Rewilding

at Knepp Wildland in 2019 Rewilding is a form of ecological restoration aimed at increasing biodiversity and restoring natural processes. It differs from other forms of ecological restoration in that rewilding aspires to reduce human influence on ecosystems. It is also distinct from other forms of restoration in that, while it places emphasis on recovering geographically specific sets of ecological interactions and functions that would have maintained ecosystems prior to human influence, rewilding is open to novel or emerging ecosystems which encompass new species and new interactions. A key feature of rewilding is its focus on replacing human interventions with natural processes. Rewilding enables the return of intact, large mammal assemblages, to promote the restoration of trophic networks. This mechanism of rewilding is a process of restoring natural processes by introducing or re-introducing large mammals to promote resilient, self-regulating, and self-sustaining ecosystems. Large mammals can influence ecosystems by altering biogeochemical pathways as they contribute to unique ecological roles, they are landscape engineers that aid in shaping the structure and composition of natural habitats. Rewilding projects are often part of programs for habitat restoration and conservation biology, and should be based on sound socio-ecological theory and evidence.…

at Knepp Wildland in 2019]] Rewilding is a form of ecological restoration aimed at increasing biodiversity and restoring natural processes. It differs from other forms of ecological restoration in that rewilding aspires to reduce human influence on ecosystems. It is also distinct from other forms of restoration in that, while it places emphasis on recovering geographically specific sets of ecological interactions and functions that would have maintained ecosystems prior to human influence, rewilding is open to novel or emerging ecosystems which encompass new species and new interactions. A key feature of rewilding is its focus on replacing human interventions with natural processes. Rewilding enables the return of intact, large mammal assemblages, to promote the restoration of trophic networks. This mechanism of rewilding is a process of restoring natural processes by introducing or re-introducing large mammals to promote resilient, self-regulating, and self-sustaining ecosystems. Large mammals can influence ecosystems by altering biogeochemical pathways as they contribute to unique ecological roles, they are landscape engineers that aid in shaping the structure and composition of natural habitats. Rewilding projects are often part of programs for habitat restoration and conservation biology, and should be based on sound socio-ecological theory and evidence. While rewilding initiatives can be controversial, the United Nations has listed rewilding as one of several methods needed to achieve massive scale restoration of natural ecosystems, which they say must be accomplished by 2030 as part of the 30x30 campaign. ==Origin== The term rewilding was coined by members of the grassroots network Earth First!, first appearing in print in 1990. It was refined and grounded in a scientific context in a paper published in 1998¹ by conservation biologists Michael Soulé and Reed Noss. Soulé and Noss envisaged rewilding as a conservation method based on the concept of 'cores, corridors, and carnivores'. The key components of rewilding incorporate large core protected areas, keystone species, and ecological connectivity based on the theory that large predators play regulatory roles in ecosystems. '3Cs' rewilding therefore relied on protecting 'core' areas of wild land, linked together by 'corridors' allowing passage for 'carnivores' to move around the landscape and perform their functional role. Inside these cores, human development, especially the building of roads, is strictly limited. National parks and wilderness reserves are the most common types of 'core' areas. Soulé and fellow biologist John Terbough expanded on the concept of corridors in their book Continental Conservation. They determined that one size does not fit all: narrow, linear corridors might work for some smaller species, but if conservationists wanted to encourage the movement of large carnivores, they needed to make corridors wide enough to allow for daily and seasonal movement of both herds of prey and packs of their predators. The '3Cs' concept was developed further in 1999 and Earth First co-founder, Dave Foreman, subsequently wrote a full-length book on rewilding as a conservation strategy. ==History== Rewilding was developed as a method to preserve functional ecosystems and reduce biodiversity loss, incorporating research in island biogeography and the ecological role of large carnivores. In 1967, The Theory of Island Biogeography by Robert H. MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson established the importance of considering the size and fragmentation of wildlife conservation areas, stating that protected species and areas remained vulnerable to extinctions if populations were small and isolated. In 1987, William D. Newmark's study of extinctions in national parks in North America added weight to the theory. The publications intensified debates on conservation approaches. With the creation of the Society for Conservation Biology in 1985, conservationists began to focus on reducing habitat loss and fragmentation. Supporters of rewilding initiatives range from individuals, small land owners, local non-governmental organizations and authorities, to national governments and international non-governmental organizations such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature. While rewilding efforts can be well regarded, the increased popularity of rewilding has generated controversy, especially in relation to large-scale projects. These have sometimes attracted criticism from academics and practicing conservationists, as well as government officials and business people. Nonetheless, a 2021 report for the launch of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, the United Nations listed rewilding as one of several restoration methods which they state should be used for ecosystem restoration of over 1 billion hectares. ==Elements== ===Keystone species=== A keystone species is a species that has a disproportionately large effect on its environment relative to its abundance. ===Compatibility with economic activity=== Some national governments and officials within multilateral agencies such as the United Nations, express the view that 'excessive' rewilding, such as large rigorously enforced protected areas where no extraction activities are allowed, can be too restrictive on people's ability to earn sustainable livelihoods. The alternative view is that increasing ecotourism can provide employment. ==Rewilding in different locations== Both grassroots groups and major international conservation organizations have incorporated rewilding into projects to protect and restore large-scale core wilderness areas, corridors (or connectivity) between them, and apex predators, carnivores, or keystone species. Projects include: the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative in North America (also known as Y2Y), the European Green Belt (built along the former Iron Curtain), transboundary projects (including those in southern Africa funded by the Peace Parks Foundation), community-conservation projects (such as the wildlife conservancies of Namibia and Kenya), and projects organized around ecological restoration (including Gondwana Link, regrowing native bush in a hotspot of endemism in southwest Australia, and the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste, restoring dry tropical forest and rainforest in Costa Rica). ===North America=== structure on the Trans-Canada Highway in Banff National Park, Canada. Wildlife-friendly overpasses and underpasses have helped restore connectivity in the landscape for wolves, bears, elk, and other species.]] In North America, a major project aims to restore the prairie grasslands of the Great Plains. The American Prairie is reintroducing bison on private land in the Missouri Breaks region of north-central Montana, with the goal of creating a prairie preserve larger than Yellowstone National Park. As of 2024, American Prairie's habitat spanned over 520,000 acres. Dam removal has led to the restoration of many river systems in the Pacific Northwest in an effort to restore salmon populations specifically but with other species in mind. As stated in an article on environmental law: 'These dam removals provide perhaps the best example of large-scale environmental remediation in the twenty-first century. [...] The result has been to put into motion ongoing rehabilitation efforts in four distinct river basins: the Elwha and White Salmon in Washington and the Sandy and Rogue in Oregon'. ====Yellowstone to Yukon==== Formally launched in 1997, Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) was a conservation initiative that envisioned a wide corridor of protected land stretching from Canada's Yukon territory, through Canadian and American national parks like Waterton and Glacier, all the way to the Greater Yellowstone ecoregion in the northern Rocky Mountains. Promoters of the project worked to discourage building of roads and other human developments that would impede the movement of large predators like wolves and grizzly bears. Y2Y used lobbying and education to promote its mission and get the public involved. Organizers set up conferences between rewilding groups in Canada and the United States, facilitated dialogue between conservationists and Native American groups, and maintained high visibility for the project by featuring in newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Activists involved in the project successfully lobbied for 24 highway crossing structures in the Banff area, allowing for safer movement of wildlife across the Trans-Canadian highway. Y2Y inspired other conservation groups to focus more of their efforts on lobbying to persuade government action, and led to an increase in corridor planning across North America. The South Coast Wildlands Project successfully convinced the California State Parks Agency to buy a 700-acre tract slated for development. The Algonquin to Adirondack initiative, modeled after Y2Y, has focused research efforts on improving connectivity around the Great Lakes Region. Conservation groups from the United States and Canada have worked together to plan a series of marine priority areas from Baja California to the Bering Sea, allowing both nations to protect species of mutual concern. ====Protecting Predators==== There have been multiple projects launched to protect North America's carnivores, one of the main components of the '3 C's' approach to rewilding. Reed Noss, an early advocate for rewilding, began working on reserve designs as early as the 1980s to protect Florida's largest predators: the Florida panther and the Florida black bear. Noss' initial plan envisioned 60% of Florida's land set aside for wildlife reserves and proved so influential that the Florida State legislature set aside $3.2 billion to buy land for a network of reserves and corridors between them. At the same time, a group based in Washington D.C. called Defenders of Wildlife began promoting protection of predators across the country, including grizzly bears, wolves, and river otters. In 1987, they set up the Bailey Wildlife Foundation Wolf Compensation Trust to pay ranchers back for the loss of livestock due to predation in an attempt to raise support for rewilding among farmers, who are often some of the most vocal opponents of the conservation of large predators. In 1998, they launched another program to pay for fencing, alarms, and other methods that would protect livestock in a way that didn't harm predators. However, this approach has been largely unsuccessful at bolstering the native wolf population because of continued shooting of wolves, both illegally and permitted by the USFWS. ====New York==== Fresh Kills landfill, located on Staten Island, was once home to 150 million tons of trash. However, plans created between 2001 and 2006 reimagined it as a 2,200-acre park, the largest park built in the state of New York in over a century. Construction began in 2008 to restore the area to its original wetland ecosystem, complete with open waterways, sweet-gum swamps, prairies, and meadows of wildflowers. Part of initial plans involved removing invasive reed species and replacing them native marsh grasses. The project is slated to take up to thirty years to complete, with the end goal of combining ecological restoration with recreational activities. While planning for Fresh Kills Park, New York State initiated an even more ambitious program focused on protecting the broader ecosystem around Staten Island by restoring the Hudson River. In 2005, the organizations involved came up with a few goals for the project: re-invigorating the river's fisheries, improving water quality by removing contaminants, and preserving shoreline and forested habitats upriver. When the project is complete, it will affect fifty thousand acres containing six different habitat types. ====Illinois==== Illinois is unique among the states in that reversing habitat damage via rewilding became state law in 2026. "The legislation amended the existing Illinois Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Conservation Law, formally recognizing work the agency was already doing to restore ecosystems. Because it was simply codifying what many in the state wildlife agency were already doing, lawmakers were familiar with the types of projects that the state would undertake." ====Mexico==== In the Mexican state of Sonora, the Northern Jaguar Project bought 45,000 acres of land by 2007 devoted to protecting the northernmost breeding population of jaguars. The group also encouraged local people to help them monitor the population by offering a $500 reward for each photograph of a living cat taken by ranch owners who promised not to shoot jaguars on their property. In its first year, the program paid out $6,500 for photos of jaguars, mountain lions, and ocelots. ====Paseo Pantera/Mesoamerican Biological Corridor==== In the early 1990s, the Wildlife Conservation Society proposed a plan for a major corridor project that would span from Southern Mexico down into Panama, connecting existing reserves, parks, and undisturbed forests of all seven Central American countries and the lower five Mexican states. They called the plan "Paseo Pantera," or "the path of the panther," named so because of the movement of mountain lions throughout the area. The plan attracted a lot of controversy: indigenous peoples were concerned that their land would be taken from them to be converted into parks, and some activists claimed that the program was setting the environment above human needs. These arguments caused the project to be reviewed and refashioned. In 1997, the new plan, renamed the "Mesoamerican Biological Corridor," was unveiled as a conservation project that also promoted the welfare of indigenous people and local economies. Despite the changes, the Mesoamerican Corridor still had some flaws, most notably with regard to land use. The plan necessitated reaching agreements with numerous villages to decide what zoning for protected areas meant for the local people, how it would be enforced, and where hunting and fishing would be allowed. Rural people were largely unimpressed with the vague nature of the outline, so progress was slow. In 2005, the Central American Free Trade Agreement promised to develop many of the same areas the Mesoamerican Corridor sought to protect, but conservationists refused to oppose the development for fear of losing funding. By 2006, hundreds of millions of dollars had been spent on preserving the corridor, but only one small protected area had been created. ====Costa Rica==== Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet. In 1975, the Nature Conservancy worked with the Costa Rican government to create the first national park in the country: Corcovado. The park originally spanned 86,000 acres, nearly a third of the peninsula. The Nature Conservancy wanted to establish it as a refuge for the dozens of endemic species that occur in this small stretch of habitat. However, the project has faced many setbacks since its establishment. Conservationists quickly realized that it was too small to protect many critical species, including the jaguar, peccary, and harpy eagle. Gold was discovered in Corcovado around the same time as the park was established, and some of the natural areas within the park were illegally destroyed by miners. Programs to engage local people in conservation efforts quickly failed because of a lack of funding, causing people living on the border to become increasingly hostile towards the project. Lack of financial resources caused many people to resort to poaching within the park's borders or shooting jaguars that ate their crops. Conservation groups hoped to solve these problems by launching another initiative, the Osa Biological Corridor project. The plan was designed to enlarge currently protected areas on the peninsula, and hopes to devote $10 million to develop community support for rewilding by providing education programs and new jobs protecting the reserves. ====Argentina==== In 1997, Douglas and Kris Tompkins created 'The Conservation Land Trust Argentina' with the goal of transforming the Iberá Wetlands. In 2018, thanks to a team of conservationists and scientists, and a donation of of land by Kris Tompkins, an area was converted into a National Park, and species such as the giant anteater, pampas deer, collared peccary, red and green macaw, giant river otter, and the jaguar which have all became extinct in the region for several decades that have now been reintroduced. A spin-off of the Tompkins Foundation, Rewilding Argentina, is an organization dedicated to the restoration of El Impenetrable National Park, in Chaco, Patagonia Park, in Santa Cruz, and the Patagonian coastal area in the province of Chubut, in addition to Iberá National Park. ==== Brazil==== The red-rumped agouti, Yellow-footed tortoise, brown howler monkey, and Blue and gold macaw were reintroduced in Tijuca National Park (Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil), between 2010 and 2025 with the goal of restoring seed dispersal. Prior to the reintroductions, the national park did not have large or intermediate -sized seed dispersers, the increased dispersal of tree seeds following the reintroductions therefore had a significant effect on forest regeneration in the park. This is significant since the Tijuca National Park is part of heavily fragmented Atlantic Forest and there is potential to restore many more seed dispersal interactions if seed dispersing mammals and birds are reintroduced to forest patches where the tree species diversity remains high. The Cerrado-Pantanal Ecological Corridors Project was proposed in the 1990s to restore connectivity between two of Brazil's core reserves: Emas National Park and the Pantanal, one of the world's largest wetlands. It made significant progress in the early 2000s because of plans to conserve mainly areas with low human density. Another reason for wider support was because of a fund started to compensate farmers that lost livestock to the big cats that conservationists hope to protect using these corridors, and healthcare programs that provided free services to ranchers who committed to not killing critically endangered jaguars. ==Further reading== Foreman, Dave (2004). Rewilding North America: A Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century, Island Press. Fraser, Caroline (2010). Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution, Picador. Hawkins, Convery, Carver & Beyers, eds. (2023). Routledge Handbook of Rewilding, Routledge. Jepson, Paul and Blythe, Cain (2022). Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery (The Illustrated Edition), The MIT Press. MacKinnon, James Bernard (2013). The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Monbiot, George (2013). Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life, Penguin. Monbiot, George (2022). Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet, Penguin Books. Louys, Julien et al. (2014). "Rewilding the tropics, and other conservation translocations strategies in the tropical Asia-Pacific region". doi:10.1002/ece3.1287 Root-Bernstein, Meredith et al. (2017) "Rewilding South America: Ten key questions". doi:10.1016/j.pecon.2017.09.007 Pereira, Henrique M., & Navarro, Laetitia (2015). Rewilding European Landscapes, Springer. Pettorelli, Durant & du Troit, eds. (2019). Rewilding, Cambridge University Press. Tree, Isabella (2018), Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm, Picador, Wilson, Edward Osborne (2017). Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life, Liveright (W.W. Norton). Wright, Susan (2018). SCOTLAND: A Rewilding Journey, Wild Media Foundation. Thulin, Carl-Gustaf, & Röcklinsberg, Helena (2020). "Ethical Considerations for Wildlife Reintroductions and Rewilding". ==External links== Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution Rewilding and Biodiversity: Complementary Goals for Continental Conservation, Michael Soulé & Reed Noss, Wild Earth, Wildlands Project Fall 1998 "For more wonder, rewild the world", George Monbiot's July 2013 TED talk

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