aBOUT rEWILDING

Rewilding was first conceived as a landscape-level ecological restoration method, characterized by three “Cs,” including cores, corridors, and carnivores (Foreman, 2021; Gammon, 2018, 2019; Jørgensen, 2015; Monbiot, 2017; Prior & Ward, 2016; Soulé & Noss, 1998). The term “rewilding” now broadly applies to a variety of ecological restoration strategies, including rewilding of landscape-level wilderness, agricultural and cultural landscapes, and the “greening” of urban and suburban spaces (Monbiot, 2017; Thomas, 2020; Tree, 2019). “Rewilding” also now applies to a variety of ecopsychological strategies for reconnecting humans to the more-than-human world (Bekoff, 2014; Monbiot, 2017; Mortali, 2019; Thomas, 2020).

In North America, the rewilding movement largely advocates restoration on a landscape-level, reintroducing apex predators and securing significant land areas for them to repopulate and migrate, such as the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park (Jørgensen, 2015; Soulé & Noss, 1998; Tokarski & Gammon, 2016). Some go further to advocate for recreating the conditions of the pre-human Pleistocene Era in which herds of grazing megafauna and feline predators roamed the plains of North America and Europe (Carey, 2016; Donlan et al., 2006).

Rewilding has been approached on a landscape level as a practical method for ecosystem restoration, but in many cases, it effectively excludes humans and perpetuates the idea that “wilderness” is a place that humans visit but do not belong (Cronon, 1996; Ward, 2019). This view was initially conceived by colonizing white men as they moved westward ravaging and de-wilding the continent. As they subjugated wild lands into domesticity and brutalized Indigenous human co-inhabitants, they simultaneously envisioned a utopian human-free landscape, which had not existed for tens of thousands of years in the Americas and hundreds of thousands of years elsewhere (Carey, 2016). The U.S. forebears of wilderness preservation, such as John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, defined wilderness as a landscape “untrammeled by man” (Zahniser, 1964). The lands that were to become official wilderness areas, however, such as Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks, were not untrammeled by man, and the people who had been living in them for thousands of years were extirpated by force, making the act of designating wilderness also an act of colonization (Cronon, 1996; Jørgensen, 2015; Merchant, 1980; Plumwood, 1998).