits from the absence of humans is problematic and unlikely to be successful in the Anthropocene.