Author’s Note: I have not been affiliated with the rewilding movement since mid-2023. See my “declaration of intellectual independence” (“Autonomous Evolution” Revisited) published in Substack blog Ethics from the Outside, which has supplanted this website as the home for future musings on ethical topics.
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I recently learned that the 20th of March is World Rewilding Day…
Apparently, this global day of celebration and mirth was launched in 2021 by the Global Rewilding Alliance (GRA). It’s likely that I heard something about it at the time, since I’d been following the rewilding movement for nearly a year by then. It’s also likely that I didn’t pay it much heed if I did, since I was then following the movement only very casually. Perhaps I’m not the only one not to pay much heed. As the deputy director of The Rewilding Institute (TRI), I can confirm TRI’s complete silence on the topic of Rewilding Day 2023. Hell, even GRA’s own webpage for the holiday is stuck on the 2022 edition at the time of this writing.
On 20 March 2023, I will honour the third anniversary of World Rewilding Day by joining a fundraising meeting for TRI and standing firm on my conviction that the moral imperative to rewild Earth should never, ever be cast as an instrumental strategy for the realisation of popular anthropocentric goals – such as, say, helping to “meet the 1.5°C target” that is necessary if “human civilisation is to avoid catastrophe” – even if doing so would make it possible to energise anthropocentric, climate-obsessed donors or grantmakers.
Having just reviewed GRA’s webpage for Rewilding Day 2022, I am convinced that there’s no better way to recognise the occasion. This is because said webpage is little more than a depressing litany of the (so-called) global rewilding movement’s selling out to mainstream environmentalism and its single-minded focus on carbon and climate. It is, for one, the source of an “open letter” from which the previous quotations were taken (see §2.1 below). Meanwhile, although the Rewilding Day webpage per se is a year out of date, “animating the carbon cycle” remains the core focus of GRA, and GRA does exert some influence on organisations who do things they call ‘rewilding’. Even TRI’s Rewilding Earth recently republished a Mongabay article reporting on GRA’s work on “animating the carbon cycle” (ACC) (but perhaps we are redeemed slightly by the fact that the single public comment, from conservationist Martyn Murray, rightfully exhorts us, “Keep your message on target – these animals and this Earth are natural wonders”).
In this post, I review a typical taxonomy of climate strategies and where I believe rewilding does – and doesn’t – fit (§1). Then, I take a critical look at GRA’s ACC rhetoric and why the rewilding advocate should reject this way of framing the importance of our cause (§2).
1. Climate Change and Rewilding
1.1 A Taxonomy of Climate Strategies
A traditional taxonomy in environmental ethics lumps approaches to climate change into three broad categories: “(1) mitigation: reducing emissions; (2) adaptation: moderating climate impacts by increasing our capacity to cope with them; and (3) geoengineering: deliberately manipulating physical, chemical, or biological aspects of the Earth system.” (This quotation comes from the American Meteorological Society, but I first learned the taxonomy from an environmental ethicist.)
Geoengineering is often scorned as a band-aid solution, cop-out, moral hazard, and playing god – yet it needn’t take the form of the most feared high-tech fixes like solar mirrors or spraying aerosols into the stratosphere. As the term is defined here, tree planting can be considered a type of geoengineering if the intent is that the trees function as tools to remove carbon dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere. Likewise, as the concept is presented by GRA, ACC is arguably also a form of geoengineering – similar in spirit to tree planting, but with a focus on animals instead of plants as the key tools to remove carbon dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere (albeit indirectly). But if that’s what ACC is about, and I will show in §2.1 that it is, then ACC should not be conflated with rewilding, which serves the end of wild things for their own sake. The true rewilder respects wild animals – wildeors, self-willed beasts – for their intrinsic value as autonomous creatures; she does not regard wild animals as tools to aid humans in cleaning up their excessive greenhouse gas emissions.
1.2 Rewilding ≠ Climate Strategy
Rewilding, in contrast, is not a strategy for addressing climate change at all; it is an independent conservation imperative that is orthogonal to the climate crisis. Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant of the normative and ecological basis of the movement as it was hatched and developed in the US in the 1990s (see, e.g., Mark Fisher’s “Natural Science and Spatial Approach of Rewilding” for an exhaustive review).
As TRI defines it, “Rewilding is [a] comprehensive, often large-scale, conservation effort focused on restoring sustainable biodiversity and ecosystem health by protecting core wild/wilderness areas, providing connectivity between such areas, and protecting or reintroducing apex predators and highly interactive species (keystone species).” Its main goals include “mitigat[ing] the species extinction crisis” and restoring “dynamic but stable self-regulating and self-sustaining ecosystems.” Crucially, the rewilder’s perspective is that we owe this to Nature; Nature doesn’t owe us. The Preamble to TRI’s Vision states it clearly: “we modern humans have an ethical obligation to protect and restore wild Nature.”
The goal of the rewilding movement, as conceived by its founders, was never the restoration of nature and natural processes for the “ecosystem services” that they provide to human society. If restored and protected wilderness areas happen to sequester and store carbon, that might be a happy side effect, but it would not make rewilding into a “geoengineering” solution to climate change, because carbon sequestration was not the intent of the restoration and conservation efforts, merely a byproduct. Whereas geoengineering involves the deliberate modification of planetary systems in order to obtained certain human-specified ends, rewilding involves intervening in natural processes minimally, and then only for the sake of restoring a state closer to what wild Nature had chosen for itself prior to destruction and degradation at the hands of human beings. Geoengineering is commonly and appropriately derided as hubristic; rewilding, in contrast, is “fundamentally about humility and restraint” (as Dave Foreman reminded us, e.g., on the last page of Rewilding North America).
1.3 How Rewilding Does Interface with Climate Strategies
That being said, rewilding does promise important side effects – underline side effects – with respect to climate change. One of these is the carbon sequestration provided by restored and protected forests. However, this is not the only one. Rewilding is also important – arguably even more important – as an unintentional contributor to both mitigation and adaptation:
1.3.1 Rewilding and Carbon Mitigation.
As I’ve noted, rewilding demands human restraint. Rewilding advocates begin with the assumption – to again invoke TRI’s Vision – that “most of the world ought to be wild.” This is non-negotiable; it’s a basic precept that follows immediately from the axioms that we must share the Earth fairly with millions of other species and that preserve space for the autonomous flow of self-regulating ecological and evolutionary processes. But if most of the world ought to be wild, then most of the world ought not be managed by and for humans, and this cannot be fulfilled without scaling back the human enterprise. At present, agriculture alone consumes nearly half of the planet’s habitable land (see Our World in Data), and we keep producing more and more mouths to feed. Returning the majority of the land to wild Nature demands a shrinking of the human population, as well as dietary shifts away from land-intensive food sources such as beef. However, any reduction in the human population is also a reduction in carbon emissions, and a move away from land-hungry beef production also limits greenhouse gas contributions from cow burps (and, yes, it’s mostly burps, not farts, that are the culprits).
TL;DR – Rewilding requires human restraint, which in turn (as a side effect) entails the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. When we decree from the outset that most of the world ought to be wild, then most of the world is automatically off-limits to industry, agriculture, transportation and traffic, and other polluting human activities.
1.3.2 Rewilding and Climate Adaptation.
Rewilding, by definition, establishes large areas of wild land and water connected by corridors and buffer zones that permit the safe movement of wildlife. This is necessary, for one, to permit evolution to continue to unfold without human imposition – an intrinsically desirable goal, as Dave Foreman, Michael Soulé, and Aldo Leopold would agree. But this implies that rewilding also provides, effectively, an adaptation approach to climate change – of sorts. It is a conservation strategy that, by its nature and design, permits the adaptation of wildlife to novel challenge. This can include – but, of course, is not limited to – adaptation to climate change [*], such as the migration of populations northward, further inland (as sea levels rise), or to higher altitudes, or the natural selection of traits that are more advantageous in a warmer world.
Typically, of course, climate adaptation refers to the adaptation of human societies to climate change and its effects. But this is a crassly anthropocentric way of thinking about climate change. If anything, humans are the only species that’s getting what’s coming to us, and it’s literally every other species except us that truly deserves a fair chance at adaptation – a chance that rewilding, more than any other conservation strategy, can help to provide.
Importantly, core wilderness areas and linking wildways are ecocentrically necessary irrespective of climate change. In other words, even if there were no anthropogenic climate change, that wouldn’t remove the need to restore and protect wildlands – for the preservation of wild Nature and autonomous natural processes is an end unto itself. However, the reality of climate change does lend additional importance to the conservation of large and connected wild places.
[*] If we admit that a side effect of rewilding is to permit wildlife to adapt to anthropogenic climate change, does that mean that we’re giving up on the goal of preserving evolutionary processes as autonomous from human influence? I suggest that the answer is no, because the concept of “respect for autonomy” is about the respecting more than it is about realising some pure and complete state of autonomy. And, no, I’m not just making sh*t up here; the same thing could be said about how we must intuitively think about respecting one another’s autonomy as human beings. No one is completely immune from the influence and impact of other people, yet we don’t consider this an excuse to exercise coercion. Analogously, it may be that some impact of human activities – such as climate change – are inescapable and bound to influence the evolutionary future of life on Earth; nonetheless, there is no reason to think that this provides a blanket licence for deliberate intervention in wild Nature any more than the admission that “no man is an island” justifies extortion or slavery.
2. ACC versus #WhyWeRewild
2.1 A Depressing Litany of Rewilding’s Selling Out to Mainstream Environmentalism
Let’s return to GRA’s Rewilding Day 2022 webpage for a more thorough critical examination. The webpage purports to tell us “why we rewild,” but it ain’t why I rewild.
According to the opening paragraph, Rewilding Day celebrates the benefits provided by “wild places on land and in the sea” – including “critical habitat for Earth’s many lifeforms,” “the life-giving services upon which we all depend,” and (you were waiting for it!) carbon sequestration: “These critical areas are also a necessary part of any solution to the climate crisis. Wildlands capture and store billions of tons of carbon.” Now, it’s hard to deny the importance of wilderness and wild places as habitat for Earth’s many lifeforms; this is a very traditional objective of the rewilding movement. However, it soon becomes obvious that wildlife habitat will only receive this passing mention, and that (at least in its rhetoric) GRA’s is chiefly interested in the ecosystem services that rewilding is presumed to provide for humans, especially the sequestration of carbon and reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The next section leans further into the claim that restoring wildlife populations is important because it helps to moderate climate change: “Healthy populations of wild animals are critically important for Earth’s ability to regulate atmospheric carbon.” For anyone who holds that wild animals have intrinsic worth and a basic right to inhabit their native bioregions without displacement or extirpation by humans, this instrumentalisation of the value of wild animals should be an immediate red flag. It was bad enough when environmentalists couldn’t see either the forest or the trees for the carbon-capture devices; now self-professed rewilders see wild sentient creatures as carbon-regulating instruments too? This type of rhetoric is what underlies my claim that ACC is better seen as geoengineering than rewilding (§1.1).
Let’s pause to emphasise what GRA is not saying here. Note that the biocentric or ecocentric rewilder could easily state that healthy populations of wild animals are especially important in light of climate change, because larger populations usually mean greater genetic diversity, and greater genetic diversity within a species means a greater probably that the species will be able to adapt to the novel stressors and environmental changes brought about by climate change. This would align with my suggestion that rewilding provides a climate “adaptation strategy” for wildlife (§1.3.2). But, critically, that’s not GRA’s message here, and that’s never GRA’s claim in its materials on the importance of “healthy populations of wild animals” in the fight against climate change. For GRA and its concept of ACC, the issue is not what’s in it for wildlife – as the issue should be for rewilders – but what wildlife can do for us.
Onward, then, with our perusal of the Rewilding Day webpage… Those who want to “discover more” about GRA’s anthropocentric perspective can click a link to learn about animating the carbon cycle, including the open letter on supercharging ecosystem carbon sinks to meet the 1.5ºC target. Yes, to repeat, the latter does open with the assertion that holistic solutions to climate breakdown are required “if human civilization is to avoid catastrophe, creating opportunities for game-changing practice and behavior for a more enlightened and prosperous future” (p. 4). Is this why we rewild?! For a more enlightened and prosperous future for human civilization?! If so, it is surely not the rewilding movement for which I signed up – nor that which Dave Foreman founded TRI to promote.
The short letter continues with a relentlessly ecosystems-services-based perspective on the value of wild animals: “animals can enhance the carbon density of plant communities on land and in the sea, prevent massive CO2 releasing wildfires, protect against permafrost thawing, and enhance soil and sediment carbon retention through influence on microbial processes and chemical reactions” (p. 5). Their intrinsic value is not mentioned, nor is the intrinsic value of a complete ecosystem with its native fauna. The letter concludes that “Combining nature-based solutions with an array of other technologies and changed human behaviors can revolutionize our results to change the trajectory of combat climate change” (p. 6). Note the use of the word ‘other’: it’s a techo-fix, I’m tellin’ ya; it’s a geoengineering mentality.
Scrolling on down the Rewilding Day webpage, we find a free downloadable booklet to learn more about “animating the carbon cycle” (“There is a missing link in our current climate solutions, and it is wild animals…”); it’s an expansion of more of the same, by and large, but I’ll say a bit more about a couple of its case studies and other excerpts below.
Next, we reach a short FAQ section, in which we are informed that rewilding is (by definition!) the “process of helping nature heal” and thereby “creating the most large-scale and efficient carbon sequestration system possible.” The next question is “How does rewilding help the climate?” and there are no questions referring to any other effects or benefits of rewilding. Perennial topics such as continent-scale conservation, wilderness areas, landscape permeability (except dam removal), natural disturbance regimes, and evolutionary processes are not mentioned. The importance of keystone species is alluded to, but vaguely. (In other materials on ACC, we see reference to common topics like trophic cascades and importance of apex predators, but only in the context of the effects on carbon sequestration and storage.)
That’s the end of the substantive content – er, sorry, the “substantive” content – but even the closing information about how to follow GRA manages to further entrench the organisation’s climate-centric positioning. When joining the conversation online, we are encouraged to use the hashtag #ClimateEmergency (and, if as an irrelevant bonus, #EconomicStability – why not co-opt #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter while we’re at it?). Finally, even the friggin’ email sign-up states, “Right now, you can help our planet stabilize climate change through rewilding efforts.”
Hmm, I think I’m beginning to detect a theme here.
2.2 Why Promote the Message of Animating the Carbon Cycle?
In this section, I will consider two reasons that self-described “rewilding” proponents might adopt and promote the message of ACC, despite the fact that rewilding was never envisioned as a climate strategy: (1) you’re a sell-out; (2) you’re a Euro-style “rewilder” for whom the focal point of so-called “rewilding” is the use of large grazing animals (including cattle) to prevent forest regeneration, and you want to dispel the apparent worry that your approach to conservation is bass-ackwards from the standpoint of combating climate change. It should be self-evident that both are bad reasons.
2.2.1 You’re a sell-out.
If rewilding is your job, then there’s an obvious reason to connect #Rewilding with the #ClimateEmergency and frame rewilding as an effective method to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide: in the eyes of the media, politicians, and grantmakers, climate change is the environmental issue of our time; meanwhile, people dislike real solutions that focus on the need to exercise restraint, preferring silver bullets like techno-fantasies. ACC is not exactly a techno-fantasy, but it plays into the same desire to believe that curtailing catastrophic climate change is possible with minimal effort on our part: just add animals – especially large, charismatic mammals – and we’ll sequester carbon and revitalise rural economies to boot! (Of course, genuine rewilding will necessarily require considerable human restraint; however, the authors of GRA’s materials on ACC conveniently skirt this reality.)
Meanwhile, it might be depressing for some people to face up to the reality that human expansionism has caused the population sizes of terrestrial vertebrate wildlife to decline by an average of 69 percent since 1970. In its downloadable booklet on ACC, GRA sidesteps mention of humanity’s crimes against wild Nature and instead seeks to “change the narrative around wildlife conservation”: “Instead of framing wild animals as ‘victims of humanity’s doomed climate voyage’, they should be seen as real and significant climate heroes” (p. 4).
GRA’s reframing of the narrative continues: “Climate change is commonly viewed as causing collateral damage to biodiversity. Wildlife species, particularly animals, are widely perceived as unwitting victims – passengers trapped aboard a ship on an ill-fated voyage. In reality, animals play a critical role determining the course of the climate ship” (p. 7). In fact, however, it’s only humans that are f–king up the climate – as well as destroying, degrading, and fragmenting habitat, directly exploiting organisms, introducing invasive species, and polluting the planet with poisons, plastic, light, noise, and more – and wild animals are our unwitting victims. It’s kinda perverse for conservationists to deny this. Humans are guilty AF and should be ashamed, remorseful, and penitent. Wild animals, for their part, owe us nothing to get us out of this mess we’ve made. But maybe that’s not the feel-good rhetoric that sell-outs favour.
So why promote the message of ACC instead of confronting the catastrophic, human-caused loss of wildlife and human responsibility to restore wild Nature? Well, one reason might be that you’d rather the masses like you – and donate to your organisation – than risk alienating people by facing up to reality and telling it as it is.
2.2.2 You’re a naturalistic grazing proponent.
Any morally corruptible rewilding proponent can be a sell-out, including those in the classic North American tradition. However, as I’ve described at length in previous writings, Rewilding Europe, Rewilding Britain, and other European proponents of (so-called) “rewilding” commonly use the term to refer to the practice of naturalistic grazing, exemplified by the archetypal Dutch nature development project Oostvaardersplassen. This flagship European “rewilding” technique involves the introduction of large herbivores – often domesticated breeds of cows and horses that are considered “proxies” for extinct species – to graze landscapes to limit the growth of vegetation and prevent the development of closed-canopy forests (see my latest article for Rewilding Earth, “Counterparts in Name Only,” and the preceding posts).
Now, here are two things that fly in the face of what we’re generally told are appropriate ways to address climate change: (a) adding livestock to a landscape and (b) preventing afforestation. As even Svenning et al admit in “Science for a wilder Anthropocene” (2016, PNAS 113:4), “it is also plausible that megafauna restoration in some cases may trade-off against climate change mitigation, decreasing carbon sequestration and increasing methane emissions. There is a strong need for research to further our understanding of these issues.” (p. 903). Naturalistic grazing advocates could just hold the line that mitigating climate change is not the goal of their conservation practice – their objective is merely the maintenance of open landscapes, and the effect on carbon and climate is what it is – but key players like Rewilding Europe do have a penchant for selling out (e.g. to business and economy), so it would be a bit surprising if they didn’t want to be able to offer a more popularly appealing line on climate (beyond the usual bit about grazing as a means to reduce wildfire risk; as former President Donald Trump informed us in over in the States, gotta clean your forests!).
Given the involvement of Rewilding Europe, and recognising the obviousness of the above worry, it’s hard not to read the booklet on ACC as an implicit apology for naturalistic grazing, notwithstanding the fact that the megaherbivores of its case studies are Musk Oxen and Wildebeest rather than Heck cattle and Konik ponies. (Wildebeest make poops, as we’re told, and so do(o) cattle; it’s this nourishing of the soil that allows businesses like Denmark’s Klintholm to claim to sell us “carbon-negative beef” and even have the gall to call it rewilding.)
This cynical perspective is substantiated by a dig at reforestation at the end of the GRA’s downloadable booklet on ACC: “Forest protection and restoration is currently the primary focus of nature-based climate solutions. […] It is essential that we move away from tree planting […]. By promoting the natural regeneration of forests instead of tree planting, we could capture up to 40 times more carbon” (p. 31) [*]. The latter statistic is not cited, but we might note that for Rewilding Europe (and like-minded groups like Denmark’s Verdens Skove), the phrase “natural regeneration of forests” is roughly euphemistic for “forests grazed by livestock.” I learnt my lesson early on, when I was briefly heartened to see a social media post from Rewilding Europe promoting natural forest generation (and, yes, I used to hope Rewilding Europe was a worthy organisation), only to be directed to a brochure on “Herbiforests” (and, yes, that is the word they use).
This passage in the handbook is followed by praise for grazed open landscapes as carbon sinks: “Grasslands cover around 40 percent of the Earth’s terrestrial surface and store more than 30 percent of land-based carbon, but are still largely ignored in considerations of nature-based climate solutions. […] Restoring large herbivores at historic baseline densities has the potential to significantly speed up the carbon mitigation process and reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire” (p. 32). It’s typical Rewilding Europe fare; I’ve said my piece on that organisation elsewhere.
[*] The blanket rejection of tree planting, incidentally, is hypocritical. Most rewilding advocates, I presume, would agree that natural forest regeneration is preferable when possible. Most would also agree that natural recolonisation of wildlife is preferable to human-led reintroductions when possible. But sometimes the latter is not possible due to past human-caused extirpation of animals, and sometimes the former is not possible due to past human-caused deforestation of large areas of land, leaving landscapes devoid of seed sources for native tree species and thus severely limiting the potential of natural regeneration. Shall we say it’s okay to intervene to introduce “lost species” of animals – the whole basis of ACC, allegedly – but not lost species of trees? There is no moral consistency here.
2.3 Why NOT Adopt the Message of Animating the Carbon Cycle?
My position, of course, is that there is a moral imperative to rewild for the benefit of wild Nature – rewilding for the sake of rewilding, if you will – and that this is incompatible with elevating ACC to the forefront of rewilding discourse. I don’t mean to imply that rewilders should never talk about climate change in relation to rewilding (cf. §1.3). Further, there can be little doubt that the activities of animals do impact the carbon cycle, and there is no harm in studying this process. It’s okay to discuss and debate the impact that rewilding would have on carbon storage and climate change. But it should never be the reason #WhyWeRewild.
In this concluding section, I summarise six reasons to resist a focus on climate change and “animating the carbon cycle” in rewilding discourse – three moral, three rhetorical. Simply put, curtailing climate change is neither a necessary or sufficient reason for rewilding. Moreover, while the rewilding movement bears no special obligation to highlight the problem of climate change, it does bear considerable responsibility for calling attention to ecological crises other than climate change – and, especially, to the need to preserve wild Nature for its own sake.
Moral Reasons
2.3.1 Even if rewilding didn’t mitigate climate change, there’d still be an imperative to rewild.
The concept of ACC relies on the assumption that rewilding will, in fact, result in a drawdown of atmospheric carbon. But this is a gamble; it’s an empirical claim that could turn out to be false. It seems that modern educated humans have become accustomed to thinking of carbon as the enemy, as some sort of unwelcome pollutant that wouldn’t exist at all in the pristine state of nature. To clear up any confusion: atmospheric carbon dioxide is, in fact, natural. Indeed, atmospheric carbon concentrations have even been much higher than today’s levels many times throughout Earth’s history, due to natural rather than anthropogenic causes. “Wild” does not imply carbon-reducing; wildfire, volcanism, the death and decay of organic material, and the respiration of wild animals are all “wild” sources of CO2. A priori, there’s no guarantee that the net contribution of any particular species of wild animal will be to reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide. But it’s not their fault if they don’t comply with our desires for an organic geoengineering solution to clean up our own mess.
Would it be wrong to restore beavers to their native range throughout North America if their net effect is to decrease carbon storage in the ecosystems they inhabit? What about wolves? We rewilders have never assumed that our proposals will stand or fall on this basis – nor should we. However, if we were to pretend that carbon sequestration is the reason to rewild, then by GRA’s own lights, ACC should give us pause:
• “A 2018 study carried out by a Finnish research team found that beaver ponds range from carbon sinks to carbon sources. […] [B]eaver ponds and meadows could fix as much as 470,000 tonnes of carbon per year on a global scale, or alternatively release up to 820,000 tonnes” (downloadable booklet, p. 9; emphasis added).
• “[T]he study team estimated that wolves could (with a number of caveats) increase carbon storage in North American boreal forest by up to 99 million tonnes a year, compared to an ecosystem without wolves. […] The situation in North American grasslands is very different, where the presence of wolves may actually decrease the amount of carbon stored in the landscape. Here, elk stimulate the growth of grass by excreting what they eat and fertilising the soil. In this scenario, an increase in the number of wolves may decrease the abundance of elk and thereby significantly suppress carbon storage. If wolves and elk co-existed across the entire expanse of North American high-altitude grassland, the 2016 study team estimated a loss of carbon storage of up to 30 million tonnes a year” (p. 27).
I would hope that such passages are further red flags to North American rewilding advocates. Even if it turns out that wolves decrease carbon storage in American grasslands, this would be a frankly ridiculous reason not to reinstate wolves to this part of their native range (and, to state further obvious things, wolf reintroduction faces enough resistance without a new excuse from climate pundits). After all, it’s not wolves who are causing runaway global warming, nor beavers, nor any other carbon-based, carbon-breathing non-human animal; it’s humans and humans alone who are to blame. Granted, GRA doesn’t propose that we should therefore resist the reintroduction of wolves into the American grassland – but neither does its ACC guidebook provide us with reasons to support the reintroduction of species when they don’t make a positive contribution to mitigating climate change.
The traditional rewilding movement does offer an explanation as to why species reintroductions are important even if they fail to make a positive contribution to carbon sequestration: natural ecosystems with their native fauna are intrinsically valuable, irrespective of their contributions to our goals in alleviating the climate chaos that we created.
2.3.2 Even if rewilding weren’t necessary to address the climate crisis, there’d still be an imperative to rewild.
Suppose that, in fact, the net effect of restoring populations of wild animals is to decrease atmospheric carbon dioxide. But suppose that, meanwhile, humans were able to find some other means to combat climate change – or, much more realistically, suppose they thought they did. Perhaps it’s a high-tech carbon-capture solution that’s less land-intensive than restoring grasslands and sh*t (no, not “grasslands and stuff,” grasslands and sh*t; this is the ACC proposal), thus allowing more room for unchecked human expansion.
Or consider this (realistic) sub-case: suppose some clever person suggested that, instead of rewilding, we could rely on extensive livestock farming (i.e. regenerative agriculture) to accomplish the carbon sequestration benefits attributed to large animals, such as pooping and compacting the soil. This is not an outlandish thought experiment; it’s already being proposed that farming can subserve the (alleged) goals of rewilding for reasons like this (see my post about “agricultural rewilding”).
If ACC were the reason to rewild, then we might have to shrug and say “Okay, you win; you can manage the land and sequester carbon too.” Most of us true-blood rewilders, however, believe that the moral imperative to rewild is independent of the climate crisis; thus, any solution to the climate crisis would not relieve us of the obligation to rewild Earth. And we have the explanation: self-willed Nature is intrinsically valuable and must be respected, irrespective of its contributions to our goals in alleviating the climate chaos that we created.
2.3.3 Restoring wild Nature is an end unto itself, and so is being honest and sincere.
The third point is the most general and straightforward: if restoring and protecting wild Nature is its own end (and it is), then we should simply say as much. If a rewilding advocate insteads buries this fact beneath rhetoric that portrays rewilding as merely instrumentally valuable as a “nature-based solution” for climate change, then there are two possibilities, both of which demonstrate failures that are not only rhetorical but also moral:
(i) The rewilding advocate fails to recognise the intrinsic value of wild Nature and the moral duty to protect and preserve it for its own sake. In this case, the (so-called!) rewilding advocate is not sensitive to moral fact to which s/he really oughta be attuned, especially if s/he wants to be a rewilding advocate.
(ii) The rewilding advocate does recognise the intrinsic value of wild Nature, and privately holds that there is a moral duty to protect and preserve it for its own sake, but publicly avows that rewilding’s main value is as a nature-based solution for climate change. But this ignores the independent ethical imperative to be honest and sincere (see my post specifically on this topic: “Why Intrinsic Value? A Defence of Being Honest”).
Rhetorical Reasons
Despite compelling moral reasons to believe and avow that rewilding is its own end, some might insist that there are prudential reasons to speak as if the exciting part of rewilding is its potential to enhance carbon sequestration and combat climate change (see §2.2.1). I maintain that, on the contrary, there are compelling reasons that rewilders should not put considerable emphasis on the climate crisis.
2.3.4 The world would know about climate change even if the rewilding movement remained silent on the issue.
This goes without saying. Everyone knows about the climate crisis. The rewilding movement does not bear any special obligation to inform people about it.
2.3.5 Too few people realise that climate change is not the only ecological crisis; the rewilding movement can play a role in helping to mitigate this.
Like many who’ve been exposed to Conservation Biology 101, I know about HIPPO, E.O. Wilson’s acronym for the causes of species extinction: habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, population, and overexploitation. My conservation biology instructor emphasised that the second p – population – is less an independent cause of extinction than the basic driver underlying the rest of the HIPO. For our purposes, though, it suffices to note that it’s not CHIPPO or HIPPOC: climate change doesn’t even appear in the acronym.
By now it’s second nature to me to think of habitat loss and fragmentation as the main causes of extinction, so it always surprises me when an otherwise informed and intelligent person takes for granted (falsely) that climate change is the cause of the biodiversity crisis and the latter is merely a symptom of the former. This is a gross misconception, and it’s the fault of the single-minded focus on climate in media, politics, and the mainstream conservation industry.
In Rewilding North America, Dave Foreman wrote about seven “wounds” of nature. Climate change was one of the wounds, but that leaves six others. Similar to the components of HIPPO, the other wounds that Foreman identified included the direct killing of species, the loss and degradation of ecosystems, the fragmentation of wildlife habitats, the loss and disruption of natural processes, invasions by exotic species and diseases, and the poisoning of land, air, water, and wildlife. As the inheritors of the vision of RNA, it is imperative that we continue to inform the public about all wounds – especially those about which the public might not otherwise be aware (e.g. anything that isn’t climate change and its direct effects). After all, the reference to “nature’s wounds” is an allusion to a passage in which Aldo Leopold spoke of wounds that are obvious to ecologists but “quite invisible to laymen.” It is the role of those with an ecological education to “be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” That means us, as rewilders, informing our audience that climate change is not the only crisis on our hands.
2.3.6 If the rewilding movement were not to advocate the need to protect “wild things for their own sake,” there would be few or no voices doing so.
Although the rewilding movement can and should help to inform the public about threats to wild Nature other than climate change, it does not bear the sole responsibility to do so. There are other high-profile voices sounding the alarm about the full range of contributing factors to the biodiversity crisis, such as the much-cited 2019 IPBES report that found up to one million species at risk of extinction. This report placed climate change among the top five drivers of biodiversity loss, behind land use change (e.g. conversion of wild land to agriculture) and direct exploitation of organisms (e.g. overharvesting). If people paid attention, they could figure out that climate change is not the only ecological issue, and not even the most important from the standpoint of the more-than-human world – and they should be able to figure this out even if they didn’t follow the rewilding movement (which isn’t to say that we can’t, or shouldn’t, help to spread full and accurate information about the extinction crisis).
But there’s still something missing from the discourse that’s even more rare than attention to problems other than climate change: respect for the intrinsic value of wild Nature. Take the aforementioned IPBES report, for example; hell, the anthropocentric concept of “ecosystem services” is the very name of the group that produced it. Ultimately, the biggest problem with ACC is that it represents a fundamentally mistaken way to conceptualise the benefits of rewilding. It transforms rewilding into just another ecosystem service for human ends – and this is precisely the type of domineering and anthropocentric attitude toward Nature that the rewilding movement must counter and resist.
Suppose that the aspirations of ACC are actualised, and that meanwhile human civilisation manages to convert itself to a net-zero society. That is, while wild animals are off doing their thing to sequester carbon, humans manage to curtail all of their greenhouse gas emissions. Shall we then say, “We don’t need wild animals any more; they’ve done their duty [insert joke about herbivore dung] and helped us to keep global warming within manageable levels when we needed it the most. But now we have advanced as a civilization, and we are prepared to go forward and destroy their habitat in a carbon-neutral way.” The answer is no; we should not say that. As far as it goes, however, ACC is compatible with such a way of thinking about wildlife and wild Nature – and this should horrify us as rewilders.
Far from selling out to anthropocentric worldviews, we must be a lone voice in (and for) the wilderness, speaking for the intrinsic value of Nature when few others are willing to do so, and when Nature herself doesn’t speak in our languages. For if not us, then who?
Kate McFarland
March 2023