Over the coming months, I will be decommissioning this site and establishing my web presence elsewhere, independent from my employer and free from the baggage of my short-but-intense involvement with the rewilding movement, which this website had also come to symbolize to me (despite the fact that I was right all along in my first post, “Reflections on Downshifting Day,” wherein I described ‘rewilding’ as a “semantic clusterf–k” or “a technical term for a cluster concept confounded to the point of uselessness”).
To that end, I have launched one new blog on Substack, Nonmotorized Trails(carfreebirdnoticer.substack.com) with a second one coming soon, Ethics from the Outside (outsideethics.substack.com). Unusually for me, the former is centered around photos rather than text, and it is intended to serve as my outlet to share my love of sauntering, car-free living, the company of feathered friends, and the experience of wild nature. It is, in a sense, the continuation of my essay “Around the World for a Ten Miles’ Radius” (June 2022), in which I wrote, “It is not out of the question […] that I will eventually launch a new blog devoted to a selection of case studies in living life – and connecting with nature – within the limits of an afternoon walk, drawing from my own experiences as a ‘digital nomad’ […],” although the first two installments are in fact about some of my experiences (positive ones!) living and looking for nature in my long-time home base of Columbus, Ohio.
Nonmotorized Trails is introspective and reflective, but it will never be particularly philosophical. That is why I also plan to launch Ethics fromthe Outside, in which I will give free rein to my love for analytic philosophy and critical thinking. The initial focus will be issues related to ecological ethics, and since I am now a solo actor – with no feeding hands to bite – I will start with critiques of my own former work (beginning with a reevaluation of some of the ideas in my April 2023 essay “Evolution is Good; Autonomous Evolution is Better“). Meanwhile, I have been asked to contribute a chapter on intrinsic value to a “Nature Values” book, so expect some blog posts on this topic, as I continue to explore new thoughts related to this perennial interest of mine (including a sort of plea for Ordinary Language philosophy, in light of what I’m coming to learn about what philosophers read into that term, presumably without much attention to what practitioners are actually doing in the language games in which they ascribe ‘intrinsic value’ to things… but I digress).
I do not intend to impose any sort of publication schedule on Ethics from the Outside, but I am trying to adhere to one for Nonmotorized Trails: new posts every other Sunday.
I hope that folks who were interested in my work with The Rewilding Institute or The Ecological Citizen will remain interested in my output, since love of wild nature will be a theme central to both blogs. The two blogs are importantly distinct, but together they will form a composite picture of my approach to thinking about nature and ecological ethics. At the same time, however, I hope it is clear that neither blog is about environmental action or activism. Nonmotorized Trails is fundamentally about slowing down and noticing things, as I emphasized in my most recent post, “Conference of the Wading Birds” (June 2024). Yes, the blog is intended to showcase the virtues of car-free living, but I hope it’s clear that this doesn’t make it about sustainability and definitely doesn’t make it about sacrifice or self-deprivation. On the contrary, to me, car-free living has always epitomized the decision to embrace leisure and peace of mind (who has heard of “footpath rage,” “bike trail rage,” “greenway rage,” etc?) and jettison the social norms that tell us we can’t be responsible adults unless we commit to stress for the sake of stress, speed for the sake of speed. Readers who followed Useless Living in its earliest days might figure out that, in fact, Nonmotorized Trails is something of a return to form: my rejection of car culture is very much cut from the same cloth as my rejection of career culture. Ethics from theOutside, meanwhile, will not be intended to preach, but it is also meant to embody the virtue of slowing down and, in this case, stopping to think.
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ADDENDUM (July 2024): For more on my approach to car-free living, see my recently launched blog Nonmotorized Trails: An Ex-Driver Searches for Wild Things (carfreebirdnoticer.substack.com). With new photo-heavy posts each month, I aim to provide glimpses into my foot-based explorations of local nature, at home and abroad. My goal is to convey that car-free living is not about sacrifice (not to me anyhow); it’s about slowing down, engaging one’s body and senses, and taking time to notice beauty and magic.
* * *
I was recently asked to write my story about being car-free for the Alliance of World Scientists website. The story was published in abbreviated form. This is the full submitted version.
Growing up in rural Ohio, I took for granted that every adult human relied on a personal motor vehicle for transportation. However, growing up in rural Ohio, I was also unprepared for the stress and anxiety that would come with driving on busy city streets and multi-lane freeways when I moved to the city for college. Worst of all, perhaps, I had never learned to parallel park (no, pulling back and forth between traffic cones is not the same). As soon as I realized that alternatives were available, reducing my car use was all but an automatic response. I walked whenever possible. I used city buses when necessary. I relearned how to ride a bike (no, it’s not like riding a bike if it’s been long enough). I drove my car every other Saturday morning to keep the battery from dying.
As I relied less and less on an automobile and more and more on active transportation, I felt healthier both mentally and physically. I also experienced unexpectedly deep and transformative changes in my conception of what transportation can and should be. For one, I discovered that walking or cycling transformed transportation from a merely instrumental means of getting from point A to point B to an intrinsically rewarding activity. Every journey is not merely a journey but, at minimum, a source of exercise, fresh air, and awareness of one’s community. For another, I realized that it is the pedestrian who enjoys the purest form of freedom of movement. The pedestrian, for example, can make a spontaneous decision to pause on the sidewalk to window-shop, greet a passing friend, or admire an interesting bird or flower. If she doesn’t stop but then regrets it, she can turn on her feet and backtrack. The motorist, in contrast, is often deprived of the liberty of spontaneity — forced to proceed with the flow of traffic at risk of mortal danger. The pedestrian, in other words, enjoys much greater leisure both to be distracted by her surroundings and to succumb to distraction; it is she, not the driver, who can literally stop and smell the flowers.
When I finally decided to sell my car, it was the most liberating thing I’ve ever done. Gone were all the remaining worries of car ownership – maintenance, insurance premiums, agreeing to give a lift to a friend only to face the embarrassment of being unable to parallel park upon reaching the destination, etc. Best of all, however, it felt to me like the ultimate act of social defiance: I had officially rejected the expectation that all adults must own a car. That was over six years ago. I have never once regretted it.
If there is a problem with car-free living, it’s that it forces you to realize how darned annoying it is to live in a world designed for cars. When you’re out on foot or bike in a high-traffic area, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that automobiles are loud, smelly, omnipresent threats to life and limb. When you’re moving at a slower pace, you have ample time to reflect on how much space is wasted on parking lots that could be dug up and transformed into community gardens. And even our freedom of movement is too often curtailed by impassable busy roads.
Another problem with car-free living is an arbitrary consequence of American culture: in the US, car-free living is often assumed to be a prerogative of urban dwellers, and car-free individuals are effectively denied access to wild nature outside of city parks. It is a sad irony, considering that the lifestyle should be an appealing choice to many who favor a quiet and slow-paced life of greater connection to the natural world – the same preferences, that is, that tend to drive (no pun intended) many folks to move away from the city. Perhaps the saddest irony of all is that, in much of the US, it’s taken for granted that it’s necessary to use a personal automobile to escape the noise pollution caused by personal automobiles.
I had made my personal choice to go car-free, but I did not want to continue to be confined by a world manufactured for car users. I did not want to drive just to find relief from the sight, sound, and smell of motor traffic. I did not want to drive just to go for a walk in the woods. I did not want to drive just to see the Milky Way. I did not want to have to rely on such a destructive technology as the personal automobile just to experience the natural landscapes, soundscapes, and nightscapes that have been stolen from so many of us due, in large part, to car culture and its associated sprawl.
Thus, on more than one occasion, I left my home country to spend time living nomadically in Europe, where there are many more opportunities to live car-free away from major cities. In my experience, this difference is due to three main factors: (1) transit infrastructure that makes rural areas reachable from cities; (2) dedicated foot and bike paths even in rural areas; (3) numerous small grocery stores scattered among villages instead of centralized megastores. Most of my formative experiences happened in the Nordsjælland region of Denmark, which is certainly not car-free yet very suitable to bicycle-based living. I also spent time on completely car-free islands like Sark (Channel Islands), Silba and Zlarin (Croatia) and “car-lite” islands like Anholt (Denmark), Vlieland (Netherlands) and Eigg (Scotland), where only the small permanent populations are permitted to use cars. I researched others, perhaps for future sojourns.
Selling my car was liberating, but what has been truly unforgettable has been the experience of living in small and quiet communities designed for people rather than two-ton hunks of metal. Once experienced, the quiet, safety, and freedom cannot be unlearned. We all deserve a better way of life than car culture.
Wild nature, as we know it, is the product of billions of years of evolution, unfolding autonomously with no human oversight or management. In the Anthropocene, however, human activity has become a dominant force constraining future evolution. Despite these realities, we see little acknowledgement of the human obligation to protect the autonomy of evolutionary processes. We argue that the latter must be a critical priority in an ethic for conservation.
“Wildness is a name we give to living nature, on planet Earth, at its most robust, unfettered, undiminished, dynamic, and diverse. … Wildness is biological”
David Quammen, “What Is Wildness?” The New York Review, May 16, 2023
Unfettered Evolution: A Cornerstone of Wildness
Writing recently in The New York Review of Books, American science, nature and travel writer David Quammen delivered a primer on the conservation biology (1) that we see informed rewilding as envisaged by its originators (2). In the context of defining wildness, Quammen identified four crucial ecosystem features: scale, connectivity, diversity, and processes. By processes, he meant the interactive dynamics of an ecosystem, such as “photosynthesis, herbivory, pollination, parasitism, competition, predation, seed dispersal, and decomposition.” He saw connectivity as the “linkages and dependencies that such processes build among living creatures and their physical environments.” He emphasised that scale is an ineliminable consideration because “connectivity and processes — and biological diversity too — all depend on the sheer size of the place where they exist.”
Quammen also laid out the tenets of island biogeography (3) before delivering its dire warnings for the present: as we “increasingly occupy the Earth’s surface and arrogate vast areas to our purposes,” humans are fragmenting natural landscapes and thereby destroying their biological diversity. Quammen’s travels confirmed this reality, as he observed places of deforestation where local species were threatened with extinction. He averred that every loss from a great forest – from predators to pollinators to amphibians – diminished it, and that a large reduction in size or fragmentation with roads also diminished it. By progressively taking away scale, connectivity, diversity and dynamic processes, these acts of human appropriation would lead to the “heartbeat of the wild” growing weaker until it eventually stops, leaving a lifeless empty forest. But Quammen argued that it is not too late for humans to preserve those elements of wildness: the scale and connectivity of natural landscapes, the biological diversity within them, and the processes by which those living creatures and their environment interact.
A missing element
We can only agree, and we find Quammen’s viewpoint heartening in a contemporary context in which much academic and popular work purports to deny the very concept or continued existence of wildness (4). However, we believe that there is an element missing from Quammen’s discussion – unfettered evolution – that is even more fundamental to wildness. This missing element has two important facets: the autonomy of natural processes from human determination and the focus on evolutionary processes in particular. Quammen did not pinpoint autonomy as an essential quality of wildness, although his discussion often alluded to it, as when he described wildness as “unfettered” and “uncontrolled by humans”. Meanwhile, he did not seem to recognise evolutionary processes as something integral to wildness, despite the fact that many of his earlier books have dealt with evolution at length (5,6). On the contrary, he has at times written acceptingly of the role of humanity as an evolutionary force, such as in his review of the book Darwin Comes to Town by Dutch biologist Menno Schilthuizen (7). Conceding that humanity is now the dominant force governing the future of life on Earth, Schilthuizen argued that evolutionary processes are acting on non-human species living in urban environments at a faster pace than expected, a phenomenon that he dubbed human-induced rapid evolutionary change or HIREC (8). Schilthuizen saw this rapid change as a saving grace for non-human species eking out their living in an increasingly and inevitably human-dominated world. As an example, Quammen described Schiltuizen’s case study of the London Underground mosquito (Culex molestus), which became genetically distinct from its closest relative, the northern house mosquito (Culex pipiens), in a mere matter of decades, due to its adaptation to an anthropogenic urban habitat.
Following Schiltuizen, Quammen appeared to see merit in this accelerated evolution and diversification in response to anthropogenic pressures within human-controlled environments, suggesting that it might enable non-human species to resist their annihilation and allow us humans to sate (if only “slightly”) our appetite for nature’s beauty and wonder. To be sure, Quammen was not wholly optimistic about the human-induced rapid evolutionary change. He acknowledged that some species fare better than others in adapting to anthropogenic environments, that urbanisation acts an homogenising force on biodiversity, and that the formation of the new species like C. molestus would almost certainly fail to keep up with the rate of human-caused extinctions. However, we suggest that Quammen missed an even more basic problem with this concession to the role of humanity as an evolutionary force, and it appears discordant with his recent views on wildness. Why should non-human species be forced in the first place to adapt to our environments or perish? What of the wildness of evolution itself?
A lack of precision
Quammen is not alone in failing to bridge the connection between evolution and wildness. Originators of conservation biology and rewilding, such as Michael Soulé and Dave Foreman, recognized the importance of protecting the autonomy of nature and occasionally invoked evolution in this context. Even they, however, did not fully articulate the importance and implications of protecting autonomous evolutionary processes. In his well-known article from 1985 “What is Conservation Biology?”(9). Soulé included “evolution is good” as one of the four normative postulates of the discipline but said little to elucidate it. He recognised the ethical imperative “to provide for the continuation of evolutionary processes in as many undisturbed natural habitats as possible,” but he did not elaborate what this means in practice, including the scale at which evolution must occur for it to be wild, despite the fact that he had previously written about the area of land needed for speciation (10).
Foreman also frequently alluded to evolution as a reason for rewilding. For example, the homepage of The Rewilding Institute, an organisation which he founded, prominently displays a quote from “Wild Things for Their Own Sake,” one of Foreman’s personal “broadside” columns: “The most needed and holy work of conservation is to keep whole the building blocks of evolution. Such is the true work of conservation, the goal of those who cannot live without wild things” (11). In the essay, however, Foreman did not identify what those building blocks are, and he seemed to vacillate between talk of “building blocks” and the evolutionary processes that act upon them (12). He declared that we must “step back somewhere (many somewheres) so evolution is free to unfold for wild things in its own unhobbled, eerie way,” but like Soulé provided no details about the scale required. He asserted that “evolution is wild,” but this seems to either overgeneralise or trivialise the notion of wildness. After all, the human-induced evolution described by Schilthuizen is evolution, so is the evolution of pesticide resistance in insects or antibiotic resistance in bacteria – but ostensibly there is little “wild” about the environments in which this evolution occurs.
Although Soulé and Foreman express an exemplary sentiment, their lack of precision ultimately leaves their work unhelpful on this topic. Most glaringly, perhaps, they have offered no resources to differentiate the unfettered evolution that rewilding must aim to protect from evolution that occurs in response to human-driven selection pressures, such as the urban evolution discussed by Schiltzhuizen and Quammen.
Respect for autonomous evolutionary processes
Our objective in forthcoming work is to remedy the striking omission of evolution from contemporary conversations on wilderness and rewilding, and to reassert and explicate the moral imperative to protect the autonomy of evolutionary processes. We will characterise the importance of evolutionary processes, why they should be unfettered by human influence, and what conditions need to be met for this to happen. We will describe why our position represents a unique and novel contribution to the literature on conservation and ecological ethics, detail the threats that embroil it, and offer paths forward. This far-reaching endeavour exceeds our present scope, but we offer this medium-form essay as a foretaste.
As a philosopher and a life scientist, we maintain that conservation is morally vacuous if it is not predicated upon respect for autonomous evolutionary processes. These processes antedated our own species by billions of years, and they are responsible for our existence and the existence of all other life on Earth. Although we will say more in future work to justify our normative position, we take it as self-evident that these processes are intrinsically good and worth preserving. At the same time, we believe that the Anthropocene (13) characterised by a human inability to be impartial to its own species (14) poses a grave threat to the freely unfolding productivity of the future evolution of life.
Evolution is the change in heritable traits of organisms within a population over successive generations (15). Stereotypically, this change occurs as a result of the passing on of successful gene combinations that permit organisms to survive and reproduce in the face of selective pressures imposed by their external environment. When conservation biologists speak about evolution, they commonly focus on genetic variability within and between populations of organisms (sometimes described as evolutionary potential), often with an interest in ensuring species survival or promoting future biodiversity (16). In contrast, our main interest comprises the evolutionary processes themselves – processes such as natural selection and gene flow that determine the evolutionary trajectories of populations. We believe that conservationists have a mandate to ensure that, to the extent possible, the selective pressures that drive evolution are allowed to be chosen by the free-flowing processes of wild nature instead of intentional human judgement.
Human domination of evolutionary processes
At present, human activity has become a dominant force shaping the evolutionary trajectory of life on Earth, which threatens to lead to the erosion of the very existence of wild species (17). The anthropogenic transformation of the biosphere will irrevocably change non-human species to the point that the autonomy of their free living is severely constrained, if not lost entirely (18). Crucially, however, we believe that this present de facto domination by our species does not justify concession to ongoing human management of nature, or abandonment of the aspiration to protect wilderness. On the contrary, humanity can – and must – choose to reverse our course of domination and return significant portions of the planet, at the right scale, to a self-governance by unfettered evolutionary processes. This entails not only preserving areas of land and sea as uninhibited as possible by human-derived selection pressure, but also permitting the continuation of all natural selection pressures, including predation.
We see very little in the literature that so much as recognises this real threat of human domination of evolutionary processes. On the contrary, we have observed the rewilding movement digress even farther from Soulé and Foreman’s gestures toward the need to safeguard evolution and their emphasis on the autonomy of nature. As advocates for rewilding as envisaged by its originators, we have been dismayed at the constant stretching and redrawing of the boundaries of the concept in Europe and elsewhere, as practitioners and stakeholders attempt to dictate what rewilding means through ongoing compromises that have resulted in its domestication (19,20).
Proposals for the assimilation of farming to rewilding (21) urban rewilding (22) and other attempts to introduce so-called rewilding into anthropized landscapes capitulate to human influence on selection and gene flow, and common prescriptions for the use of domesticated species in “rewilding” projects overtly introduces artificial selection into the practice (23). Meanwhile, the new “domesticated” rewilding often forsakes the restoration of natural selective pressures, mostly notably by downplaying the importance of large carnivores to ecological processes, as do other interests (24-27). The moral mandate to ensure the perpetuation of unfettered evolutionary processes removes any legitimacy of all such compromises.
Predation has been an important driver of natural selection since at least the Cambrian (28,29). Despite this evolutionary reality, we have seen this fundamental ecological process under attack from multiple quarters, including so-called “animals rights” theories in moral philosophy. For example, recent work by philosopher Martha Nussbaum has suggested that we ought to curb predation in nature, or avoid reintroducing large carnivores, for the sake of preventing the pain and suffering of sentient animals – “intelligently respectful paternalism is vastly superior to neglect” (30). This sentiment is far more extreme than compassionate conservation (31) because it implies that the wild needs stewardship, human intervention to prevent predation, and that wilderness can be improved upon. Nussbaum herself has skirted this issue by claiming that none of the Earth can truly be considered wild, but this is beside the present point; her position seems to entail that if wilderness does exist, we would need to destroy it, under the guise of improving the wellbeing of the individual animals therein – “When humans do not intervene, Nature does not attain a stable or balanced condition, nor does it attain the condition that is best for other creatures or for the environment” (32). The logical endpoint is the herbivorizing of carnivores, which is in fact the aim of the research of a newly formed advocacy organisation whose strapline is “Leading Evolution Compassionately” (33). If this, unlikely to us, proposition was to have any realisation, then it would be a gross attack on self-regulating evolution by removing a biotic interaction that is one of the key processes that shapes its outcome. In essence it is an acquiescence to the purported end of nature in Bill McKibben’s prophetic book from 1989 that he previewed in The New Yorker (34) so that there is instead a human governance of the evolutionary futures of life on Earth.
We find it dispiriting that contemporary moral theories have been proffered to justify this sort of deliberating undermining of natural evolutionary processes, while none of note have been put forth to argue in favour of the moral importance of respect for the autonomy of these processes.
Transforming ourselves out of the lock that the Anthropocene has on us
In forthcoming work, we will address an array of other adversaries, from speciesism to social constructivism about nature. We will counter the objection that humans are merely a part of nature – another “ecosystem engineer” like so many other species (8) – and that it is thus only “natural” that humans impinge upon their environment and, in doing so, influence the flow of evolution. In addition to challenging intellectual adversaries to unfettered evolution, we will examine the pressing threats of human overproduction, overconsumption and overpopulation, which directly and increasingly impinge on our ability to ensure the perpetuation of wild nature and its self-directed evolutionary processes (35-37). It is our species’ moral imperative to acknowledge these realities, to recognise the power and ownership structures that facilitate them, and to transform ourselves out of the lock that the Anthropocene has on us.
In the meantime, there must be a revitalised strategy for conservation and rewilding based on strict non-intervention, at a scale large enough to permit significant global populations of non-human species to remain subject to natural evolutionary processes. Existing protected area systems fail to designate sufficiently large and connected strictly protected areas to allow speciation to occur naturally, especially for large mammals (10), and there is no widespread commitment to strict non-intervention (38,39). Correspondingly we believe that ecological restoration must be predicated upon respect for evolution’s own past choices, not dictated by human-desired outcomes for biodiversity or ecosystem services. Our hope is that by focusing upon evolution, and in a manner removed from human interpretation and influence, we can foreshorten the endless and revolving discussion and procrastination so that a revitalised strategy for conservation can be promptly realised.
Kate McFarland and Mark Fisher 16 June 2023
References
(1) Quammen, D. (2023) What Is Wildness?, The New York Review, 16 May 2023
(2) Fisher, M. (2020) Natural Science and Spatial Approach of Rewilding: Evolution in Meaning of Rewilding in Wild Earth and The Wildlands Project. Self-willed land
(10) Soulé, M,E, (1980) Thresholds for Survival: Maintaining Fitness and Evolutionary Potential, In: M. E. Soulé and B. M. Wilcox, Eds., Conservation Biology: An Evolutionary-Ecological Perspective, Sinauer, Sunderland, pp. 151-170
(13) Steffen, W., Crutzen, P.J. and McNeill, J.R., 2007. The Anthropocene: are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature. AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment, 36(8): 614-621
(14) Washington, H., Piccolo, J., Gomez-Baggethun, E., Kopnina, H., & Alberro, H. (2021) The trouble with anthropocentric hubris, with examples from conservation. Conservation, 1(4): 285-298
(15) Forbes, A. A. & Krimmel, B. A. (2010) Evolution Is Change in the Inherited Traits of a Population through Successive Generations. Nature Education Knowledge 3(10): 6
(16) Milot, E., Béchet, A., & Maris, V. (2020). The dimensions of evolutionary potential in biological conservation. Evolutionary Applications, 13(6): 1363-1379
(19) Pettorelli, N., Barlow, J., Stephens, P.A., Durant, S.M., Connor, B., Schulte to Bühne, H., Sandom, C.J., Wentworth, J. and du Toit, J.T., (2018) Making rewilding fit for policy. Journal of Applied Ecology 55(3): 1114-1125
(20) Martin, A., Fischer, A., McMorran, R., & Smith, M. (2021). Taming rewilding—From the ecological to the social: How rewilding discourse in Scotland has come to include people. Land Use Policy, 111: 105677
(21) Gordon, I.J., Manning, A.D, Navarro, L.M. & Rouet-Leduc, J. (2021) Domestic Livestock and Rewilding: Are They Mutually Exclusive? Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 5: Article 550410
(23) Gordon, I. J., Pérez-Barbería, F. J., & Manning, A. D. (2021). Rewilding lite: Using traditional domestic livestock to achieve rewilding outcomes. Sustainability, 13(6): 3347
(24) von Essen, E., & Allen, M. P. (2015). Wild-But-Not-Too-Wild Animals: Challenging Goldilocks Standards in Rewilding. Between the Species, 19(1): 80-108.
(25) Svenning, J.C., Pedersen, P.B., Donlan, C.J., Ejrnæs, R., Faurby, S., Galetti, M., Hansen, D.M., Sandel, B., Sandom, C.J., Terborgh, J.W. and Vera, F.W., (2016) Science for a wilder Anthropocene: Synthesis and future directions for trophic rewilding research. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(4): 898-906
(26) Kuijper D.P.J., Sahle´n E., Elmhagen B., Chamaille´-Jammes S, Sand H., Lone K., Cromsigt, J.P.G.M. 2016 Paws without claws? Ecological effects of large carnivores in anthropogenic landscapes. Proc. R. Soc. B 283: 20161625
(34) McKibben, W. (1989) The End of Nature – The rise of greenhouse gases and our warming earth. September 3, !989. The New Yorker, September 11, 1989 Issue
(36) Kopnina, H., & Washington, H. (2016) Discussing why population growth is still ignored or denied. Chinese Journal of Population Resources and Environment, 14(2): 133-143
(37) Bradshaw, C.J., Ehrlich, P.R., Beattie, A., Ceballos, G., Crist, E., Diamond, J., Dirzo, R., Ehrlich, A.H., Harte, J., Harte, M.E. and Pyke, G. (2021) Underestimating the challenges of avoiding a ghastly future. Frontiers in Conservation Science, 1: Article 615419
(38) Cantú-Salazar, L., & Gaston, K. J. (2010). Very large protected areas and their contribution to terrestrial biological conservation. BioScience, 60(10), 808-818.
(39) Ward, M., Saura, S., Williams, B., Ramírez-Delgado, J.P., Arafeh-Dalmau, N., Allan, J.R., Venter, O., Dubois, G. and Watson, J.E. (2020) Just ten percent of the global terrestrial protected area network is structurally connected via intact land. Nature communications, 11(1), p.4563
Caveat: This is, in essence, a philosophy paper. A long one. Theoretically speaking, however, the target audience would be rewilding advocates who find intuitive appeal in statements like, e.g., “Evolution is wild. It is wild in the deepest meaning of the word, and thus is the hallmark and the highest good of wilderness (Uncle Dave Foreman, “Wild Things for Their Own Sake”).
A main thesis that I defend is that, really, we sound like fools when we talk as if wilderness is somehow necessary to preserve evolution per se. This is not a call to abandon evolution-focused rhetoric, however. On the contrary, I deeply believe that a normative commitment to respecting self-willed evolutionary processes must lie at the very heart of an ethic for rewilding. Our rhetoric, however, must be precisified. Specifically, I argue that we need to be more clear about the points that (as Foreman puts it) “[e]volution is good-in-itself,” not merely instrumentally, and – above all – that honoring this intrinsic worth requires the manifestation of respect for evolution’s autonomous creativity. Wilderness is merely an arena of evolution, but it is the arena for “self-willed” evolution.
This essay represents an attempt at dissecting and reconstructing the intuitively appealing idea (to some of us) that evolutionis, in some way, an appropriate object of conservation. I stress the importance of distinguishing between the process of evolution and the inputs to this process as potential objects of conservation (§1), and ultimately motivate the need to focus on the ethical mandate to respect the autonomy of evolution, rather than (for example) to protect evolution per se (§5), and I assess the implications for both of the previous dimensions (§6). Along the way, I motivate and defend the idea that evolution is (intrinsically) good (§§2-3), while emphasizing the fact that this normative assumption cannot be taken for granted even among conservation biologists with an interest in evolution (§4).
1. Introduction: Evolution’s Building Blocks vs Processes
At the top of The Rewilding Institute’s homepage is a striking quote from founder Dave Foreman: “The most needed and holy work of conservation is to keep whole the building blocks of evolution. Such is the true work of conservation, the goal of those who cannot live without wild things.” Its source is “Wild Things for Their Own Sake,” an essay that comes about as close as anything I’ve read to capturing my own intuitive view on the moral mandate for conservation. Like the strongest passages of Rewilding North America, this short essay embodies the ethical perspective behind my initial attraction to the rewilding movement (even though, incidentally, Foreman doesn’t use the word ‘rewilding’ once in the entire essay).
However, while the essay contains many compelling ideas, it lacks rigor and conceptual clarity from the standpoint of a philosopher (but, then again, what doesn’t from that perspective?!). Consider, for instance, the quotation above. While superficially inspiring (IMO), it surely oversimplifies. Foreman enjoins us to “keep whole the building blocks of evolution,” but what are the building blocks of evolution? Genetic diversity? Mutation? Inheritance? Selective pressures? And what, pray tell, does it mean to keep them whole? Without answers to these questions, conservationists lack any actionable guidance for their “holy work.”
That said, the “building blocks” metaphor is only one of several tropes that Foreman has employed in speaking about evolution as an object of conservation, and part of the purpose of my present essay is to argue that it’s not the one most important to wilderness protection and rewilding. In fact, even the aforequoted passage contains an elision. In the original text, Foreman continues, “…keep whole the building blocks of evolution along with the sweeping landscapes such as Arctic National Wildlife Refuge where that unforeseeable, unfathomable wonderwork can play out unhindered” (emphasis added). It’s the latter part of this sentence that closely mirrors my own moral position, that which first endeared me to the original North American rewilding movement: the process of evolution should be revered as a human-independent creative force that our late-coming species can’t hope to outdo; further, respecting its autonomy and creativity requires us to set aside and protect space – space, say, that’s sufficient for natural disturbances to shape habitats, for populations of extant species to live without human inference, and for speciation to occur (again and again…).
In “Wild Things for Their Own Sake” and other writings (including RNA), it’s clear that Foreman does consider conservation’s “holy work” to consist not only of maintaining the existence of the “building blocks” of evolution – whatever these are – but also protecting the autonomy of the process itself. Take, for example, his discussion of the motivation behind the creation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where he cites founders Lowell Sumner and George Collins as holding that natural processes are “right unto themselves and can evolve naturally without the medium of man” and that the refuge ought to be granted the “freedom to continue, unhindered and forever […] the particular story of Planet Earth unfolding here […] where its native creatures can still have the freedom to pursue their future, so distant, so mysterious.” Note, importantly, that Sumner and Collins don’t deny that nature can also evolve with “the medium of man.” What’s important is that evolution doesn’t need us (duh). Given that evolution can and does occur autonomously, it makes intuitive sense to think of granting this time-honored process freedom to do just that – as will be a recurring theme of this essay.
From the preceding short passage in Foreman’s essay, we can distinguish two different dimensions or variables that might be in question when one speaks about conservation’s mandate to, in some way, protectevolution:
(i) The degree/type of human intervention with respect to the inputs to the process (i.e., if you like, the “building blocks”) at some time t.
(ii) The degree/type of human influence on the unfolding of the process over time.
Although Foreman seems to blur the distinction, (i) and (ii) are importantly different concepts. Moreover, while talk of “building blocks” seems oriented toward (i), the intuition that we ought to let evolution “play out unhindered” is a response to (ii): it dictates that we must strive to minimizethe degree of human influence on the future course of evolution. However, a non-interventionist answer to (ii) does not necessarily a strictly non-interventionist answer to (i). Is it ever permissible to modify a landscape prior to leaving evolutionary processes to their “freedom to continue, unhindered and forever”? Should we clean up litter? Remove roads, dams, or other manmade structures? Eradicate invasive species? Replant native vegetation? Reintroduce extirpated species? Proxies of extinct species? “De-extinct” dodos? Novel species that have been genetically engineered to have a better chance of coping with the consequences of climate change? Novel species genetically engineered merely for the sake of throwing some fun new experiments into the mix (e.g., say, glow-in-the-dark fish and transparent frogs)?
I’ll return to these types of questions when I come ‘round to wrap up this essay in §6. For now, suffice it to recognize that when we consider the opportunity to reset the initial conditions upon which evolutionary processes are let alone to act, some types of interventions seem clearly more acceptable than others. What’s most important to note, perhaps, is that even ardent defenders of wilderness often share powerful intuitions that there are many cases in which we shouldn’t simply abandon modified and degraded landscapes to the natural course of evolution from here on out. I doubt, for example, that many who share Foreman’s love of wild things would balk at intervening for the sake of removing a dam prior to letting nature be. Nor would many would balk at reintroducing wolves, cougars, or jaguars, for example, to parts of their former ranges from which humans have extirpated them, and which they are unlikely to recolonize without active human assistance. Rewilding supporters, in general, tend to accept restorationto a more natural baseline prior to letting wild nature be. But it’s not an “anything goes” situation. Most defenders of wilderness, I presume, would oppose the release of Glofish into an undammed river for the sake of providing evolution with a greater variety of genetic raw material for its future self-willed experimentation. And there are borderline cases, supported by some but not all wilderness and rewilding proponents – such as the use of proxy species to replace extinct native species. What’s the dividing between acceptable and unacceptable intervention prior to withdrawing our hand? And might it have anything to do with the notion of respect for evolution’s autonomy? I think it does (§6).
In the next two sections, before delving further into these two facets of conservation’s “holy work,” I will step back to motivate the intuition that evolution – specifically, autonomous or “self-willed” evolution as unconstrained by willful human interference – ought to be the object of conservation. This is essential because, in an important sense, “conserving evolution” doesn’t even make sense: evolution will continue to occur regardless, even in areas heavily impacted by human activity, and it will occur even if people intentionally intervene to manipulate the process (as I discuss further in §5). We should, therefore, resist uncritically accepting Foreman’s interpretation – on which protecting evolution implies protecting wilderness – and first reflect more deeply on why evolution is important. Like Foreman, I hold that evolution is intrinsically valuable and commands our wonder, awe, and deference as a natural process which both created and long antedated Homo sapiens. However, this is only one of many normative perspectives on evolution seen in conservation biology (§4).
Defending “pro-wilderness” answers to (i) and (ii) requires first motivating the claim that evolution is intrinsically valuable and worthy of respect as an autonomous natural process – for it’s ultimately the element of respect or deference to evolution’s own autonomous choices, rather than a desire to preserve evolution per se, that undergirds perspectives like Foreman’s.
2. Evolution is Good: The Basic Intuition
Let’s start with the basic intuition: whether one chooses to focus on evolution’s building blocks or evolutionary processes, the common premise is that evolution should, in some way, be an object of conservation. In his well-known article “What is Conservation Biology?” (1985), Michael Soulé enumerates four normative postulates that are shared by most conservationists: diversity of organisms is good; ecological complexity is good; evolution is good; biotic diversity has intrinsic value. He says little to justify the inclusion of the third postulate, which he seems to find obvious enough without further explanation: “Assuming that life itself is good, how can one maintain an ethical neutrality about evolution? Life itself owes its existence and present diversity to the evolutionary process” (p. 731).
Despite my employment in the ethics industry (where theory tends to linger a few centuries behind the insights of conservation biology), I find myself in agreement with Soulé. His argument for the claim that “Evolution is good,” as brief as it is, captures a powerful intuition – one that, at its heart, is shared by not only conservationists but also countless religious believers (for whatever that is worth): if life itself is good (and it is), then whatever power created life is also good. Worshippers of God harbored the same basic intuition for centuries before Darwin presented his theory of natural selection, and it’s common ground even with present-day Creationists who adamantly deny that an animal died before Adam realized he was naked. Life owes its existence and present diversity to whatever it was that created and shaped it. That’s hardly a novel or radical idea. It just so happens that this creative power wasn’t a supernatural deity (sorry… there’s no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy either, btw).
Religions have tended to agree that humans owe reverence and respect to the god(s) who created our world and ourselves. To be sure, these religions are also wrong about many, many things – such as the supposition that it’s necessary to posit a supernatural cause of life’s origin – but mightn’t there be something normatively probative about the root intuition that our Creator deserves our reverence and respect? I suggest that there is. If a person can fail to experience such sentiments while marveling at Earth’s life in all its diversity, it would seem that person must be lacking in some of the very qualities that we prize as uniquely human (featherless biped though they may be). Life on Earth is truly astounding in its biological diversity and ecological complexity – and, indeed, in the mere fact that it exists at all. Whatever caused it to come into being is thereby an awe-inspiring force indeed. Yet it is no god or gods but simply the natural process of evolution that is our one true Creator.
To be sure, evolution has – or rather, lacks – certain traits that religions (especially Western monotheistic religions) tend to ascribe to deities who are deemed worthy of reverence. Evolution, for instance, is not omniscient (on the contrary, it doesn’t know a damn thing), nor is it omnibenevolent – or even partially benevolent. Evolution doesn’t love us or care for us. Of course, evolution is also not malevolent; evolution doesn’t have a mind, and so doesn’t value us in any way. But does this make the evolutionary process – the shaper of all life in all its wondrous diversity – any less awe-inspiring? I fail to see how it could. Nature’s indifference does not abate the wonder that Nature instills in us. On the contrary, the natural world should seem all the more marvelous when we acknowledge that the creative processes that crafted it are nothing like the creative processes that we enact with our own hands and minds. It defies comprehension. It is ineffable. It commands wonder, awe, and humility. It humbles us, and rightfully compels us to question, “Why assume the human brain could outdo this?”
Now, I’ve never felt the pull of anthropocentric worldviews. On behalf of those who do, however, it is worth emphasizing that we can’t be spared the obligation to marvel at evolution on account of whatever special fondness we have for the human kind, for the simple reason that evolution created us too. Whatever it is we love about humans – our intellect, our empathy, our language, our abilities to fashion and use tools, our capacity to form societies and transmit culture, our bipedalism, our relative lack of body hair, and so on – evolution created it too. We wouldn’t possess our own remarkable abilities were it not for the same self-directed natural processes that also fashioned the rest of life on Earth.
Meanwhile, even the staunchest anthropocentrist must admit that evolution is not teleological. The evolutionary history of life on Earth has not been a goal-directed process destined to terminate in Homo sapiens. Foreman also makes this point in “Wild Things”:
“Darwin saw that evolution has not worked with goals in mind nor has it been overseen or led in any way. Paleontologists, such as the late Stephen Jay Gould, chide our high and mighty gall with the sharp understanding that, therefore, Man is not the unerring outcome or endpoint of hundreds of millions of years of ‘life’s descent with modification,’ but is, rather, a happy or unhappy (hinging on what kind of Earthling you are) happenstance. Belying Gandalf and other wizards and sages, we were not ‘meant to be.’ […] We happened to become, just as did deep-sea fish with gleaming flesh-lanterns hanging in front of their nightmare mouths.”
It follows that even the staunchest anthropocentrist has no reasonable basis to deny that evolution, left to its devices, could go on to produce other species with capacities as or more impressive as those they admire in humankind. It’s pure hubris to decide that evolution should end with us – or, better put, that all future evolution must occur within our thrall – when we could use our incredible evolution-created brains to choose otherwise.
3. Is Evolution Really Good? Objections and Refinements
The proposal that we have a moral mandate to respect evolution will raise some obvious objections (and not only from America’s ranks of evolution-deniers). The first is that the proposal is nothing but an obvious case of the naturalistic fallacy, assuming that self-willed evolutionary processes are good merely because they are natural (§3.1). An overlapping worry is that it’s hypocritical to argue that humans should respect self-willed evolutionary processes in wild nature, given that we obviously don’t (and won’t) in civilization (§3.2). A follow-up is that it would represent a morally problematic type of human exceptionalism to maintain that it’s okay for our species to manage evolutionary processes in civilization while denying that it’s okay to intervene for the sake of other animals (§3.3). Overcoming these objections might require admitting to a bit of speciesist compromise, but they’re meanwhile a good opportunity to dig in our heels on the awe-inspiring nature of the deep-time evolutionary history of life, which renders it self-evident that autonomous evolution is intrinsically valuable.
I might flag one other objection that I won’t bother mentioning again: the idea that the conservation of self-willed land is a luxury that humanity can’t afford, given that our own species has over 8 billion mouths to feed. I have often seen such statements uttered as knee-jerk reactions to rewilding proposals, but despite the pretense of magnanimity, they rest on a root assumption of human imperialism. Even if it’s a long-term project, humanity can choose to shrink its footprint and population size in order to make room for self-willed land. If there’s a moral mandate to preserve autonomous evolution processes for their own sake, we can and must do just that – no excuses. To accept human overshoot as a given is to accept human overshoot as an entitlement, for it’s within our capacities to choose to reverse it.
3.1 The Naturalistic Fallacy
G.E. Moore introduced the term ‘naturalistic fallacy’ to refer to the philosophical mistake (in his view) of concluding a normative claim (e.g. “smoking pot is good”) from a claim about something’s natural properties (e.g. “smoking pot is pleasant”). (I don’t think this was Moore’s exact motivating example, although he did make the general point that “X is good” doesn’t follow from “X is pleasant,” if memory serves.) Today, the term ‘naturalistic fallacy’ is used colloquially to refer to the fallacy of concluding that something is good or acceptable simply because it occurs in nature (e.g. “eating meat is morally acceptable, because humans are animals, and it’s only natural for animals to eat other animals”). Interestingly, though, Moore himself conceived of the naturalistic fallacy much more broadly, even using it to argue against “divine command” theories of morality (e.g. “adultery is wrong because God declared that adultery is wrong”). For Moore, the important take-away was that the normative claims cannot be derived from descriptive ones; statements about what ought to be can’t be derived from statements about what is (whether natural or supernatural). On his account of ethics, moral properties are unique and irreducible. If this all sounds tangential to the topic of the normative foundations of conservation, that’s because it is – and that’s one reason I don’t think the naturalistic fallacy is a real worry for the Soulé/Foreman position.
The claim that evolution is good – or, all the more, the claim that evolution is good as it occurs on its own, unhindered by the actions of humans – might seem to smack of the naturalistic fallacy, since it seems to assume that something possesses the moral property of goodness simply because it’s natural. Indeed, Foreman effectively asserts as much, stating that wild things are good in virtue of being wild: “… wild things, which are Earthlings that are as yet self-willed and not thralls to Man. These other Earthlings are good because they are and because they are free by being wild. Wild things are good-in-themselves” (emphasis added). For Foreman, Nature’s freedom from Man’s will is intrinsically good, a truth he seems to accept as axiomatic. This includes, perhaps more paradigmatically, the process of evolution: “Evolution embodies wild things being for their own sakes. Evolution is good-in-itself.”
I maintain that, in fact, that this is not an instance of the naturalistic fallacy. First, it doesn’t commit the naturalistic fallacy as defined by Moore, because Foreman is making a claim about self-willed nature and evolution, not attempting to define what makes something good (§3.1.1). Moreover, I deny that Foreman (or Soulé) commits the naturalistic fallacy even in its colloquial sense, simply because there’s no argument from a premise “X is natural.” As I presented in our first pass in §2, the claim that “evolution is good” is the conclusion of a different argument, which doesn’t contain such a premise (§3.1.2). More importantly, though, I conjecture that the moral belief that “self-willed evolution is intrinsically good”needn’t be, and sometimes is not, the conclusion of any rational argument at all. Instead, for many or most lovers of wild things, it’s merely something intuitively obvious, a bedrock proposition, once our sentiments are attuned to the wonder of life on Earth and its natural history (§3.1.3).
3.1.1 What’s Good vs What’s Goodness
I don’t know whether Foreman was a moral naturalist or non-naturalist in the Moorean sense, but this seems to be an orthogonal issue – and one about which, TBH, the vast majority of conservationists would rightfully give zero f***s. If we like, we might imagine Foreman saying this: “Self-willed evolution is good, and by the way, goodness itself is an irreducible, sui generis property; self-willed evolution merely happens to be something that possesses it.” Well, actually, I find it hard to imagine Uncle Dave saying that, but if he did, he’d seem to accept Moore’s view of moral properties. Likewise, in saying “Evolution is good,” Soulé is merely ascribing goodness to evolution. Neither Foreman nor Soulé attempts to make a claim about what goodness itself consists in – and it’s unclear why in f***’s sake a conservationist should ever need to engage in moral theory at that level of abstraction, however important it is that conservation be morally grounded.
In other words, Foreman and Soulé are willing to accept the concept of “goodness” as something that people will intuitively understand. This, to me, seems reasonable. Just as a social scientist can study human behavior without providing an account of physiology, a conservation biologist can delineate the moral foundations of their discipline without providing a metaethical theory on the nature of the good. They assert that certain natural things are good, but they never attempt to define goodness in terms of natural properties, since it’s unnecessary for them to go to the bother of defining goodness at all. Thus, any accusations of the Moorean naturalistic fallacy are non-starters.
3.1.2 “The bringer of goodness is thereby also good.”
To be sure, most people who talk about the “naturalistic fallacy” these days don’t mean the term in the sense originally used by Moore. They mean, roughly, that it’s fallacious to assume that X is good on the grounds that X occurs or happens in nature. Although this appears more threatening to the positions of Soulé and Foreman, I maintain that it also misses the mark.
In §2, following Soulé, I accepted the premise that whatever in fact caused life to exist and diversify is ipso facto good. This might seem to derive a claim about moral properties from a mere empirical fact, exactly what Moore advised us not to do. However, this claim is not a brute assertion but the conclusion of an argument:
P1.The existence of life is good.
P2.What brings goodness into being is thereby also good.
C. Therefore, whatever in fact caused life to exist is itself good.
This argument makes assumptions about the logical or conceptual relations between good things. However, it does not rest upon any specific definition of ‘good’. Moreover, it does not require the latter to be a valid argument (as long as there’s no equivocation on the meaning).
Now, for any philosopher – even G.E. Moore – moral theorizing has to hit bedrock somewhere, usually with unshakeable brute intuitions about what’s good and bad. Most people, presumably, would agree that the existence of complex life is good. As Foreman also writes, “If there is good-in-itself at all, I would think ‘life is good’ would be self-evident or unmistakable.” This is true even for those who aren’t biocentrists or ecocentrists, since life is kinda a prerequisite for other things that even anthropocentrists think of as intrinsically good, things like health, love, friendship, or appreciation of beauty. Thus, P1 seems like little more than a basic postulate in an inventory of things that are obviously good.
The action, presumably, will be with P2 – the elided premise in Soulé’s brief argument. Admittedly, P2 isn’t obviously true, and it possesses the fatal flaw of lending itself to apparent counterexamples involving references to Hilter (e.g. “Let us suppose that some of Hilter’s paintings were in fact good; does this thereby entail that Hilter was good?”). Mightn’t something cause good to exist – perhaps even accidentally – without being good itself? There are significant concerns with P2, but they’re not the naturalistic fallacy.
I happen to think, however, that the more promising approach is one that doesn’t require us to defend the truth of P2 at all. As an alternative, given that moral theorizing must hit bedrock somewhere, we might consider the idea that the postulate “(self-willed) evolution is good” is itself moral bedrock. In this case, there is no further need to “prove” that evolution is good by appealing to the goodness of the life that it has created. So let’s go there…
3.1.3 “Evolution is good, period.”
As an observation, I’ve encountered no defender of wilderness who concluded that “wilderness is good” on the basis of a logical deduction from the premise that “what is natural is good.” On the contrary, most fervent advocates of the intrinsic value of wilderness are people who have directly experienced wilderness areas and come away indelibly impressed by their undeniable beauty, wonder, and magnificence. For many wilderness advocates, the proposition that “self-willed nature is intrinsically good” might be said to have roughly the status of a revealed moral truth. It is not, in any case, the conclusion of a deductive argument; it’s a truth that nature impresses upon a person directly, and one that can seem as entrenched and unshakeable as propositions like “health is intrinsically good,” “love is intrinsically good,” or “friendship is intrinsically good.” As mentioned above, moral theorizing has to hit bedrock somewhere – and I posit that the inherent goodness of self-willed nature is itself moral bedrock. Further, I hypothesize that the fact that many or most moral philosophers ignore this is due to demographic bias: most moral philosophers, like most people, are estranged from experiencing or even thinking about wild nature. When wild nature is just something “out there” – or something that used to be out there, but which humans have already vanquished from Earth – it’s easier to ignore, forget about, or conceptualize in merely instrumental terms.
(I realize that it may be an unpopular move dialectically to accuse other philosophers of moral ignorance due to estrangement from important lived experiences. Nonetheless, I think it true.)
Although direct experiences of self-willed nature might be the most common route to recognition of its intrinsic value, I believe this recognition and respect can also result from indirect means, such as imaginative and mindful engagement with the natural sciences. For my own part (as someone who, confessedly, has never set foot in a designated wilderness area), it simply always seems to be the default position to see the natural and unguided unfolding of evolution as something inherently good. For me, this is likely the consequence of decades of casual fascination with palaeontolgy and the deep-time history of life on Earth. Even as an urban-dwelling adult “professional,” I’ve often sauntered along sidewalks in the thoroughly humanized landscape of Columbus, Ohio while distracting myself with fantasies of the landscape during its prehistory as a warm Devonian sea, teeming with reefs of corals and crinoids, a few placoderms swimming by… so unlike the Holocene, so unlike even the Silurian or the Carboniferous. How can one imaginatively reflect on the long history of life on Earth without perceiving intrinsic value in evolutionary processes that are (as Foreman puts it) “free to unfold for wild things in its own unhobbled, eerie way”? But then again, most moral philosophers also don’t spend a significant amount of time contemplating palaeontolgy…
The upshot is simply this: it’s possible to cultivate a mindset in which “(self-willed) evolution is good” has as much claim to the status of a self-evident “bedrock proposition” as “life is good,” an mindset of deep enchantment and wonder at life’s natural history. Moreover, once one attains this mindset, it’s hard to unsee the intrinsic value of naturally unraveling evolutionary processes. There does seem to be value added to our fascination with the diversity of life on Earth – and even the mysteries of our own species and its wondrous capacities – when we reflect not only on life as it is but also on the billions of years of arational and unguided processes that created it. I submit that it’s hard not to instinctively see the evolutionary history of life as the source of additional wonder (if this isn’t obvious, perhaps try asking a dinosaur-clutching child?); it is more than an instrumentally valuable tool for the creation of intrinsically valuable life. For my own part (and I know that I am not alone in this view), I find that knowledge that life is the product of blind and impersonal natural processes generates much mystery and enchantment in the more-than-human world than acceptance of the false belief that life was created in its present state by an intelligent and anthropomorphic god.
Importantly, the claim here is not that evolution is valuable because it’s a source of wonder and enchantment to humans. My suggestion is that we should accept sentiments like wonder, enchantment, and awe as morally probative sentiments, just like love and empathy (or perhaps, on the negative side, shame or indignation). If knowledge and contemplation of the deep-time evolutionary history of life tends to arouse such sentiments in those who are both mindful and informed, then that is evidence that the natural unfolding of evolution is intrinsically valuable – and thereby worth protecting for its own sake.
My suggestions above are parallelled, I believe, by the arguments implicit in “Wild Things for Their Own Sake.” Following Leopold, Foreman identifies conservationists as “those who cannot live without wild things.” Such a personal love and need for wild things, as he says, “is bedrock” – bedrock, as I would suggest, upon which to build a moral theory. But Foreman is meanwhile clear enough that wild things are good for their own sake (I mean, hell, it’s the friggin’ title). They aren’t good (only) because they bring pleasure and enchantment to our lives as humans. On the contrary, it’s our deep and immutable love of wild things that makes it impossible to deny that wild things are good in themselves. We might say much the same about the undeniable intrinsic value of a person for whom we feel a great love: we don’t consider our loved ones to be valuable because they engender pleasant feelings in us; much to the contrary, our feelings toward our loved ones reveal to us plainly and without question that they are intrinsically valuable beings. Foreman is not explicitly a moral sentimentalist, but one can read him here as endorsing a morally probative role of the sentiments – as I suggest.
And what, again, does this long and rambling sub-subsection have to do with the naturalistic fallacy? Recall that in colloquial understanding, the naturalistic fallacy is to infer “X is good (or X is acceptable)” from “X is natural.” It can be exemplified by perverse reasoning such as concluding that rape is acceptable from the premise that forced copulation is a natural mating strategy among many non-human animals, or that it’s okay from a child to push her sibling from a tree into crocodile-infested water, because it’s merely a natural behavior (as seen in, e.g., egret chicks). But as articulated above, the claim that evolution is good is not the conclusion of an argument from an implicit premise referring to its naturalness – for it’s not the conclusion of an argument at all, but an axiom, something akin a truth directly revealed by intuition.
(And as for the fact that it’s not intuitive to many people, I’ve suggested that that’s merely because many people are estranged from nature and even from the imaginative contemplation thereof. Granted, the latter is an empirical conjecture, and it is probable that much irresolvable disagreement-in-value would persist even if all people had relevant experience. The likelihood of an inescapable stalemate is why I believe that, ultimately, ecological ethics is really pretty boring.)
3.2 Human Hypocrisy?
Let’s now turn to another objection, ostensibly more damning than mere accusation of the naturalistic fallacy: as a matter of fact, leaving evolution to its own devices results in states of affairs that are obviously bad, such as disease outbreaks, mass starvation, or being attacked and eaten by predators. Moreover, not only are these states of affairs ones that are intuitively bad, they’re ones that can be prevented – and replaced by states of affairs that are clearly better – through deliberate human intervention in the natural course of evolution.
Virtually every human alive – the author included – is disposed to agree that it’s morally permissible, even morally mandatory, for humans to take our own evolutionary destiny into our own hands. For example, we use vaccines and other medicines to treat or (ideally) eradicate diseases, for example, rather than permitting viruses and bacteria to run their course, allowing natural selection to gradually skew the human gene pool to genotypes better able to survive the diseases they cause (at least ‘til reproductive age). We severely nearsighted humans wear corrective lenses, when otherwise an early accidental death might have prevented our transmitting the relevant genes to another generation. Rather than letting the slowest and weakest among fall prey to large carnivores who fail to perceive the sanctity in our bodily meatsacks, we avail ourselves of technologies to obliterate natural predators en masse. And so forth. Nearly all of us accept that, to some extent, our technologically enabled self-protection against natural threats as our right, even our mandate for the sake of our communities and societies. This proves, it seems, that we believe not only that we can outdo natural evolution with our own ingenuity but also that we are morally right in doing so.
Isn’t it hypocritical for the author, for one, to call upon people to revere natural evolutionary processes at the same time as partaking of the advantages and protections afforded by human technology and civilization? I am, after all, quadruple-vaccinated against COVID-19, and in matters of public health I’ve remained staunchly anti-anti-vaxx. If I were true to my stated principles, should I not want to allow unguided evolutionary processes to sort out the human response to COVID-19 and other infectious diseases?
We might pause here to note what this objection is not: it’s not the concern that acceptance of the “goodness” of evolution will lead to “Social Darwinism” and hence morally egregious policies such as eugenics. Eugenics, after all, is deliberate human intervention in the composition of the human gene pool – anything but leaving self-willed evolution to its own devices. Nor does veneration of natural evolution seem to entail that societies should choose laissez-faire capitalism over a welfare state; economics seems like something entirely orthogonal here. Social Darwinism, as typically construed, has little to do with biological Darwinism – and I’m talking here about biological Darwinism. Yet, as we’ve seen, the latter alone is sufficient to raise serious moral concerns in the context of human society.
I actually think the hypocrisy objection has some teeth, to be sharpened in §3.3, but an initial response is to say that it misses the target entirely – for it was the never the proposal of Soulé, Foreman, me, or any other conservation biologist (to my awareness) that self-willed evolution must be allowed to run its course over the entire world, human civilization included. On the surface, at least, there’s no incompatibility between controlling the unwanted action of natural evolutionary processes within the scope of human society (e.g. vaccinating against infectious diseases)at the same time as preventing the sprawl of human society, setting aside wild places specifically to safeguard the natural flow of evolution. It may be something of a compromise position, but it seems nonetheless internally consistent, to declare something like the following: “We accept it as our evolution-given right to use our know-how to the best of our ability to advance our wellbeing as a species. At the same time, however, we acknowledge that we are not evolution’s be-all and end-all, and thus we also choose to protect areas of the Earth sufficient for natural evolutionary processes to exercise their own creative powers in shaping future life, unguided and unassisted by us.”
This is, it seems, precisely Foreman’s view. Clearly, Foreman maintains that human societies need to exercise restraint in order to save space for “self-willed” evolutionary processes to transpire: “Man must show restraint […] by leaving some lands and wildlife alone, by not stamping our will on them,” and “we must step back somewhere (many somewheres) so evolution is free to unfold for wild things in its own unhobbled, eerie way.” Meanwhile, however, he never suggests that humanity must submit itself to governance by these processes. It is a way, perhaps, to have our cake and eat it: we can take advantage of our unique abilities to improve the lot of our kind through medicine and other technologies, as long as we limit the expansion of our civilization and retain areas of wilderness, where wild things can “follow their own path as cobbled out by evolution, ecology, and happenstance.”
3.3 Human Exceptionalism?
The compromise position suggested in §3.2 is alluring to me, as it likely is to any other wilderness advocate reading this on a beloved technological device. However, given that many of us also adamantly deny human exceptionalism, worries about hypocrisy linger.
Here is the next in the line of worries: if deliberate interference with evolution is better for humans, then why should it not also be better for non-human animals? Is there any reason not to assume that, like us, many non-human animals would prefer the protection, security, and comfort of domestication? We associate wildness with freedom, but what if wild animals, given the choice, would happily trade that freedom for goods like food, protection, and antibiotics? Many humans, after all, prefer a life of office work to a life of bushcraft, despite the numerous artificial constraints imposed by the former. Is it morally wrong to allow sentient non-human animals to remain mere pawns in the ongoing saga of evolution – fraught as it is with disease, predation, scarcity, exposure to the elements, and other hardships – when we could impose our civilized technologies upon them too? (“What have the humans ever done for us…?”)
Some philosophers have argued that we should, in fact,protect non-human animals from such natural hardships like starvation, disease, and predation – to the groans and incredulous stares of those who can’t live without wild things. See, for example, the literary inspiration behind a group of animal rights activists and transhumanist crackpots on a mission to “safely transform carnivorous species into herbivorous ones,” or Martha Nussbaum’s latest book Justice for Animals (Chapter 10) and the associated article “A Peopled Wilderness” (The New York Review). Reading the work of Nussbaum or Jeff McMahan, suffused as it is by an utter indifference to the wonders of ecology and evolution, I can’t help but feel embarrassed for my own discipline (but recall my accusations made against the majority of philosophers in §3.1.3).
Nussbaum embeds her argument in a purported takedown of the concept of the “wild” that is frankly too atrocious to waste time diagnosing its flaws. In any case, it would be unnecessary to do so, since the welfarist positions of Nussbaum and McMahan seem to lead to radically interventionist conclusions even without Nussbaum’s assumptions that humans irrevocably control all of the Earth and the idea of the “wild” is a mere human-contrived fantasy: if self-willed nature does exist, the Nussbaum/McMahan position entails that we should put an end to that, for (formerly) wild animals’ own health and welfare. Nussbaum notes that “For millennia, Nature has meant hunger, excruciating pain, often the extinction of entire groups,” and denies that self-willed nature offers “useful guidance” for normative thinking (JfA, p. 227). Instead, she enjoins us to “use our knowledge – wisely and deliberately – to protect wild animal lives” from natural dangers and hardships (p. 235). The fact that Nussbaum is thinking on the order of “millennia” should tell us something about her grasp on evolutionary history.
To the lover of nature, as opposed to the animal lover, proposals like “herbivorizing predators” are viscerally appalling. Nevertheless, I do believe that the tu quoque objection has some force: we humans think we’re good enough to use our technologies to protect ourselves from natural disease, scarcity, and predation, and even the majority of wilderness advocates don’t plan to give this up (as granted in §3.2); why, then, should we deprive other sentient animals of the same benefits of our know-how? We might offer up the line that only humans can express consent to relinquishing our “wildness” for safety and security. However, those persuaded by Nussbaum’s conception of justice for animals would doubtlessly insist that we don’t even need to ask: we can reasonably assume consent when the alternative is an early and painful death. On the other hand, perhaps the assumption is unwarranted. After all, a few humans do choose backwoods survivalism – or would if they could – and resent civilization. We don’t know for sure without asking, and non-human animals don’t speak our language.
Intuitively, however, there should be no reason to worry about whether or not non-human animals would consent to a full-fledged taming of the wild “for wild things’ own good” – for, intuitively, this Nussbaum/McMahan-inspired line is ludicrous and dead wrong. Instead of a viable competing perspective, it’s the sort of counterintuitive consequence that one puts forth as a reductio ad absurdum of ideas like “compassionate conversation,” as I instinctively did after my friend Mark Fisher altered me to the existence of herbivorizepredators.org. It’s been my position that rewilding advocates shouldn’t forefront the wellbeing of individual animals, precisely because it has such ludicrous entailments that run afoul of our commitment to the protection of self-willed evolutionary processes (e.g. I have put forth this view in response to a recent column by William Lynn, as here on Twitter). Yet merely saying this is question-begging: why should we protect self-willed evolutionary processes when doing so leads to preventable individual suffering? After all, it’s not what we’ve chosen for our own species, and most of us believe that it would be morally wrong to choose it for human societies.
It would demand a separate article to address the tension and controversy between ethical theories focused on the wellbeing of individual animals and the ecological holism of ecocentric ethics, including Foreman’s/my evolution-first perspective. However, as I reflect on my own intuitions, the truths I just can’t shake include the following: (a) predation and other causes of individual pain and suffering have been natural facts of the history of life since at least the Cambrian; (b) these dangers to individuals were also selective forces that propelled evolution for the past 500+ million years; (c) without this evolutionary history, Earth would never have produced creatures with the “Capabilities” that Nussbaum holds so dear, nor creatures with capable of inventing modern medicine and willfully domesticating the wild; (d) the latter creatures only happened to be (as Foreman put it); (e) if humans had not evolved, there’d’ve simply been no question that evolution would continue on its own unhobbled path, along with all its concomitant pain and suffering; (f) we don’t know what novel lifeforms autonomous evolutionary processes would (and still could) produce without deliberate human intervention, but if we think that we’re worth the hundreds of millions of years of suffering that antedated our evolution, then who’s to say that these possible future species wouldn’t be worth the suffering that a Nussbaum would have us prevent? I simply find it impossible to rationalize longer lives and more peaceful deaths for any number of individual animals as an acceptable trade-off for the premature curtailing of the uncertain unfolding of future evolution.
4. Proposed Reasons to Conserve “Evolutionary Potential”
For the remainder of this piece, let’s accept the common intuition that animal-rights positions like those of Nussbaum are wackadoodle (to adopt a technical term from Jack Humphrey, p.c.) and that evolution ought to be left to continue as a natural phenomenon without attempting to force it to conform to human ideals of justice. This still leaves much room for foundational normative disagreement between conservation biologists, and these underlying differences in value can profoundly influence one’s views about the appropriate means to “conserve evolution” in practice. Differences are especially stark with respect to questions concerning the degree and type of deliberate human intervention that is acceptable.
According to the position expounded above, evolution and its natural creativity – unaided by us – is a bearer of intrinsic value. Foreman, following Soulé and Leopold before him, further argues that this implies a need for the protection of wilderness areas. Before looking in more detail at the practical implications of the “evolution is good” postulate (i.e. under what circumstances it actually entails wilderness conservation), it’s important to stress that this position does not represent the only normative basis upon which conservation biologists have argued for the importance of evolution as an object of conservation. Most notably, it’s possible to believe that evolutionary processes are important without believing that their value is intrinsic. Indeed, it’s possible to believe that evolutionary processes are important due to their ultimate instrumental value for people, or even due to their instrumental value in preserving human-valued biodiversity in the face of human impact.
It is not my goal, of course, to suggest that we ought to “let a hundred flowers bloom” with respect to schools of thought on the moral basis for protecting evolutionary processes or evolution’s “building blocks.” Of course I support free speech and open debate. But I also support having some backbone and defending the position that one believes to be true, especially when (as in the case at hand) divergent normative frameworks lead to prescriptions for action that are often diametrically opposed. It’s important to acknowledge competing perspectives on the value of evolution, because it’s imperative for wilderness advocates to learn that they can’t rest content with parroting Soulé’s axiom that “evolution is good,” sharing the Foreman quotation on the rewilding.org frontpage, or echoing Leopold’s statement that wilderness is the theater of evolution. Statements such as “evolution is good” oversimplify, and they ignore the fact that conservationists with highly contrary opinions could say the same things. Furthermore, divergent normative frameworks also permit extremely different practical interpretations of the mandate to “keep whole evolution’s building blocks” (cf. §5.2).
An article published in 2020 in Evolutionary Applications is very useful in illustrating the myriad perspectives that conservation biologists bring to the table when discussing (or presupposing) the importance of evolution (Emmanuel Milot, Arnaud Béchet and Virginie Maris, “The dimensions of evolutionary potential in biological conservation”). Milot, Béchet and Maris (MB&M) usefully showcase the fact that “conserving evolutionary potential” can be interpreted as something very human-centric, in both its motivations and its execution.
First, though, I want to note that even Soulé doesn’t necessarily take the strong approach of proposing that evolution itself is something intrinsically good, as opposed to instrumentally good insofar as it generates biodiversity (or life itself; cf. the argument reconstruction in §3.1.2). Soulé makes a point of specifying that biotic diversity is intrinsically good (Postulate 4), which he does not in the case of evolution. If this is indeed Soulé’s position on the relative value of evolution and biodiversity, it seems bass-ackwards. As I’ve noted in various past writings, biodiversity does not always appear to be good ipso facto; instead, greater diversity seems good only insofar as it’s the result of natural processes. For example, releasing lab-created chimeras (or non-native species) into wild nature might indeed increase regional biodiversity. However, this seems to subtract rather than add value to the landscape; it is pollution, not enhancement. On the flip side, the extinction events of prehistory, including mass extinctions, were simply part of natural unfolding of life’s long history, opening new niches for adaptive radiation and novel evolutionary experiments. The present biodiversity crisis is bad, but the fundamental ill is not biodiversity loss per se but its cause: human overshoot and the accompanying destruction of natural ecosystems and self-willed natural processes.
I might devote a future essay specifically to the case for an “evolution-first” instead of “biodiversity-first” ecological ethic. It might appear to split hairs between different types of ecocentrism, but there are real differences in practical implications. Presently, however, I will defer further discussion and turn to the point that the conservation of evolutionary potential – to refer to the concept of MB&M’s focus – needn’t even be ecocentric in its motivations. Indeed, some conservationists propose the same objective for anthropocentric reasons.
“Dimensions of evolutionary potential…” is a worthwhile read for any conservationist attracted to the normative positions of Foreman and/or Soulé, largely because it provides a reminder that evolution-focused conservation implies neither ecocentrism nor wilderness conservation. Indeed, while MB&M do mention the idea of a “non-anthropocentric, process-centred, normative commitment to preserve evolution as a process in itself,” they give little attention to the view, which they present this view as an outlying perspective: “while [the conservation of evolutionary potential] is viewed as a means in the vast majority of instances, there is also a tendency by some to consider it as an end in itself, without any explicit qualification of the normative goal it is supposed to contribute to” (p. 1365; emphasis in original).
Because they swiftly pass over the aforementioned “process-centered commitment,” many of the details of MB&M’s article are orthogonal to the present discussion – given that it’s precisely this neglected perspective that I consider to be the necessary core of an ethic for rewilding and wilderness conservation. Nonetheless, it is well worth paying attention to the disparate normative frameworks that can underlie the demand to conserve the vehicles of evolutionary potential, as this highlights some of the problems with Foreman’s “building blocks” rhetoric. Granted, it’s not quite clear whether MB&M’s “vehicles of evolutionary potential” are the same as Foreman’s “building blocks of evolution,” since Uncle Dave leaves the latter undefined. MB&M, in contrast, do provide an operational definition for “evolutionary potential,” this being “the property of a biological entity (e.g. genome, trait, population, species, ecosystem) to be able to experience heritable change in some of its components between times t and t + Δt.” As this schematic definition makes plain, there are multiple variables that need to be defined before proposing any type of actionable plan for the conservation of evolutionary potential, including the relevant type of biological entity and the appropriate timespan. There’s no need to get into the weeds here. What merits emphasis is simply the range of normative frameworks that MB&M identify as compatible with the conservation of evolutionary potential (and thus, presumably, the building blocks of evolution).
Following Soulé 1985, one possible position noted by MB&M is that evolutionary potential is instrumentally valuable as a means to promote future biodiversity, where biodiversity is intrinsically good. But this is far from the only option. For example, the generation of biodiversity might be accepted as a proximate goal, but the ultimate goal might be the provision of ecosystem services for humans via this biodiversity. MB&M summarize this type anthropocentric thinking on the value of evolution:
“Within the context of global environmental changes, the evolutionary potential of ecosystems to adapt to new environmental conditions could be a key feature to maintain or enhance the provision of ecosystem services […]. Furthermore, the evolutionary process itself may provide benefits to humans, coined “evosystem services”; some authors go as far as to metaphorically qualify the evolutionary process a “factory for human uses” […], for instance when a native species evolves rapidly to predate a harmful exotic species” (p. 1374).
Another perspective considered by MB&M has it that evolutionary potential is important not necessarily to promote the future diversification of life, but to allow existing biological lineages to adapt in the face of climate change and other anthropogenic modifications of the Earth (see their discussion of “process” and “pattern” on p. 1364). Here again, the protected biodiversity may be deemed valuable either intrinsically or instrumentally. It might be considered valuable to humans, whether for further practical reasons or simply for the “preservation of contemporary species of human interest” (see Box 3, p. 1366). MB&M also entertain the possibility of conceiving of the conservation of evolutionary potential as something useful to individual animals (i.e. the accursed “compassionate conservation” perspective we touched on in §3.3). Here, one might conjecture that “for individuals confronted to changing environments, being able to express adaptive traits is beneficial if it means less stress or suffering for them” (p. 1374) or, alternatively put, that evolutionary potential might be “a vital asset to allow the survival and welfare of the individual members of these [animal] populations” in the face of rapid environmental changes (Box 3, p. 1366).
In sum, a commitment to conserving evolutionary potential doesn’t by itself imply an ecocentric moral framework, much less commitment to the autonomy of natural processes as an end-in-itself. A focus on evolutionary potential could follow from animal-welfarism or, much more commonly, anthropocentrism. In part because of this disparity in underlying normative frameworks, the conservation of evolutionary potential also does not automatically imply the conservation of wilderness, i.e., self-willed land. MB&M make a similar point themselves:
“Many will agree that the free evolution of two lineages after a continental drift is more ‘natural’ than the directed evolution of adapted varieties of crops. The normative intuition motivating [conservation of evolutionary potential] will not be the same depending on whether we target/accept ‘natural’ evolution, “artificial’ evolution, or both, and likewise for natural versus human-created evolutionary potential. […]
“[W]hen [conservation of evolutionary potential] is justified on an anthropocentric basis, the level of human influence interferes less with conservation values. What matters is the capacity of ecosystems to deliver services […], regardless of whether it happens naturally or not. Things get more complicated when [conservation of evolutionary potential] is based on nonanthropocentric values for which the level of human intervention may be decisive” (p. 1375).
MB&M are well aware that non-anthropocentric moral commitments can lead to intrinsic objections to human interference with evolution. However, this issue receives scant attention until the penultimate section of the article. As a result, conservationists who place normative importance on wildness might spend much time scratching their heads on a first read, due to what at first seems like obliviousness to the possible relevance of whether certain adaptations are human-caused. Consider, for example, MB&M’s warbler case: two delightful New World Warbler species, the Blue-Winged Warbler (Vermivora cyanoptera) and Golden-Winged Warbler (Vermivora chrysoptera), have begun to hybridize at much greater-than-natural rates as a result of deforestation, which caused their previously isolated ranges to overlap. As it turns out, “females of both species prefer golden-winged mates, causing the disappearance of pure golden-winged phenotypes after a few decades of contact in a given area” (p. 1367). MB&M consider multiple interpretations of this case study, including the suggestion that it “could be seen as the expression of the evolutionary potential of the blue-/golden-winged system taken as a whole, thereby responding to human-induced environmental change” and arguably even a means of “maintaining biodiversity, perhaps not under the form of two separate species but as a merged one adapting to its new environment” (p. 1368). The authors nearly reach the end of the article before pointing out that “Hybridization seems to be more tolerated by conservationists when humans are not responsible for it” (p. 1374). The general point is simply this: if it takes MB&M this long to consider the possibility that human interference (or lack thereof) is a morally relevant factor, then there must be widespread views in conservation that hold that it isn’t, while nonetheless focusing on “evolution potential.”
Many other examples in MB&M’s article are equally illustrative. In their Table 1 (p. 1370-1), they delineate an array of possible proposals for the conservation of evolution potential, chosen to exemplify the wide variety of goals and actions that might fall under this heading. Some of the proposals wear their tolerance for human intervention on their sleeve. One, for example, addresses the specific target of “maintain[ing] diversified communities in human-altered landscapes,” entirely setting aside the critical topic of the conservation of landscapes that aren’t human-altered. Another glaringly anthropocentric target is “maintain[ing] a provisioning service in forestry (timber production).” Meanwhile, the proposals encompass actions that demand a high degree of direct and deliberate human influence on the evolutionary process, such as “assisted migration of tree species adapted to warmer climates.”
Later, they introduce the proposal of prescriptive evolution, “defined as the ‘use of planned manipulations of evolutionary processes to achieve conservation outcomes’,” such as “favour[ing] individuals with (genetic values for) phenotypes that are expected to be better adapted to changing environments” (p. 1375). As Smith et al describe the cited proposal, prescriptive evolution also encompasses such strategies as introducing genes “from suitable sources” into populations with low genetic diversity to prevent adverse fitness consequences of inbreeding, artificially proliferating genes of “invader-experienced” plants to promote the ability of native species to withstand biological invasions, or genetically monitoring species threatened by disease to promote resistance. In the latter case, they mention a hypothetical example of genetically engineering species of amphibians for resistance to the deleterious chytrid fungus, in addition to a more familiar example that might render the idea somewhat less sci-fi: the genetic engineering of blight-resistant American Chestnut trees (see 2014, “Prescriptive Evolution to Conserve and Manage Biodiversity,” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics). (As an exercise for the reader, the last example could be a good intuition pump to gauge one’s willingness to tolerate “prescriptive evolution”: is this admissible, given that the Cryphonectria parasitica fungus was itself imported by humans?)
Outside of their revealing examples, MB&M also offer a bit of informative commentary on scientists’ and practitioners’ lack of debate over these fundamental normative issues, e.g., “Curiously, those engaged in the conservation of the evolutionary potential have apparently not engaged very far in this debate” about “new conservation” versus a commitment to “a certain value of naturalness or wildness” (p. 1374). They correctly point out that this is significant omission, and that “the fit of [conservation of evolutionary potential] to the degree of naturalness underlying conservation values and goals must be looked at from the broader perspective of normative issues surrounding the conservation of biodiversity” (ibid).
Near the end of their article, MB&M again broach the position that I recommend, that “it is the processes of life, not just existing entities, that should be valued for themselves, and among these processes, the evolution of life is a prominent candidate for intrinsic value” (p. 1374). (As I exclaimed on a first read, “Yes! Finally!”) However, this still leaves open the question of the degree to which it is acceptable to allow human activity to influence these processes. MB&M aver that from this process-oriented perspective, “evolutionary potential, in almost any form, becomes an end for conservation as much as a means.” That, however, does not seem quite right, not if our specific concern is the preservation of autonomous evolutionary processes, given what we’ve now seen to be a high degree of human intervention countenanced by some proposals for conserving evolutionary potential. As I’ll emphasize in §5, life will evolve whether or not it is impacted by humanity, and whether or not the organic inputs to the evolutionary process have themselves been modified by the actions of our species. This reveals why it’s not quite enough to say even that the process of evolution is intrinsically valuable. Wilderness advocates must never lose sight of the essential normative importance of the self-willed – self-willed evolution as much as self-willed land and self-willed beasts.
In their subsequent discussion of the “naturalness” dimension, MB&M point out – rightly – that “favouring the ‘natural’ (unassisted) expression of evolutionary potential does not necessarily imply the conservation of a more pristine, or ‘natural’ state of biodiversity” (p. 1375). This is similar (if not identical) to the distinction that I made in §1 between the process of evolution (which may or may be assisted or hindered by human actions) and the inputs to that process (which may or may not be attempted to be to restore to a more natural or pre-human baseline). The naturalness (or autonomy) of the process does not imply the naturalness of the state. In §6, I propose that the normative ideal for conservation should be both – permitting the process to unfold with minimal human influence, of course, butalso (when possible) restoring baseline conditions closer to what evolution had previously chosen for itself.
5. Problems for Rewilding’s Received View on Evolution
Milot, Béchet and Maris provide an overview of approaches to the conservation of evolutionary potential that is much more encompassing, thorough, and up-to-date than the occasional off-hand references in the rewilding literature to the importance of sustaining evolution and its building blocks. Having reviewed their lay of the land, we’re in an even better position to point out what’s wrong with the “received view” of evolution in the North American rewilding tradition. One part of this view – perhaps the most canonical – has it that the obligation to protect wilderness follows almost immediately from the normative commitment that evolution is good (§5.1). Another, closely related, is that the “building blocks” of evolution that we are to preserve must themselves be elements of wild nature (§5.2).
The problem is that neither of these above conclusions follows from the premise that “evolution is good,” nor that assumption that the “holy work” of conservation is to protect evolutionary processes or potential. Importantly, this should not lead us to conclude that a central focus on evolution is wrong. Instead, the message is that rewilding and wilderness advocates need to be more precise about their claims, so as not to look like fools. Our goal is not to protect evolution generally speaking, but to respect its autonomy as a natural process.
5.1 Wilderness is an Arena of Evolution
According to Soulé, the postulate that “evolution is good” implies an “ethical imperative to provide for the continuation of evolutionary processes in as many undisturbed natural habitats as possible” (1985, p. 731). Similarly, Foreman writes in Rewilding North America that “Nature reserves have to protect entire ecosystems, guarding the flow and dance of evolution. We have finally learned that wilderness is the arena of evolution” (p. 114), invoking Leopold, who writes in his essay “Wilderness” that “Only those able to see the pageant of evolution can be expected to value its theater, the wilderness.”
The biggest problem with this assertion that “wilderness is the arena (or theater) of evolution” is that it’s false. Wilderness, no doubt, is an arena of evolution – but the word ‘the’ implies uniqueness, and wilderness is demonstrably not theonly arena of evolution. Likewise, the postulate that “evolution is good” does not by itself necessarily entail a need to protect undisturbed natural habitats, given that evolution also occurs in disturbed, unnatural habitats.
We need only consider antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the textbook example of evolution in action. The use of antibiotics to protect human populations against the selective pressures of pestilence is, arguably, human intervention in evolutionary processes par excellence. And yet without the invention and use of antibiotics, there would have been no evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains. Similar points could be made about the evolution of pesticide resistance in insects. Or take another classic textbook example of evolution by natural selection: the Peppered Moth (Biston betularia). In wild nature, the black-colored variant of B. betularia is rare, and black moths presumably would have remained rare if the pollution of coal factories hadn’t tainted England’s trees with soot. Anthropogenic pollution, not wild nature, provided that environmental change that caused dark coloration to be advantageous for survival and reproduction – and, hence, evolution. More recently, extensive human harvesting of fish has been recognized as a selective pressure that favors the survival of fish that breed earlier and reach a smaller adult body size, and anthropogenic climate change is likely to select in favor of animals with body sizes and shapes that more advantageous in warmer environments (see, e.g., “Abiotic conditions shape spatial and temporal morphological variation in North American birds” and “Shape-shifting: changing animal morphologies as a response to climatic warming”). In the previous examples, human influence inadvertently caused evolutionary changes, but humans can also act as an evolutionary force directly and intentionally – from the domestication and selective breeding of animals and plants, to recent proposals for assisted evolution or prescriptive evolution, as mentioned in §4.
We’ve already seen that acceptance of human impact on evolution, whether direct or indirect, is compatible with many positions within MB&M’s taxonomy of approaches to the conservation of evolutionary potential. One could hold, for example, that the reason to conserve evolutionary potential (in the form of, say, genetic diversity within a population or species) is to protect biodiversity in the face of anthropogenic disruptions: the greater the genetic diversity within a species, the more likely that some members of that species will possess heritable traits that are advantageous in the face of novel environmental changes and stressors – just as with the melanic moths in industrial England. Such an approach to conservation is incompatible with envisioning evolution as confined only to wilderness.
Now, of course I agree with Leopold, Soulé, and Foreman that we ought to protect large and undisturbed wilderness areas, and moreover that we ought to do so for the sake of the continuation of evolutionary processes. The problem is that we’d appear woefully ignorant to leave it at that, without admitting that evolutionary processes can indeed continue in our cities, hospitals, pesticide-ladened farms, and other heavily anthropized environments. Wilderness is but one of many arenas of evolution. Foreman, I think, moves us closer to where we need to be when he declares that “Evolution is wild.” Presumably using ‘wild’ in the sense of ‘self-willed’ (for how else would he use it?), he’s undeniably right insofar as evolution can occur, does occur, and for many millions of years has occurred in the absence of any assistance or pressure from us. Evolution can occur autonomously, and it has an exceedingly long and venerable history of so doing. One might suggest that wilderness protection is less about protecting evolution than respecting evolution – respecting, that is, its autonomous ability to create for itself, in the absence of any meddling from us.
Consider, by analogy, human actions performed under duress. If you put a gun to a person’s head and command her to walk, talk, dance, or sing, she might very well walk, talk, dance, or sing. (Okay, sure, if she’s crippled by fear, she might not be able to execute the actions demanded. As a general matter, however, we can go through the same motions under coercion as we can when acting under our own volition.) Despite this, most of us still tend to believe that liberty and autonomy are good, and that coercion is bad. Evolutionary processes, by analogy, will continue to act upon populations of organisms whether the process is unbridled from our impact or tightly constrained by it – but why should we assume that the two conditions are morally equivalent? We don’t in the case of free vs coerced human action.
I suggest, then, the following refinement: although it’s far from the only arena of evolution, wilderness is the only arena of free, self-determinedevolution. Wilderness is the playing field in which evolution can continue to actualize its wild – self-willed – capabilities.
5.2 The Trouble with Building Blocks
In §1, I set up this essay with another gripe of mine: the lack of precisification of concepts like building blocks, despite their apparent importance for conservation (the “holy work” of the enterprise!). Worse, on any plausible gloss of what evolution’s “building blocks” really are, the mandate to conserve them simply doesn’t motivate rewilding or wilderness protection.
Now, in fairness, Foreman has occasionally told us what he means by this term. For example, in Rewilding Earth Podcast Episode 1, he identifies the “building blocks of evolution” as “native species, natural processes, large chunks of land and oceans and lakes and rivers that are off limits to industrial civilization.” But this is an undeniably strange definition of evolution’s building blocks. As described above, evolution can and does occur inside the limits of industrial civilization, and evolution can result from “unnatural” processes like pollution or (more directly) artificial selection. Moreover, native species hold no special prerogative on the ability to evolve; for better or worse, non-native species can evolve too (see, e.g., “Urban evolution of invasive species”). Of course, native species, natural processes, and large areas wild terrestrial and aquatic habitat can serve as the raw material for evolution – and insofar as we strive not to disrupt wild nature’s own “will,” they seem like especially virtue choices for a starting point, but it’s simply false that evolution needs these building blocks to happen.
Instead, if anything deserves the ‘building block of evolution’ moniker, genetic diversity must be the leading candidate. If a population of organisms belonging to the same species is entirely genetically homogenous, then that population cannot evolve. Heritable variation in genotype is the essential raw material upon which evolution acts. But it simply doesn’t follow that protecting heritable genetic variation per se requires the conservation of wilderness, nor the restitution of native species. Yes, some strategies for protecting this “building block” will appear friendly to rewilding. For one, it seems to enjoin us to aspire to prevent population sizes of plants and animals from dropping precipitously low. It is not enough, ideally, to prevent species extinction; we must also prevent genetic bottlenecks in which the genetic diversity of species decreases greatly due to a severe reduction in population size and subsequent inbreeding. But while the strategy of protecting large and diverse populations of wildlife is likely to appeal to rewilders, it’s not the only potential strategy here. As another possibility, a conservationist who takes seriously a mandate to preserve evolution’s building blocks might advocate genetic engineering to increase genetic diversity within a population – perhaps even beyond the diversity expected by natural variation. Some ideas that have been put forth under the heading of “prescriptive evolution” (mentioned in §4) might lie here, or the use of assisted gene flow to enhance diversity in populations of corals or other organisms.
Another obvious candidate “building block” is the existence of selective pressures, environmental factors that cause certain inherited traits to be more conducive to survival and successful reproduction than others. As we’ve already seen, though, selective pressures needn’t be natural, and indeed human overshoot is producing very profound selective pressure, which might only be speeding the rate of evolution. As urban ecologist Menno Schilthuizen likes to put it, cities are “pressure cookers of evolution,” causing genetic changes as animals are forced to adapt or die to new food sources, new habitats, and new threats. (We can acknowledge the phenomenon without painting it in the rosy way that Schilthuizen does in Darwin Comes to Town, nor need we adopt his fatalistic attitude toward human expansion.)
So how in the hell does the textbook picture of evolution by natural selection lead us to a demand for wilderness protection and rewilding? The short answer is that it doesn’t. We can promote genetic diversity by preserving large populations of wild animals and plants, and banking on random mutation as a source of novelty. But, alternatively, we could intervene and biologically engineer populations of animals and plants with greater genetic diversity than we would expect naturally. We could artificially speed the pace of mutations. As to the introduction of selective pressures, we can expect wild nature to produce its own selective pressures, but we also know that we can create them ourselves – often at a pace more rapid than wild nature would offer. Despite the demolition of most wild places on Earth, evolution itself isn’t stopping. As long as there are some other species sharing our managed planet, descent with modification will happen despite our actions, and often because of them. The question is whether humans ought to have a hand in the process – or deliberately withdraw it.
Once again, the conclusion is the same: advocates for wilderness and rewilding mustn’t misrepresent the facts as though the salvation of evolution itself is in our hands. When we demand that vast wild places be left untrammeled, and when we make this demand for the sake of life’s future evolution, we must be clear that our mission is not to protect evolution per se. Instead, we’re expressing our respect for evolution as a process capable of transpiring autonomously… and, perhaps, our own wonder and curiosity at thought of what self-willed evolution will invent on its own someday, even if millions of years after our species’ demise.
6. An Autonomy-Based Approach to “Conserving Evolution”
In this concluding section, I summarize my suggestions for how rewilding advocates ought to fine-tune our intuitive moral mandate to conserve evolutionary processes or building blocks, with an emphasis on respect for evolution as a creative force that excels without our input.
6.1 Autonomous Evolution is Intrinsically Valuable, Redux
Our takeaway from §5 was that it’s not good enough to speak in terms of protecting evolution and its building blocks. To motivate the demand to protect self-willed land, we need to emphasize specifically the need to respect evolution’s ability to unfold autonomously, as opposed to allowing it to operate only under control and coercion.
An important question, though, is whether the intuitions with which we began motivate this stronger claim, as opposed to merely a weaker claim like “evolution is good” or even “evolution is intrinsically good.” I believe, in fact, that they do. Think back to §3.1.3, where I argued that the postulate that “(self-willed) evolution is (intrinsically) good” should be accepted as a self-evident and undeniable bedrock proposition, one that it is intuitively obvious upon mindful contemplation of life’s history. Significantly, I was there envisioning an exercise of reflection on the deep-time history of life on Earth – from the earliest microbial life of the Archean, on through the enigmatic multicellular life of the Ediacaran (cf. my Twitter handle) and the subsequent “explosion” of diversity in the Cambrian, on through the “big five” mass extinctions and the resurgence of new and wondrous biodiverse ecosystems after each.
In this imagined exercise of imagination, I was not picturing a person dwelling on the wonders of antibiotic resistance or the fascination of the shrinking body size of cod as a genetic consequence of the selective pressure of overharvesting. Instead, the envisioned exercise was to reflect on the wonders and fascination of the autonomously unfolding evolutionary processes that long predated the emergence of any lifeforms capable of self-consciously and deliberately impacting them. That said, the adaptability of life is itself an intrinsically wondrous thing, even when it’s instantiated through the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria or pesticide resistance in insects (hell, in a way, it’s especially satisfying when evolution flips the bird at humanity’s attempts to control and restrain it…). Nonetheless, there is also something uniquely humbling about the deep-time evolutionary history of life, a history that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that evolution doesn’t need us and can’t do very well without us. The autonomy of this deep-time evolution is an essential property, and it does seem clearly to be a property that contributes to the awe, wonder, and humility it causes us to feel.
As I also emphasized in §3.1.3, the point is not that autonomous and unbridled evolution is good because it causes humans to experience such mental states, but that the latter states should be accepted as morally probative – revealing the intrinsic value of (autonomous) evolution itself. When we love another person, we don’t conclude that that person is merely instrumentally valuable because they cause us to feel love, and love is (sometimes) a pleasant emotion (but cf. The J. Giles Band, 1980, for a more accurate depiction of love). When we love another person, it’s just intuitively obvious and undeniable that that person is intrinsically valuable. Here is an even closer analogy: for religious believers, feelings of awe in the presence of natural beauty and wonder are commonly accepted as morally probative. Supposedly, such experiences reveal to us the glory of God and His fittingness as an object of reverence. The devout are right, I claim, in the intuition that this non-cognitive experience should lead us to recognize the need to respect a force much bigger and older than humanity, and to be modest and humble before it. We atheists can learn from this instinct, as far as it goes. But they are wrong that this force is a supernatural deity. The object revealed worthy of reverence, respect, and deference is nothing but self-willed nature itself – including the autonomous evolutionary processes that have shaped all of life as we know it (not to mention the additional hundreds of millions years of past and future life that we can only imagine).
While it will inevitably leave some unsatisfied, I will rest here with this sentimentalist account of the intrinsic value of self-willed evolutionary processes. The latter value statement is a truth I hold to be self-evident, and my gamble is that it will be similarly self-evident to others who take the time to unburden themselves from the practical worries of the day-to-day and lose themselves in mindful and engaged contemplation of the deep-time history of life on Earth. For my own part, although I am both a philosopher and ecocentrist, the two are unrelated: my commitment to ecocentrism has nothing to do with moral theory. I did not come to my moral beliefs about nature as a result of philosophical theorizing, nor can I offer any deductive argument to persuade others. True, science has a role to play in underpinning the obviousness of ecocentrism. It’s simply a brute fact, for one, that Homo sapiens is nothing but a contingent result of billions of years of evolutionary processes that have shaped and reshaped life over and over again without our guidance or input. However, G.E. Moore was right, I think, that we can’t conclude moral truths from brute facts about the way the world is – not deductively, at least. The missing link, I submit, is experiential and non-cognitive; if you’re not already convinced of the intrinsic value of autonomously unfolding evolution, then a logical deduction isn’t the route to convince you.
When we perceive evolution as intrinsically valuable, how are we to honor this in our conservation practices? In setting the general mindset, I suggest (in keeping with Uncle Dave Foreman) that we strive to manifest respect for its capacity to function autonomously and deference to the choices that it makes on its own. Anything else is hubristic, paternalistic, or otherwise disrespectful of evolution’s long-standing status as an automatically-acting force whose self-determined powers and creativity far exceed our own.
6.2 Process, Potential, and Protecting Evolution’s Autonomy
In concluding this piece, let’s return to the distinction proposed in §1:
(i) The degree/type of human intervention with respect to the inputs to the process (i.e., if you like, the “building blocks”) at some time t.
(ii) The degree/type of human influence on the unfolding of the process over time.
I summarize what I take to be the implications of the above moral framework for both (i) (§6.2.2) and (ii) (§6.2.1), and contrast this with the positions of other rewilding proponents who attempt to use an evolution-focused framework to argue for Pleistocene rewilding (§6.2.3).
6.2.1 Re (ii): Let Evolution Be.
As already mentioned, the demand to respect evolution’s autonomy seems to lead us to foreground (ii), and it further leads one clear answer: we must minimize our influence on the future unfolding of evolution. We need to preserve large areas of land and sea as wilderness, self-willed land, where we declare that the expansion of our human enterprise is off-limits.
One anticipated reaction, which seems presently en vogue, will be something like this: “Give it up! Humans control the entire planet – our influence is everywhere and unavoidable – so there’s no sense in speaking of protecting evolution’s autonomy.” I have never understood this line of objection, given that it’s entirely out of kilter with how we already think about respect for autonomy in more familiar domains, viz., that of human interaction. As I write this, I am in many ways acting of my own volition. I’m freely writing on a topic of my choosing (nobody asked me to do any of this, y’know; it’s just a hobby). I am choosing to write at home, rather than at the library or a coffee shop, and I am choosing to write at this particular time of day (despite acknowledging that I really ought to get off my ass). More broadly, I’ve chosen a certain line of anti-careerism, and I’ve chosen to be single and child-free – all of which facilitates greater freedom and flexibility in the selection of day-to-day activities. At the same time, it’s obviously false that I am completely free from the influence of – even dependence on – other people. I rely on the work of others for my WiFi connection and the beloved 2016 MacBook on which I continue to type. The coffee I sip is the result of a long supply chain involving very many other humans (and obviously I’d be incapacitated without it). Although I’m alone as I write, I’m disposed to have my actions impacted by others; I could be distracted at any moment by a task that awaits me at my day job or a text from a friend with an urgent need to vent. I’m not fully autonomous. Nobody is. But that doesn’t mean that it’s unimportant to respect our capacity for freely chosen actions in the many ways we are able to execute it.
Analogously, it seems a bit inane to reason from the premise that (for example) anthropogenic climate change will inevitably impact the future evolution of life to the conclusion that humanity can impose on evolutionary processes however we damn well please. Quite likely, the future evolution of life will be ineluctably affected by anthropogenic climate change, but the future evolution of life is not ineluctably affected by future land conversion, infrastructure development, light and noise pollution, pesticide use, human population growth, and numerous other factors that remain within our power to prevent. The fact that some humanimpact on evolution is unavoidable is simply no excuse to conclude that all human impact is acceptable. There are still many choice points at which we can decide to let wild nature be.
6.2.2 Re (i): Strive to Respect Evolution’s Freely Chosen Initial Conditions.
At first glance, (i) and (ii) might appear orthogonal, and indeed they might be treated as such. However, the normative framework that underlies one’s answer to either (i) or (ii) might determine, or at least narrow, the possible answers for the other.
Suppose, for example, that one’s goal in conserving of evolutionary potential is to preserve biodiversity for the sake of its value to humans, and specifically to promote the ability of biological lineages to adapt to the changes wrought by increased urbanization, infrastructure development, land conversion, and other forms of human expansion. The selection of appropriate vehicles of evolutionary potential, given this aim, falls under (i). Whatever vehicles of evolutionary potential are chosen for conservation efforts, the justification itself presupposes that humans will continue to be a major force influencing the future evolution of life, and that our goal is not to stop it, but to help give life the genetic diversity it needs to raise the chances of successful adaptation. Thus, the justification presupposes an answer to (ii), something like: “We can’t control this; whatever will happen, will happen.”
Under the present proposal, I have instead forefronted an answer to (ii): respect evolution’s autonomous potential by protecting large areas of Earth free from all avoidable human influence (e.g. agriculture, development, disruptive or excessive recreation use, etc). I believe that the underlying moral perspective also constrains the admissible answers to (i). Specifically, I believe that part of what it means to respect evolution’s autonomy must be to strive to restore the outcomes of previous self-willed evolutionary processes as they existed prior to acts of human intrusion and disruption, where this remains possible.
Proponents of rewilding sometimes take pains to deny that rewilding is backward-looking, and to a large extent they’re completely right: the prevailing goal of rewilding should be to allow ecological and evolutionary processes to continue in their own way into an uncertain future. But that alone doesn’t relieve us of an additional moralimperative to respect the choices that evolution has already made. It would hardly respect a person’s autonomy to tell that person, “You will henceforth be free to pursue what you want in life, but before setting you free to your own pursuits, I will kidnap you from the house you bought for yourself in your favorite neighborhood, and force you against your will to emigrate North Korea.” Nor would it respect a person’s autonomy to rob them of the capital they’d accumulated with the plan to invest in a new business venture, thereupon assuring them, “Of course you’re free to henceforth pursue whatever business venture you please, but the hell if I’m going to give back the thousands of dollars I stole from you.”
As I noted in §1, a non-interventionist answer to (ii) doesn’t necessarilyimply that the answer to (i) must be “Leave things however they are right now as the starting point.” Intuitively, some amount of intervention for the purpose of restoration is not only compatible with the goal of protecting the autonomy of future evolutionary processes but also, perhaps, required by the same underlying moral intuitions. I presume, for example, that few would object to conducting a litter clean-up on an area about to be designated as wilderness. And many would support removing even large pieces of litter – such as dams, roads, and other structures, as well as introduced species that have become invasive. Many readers who share Foreman’s intuitions about the importance of wilderness will meanwhile unhesitatingly support the active reintroduction of large carnivores like wolves and cougars into parts of their former range from which they’d be extirpated. These activities obviously require human intervention, delaying the point at which we can say, “We shall henceforth let nature be.”
At the same time, other forms of intervention would undoubtedly unsettle advocates for wilderness preservation and rewilding, even if the ultimate goal is to step back and leave nature alone. Many, I presume, would balk at the intentional introduction of genetically modified organisms, even if it’s a means to boost the “evolutionary potential” of a landscape’s starting point. If conservation approaches like assisted evolution are anathema to others who share my intuition that conservation should protect the autonomy of evolutionary processes, it should come at no surprise: it’s something of a cheat to say that evolution should be granted autonomy, only to meddle with the components of the natural system that is to be left to evolve. It is still an intrusion. It still leaves an indelible human impact on the future course of evolutionary history in a manner that is both intentional and avoidable. What’s curious is not that some interventions seem unacceptable, but that not all do. In other words (removing the superfluous negations), what’s curious is that some interventions seem acceptable at all.
If our goal – our moral mandate – is to remove our hand from the course of evolution, then why not do it sooner rather than later? On the surface, the execution of this mandate seems only to be delayed by litter clean-ups, dam removals, invasive species eradication, tree plantings, wildlife reintroductions, and other restoration activities. The intuition, of course, is that these restoration activities are acceptable (or mandatory) because the structures and species slated for removal are unnatural and, conversely, the species slated for reintroduction are natural and deserve to be part of their native territories and habitats. Now, according to one popular line of condemnation, this preference is arbitrary, representing no more than a human aesthetic judgment about what nature is “supposed” to look like. But I see no reason why this objection should hold water, given that there’s a fact of the matter about the state of nature prior to the evolution of Homo sapiens and the species’ subsequent global expansion. Sure, we might lack complete knowledge about the pre-human state of natureat any given point on Earth, and practical limitations might prevent us from ever being able to restore it with fidelity. But this doesn’t imply that wild nature didn’t exist in some specific, objective state prior to human intrusion; obviously it had to. If one wants to argue that epistemic and practical limitations are bound to prevent successful restoration, that’s a different matter, but it’s sheer poppycock to say that the “wild” and “natural” are human constructions, given that nature actually existed before humanity. Hell, even young-earth creationists could grant that, on the fifth day, fish and birds were “wild” – where this wildness couldn’t be a human construction.
That said, I find it more useful not to think in terms of what is “natural” and “unnatural” but instead to conceptualize our choices as answers to the question “What would wild nature have (not) chosen for itself?” This also makes plain that our moral perspective is one of respecting the autonomy of a force that’s fully capable of acting on its own – that it’s about respect and deference to processes that are much older and larger than us, not a mere human urge for purity or naturalness. When we defer to the choices that wild nature would have made in the absence of human interference (as much as it’s within our knowledge and capacity), we respect nature’s autonomy by striving to respect the “choices” (i.e. the natural outcomes) that evolution made for itself, prior to some human disturbance that could have been avoided, whether the clearing of a forest, the draining of a swamp, the damming of a river, the fragmentation of habitat by the building of roads, the extirpation of native species, the introduction of non-native species, the dumping of toxic waste, the disruption of natural light/dark cycles due to the installation of artificial lighting, etc. In each of these cases and many others besides, human activity disrupts natural processes in a way that could have been avoided (i.e. it is not merely a “natural” behavior of the human animal’s interaction with its environment), and in a way that wild nature quite obviously would not have chosen on its own.
Conceived within the framework of a moral mandate to respect the autonomy of evolution, the goal of restoration is to give back to nature a set of initial conditions closer to what it had chosen for itself prior to some avoidable human-caused disruption. By analogy, although I’m assured by friends in the service industry that the customer is not always right, we generally acknowledge customers’ right to choose for themselves what dish to order at a restaurant. Here is one manifestation of respecting that freedom: if a customer is served the wrong dish, the server takes away the incorrect item and returns what customer chose from themselves.
By way of example, consider several proposals for restoration following a hypothetical case of deforestation: (a) do nothing and allow regeneration to unfold on nature’s own terms; (b) actively plant some trees belonging to the species assemblages that existed in the area prior to deforestation (and then avoid further intervention); (c) actively plant trees whose natural ranges lie farther to the south, assisting a northward migration that’s hypothesized to help the species survive in the face of anthropogenic climate change; (d) actively intervene to maintain the open landscape resulting from deforestation and prevent passive forest regeneration.
The diehard non-interventionist might always choose (a), which does respect nature’s autonomy – to an extent. However, the appropriateness of the choice of (a) over (b) is likely to depend on the particular circumstances. Suppose, for example, the deforestation was complete and widespread, and there are no nearby seed sources for the native flora. In this case, we might readily predict that without restoration wild nature’s subsequent course will diverge from what wild nature had already chosen prior to the deforestation (which, of course, was itself a coercive act imposed on it). Perhaps there will be no natural forest regeneration, or perhaps invasive species will overtake the landscape. In such a case, (b) might in fact be the option that best respects nature’s autonomy, for it aims first to give nature back its own prior choices, and only then withdraw to let nature carry on as it will. In contrast, the intervention involved in (c) does not seem to represent respect for nature’s autonomous choices. Climate change will inevitably become a significant factor impacting the future evolution of life, and it is a good practical reason to allow nature space – large and connected areas of wild lands – in which it can make its own choices as to how to respond, adjust, and adapt. But assisted migration, in my view, is a step too far – proactively (and paternalistically) making decisions for nature about the constituents of future climate-adapted ecosystems.
Finally, (d) is included as a throwback to my essay “In Memory of Anholt as I Never Knew Her” about this very type of case study; little, it seems, could manifest less respect for evolution’s autonomous choices (cf. also the “double bind” for Refarming Europe in §4.2 of this essay). But it’s also a useful contrast with (c), serving to highlight two different ways in which we can fail to respect the autonomy of wild nature. In the case of management programs in which human intervention is used to artificially maintain an open landscape (as on Anholt or in many other cases of heathland preservation), the continuing active intervention removes any semblance of respect and deference to the natural flow of self-willed evolutionary and ecological processes. In contrast, in the case of (c), the practitioners of assisted migration could claim that they are merely updating nature with a new set of initial conditions to help it cope with global warming, and that thereafter they will refrain from future intervention and allow nature to take its course. My claim here is that the latter scenario still represents a form of disrespect for nature’s autonomy – roughly analogous to telling a person “You’re free to live as you choose, but only after being forced against your will to quit your job and relocate.”
The general message is this: even if our ultimate goal is to “let nature be” in large protected areas, a commitment to respect the autonomous choices of evolution should also influence whether or not – or how – we engage in any restoration activities prior to leaving natural processes to their own devices. If Milot, Béchet, and Maris’ article gives any indication, the desideratum of “restoring evolution’s own self-willed choices” seems entirely off the radar of mainstream conservationists who concern themselves with evolutionary potential. They say little about the topic. However, in their discussion of “genetic essentialism,” they suggest that the goal of the “recovery of ‘pure’ historical genomes” is antithetical to the very aspiration of conserving evolutionary potential (p. 1371). But it is not quite clear why the essentialist bias should seem surprising or appalling if one of our goals is to select “vehicles” of evolutionary potential that are as close as possible to what wild nature had chosen for itself, prior to human intervention. A major reason for this, I would surmise, is that conservation almost always has a consequentialist bent; it is unusual to think in virtue-theoretic terms about a moral imperative to act with respect, humility, or deference to the processes of wild nature – but such a virtue-based approach is precisely what I am suggesting.
6.2.3 More Re (i): Contrast with “Pro-Evolution” Pleistocene Rewilding
Before finally ending this long essay, I will contrast the ideas put forth in §6.2.2 with the conclusions of two very different evolution-focused articles in the rewilding literature. Both are proposals for Pleistocene rewilding: the translocation of surrogate species for extinct North American megafauna. Now, if you’ve read any of my condemnations of European “rewilding” (and, if not, what are you waiting for?), then you already know that I’m no fan of the use of proxy species, and this is precisely because they don’t represent evolution’s own autonomous choice for a region’s fauna; they are mere functional substitutes to meet human-desired ends. Evolution, given time, will invent its own functional substitutes to fill ecological niches left open due to extinction; if we’re too impatient to wait, that’s our problem, not wild nature’s.
In its North American lineage, Pleistocene rewilding often lacks the overt anthropocentric tendencies that are so deplorably common in the European “rewilding” movement and discourse. Indeed, some of its proponents endorse openly ecocentric motives – as we’ll see below. The rhetorical framing notwithstanding, however, I believe that the use of proxy species is no more morally sound in the case of translocating cheetahs, elephants, and so on to North America than in the (numerous) cases of using (semi-)domesticated horses and cattle as surrogate species for tarpan and aurochs in Europe. In either case, conservationists introduce species of their own choosing, unwilling to exercise the patience and restraint to defer to whatever long-term solution evolution would autonomously invent to replace missing megafauna. (In fact, the aspirations of North American Pleistocene rewilding are arguably more problematic, given its proponents’ simultaneous endorsement of genuine wilderness areas, as opposed to the European norm of small fenced enclosures – shall no wild part of the continent remain free from populations of unnaturally introduced non-native megafauna?)
The problem with proxies follows directly from the perspective presented in §6.2.2: if our basic moral mandate is to respect the autonomy of evolutionary processes, then the goal of any restoration project should be to restore wild nature’s own previously self-selected course of development. Certainly, when we intervene in areas that are to be protected as wild, our actions should never bring nature farther from the outcomes that evolution has naturally chosen. But whenever we introduce non-native species into a landscape, we do just that – even if the goal is to increase biodiversity, evolutionary potential, or ecological completeness (which, we might note, are all instrumentalist aims that presuppose human rather than geological timescales). Note that Pleistocene rewilding would be morally problematic in this way even if humans were the cause of the late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions: non-native species are still non-native if even those to introduce them are motivated by guilt and a desire to make amends. But it is particularly problematic given the “overkill hypothesis” is far from uncontested (for a recent article on the topic see, Stewart et al, 2021, “Climate change, not human population growth, correlates with Late Quaternary megafauna declines in North America,” Nature Communications). If megafauna extinctions were themselves natural rather than human-caused, then there now seems to be a twofold moral problem with any attempt to replicate the Pleistocene megafauna through the translocation of surrogate species: not only do we defy evolution’s own choices when we move animals from their ancestral habitat to a geographic location entirely outside of their native range, we also defy evolution’s choices by presumptuously attempting to reverse the effects of a naturally caused extinction event!
There are also numerous practical and ecological worries about Pleistocene rewilding (see, e.g., Rubenstein et al, 2005, “Pleistocene Park…”), but that’s the essential moral concern that arises from the framework proposed here. Curiously, though, some advocates of Pleistocene rewilding base their proposal in part on considerations related to evolution; it’s therefore illustrative to look at their reasoning and see where the differences lie.
First, in an (in)famous piece published in Nature (“Re-wilding North America,” 2005), Josh Donlan and colleagues declare that Pleistocene rewilding is a way to “restore some of the evolutionary and ecological potential that was lost 13,000 years ago” (p. 913). They state that, “In the coming century […], we will constrain the breadth and future evolutionary complexity of life on Earth,” and worry that the “default scenario will surely include ever more pest-and-weed dominated landscapes, the extinction of most, if not all, large vertebrates, and a continuing struggle to slow the loss of biodiversity” (p. 914) – if we don’t, that is, take bold measures like restoring the continent’s megafauna. In response to the potential objections that “the proposed proxies are not genetically identical to the animals that formerly existed in North America” and that the proposal “might strike some as ‘playing God’,” Donlan et al say only that “‘same’ is relative,” noting the successful use of a mix of captive-bred subspecies of peregrine falcon as a proxy for the extinct midwestern subspecies of peregrine falcon (p. 914).
Donlan et al are clearly concerned with the restoration of the specific form of “evolutionary potential” contributed by the existence of large mammals in ecosystems, and they’re just as clearly unconcerned with genetic purity. While they do not themselves define their specific concept of evolutionary potential, we already know from our review of Milot, Béchet, and Maris that a commitment to restoring it doesn’t imply – by any means – a commitment to the intrinsic value of self-willed evolution. Donlan et al breeze through a plethora of justifications for their proposal, moral and practical, anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric, but overall their main interest emerges as the protection of biodiversity and ecosystem services on human timescales, with “evolutionary potential” seen as means to secure this. They do not necessarily perceive the process of evolution as its own end.
Although it lacks the reach and influence of Donlan et al, an even more interesting article for present purposes is Connie Barlow’s article “Rewilding for Evolution,” published in Wild Earth in 1999. It’s especially interesting due to its overt non-anthropocentrism and, specifically, its emphasis on the thesis that evolution should be placed at the core of an ethic for rewilding. Barlow immediately sets out her thesis that it’s wrong to permit human activity to influence a lineage’s “evolutionary futures.” Significantly, she does not fall into the trap of suggesting that wilderness is somehow necessary for evolution to occur at all. Instead, she rightly notes that “whatever each of us may feel about the propriety of intentional genetic manipulation conducted in laboratories, such pales next to the reality of the evolutionary consequences that our species is forcing upon life everywhere outside the scientist’s lab” (p. 54). Barlow recognizes that humans are a selective pressure, to the extent that even certain forms of recreational access to wilderness may result in human impact on future evolution:
“Backpackers should be easy to hunt; nevertheless, if a large carnivore experiments in this direction, the innovator will be tracked down and killed. Intermittent exposure to the magical powers of humans to kill or wound at a distance does seem to preclude that kind of experimentation in the wilderness region I am most familiar with – the Gila Wilderness in southwestern New Mexico. There bears and lions are hunted for sport. In this, the first of all designated Wilderness Areas, the evolutionary futures of wild beasts are thus profoundly influenced by human demands for meat and recreation” (ibid).
All the more, she opposes active management of conservation areas to preserve biodiversity’s status quo: “Even well-intentioned and scientifically based management decisions in the most excellent of biodiversity reserves designed to preserve this planet’s evolutionary heritage are an inescapable manifestation of humanity’s unchecked reach into evolutionary futures” (ibid). Presumably, then, she would also share my antipathy towards direct attempts to steer “evolutionary futures” through “assisted” or “prescriptive” evolution. And, presumably, she’d oppose anthropogenic manipulation of the course of evolution via the translocation of species to entirely new continents outside of their native range… right?! Barlow herself asks, “If an endemic subspecies is now extinct, should another subspecies be introduced […]? Similarly, if a keystone species is extinct, should an ecological proxy — perhaps from another continent and of another genus — be introduced?” (p. 55). Her own thesis would seem to answer this straightforwardly: no and no.
In fact, however, Barlow pivots to support the use of such ecological proxies (“from another continent and of another genus”) to replicate North America’s late Pleistocene megafauna guilds. It’s a logical transition that I can only describe as a non sequitur. It seems manifestly inconsistent with her own central normative premise: if we translocate a species to an entirely new geographical region, can our action be construed as anything other than a case of humanity influencing the future evolution of that species? As I read the article, Barlow confusingly conflates a defense of the autonomy of the evolutionary process – one, indeed, that is quite similar to that which I have defended here – with a Donlan-like appeal to a need to (re-)diversify North America’s megafauna for the sake of evolutionary potential. When she addresses what I’ve called our factor (ii), Barlow defends a thesis very much like my own in §6.2.1. However, for reasons that elude me, she fails to recognize the constraints that the same underlying normative perspective places on admissible answers to (i) (see §6.2.2).
Emma Marris, science writer and champion of managing the planet under the guise of conserving it, seems to be among the fans of both Donlan and Barlow, judging from her book Rambunctious Garden. She also follows Barlow in failing to recognize how a genuine commitment to nature’s autonomy should simultaneously inform both our factors (i) and (ii). In her chapter of praise for novel ecosystems (e.g. ecosystems with a high proportion of non-native species that nonetheless fail to be monocultures of invasives), she avers, “if what one values is not any existing species or ecosystem per se but the process of evolution, then novel ecosystems are worth protecting. […] [N]ovel ecosystems are really wild, self-willed land with lots of evolutionary potential” (p. 121). Sure, and if we replace a person’s material possessions with a lot of s*** they don’t want, and replace that person’s friends with a bunch of people they dislike, and thereupon leave them be, that’d really be a self-willed person…
(Incidentally, Marris’ chapter on “rewilding” is not in tension with her thesis of a “post-wild world,” since she chooses to limit her attention to Donlan and – you guessed it – Frans Vera. I’ve argued before that Oostvaardersplassen is far from manifesting respect from self-willed land, so there’s no need to go there. But Marris provides a quote from Donlan, in response to the “playing god” objection, that intrigues me: “‘[…] We are already playing god.’ The leap, he says, is ‘admitting to ourselves that we live in an intensely managed world’” (p. 64). Contrast this with Foreman’s repeated entreaties to humanity to exercise restraint and humility, and to let wild things be. Donlan’s position on wild nature is much closer to that of Martha Nussbaum (!) than to that which served as the moral foundation for the original rewilding movement.)
6.3 Coda: Forward-Looking Deep-Time Thinking
AlthoughI have not so far placed much emphasis on it, a unique feature of the above normative framework is its indifference to criteria such as biodiversity and other measures of ecosystem health, which are typically foregrounded even in non-anthropocentric perspectives. (Self-willed) evolution is take as an end in itself, and restoration is oriented around a virtue-theoretic framework of expressing respect and deference to wild nature (specifically, the autonomously “chosen” past outcomes of evolutionary processes); unusually, the goal of restoration on this picture is not to better facilitate the preservation of biodiversity, ecosystem services, or any other particular desired outcomes, whether ecocentric or anthropocentric in their motivations. Indeed, there might be cases in which the protection of biodiversity or other outcomes would be more effectively served by conservation actions that do not represent any plausible outcome of self-willed evolution; such, at least, is often the justification of the use of surrogates of extinct species, when it’s worried that ecosystems will collapse without something to play the functional role of the lost species. However, if the primary purpose of wilderness conservation is to preserve large areas in which evolution is free to continue autonomously, then there should be no reason to modify nature in these protected areas for the purpose of biodiversity conservation, ecosystem health, etc., simply because there is no doubt that self-willed evolution will sort all of this out on its own terms. When we feel the need to intervene, we are thinking in human timescales, not evolutionary ones. The ultimate act of humility and deference is to trust evolution to find its own way to restore lost biodiversity and degraded ecosystems – even if not in our own species’ lifespan.
Now, I don’t propose that we should never engage in interventions for the sake of protecting extant biodiversity that might perish without active conservation efforts. I don’t claim that it’s morally wrong to install gourds for Purple Martin (Progne subis) to nest in the Eastern US, say, or to manage for early successional jack pine habitat or suppress native Brown-Headed Cowbirds to sustain the existence of Kirtland’s Warbler (Setophaga kirtlandii). What’s important is that such artificial or continuous interventions not be conflated with the independent imperative to conserve wilderness in order to allow evolution to choose its own path. When we commit to set aside large areas of the planet to allow evolution “unfold in its own unhobbled way,” then within these areas we must do just that – even if that means suppressing a desire to prevent local or global extinctions by any means necessary. No, protecting an area as unmanaged wilderness is not a surefire guarantee that all species therein will persist indefinitely, thanks to extinction debt, future consequences of climate change, etc (and not to mention the fact that extinctions do occur naturally in wild nature).
Foreman admonishes us, “For wilderness and wildeors today, […] Man must show restraint — braking our self-willed might — by leaving some lands and wildlife alone, by not stamping our will on them.” Typically, we think of human restraint in terms of reining in our impulse to take more and more of the planet for ourselves. But, equally, conservationists must rein in the impulse to manage all nature for the purported good of ecosystems, species, or wildlife. My proposal is that – at least in large areas of Earth set aside for wild nature – we must prioritize the freedom of evolution over the sustenance of particular ecosystems, species, or wildlife populations. That means holding back, being patient, and admitting that evolution can take care of itself, even if its own timescale for restoration is more on the order of 10 million years.
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.
* * *
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 Earthrecently 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 doespromise 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 morethan 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 higherthan 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’tpropose 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?
Author’s Note: For a forthcoming essay with updated thoughts on the concept of intrinsic value – as it relates wild nature and otherwise – subscribe to my blog Ethics from the Outside, which has supplanted this website as the home for future musings on ethical topics. (For my “declaration of intellectual independence” from the rewilding movement – with which I’ve not been affiliated since mid-2023, see “‘Autonomous Evolution’ Revisited” published July 4, 2024 in said blog.)
* * *
For Wild Things for their Own Sake
As the recently appointed deputy director of The Rewilding Institute (TRI), one of my objectives is to ensure that TRI remains true to its founding mission of restoring and protecting wilderness and wildlife for their own sake. Sadly, recognition of the intrinsic value of wild Nature has become the exception rather than the norm in conservation – hence the publication of Dave Foreman’s Take Back Conservation, for one.
As a former philosopher of language who now sells my labour to moral philosophers, I am highly attuned to the framing of discourse and, specifically, to the implicit and explicit moral arguments (or the lack thereof) propounded by organisations and activists. This has distanced me from too many conservation organisations to count, and it was one of the main reasons – arguably the main reason – that I ultimately chose TRI as an outlet for my desire to confront today’s ecological crises in the company of fellow “Cannots” (to use Foreman’s Leopold-inspired term for those who cannot live without wild things).
Stemming from the lineage of Wild Earthand its ethos of deep ecology and ecocentrism, TRI doesn’t hide the organisation’s commitment to wild Nature’s intrinsic value. The preamble to its vision statement, for example, begins, “The Rewilding Institute begins with the assumptions that most of the world ought to be wild, that extinction is the overarching crisis of our time, and that we modern humans have an ethical obligation to protect and restore wild Nature.” This sits in stark contrast to the many, many conservation organisations that justify their work in terms of human dependence on the “natural resources” and “ecosystem services” derived from Nature.
Contrast TRI’s stated aims, for example, even to the rhetoric deployed by the congenial Half-Earth Project: “The ongoing mass extinction of the natural world ranks with pandemics, world war, and climate change as among the greatest threats that humanity has imposed on itself. To lose so much of Earth’s biodiversity is to both destroy our living heritage, and to risk the stability of the planet, today and for all future generations.”
If one’s ultimate objective is the preservation of most of the world as wild, why choose to throw one’s weight behind TRI rather than Half-Earth? Well, to speak for myself, my favouritism for TRI owes much to TRI’s upfront, non-nonsense commitment to Nature’s intrinsic value. Our objective should be to conserve wild Nature, period, not to conserve wild Nature in order thereby to save humanity from ourselves.
In this post, I offer a straightforward defence of framing our demands for conservation and rewilding in terms of an ecocentric worldview that recognises Nature’s intrinsic value. It goes something like this: All else equal, we should be honest (§1). One might suggest that we have practical reason to be dishonest (i.e. attempt to appeal to anthropocentrists) in order to protect wild Nature (§2); however, this potential counterargument doesn’t hold water (§§3-4). Thus, we’re back to the starting point that we ought simply to be honest. Imagine that!
Sometimes conservationists pose a question that I find frankly bizarre: “Should the demand for conservation be framed in terms of anthropocentric values or ecocentric values?”
Such questions always strike me as putting the cart before the horse. Unless there are extenuating factors that make it morally appropriate to lie (a possibility I’ll consider in §2), the demand for conservation ought to be framed in terms of whatever is true. That is, instead of asking “What should conservationists say is true?” we should simply ask “What is true?” – and then we should say that. Does wild Nature have its own inherent value that’s independent of its value to humans? Well, it does or it doesn’t, and this should determine how conservationists should frame their rhetoric and demands. If anthropocentrism is true, the demands of conservation should be framed in terms of Nature’s value to people; if ecocentrism is true, the demands of conservation should be framed in terms of Nature’s inherent value. It is a simple matter of honesty and truthfulness.
For my own part, I accept ecocentrism (even though I have argued that ecocentrism per se is under-described for the purpose of guiding conservation). In fact, I find the truth of anthropocentrism a very strange prospect indeed, given that Homo sapiens has only lived on this Earth for 300,000 years; it is ludicrous to think that there was no value in all the biodiverse and ecological complex lost worlds that came and passed in the hundreds of millions of years before our own species arrived on the scene. They had value, surely, and they would have had value even if H. sapiens had never evolved at all. Thus, I believe that it’s important for conservationists to accept and assert that wild Nature is intrinsically valuable for this reason alone: wild Nature is intrinsically valuable, and it is best (all else equal) to believe and promote truths and to abstain from believing or disseminating falsehoods. Moreover, I believe that it’s important for me personally to openly acknowledge that wild Nature is intrinsically valuable, because that’s what I believe, and people ought to be sincere.
As Chelsea Batavia and Michael Paul Nelson have pointed out, intrinsic value is itself intrinsically valuable and needs no further justification: “We find it troubling that [intrinsic value (IV)] has been so casually demoted in the conservation discourse, especially on (usually unsubstantiated) grounds of its ineffectiveness. This is a sad and perversely ironic mishandling of IV specifically, and morality generally. Recognizing IV, and demonstrating due favor or respect for its bearers, justify themselves […], whether or not they ‘work’ to forward some other agenda. As such, we suggest conservationists ought to acknowledge and promote nonhuman IV where there is good reason to believe it exists – simply because it is the right thing to do” (2017, “For goodness sake! What is intrinsic value and why should we care?” Biological Conservation).
Nature has intrinsic value. It is also inherently good to be honest, sincere, and to hold and act on correct moral principles. One might think this would be the end of the discussion. Oddly, however, proponents of ecocentrism sometimes seem to feel the need to justify their avowals of ecocentrism in practical terms. Even the closing of The Ecological Citizen’s Statement of Commitment to Ecocentrism reads “We, the undersigned, are convinced that the future of our living planet is dependent upon the recognition of the intrinsic value of nature, and strong support for ecocentrism as a worldview.” The claim here, significantly, is not “We support ecocentrism, period (because it is true),” but “We support ecocentrism because it is instrumentally valuable for preserving the future of the living planet.” I am among the undersigned, yet this closing sentence has always galled me. Note that, arguably (unless recognition is assumed to be factive), a person could consent to that sentence even if they themselves do not accept ecocentrism, provided that they believe that there is practical benefit in “making as if” nature has intrinsic value to help to secure the future of living planet and thus humanity.
Other prominent ecocentrists have also argued for acceptance or promotion of ecocentrism on the basis of its instrumental value for obtaining certain desired conservation outcomes (see, for example, Taylor et al, 2020, “The need for ecocentrism in biodiversity conservation,” Conservation Biology). Although well-intended, such arguments can be morally suspect as they are presented – if not due to diminishing the value of wild Nature, then due to diminishing the value of truthfulness, honesty, and sincerity. Is personal integrity and steadfastness in one’s fundamental moral convictions not still a good thing? Is that itself not something worth defending amidst this quagmire of sales and marketing, public relations, and politics?
In the above portrayals of the value of ecocentrism, it is presupposed that the protection of nature/biodiversity is a desirable outcome, and it is argued that the adoption of ecocentric ethics is an pragmatically effective way to achieve this outcome. But one can then ask on what moral basis the protection of nature/biodiversity is good. If it is good for ecocentric reasons, then the entire argument seems trivial; of course the goal of ethics education is to promote behaviour that complies with that ethical system. On the other hand, if the protection of nature/biodiversity is assumed to be good for anthropocentric reasons, then the argument contravenes its own premise – implicitly assuming anthropocentrism to argue for the (postured?) acceptance of non-anthropocentrism.
2. Lying for the Sake of Wild Things?
It is a widely held position that it’s better to assert truths than falsehoods, all else being equal. On this basis, we ought to speak from the standpoint of ecocentrism rather than anthropocentrism if the former is correct. Sometimes, however, all else is not equal. Suppose the Nazi Gazpacho (to take an example Marjorie Taylor Greene) arrive at the door and ask whether any Jews are taking refuge in your house. Suppose there are. Do you tell the truth – or do you lie in the hope of saving lives? Or suppose you are a spy or a plain clothes officer. Do you tell the truth about your identity when your job itself requires you to dissemble? (Or, to quote George W Bush this time, to “disassemble; that means not telling the truth.”) Or suppose your partner asks you “Do I look fat in this?”
Honesty is the moral default, while concealment or confabulation stands in need of special justification. This is not to say, however, that no such justification can ever be given. The question at hand, then, is this: Do we have a compelling moral reason to lie about the truth of ecocentrism and the falsity of anthropocentrism?
There is one obvious candidate for such a rationale: “The bulk of humanity continues to persist under the delusion of anthropocentrism. Meanwhile, time is of the essence to save Earth’s wild places and species, and we cannot spare the time to attempt to convert the masses to ecocentrism (if that is even possible at all) before persuading them to take action; we must attempt to meet them where they are. Thus, for the sake of wild Nature itself, we need to conceal our commitment to wild Nature’s intrinsic value, and talk as though Nature’s benefits to people are what’s important.”
Although this line of reason does hold some superficial plausibility, it has never deterred me from sticking to my guns on ecocentrism and my expressed commitment thereto. Perhaps there are specific circumstances (such as, say, saving a critically endangered species) that justify acting pragmatically in whatever way seems most effective, even if it requires concealing one’s own moral principles and making shit up about why humanity will benefit if (for example) the critically endangered species is able to persevere. But let’s take these on a case by case basis as they arise. As a general matter, I am not dissuaded from speaking what I believe.
3. Nature Has Time, Even if We Don’t
For one, precisely because I’m an ecocentrist, I’m actually not in a frenzy over the prospect of running out of time – for the question is not how long do we have, but how long does wild Nature have, and that’s something on the order of 600 million years to 1500 million years before the expanding sun vapourises the Earth’s waters (see Kollipara, 2014, “Earth Won’t Die as Soon as Thought,” Science, although I guess that study’s getting a bit dated; better subtract 9 years from the endpoints of that range estimate). Furthermore, although a mass extinction is indeed underway, Earth can recover from mass extinctions in only 10 million years (see, e.g., Lowery and Fraass, 2019, “Morphospace expansion paces taxonomic diversification after end Cretaceous mass extinction,” Nature Ecology & Evolution). In the words of Thích Nhất Hạnh, “The Earth may need millions of years to heal, to retrieve her balance, and restore her beauty. She will be able to recover, but we humans and other species will disappear, until the Earth can generate conditions to bring us forth again in new forms” (“Falling in Love with the Earth”).
I will, of course, continue to defend wild Nature in the here and now; I can’t help it, for it is like defending the honour of a close friend or loved one. But the fact that I’ve committed to this enterprise for wild Nature itself – rather than my own selfish desire to be able to experience it for the rest of my own life – provides some breathing room. The Earth can heal given time. For those of us who cherish wild Nature, it is almost impossible not to experience fear and anxiety at the present rates of catastrophic destruction. However, I don’t believe this fear alone should compel us to subvert our own beliefs and attempt to tell people what we think might have some slim chance of persuading them. We should do what we can in our lifetimes to restore and liberate wild Nature heal, but we must also maintain faith in Nature’s long-term resilience, and not let eco-anxiety drive us into such a disarray that we grasp at straws in the hopes of motivating others, while losing the grip on our own core moral beliefs.
4. Anthropocentrism Won’t Save Wild Nature Anyway
Acceptance of Nature’s resilience, and our own impermanence, is a moderating factor that should lessen the felt need to “lie” for wild Nature’s behalf. But there is an even deeper reason that there’s no need for us to dissemble in the attempt to persuade human chauvinists of anthropocentric reasons to protect wildlands and wildeors: it won’t work.
Lying about anthropocentrism can’t be expected to help us to protect wild Nature – or, at least, not much of it. There’s no reason whatsoever to think that appealing to the material self-interest of humans could suffice to protect Earth’s imperilled biodiversity and remaining wild places – let alone motivate the restoration and protection of half of the planet for autonomously unfolding ecological and evolutionary processes. After all, most Americans seem to be getting on fine without the passenger pigeon, ivory-billed woodpecker, Carolina parakeet, and numerous other creatures driven to extinction by our pursuit of progress. We are getting on fine despite the loss of one-third the world’s forests and nearly 90 percent of its wetlands to our expansionism, and we might get on just fine if the last remnants of wild Nature are given over to agriculture, wind farms, lithium mines, data centres, golf courses, car parks for our EVs, and other human uses. As Brad Meiklejohn recently wrote in a contribution to Rewilding Earth, “Most of the species on the planet are superfluous to human needs; people can thrive with only a few key ingredients like corn, rice, and cows” (“Boiling Frogs”), and as Howie Wolke previously pointed out, “Like cockroaches, humans can adapt to and even thrive in nearly every artificial environment imaginable. Mumbai, for example. Or Houston. Or the expansive monocultural wastelands of Kansas” (“Thirty By Thirty and Half Earth: Promises and Pitfalls”).
John Vucetich, Jeremy Bruskotter, and Michael Nelson have addressed an array of (bad) arguments against appeal to intrinsic value in conservation, including the highly implausible claim that anthropocentrism should suffice for motivating conservation action, thus rendering appeal to intrinsic value unnecessary. On this point, they write, “Most rare species provide negligible or dubious benefit to human welfare because they are rare. Other objects of conservation concern may once have contributed substantially to human welfare (e.g., American chestnut [Castanea dentata]) but no longer do because their abundance is low. […] Finally,many objects of conservation concern could be valued because they might serve human welfare in some as yet unknown capacity. But that seems a weak rationale for conservation. The uncertain and unlikely value of many species to human welfare would almost certainly be outweighed by the utility of exploiting habitats upon which those species depend” (2015, “Evaluating whether nature’s intrinsic value is an axiom of or anathema to conservation,” Conservation Biology).
Although I dislike arguments based on the “instrumental value of intrinsic value” in conservation, such arguments do have a role in countering the potential objection that the urgent need to protect Nature gives us reason to lie about moral truths. In sum, it would be pointless to “lie” and endorse anthropocentrism for the sake of trying to save wild Nature, because anthropocentrism can’t be expected to get us – or, more importantly, Nature – very far towards that end anyway. Oh, sure, we “Cannots” are personally burdened with considerable grief at the losses, yet those of our preferences have always found ourselves at the losing end of so-called progress.
There is also practical value in being forthright about our commitment to Nature’s intrinsic value: it can help us stand firm in defence of wild places in face of the pressure to compromise. As Howie Wolke wrote in another Rewilding Earth contribution, speaking of wilderness protection, “It also requires the strength of character to avoid beginning a process by compromising with opponents, and by fighting for every possible acre thereafter as the process proceeds. This requires leadership that loves and values wilderness as the highest expression of human selflessness: a biocentric view that recognizes the intrinsic value of all wild places and creatures” (2021, “We Need Big Holistic Wilderness”). (See also George Wuerthner’s article “Collaboration Traps,” which addresses the importance of not compromising in the defence of the intrinsic value of wildlands.)
So, then, there’s no good reason – generally speaking – to subvert our ecocentric convictions for the (alleged) sake of convincing others to protect wild Nature. On the contrary, there’s good reason not to do so. It seems the virtue of honesty wins after all.
5. Rewilding for Its Own Sake
There is sometimes temptation to instrumentalise the value of rewilding – to present rewilding as something that is important because, for example, it is an effective means to combat biodiversity loss and climate change. This is a milquetoast defence of rewilding, forgoing an opportunity to articulate the moral mandate to respect wild Nature’s autonomy, caving instead to the reiteration of socially acceptable outcomes. Nothing is more politically correct in environmental discourse than to cite climate change mitigation as the overriding objective, and it is also popularly acceptable to speak of the extinction crisis as something bad that ought to be avoided.
The fundamental moral justification of rewilding is not to mitigate climate change or even (merely) to avert loss of biodiversity (although the latter was, of course, a major concern of all of the movement’s founders). Like many rewilders within the classic North American tradition, I believe that intrinsic value in Nature inheres not only in wild creatures, biodiversity, and intact ecosystems, but also in those natural processes that have shaped all of life as we know it (as well as all of the life we never knew, and all future life that we won’t). Rewilding is its own end: the liberation and protection of vast expanses of land and sea where ecological and evolutionary processes can carry on as they will, according to their own arational creative powers, untrammelled by human interference.
The same reasons given in §1 for vouching for the intrinsic value of Nature also apply to this special case. There are also no compelling countervailing reasons to lie. On the contrary, it is not only dishonest but also dangerous to attempt to instrumentalise the value of rewilding and downplay the role of the basic moral obligation to respect Nature’s potential for autonomy. If rewilding is only a means to protect biodiversity and mitigate climate change, then why should rewilding be pursued if these outcomes can be achieved while humans continue to domesticate and manage the planet? As I have previously argued, it is precisely this sort of instrumentalisation of rewilding that has opened to the door for the alleged synthesis of rewilding and agriculture, a seemingly oxymoronic concept that’s actually being promoted in the UK by Virginia Thomas and others (see my “A Follow-Up Regarding So-Called ‘Agricultural Rewilding’”).
Promoting the goal of “rewilding for its own sake” will not be politically correct. Hell, it is not politically correct to use the word ‘wilderness’ – let alone to accept the coherence of the concept and even advocate for its continued existence over large portions of the Earth. It is not politically correct to accept that the concept of Nature’s autonomy is not only coherent but also has moral relevance. It’s not politically correct to vouch for anything that entails that large parts of Earth’s surface must be kept off-limits to human habitation and exploitation. In the milieu of leftist academia and “woke” political advocacy, a voice for the wilderness is ipso facto a voice in the wilderness. And that’s all the more reason that The Rewilding Institute must support the goal of protecting self-willed natural processes for their own sake – and must do so vocally.
When conservationists feel the pressure to remain politically correct, there are perverse consequences that are bad for Nature (and, yes, bad for people too), as it is most salient in the case of overpopulation denialism. How can anyone deny the reality of human overpopulation? The statistics make it undeniable. (Or, as Meiklejohn writes in the “Boiling Frogs” article, “If you think that overpopulation is not a problem, you need to get out more.”) As far as I call figure it out, people deny overpopulation for one main reason: they don’t want to be called racists, misanthropes, and ecofascists. Organisations like The Rewilding Institute need to stand firm on our politically incorrect convictions – in part that we might serve as a beacon for others to garner the courage to assert unpopular-but-bloody-obvious truths: human overshoot is rapidly diminishing self-willed Nature, and this in itself is very bad indeed.
TRI has not always been immune from the pressure to depict rewilding as an pragmatic solution to the commonly accepted crisis of climate change and biodiversity collapse. As deputy director, one of my charges and objectives is to ensure that the organisation resists this, always foregrounding the fact that wild Nature is good in itself and, correspondingly, that human domination and overshoot is bad in itself. Climate change and biodiversity loss are symptoms, but subjugation of self-willed Nature is the fundamental moral ill. And to speak this truth is a matter of honesty and integrity.
I think of this piece as the first instalment of an ongoing project of analysing and articulating a plausible moral foundation for rewilding. In it, I lay out the motivation and groundwork of my proposal: an ethic of respecting the creative potential of “self-willed” evolutionary processes, which I will develop in a manner partially inspired by moral sentimentalism and virtue ethics. This perspective is ecocentric; however, it is also importantly different from other possible ecocentric perspectives. For one, it’s “process-focused” instead of “product-focused” in locating the key bearer of intrinsic value (i.e. focusing on evolution instead of ecosystems, the biosphere, or biodiversity). For another, it aspires to reclaim a robust enough sense of a “human/nature distinction” to allow us to conceptualise these processes as autonomous, and thus to respect and protect them as such. In later work, I intend to contrast my position with other analyses of “respecting Nature’s autonomy” in the literature, and I’ll look more closely at potential practical consequences for restoration and rewilding.
Synopsis
Rewilding, in the first instance, must be ecocentric (§1). This follows from the fact that ecocentrism is true, and thus it must guide our policies impacting the more-than-human world just as much as respect for human dignity must guide our policies impacting members of our own species. At the same time, however, ecocentrism per se is insufficient as a moral basis for rewilding. What is missing is a means to adjudicate the extent to which human intervention is morally appropriate on behalf of the more-than-human world (§2). While I do not deny that humans can intentionally intervene in nature on nature’s behalf, we must be wary of the risk of paternalism – just as when we presume to intervene in other people’s affairs for their own good. For the paternalism worry to be coherent, we need a concept of wild nature as autonomous, which possibly would not sit well with ecocentrists who attempt to deny “human-nature dualism.” However, I argue that the latter ignores human agency and our ability to consciously choose how (and how much) to impact the rest of nature (§3).
On the account that I propose, an ecological ethic must foreground the importance of respect for evolutionary processes (§4). Even under this specification, however, there remains an important question as to what this moral demand entails in practice, and it returns to similar questions regarding the appropriate nature and degree of human intervention (§5). I claim that respect for evolution, properly construed, is constituted not only by the acceptance of certain beliefs but also by the cultivation of certain sentiments toward natural evolutionary processes – such as wonder, reverence, and humility – and that the fitting sentiments are ones that tend to dispose us to favour actions that minimise intervention in natural processes (§6). While the account offered here is ultimately subjectivist, it offers a (possibly) novel starting point from which to approach questions of our moral obligations to wild nature and their implementation.
To read the rest of the paper, you must download in pdf form (because I prefer to format pdfs than u.osu.edu webpage posts).
Author’s Note: I have not been affiliated with the rewilding movement since mid-2023, and I have changed my mind on some related theoretical matters. See my self-described “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.
This paper represents yet another iteration of my exploration of the transatlantic ambiguity in ‘rewilding’ and its covariate ecological and ethical assumptions. I composed it after chatting with Jack Humphrey for a future episode of the Rewilding Earth Podcast, thinking about all the things I could’ve said more compactly, and all the other things I should’ve made room to say instead…
…and, well, I actually didn’t set out to write the attached paper (even though it might look deceptively formal with those footnotes); it just kinda manifested as I was thinking over how I might reframe and rephrase some things, in conjunction with a bit of further reading I’d been doing on the side.
There is much overlap with my recent long-form essay “On Rewilding (Whatever That Is): Thoughts of a Faux-Expat” (October 2022), and like that one it is geared toward a North American audience. However, I aim to be more direct in illustrating why rewilding advocates in the North American tradition ought to worry about what’s happening in Europe under the heading of ‘rewilding’ (or, otherwise, why they bear the burden of proof in explaining why the practices in Europe are, in fact, consistent with the ecological and moral foundations of rewilding).
SUMMARY
In this paper, I remind the reader of the semantic fact that ‘rewilding’ refers to naturalistic grazing (at least as the term’s prototype or exemplar) in the hegemonic European discourse (§1). Then I draw an important distinction between two types of questions that should be raised concerning practices called ‘rewilding’ in Europe (§§2-3). The first is whether certain projects should becalled ‘rewilding’ despite being limited in their scope and scale (§2). This question is not unimportant; however, I believe that it has garnered too much attention in exclusion of the even bigger question of whether certain projects should be undertaken at all. In the case of European naturalistic grazing, I believe that this is the question that must be asked (§3), not merelywhether the projects should be called ‘rewilding’ in spite of their often small size. I elaborate this claim by invoking topics with which a North American rewilding audience should be familiar: the depletion of vegetation in landscapes with abundance of large herbivores without natural predators (§3.1); the afforestation of abandoned farmland (§3.2); the status of Pleistocene rewilding (§3.3).
Some apologists for European “rewilding” emphasise that Europe cannot accommodate the scale of rewilding possible in the North American continent. That is beside the point, however, because it is a two-way ocean, and naturalistic grazing could be implemented in North America. I challenge North American rewilding advocates to explain why they are not advocating similar practices for their own continent – and, in turn, why these reasons should not apply equally to Europe (§3.4).
But, of course, I couldn’t stop there without revisiting my diagnosis of my own main reasons – the foundational moral intuitions – for my differing attitudes toward the “rewilding” traditions in North America versus Europe. At the end of “On Rewilding (Whatever That Is),” I posed a “double bind” for Rewilding Europe and its agrarian/Pleistocene baselines; I develop that a bit more here (§4).
Download this latest permutation of my work on rewilding (whatever that is) here (only available in pdf format, at least at the moment; note that it does have some embedded links):
Conservation grazing in Nyord Enge (Denmark); photo by author
Within a few days of my posting my long-form essay “On Rewilding (Whatever That Is): Thoughts of a Faux Expat,” a recent chapter on so-called “agricultural rewilding” was brought to my attention [*]: “Domesticating rewilding: combining rewilding and agriculture offers environmental and human benefits” by Virginia Thomas et al in Transforming food systems: ethics, innovation and responsibility. In essence, the authors relabel regenerative agriculture as ‘rewilding’ and argue that it can subserve (what they perceive to be) the goals of actual rewilding, but do so without offending social norms and while providing additional benefits to humanity (both of which are presumed to be good things).
As it turns out, this is only one of several chapters in the conference proceedings on the topic of so-called “agricultural rewilding” or “rewilding with domestic animals”. I have chosen it specifically to criticise merely because it’s the one I first heard about. I strongly considered posting nothing about it, for after all there is nothing new here; it is just the old familiar anthropocentric stranglehold on conservation in conjunction with a now common perversion of the meaning of ‘rewilding’. The fact that anyone can unironically adopt the oxymoronic expression “agricultural rewilding” – that is, the alleged synthesis of farming and rewilding – is testament to the damaging upshot of the redefinition of ‘rewilding’ such that naturalistic grazing with fenced (semi-)domesticated livestock is its prototype (discussed at length in §2 of my last essay). Despite this, I believe it would be mistaken to focus my critique on the authors’ extreme form of abuse of an item of the English lexicon, for there are more basic disagreements that underlie this co-option of the term ‘rewilding’ – and which fly in the face of the spirit of the original rewilding movement.
First, and most fundamentally, the chapter’s ethical presuppositions appear anthropocentric through and through (§1). Although some cursory comments are made about the autonomy of non-human animals, they are quite strange to say the least, and no attention whatsoever is given to the idea that there is a basic moral mandate to protect the autonomy of Nature itself. Presumably as a consequence of this narrow and unimaginative view of ecological ethics, the authors misrepresent the goals of rewilding (§2). Secondly, and derivatively, the proposal for “agricultural rewilding” betrays a pronounced lack of ambition and overarching concession to the societal status quo (§3), once again dramatically out of keeping with the ethos of the rewilding movement as it originally developed in North America.
1. Fundamental Moral Rifts
As I described in §1 of “Thoughts of the Faux-Expat,” I was initially attracted to the (American) rewilding movement due to the ecocentric worldview adopted and advocated by its chief proponents. I was especially allured by Dave Foreman’s frequent reminders that wilderness is self-willed land, as it speaks to what intuitively seems among the most important and basic reasons for wilderness conservation: respecting the autonomy of naturally unfolding processes. Okay, perhaps it is too much to ask that all authors engage with my specific elucidation of ecocentrism and the moral foundations for rewilding. Nonetheless, any writer who aspires to engage with the rewildingmovement must entertain the general notion of ecocentrism, i.e., a moral stance that considers wild Nature to have intrinsic worth that is not reducible to the intrinsic worth of individual humans or any other individual animals or organisms. The American rewilding movement was steeped in ecocentrism throughout its Wild Earth years, and remains so today, as evidenced by the vision statement of The Rewilding Institute (“The Rewilding Institute begins with the assumptions that most of the world ought to be wild, that extinction is the overarching crisis of our time, and that we modern humans have an ethical obligation to protect and restore wild Nature”).
Thomas et al completely fail here. They don’t so much as mention ecocentrism for the purpose of dismissing it. The authors make a couple of passing references to Ian Convery and Steve Carver’s article “Time to put the wild back into rewilding” (ECOS, 2021) as advancing a position antagonistic to their own, yet they evince no real attempt to analyse what Convery and Carver argue or why. Apropos of the present point, they would have done well to remark on the ninth of the IUCN Guiding Principles for Rewilding (“Rewilding recognises the intrinsic value of all species and ecosystems”), which declares that “wild nature has its own intrinsic value that humanity has an ethical responsibility to both respect and protect” and that rewilding “should primarily be an ecocentric, rather than an anthropocentric, activity.”
Instead, Thomas et al frame conservation mainly in anthropocentric terms (§1.1), remain neutral on the reasons to protect biodiversity (§1.2), and … well … seem not to understand autonomy (§1.3). It is this overwhelmingly anthropocentric outlook, combined with an complete absence of engagement with ecocentric ethics, that allows them blithely to propose regenerative agriculture as a replacement for genuine rewilding. It is effectively New Conservation.
1.1. Thomas et al repeatedly presuppose that benefiting humans (always) adds value to conservation activities; meanwhile, they do not consider the possibility that the use of land to satisfy human needs and desires can inherently subtract value, as it would if the anthropization of landscapes is an inherent ill to be avoided where possible (as I and many other ecocentrists and rewilding advocates believe). The following are examples:
“Agricultural rewilding offers the potential for win-win scenarios in which biodiversity is increased and ecosystems are restored along with active human intervention in landscapes and the provision of livelihoods which are financially and environmentally sustainable” (p. 167).
“[I]n addition to their role as ecosystem engineers, the domestic species involved in agricultural rewilding have the added benefit of fulfilling a role in productive agriculture which the wild species in rewilding max do not” (p. 168).
“Agricultural rewilding, which permits continued human intervention in the landscape, offers a win-win scenario. Domestic livestock can be present in the landscape, restoring biodiversity and regenerating ecosystem function, active human intervention in the landscape can continue in the management of these species […]” (p. 168).
The purported “win-win scenarios” are such only within an anthropocentric worldview in which Nature is conceived as a resource to be exploited to meet human needs, and not something to be regarded as sacrosanct, with portions protected from our use.
1.2. While Thomas et al also presuppose that biodiversity conservation is important (as seen in the above quotes), they leave it indeterminate whether biodiversity is intrinsically valuable, or whether it is valuable only insofar as it contributes to “ecosystem services” for humans. Thus, the authors’ references to biodiversity should not be taken as evidence that they adopt, or have even entertained, ecocentrism. It follows that their (mis)identification of biodiversity conservation as the purpose of rewilding (see §2 below) should not be taken as evidence that they understand that rewilding, in its original incarnation, was thoroughly ecocentric.
Furthermore, my own position is this: while biodiversity is indeed intrinsically good, a mandate to preserve or enhance biodiversity does not represent moral bedrock, and indeed this prima facie conservation mandate can be overridden by the more fundamental moral obligation to respect the autonomy of natural processes (chiefly self-directed evolution; this view is advanced in pieces throughout “Thoughts of a Faux Expat” and the antecedent “In Memory of Anholt as I Never Knew Her”). To be fair, even most rewilding folks don’t seem to go here. But they should.
1.3. Although Thomas et al made some feeble remarks about the obligation to respect the autonomy of non-human animals, what they say is really weird and betrays an evident lack of critical thought about non-anthropocentric ethics. Here is what they say (emphases added):
“This management and slaughter of species impinges on their autonomy and killing of animals in either conservation or farming contexts is not without controversy” (p. 168).
“[W]hile the autonomy of other-than-human species is somewhat curtailed by their management and ultimate slaughter, their lives, as part of an extensive farming system, will have been lived to high welfare and environmental standards […]” (p. 168).
I can’t help but to feel wry amusement at the gross understatement in saying that a creature’s autonomy is “somewhat curtailed” by “management and ultimate slaughter.” Nothing is more antithetical to respect for the autonomy of “self-willed beasts” (as Dave Foreman would say) than to domesticate and enslave them for any type of human use. A slave is still a slave no matter how lavish his quarters. Perhaps typifying humans who somehow tolerate life in modern society, Thomas et al seem to confuse material standard of living with autonomy when speaking of “welfare conditions”; the former in no way guarantees the latter.
The authors’ remarks on the autonomy of more-than-human Nature are limited to the above. In particular, it bears emphasis (again) that they never consider the position that wild Nature itself (e.g. entire landscapes or ecosystems) should be respected as autonomous.
2. Understating the Goals of Rewilding
In keeping with the previous omissions, the authors define the benefits of rewilding extrinsically. That is, they neglect to consider the viewpoint that rewilding – restoring and protecting self-willed Nature as such – is an intrinsically desirable goal. Instead, Thomas et al frame rewilding as a conservation strategy touted for its instrumental benefits, as when they state, in the opening paragraph, that rewilding “advocates sparing large cores of wild land for species whose conservation requires significant amounts of space to insulate them from the risk of extinction” (p. 165). It is true that rewilding has been advocated for this reason, but it is merely one facet of a broader mandate to protect wild Nature.
In reducing the moral mandate of rewilding to its instrumental aims (i.e. biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services), Thomas et al sidestep the fundamental moral disagreement concerning humanity’s obligations to autonomous Nature. This sidestepping is essential to their arguments that regenerative agriculture (“agricultural rewilding”) can effectively subserve the aims of rewilding (max) and thus function as an substitute in contexts in which the latter is impractical, as illustrated by the following passages (emphases added):
“Agricultural rewilding can enhance biodiversity within these areas to a greater extent than would be possible in conventional agriculture. Nonetheless, in negotiating its position within farming landscapes, agricultural rewilding compromises on some of the key tenets of rewilding. This compromise should not be interpreted as a weakness but rather as a strength in that rewilding can exhibit flexibility, expanding its applicability while still achieving its central purpose” (p. 167).
“In such cases [where “rewilding max” is perceived as “threatening”] agricultural rewilding can proceed and provide ecological benefits in human-dominated landscapes whereas, by rigidly adhering to its key tenets, rewilding max may not be able to proceed at all and would therefore produce no environmental benefits” (p. 167).
“Where this [large landscape conservation] is unfeasible due to human and/or physical landscapes, rather than abandoning aspirations of rewilding, agricultural rewilding can exist at more human-compatible scales, aligned to farms or other areas of landownership […] In this way, relatively large-scale rewilding can still occur and provide ecological benefits while remaining compatible with existing landownership models” (p. 167).
Clearly, if rewilding’s “central purpose” is to safeguard the autonomy of wild landscapes, then so-called “agricultural rewilding” does not achieve this – much the contrary!
The authors’ arguments can gain purchase only if rewilding is perceived as valuable only instrumentally. In that case, there would remain (a) an empirical/scientific dispute as to whether farming can genuinely achieve the desired outcomes in terms of biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, etc., and (b) a semantic dispute as to whether farming should in any circumstances be called ‘rewilding’. But I contend that the authors’ arguments can’t gain purchase at all because there is an absolute and irreducible moral imperative to protect the autonomy of self-willed Nature – that is, to rewild for rewilding’s sake.
3. Pusillanimous Concessions and Compromises
There is no other way to state it: as things are, wild Nature is pretty fucked. Thus, if one accepts a basic moral duty to protect wild Nature, one must of necessity commit to being pretty damn ambitious and radical. In contrast, if one doesn’t accept this moral obligation, adhering instead to anthropocentrism, one has much more latitude to compromise to (perceived) human interest and resign to the status quo. Thomas et al, for example, are willing to accept the immutability of norms of social acceptability (§3.1) and demographic projections (§3.2). No ecocentrist – and no true rewilding advocate – could afford to do such things.
3.1 Thomas et al are willing to allow the European conservation agenda to (continue to) be held hostage by socio-cultural mores, making no gestures whatsoever toward the possibility of changing these norms.
The authors note that proposals for rewilding in Europe have “experienced considerable controversy due to concerns over human exclusion from landscapes […] and lack of human intervention, which publics have sometimes interpreted as an abnegation of responsibility” (p. 166). The rewilding proponent might interpret this fact as a clarion call to challenge societal attitudes – to do whatever we can to instil the publics (not just one public, mind you, but every last one of them!) with a respect and reverence for the beauty and creative potential of unmanaged landscapes. In contrast, the response of Thomas et al is to praise what they oxymoronically call the “taming” or “domestication” of rewilding in Europe: “The forms of rewilding [sic] which are emerging are more compatible with other types of land use and therefore more socially acceptable, leading to co-existence and tolerance rather than generating controversy” (ibid).
Later, the authors aver that “if agricultural rewilding is perceived as less threatening than rewilding max it has the potential to succeed within productive agricultural landscapes where forms of rewilding further along the spectrum may fail” (p. 167). Again, this is to sacrifice self-willed Nature to the mere socio-cultural contingency of what is perceived as threatening (!!). It should be anathema to any ecocentrist even to imagine giving up on rewilding on the basis that one is too spineless to stand up to outmoded, unscientific, and unethical cultural perceptions of self-willed Nature as threatening.
3.2 Although it is not a focal point of the paper, the authors also appear to concede defeat with respect to the possibility of reducing human population, accepting current trajectories that the Earth will “need to feed nine billion people by 2050” (p. 169).
Human overpopulation has been and continues to be the most severe threat facing wild Nature, as it multiplies all the myriad harmful types of human activity – habitat destruction and fragmentation, overharvesting, pollution, and so on – and consigns uncultivated, undeveloped areas of Earth’s surface ever more to the margins. But it is also the easiest problem to solve, because literally all people need to do is to stop having kids. There is absolutely nothing inevitable about human reproduction; it is readily within our power as a species to end and reverse human population growth – and any rewilding proponent must advocate for precisely this. Without human depopulation, possibilities for rewilding are already severely constrained (see, e.g., the grim statistics cited in “The One in Which I Broach the Topic of Overpopulation”). This is not a reason to abandon the aspirations of rewilding; it is a reason to advocate for human depopulation in tandem.
It is a common objection to rewilding that the need to feed a growing human population doesn’t allow for it, and Thomas et al appear to recapitulate this mindset, even though they opt to redefine ‘rewilding’ instead of asserting that rewilding isn’t possible. Regardless of the words (mis)used, the upshot is the same; the authors seemingly give up on the prospects for limiting human population and, with it, give up on the preservation of wild Nature. When one instead adopts the starting point that the preservation of wild Nature is a fundamental moral mandate, then one has no choice but to do what one can to act on overpopulation.
4. Concluding Remarks: What is the Real Problem Here?
It is easy to understand why proponents of rewilding – in its original sense – would be appalled by the degree to which the term is stretched in this chapter. This, however, is nothing new. The term ‘rewilding’ has already been appropriated to refer to farms such as Knepp Estate or, in Denmark, Klintholm Gods. And this itself is an unsurprising application of the term in light of its now-prevalent use in Europe to refer, stereotypically, to a type of naturalistic grazing in which the grazing animals are (a) selected due to resemblance to their wild ancestors and (b) kept in their enclosures year-round without supplemental feeding. Thus, this new publication by Thomas et al should not be seen as uniquely shocking or reprehensible.
To be sure, Thomas et al are poor semanticists. They make no attempt to critically investigate the proliferation of uses of ‘rewilding’ – uncritically accepting all as valid and synonymous. The semantic analysis aspires to descriptiveness and inclusiveness to a fault (the famous line of Whitman comes to mind: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I contain multitudes”). The reference to Wittengenstein’s idea of family resemblance is superficial and naïve; Thomas et al believe that they can invoke family resemblance to ground the alleged univocality of all uses of ‘rewilding’ without recognising that this stretches the notion of family resemblance itself too liberally to be of use (a bit like appropriating the concept to allege that ‘football’ is univocal term because all games called ‘football’ share a certain family resemblance, being played on a field, with a ball, two teams, goals, etc.).
Despite these flaws, the danger runs deeper than mere misuse of a word. The newspeak-like redefinition of ‘rewilding’ as something simultaneously compatible with agriculture may be seen as a gambit to shut out any movement to protect self-willed Nature. Yet we mustn’t let the issue of labelling obscure what is even more deplorable here: the absence of a strong, unified, morally grounded movement – by any name – to protect self-willed Nature.
I once wrote a doctoral dissertation in philosophy of language just for fun. I like arguing semantics! At the end of the day, however, the true enemy is anthropocentrism, human chauvinism. The problem is that I am a philosopher, and no amount of philosophising can defeat anthropocentrism; no logic and reason can adjudicate this fundamental moral rift. What is needed is a transformation of non-cognitive attitudes – to learn to regard wild Nature with wonder, awe, humility, and respect. And I, as a mere philosopher, don’t know what to say or do at this point. Get outside and attune yourself to whatever wildness you can find in your surroundings, or something.
Kate M.
[*] See this and this Twitter thread with Ian Convery, Steve Carver, and Mark Fisher, which contain my original articulation of most of the ideas in this post, in their < 280 character form. Thanks to Ian, Steve, and Mark for enlivening my experience at a 10-hour layover at Boston Logan with under three hours sleep.
Author’s Note: I have not been affiliated with the rewilding movement since mid-2023, and I have changed my mind on some related theoretical matters. See my self-described “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.
I still think that I was basically correct in the semantic thesis that ‘rewilding’ was best understood as a case of “transatlantic semantic ambiguity” (akin to terms like ‘biscuit’ or ‘football’); however, the use of the term has become even more muddled in the years since I wrote the essay below. I do not believe that the world ‘rewilding’ should be used as a supposedly meaningful term in any professional or scholarly context (or in the name of an NPO).
* * *
As I have become more involved in the “rewilding” movement, I find myself compelled to make my position clear. I came to support traditional rewilding on the basis of the same moral commitments that later caused me oppose other trends in conservation that are also called ‘rewilding’ (especially in Europe, where I’ve been pretending to live). But above all, perhaps, I am committed to the rule of logic, and thus alarmed by the uncritical treatment of ‘rewilding’ as a univocal term and the nexus of a single unified movement. It is not.
This initial statement piece, although way too long, remains far from an exhaustive treatment, leaving many loose ends; it does not provide any sort of comprehensive review of the “rewilding” discourse or relevant ecological research, and the ethical analysis is still hand-wavy. But look: it is a first-pass post on a personal website; it’s not meant to pretend to be complete or authoritative. I am a novice. But I have seen enough to know that the “rewilding movement” needs to stop glossing over substantive disagreements.
On Rewilding (Whatever That Is): Thoughts of a Faux-Expat
I can’t say for sure whether or not I support “rewilding”.
I have been deeply inspired by the steadfastly non-anthropocentric moral foundations of the work of Dave Foreman, Michael Soulé, and other founders of the groundbreaking North American rewilding movement, as well as the ambitious visions for continent-scale conservation that followed therefrom. On the other hand, I now live mainly in Europe, where I refuse to use the word ‘rewilding’ to refer to any interest of mine, since for one I am loath to support the livestock industry against spontaneous afforestation (see §2). Meanwhile, as an analytic philosopher and thus inveterate stickler for linguistic clarity and logical consistency, I’ve been by turns appalled, confused, and morbidly fascinated by the tendency of advocates and other commentators to uncritically speak as though ‘rewilding’ expressed a single coherent concept. My own view is that ‘rewilding’ is best understood as an ambiguous term. In particular, what seem to be the predominant North American and European senses of ‘rewilding’ have different meanings, encapsulated by significantly different entrenched conceptual prototypes. Once we accept the semantic ambiguity, those of us in the North American tradition should see more clearly that the “naturalistic grazing” practices generally called ‘rewilding’ in Europe are not only something different from “our” rewilding but also worth critiquing (to put it delicately) on both ecological and ethical grounds (§3).
Before I get there, however, I must say more about the moral framework that drew me to something called ‘rewilding’ in the first place. This is essential to understanding my critical attitude toward both the stereotypical projects called ‘rewilding’ in Europe and attempts to provide a common definition to unify the North American and European ‘rewilding’-so-called movements: any unifying framework would, by necessity, shunt aside the moral underpinnings that lured me to the North American rewilding movement in the first place.
1. Ecocentric Ethics and Initial Attraction to Rewilding
Like many, I presume, I became enthralled by the North American rewilding movement due to Dave Foreman’s classic Rewilding North America(2004). Perhaps more unusually, the book excited me less as an American looking for inspiring conservation projects – by the time I read it, I’d already decided to flee to Europe ASAP, and thus I was already hoping to discover inspiring projects there – but as a dilettante in ecological ethics.
More context: in 2019, I was spontaneously and unexpectedly hired as the associate director of an ethics centre at a major university. It was not a research position. However, being a trained philosopher and naturally inclined to philosophical enquiry, I was inspired to join the fun of thinking about moral philosophy. Now, this happened at a time when experiences of nature and wildlife (read: birds) had become exceedingly important as part of my daily living, and when I’d recently rekindled a long-squelched hankering for the natural sciences. In fact, had it not been for the surprise job offer, my plan had been to return to school to study taphonomy and palaeoecology. Given such interests, my natural disposition was to think about environmental ethics, especially from a non-anthropocentric perspective, which always seemed like the obvious default position. Prior to Covid, I’d also begun supplementing philosophical reading with attending courses in conservation biology and restoration ecology.
Philosophically, I became particularly engrossed by the ecological holism and aesthetic themes of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and … and, well, I guess I mostly just thought that Leopold was the sh*t, and I became a bit distrustful of career philosophers who wrote about environmental ethics. Nevertheless, as philosophers are disposed to do, I began to sketch my own ideas about what my starting point would be if I were to defend my own position in ecological ethics. The thought I couldn’t shake – and, to this day, still can’t – was that naturally unfolding evolutionary processes are the fundamental bearer of value, and that this motivates the demand to protect large areas of self-governed land (and sea) from our meddling and control. In this way, wilderness protection is a means to express our respect and reverence for the autonomous and non-teleological nature of evolution. Natural evolution, in other words, should be treated as sacred – not defiled and desecrated by the imposition of human control on every square inch of the Earth. It’s a view that I’d still like someday to hash out in more philosophical analness – er, rigour, I mean.
In early 2020, I was heartened and amazed to find an author defending – or, even better, presupposing – something very much like my own intuitive position on the foundations of an ecocentric ethic: the author was Dave Foreman, and the book was Rewilding North America. I’d expected interesting conservation proposals but not necessarily philosophical depth, let alone the expression of ethical positions so congenial to my own emerging views: evolutionary processes are among the intrinsically valuable elements of nature, and it is our duty to preserve them; it is appropriate to regard nature’s autonomous, self-directed creative processes with humility, and respect, and we manifest this respect in part by allowing nature space to carry on without our intrusion; the protection of large wilderness areas is important because they provide the space needed for the continuation of organically unfolding evolutionary processes.
I was intrigued, first off, by the unusual degree of emphasis that Foreman – often citing Michael Soulé – gave to the importance of safeguarding Nature’s capacity for evolution and speciation, where by ‘unusual degree’ I mean the fact that he emphasised it at all. This was augmented by Foreman’s frequent reminders that ‘wilderness’ means self-willed land. Far from a mere etymological factoid, this definition is philosophically illuminating, deftly addressing hackneyed complaints against the coherence of the idea of wilderness (that humans are part of nature, that what we think of as “pristine” was actually shaped by the activities of Indigenous peoples, that nothing can be pristine any more, etc.). In mulling over this concept of “self-willed land”, I realised that those complaints are all beside the point, for we do have a conception of respect for autonomy, and thus we can have a conception of respecting self-willed land as such. Humans are part of nature, but so what? We can make the deliberate choice to allow other parts to persist without our active interference in their activity, where these other parts include not only “self-willed beasts” but also large landscapes in which the same evolutionary processes that created us can continue to play themselves out.
The final paragraph of Rewilding North America encapsulates many of the core moral themes:
“Wilderness and wildlife, both as natural realities and as philosophical ideas, are fundamentally about human humility and restraint. Remember that in Old English wil-der-ness means self-willed land and wildeor means self-willed beast. Our war on nature comes from trying to impose our will over the whole Earth. To develop and practice a land ethic, we must hold dear both wil-der-ness and the wildeor. Only by making the moral leap to embrace, celebrate, love, and restore self-willed nature can we stop the war on nature and save ourselves. […] [I]t is only by rewilding and healing the ecological wounds of the land that we can learn humility and respect; that we can come home, at last. And that the grand dance of life will sashay on in all its beauty, integrity, and evolutionary potential.”
As far as the rewilding proposals themselves, what I appreciated more than anything was the discovery of an approach to conservation that began with a staunchly ecocentric moral foundation and then proceeded by way of science, asking first “What is morally right?” and secondly “What must we do, scientifically speaking, to pursue what is right?”
I can’t resist mentioning one more underrated ethical insight from Foreman, this one from the inaugural episode of the Rewilding Earth Podcast in 2018 (“Dave Foreman On The History and Definition of Rewilding”): “I don’t know if Homo sapiens is going to exist in a hundred years the way we’re doing. But what my goal really is, is to have all the building blocks of evolution — which are native species, natural processes, large chunks of land and oceans and lakes and rivers that are off limits to industrial civilization — for whatever comes next, and that’s the greatest legacy we can leave.”
For my own part, this is the only perspective on conservation that I am psychologically capable of finding hopeful and inspiring. I am too much of a realist to have any modicum of genuine hope as long as Homo sapiens persists – not for self-willed nature, not for self-willed beasts, not even for self-willed humans who long to live as autonomous agents, free from the stifling artificial constraints of our overdeveloped world. As I wrote in “The One in Which I Broach the Topic of Overpopulation” (July 2022), conservation also needs a stronger theoretical basis than clichés about the rights of future (human) generations, and Foreman’s insight might be a promising basis for exactly that.
Now, mind you, I am a human, and as long as I live, Homo sapiens is ipso facto not extinct, and so as long as I live I’m sure I’ll continue to muse over what an ideal human society would be like – in theory. That ideal society, in my view, would look something like the “Island Civilisation” described by Eileen Crist in her excellent book Abundant Earth, compact and downscaled human settlements in a sea of connected wilderness areas. I favour it in part for purely selfish reasons, overwhelmed as I am by both urbanisation and sprawl (and car culture, light pollution, noise pollution, etc.) and forced thereby to seek life on small mono-settlement islands. However, in flipping the current configuration of the matrix, Island Civilisation is also the natural human counterpart to the sweeping continent-scale conservation advocated by the founders of the North American rewilding movement. I have little tolerance, then, for those who find it “practically” necessary to water down the ambitions of rewilding and, at best, fit nature in between the cracks in a thoroughly anthropized world: either we stake our hope on the eventual (or imminent) extinction of Homo sapiens – the realistic option – or we adjoin our ambitions for rewilding to a reciprocal downsizing of the human population and downscaling and localisation of human activity (which, imho, are independently necessary to make human life itself sufferable).
A Caveat on Evolution, Extinction, and Morality
So that, in broad strokes, is the theoretical basis of my attraction to rewilding – or the ideas that were originally called such. However, before I go on to argue that ‘rewilding’ means something different in Europe (the continent whereon I traipse in my personal pursuit of islandness), I need to issue one important disclaimer about my own moral position and where it potentially diverges from others who were and are attracted to this self-same rewilding movement. To my knowledge, none of Foreman, Soulé, or any other rewilding pioneer advanced the position that evolutionary processes are the most important object of conservation, or that the integrity of self-willed evolutionary processes should generally take precedence over the protection of biodiversity. Instead, the authors trend the goals as compatible, and at least rhetorically they generally place greater emphasis on the importance of safeguarding biodiversity and preventing extinction.
I plan to say more, in future writing, to distinguish the “evolution-first” position from the “biodiversity-first” position as two distinct and competing ecocentric views, and defend the former against the latter (I have already foreshadowed this in “In Memory of Anholt as I Never Knew Her” and I say more below in §3.2.1). This might seem like a triviality – a philosopher’s distinction. I suppose it is a philosopher’s distinction in a sense: I’m a philosopher and I’m making it. Despite this, the distinction is substantive with practical differences for conservation, some of which emerge in the assessment of different things called ‘rewilding’. The Wildlands Project did indeed aspire to preserve both biodiversity and evolutionary processes – simultaneously, both through the protection of large self-willed landscapes – and the conflation of these separate ecocentric goals never bothered me when I first read Rewilding North America and related material. I was not thinking at that time about the use of proxy species, artificial selection (e.g. the Tauros Programme), or synthetic biology – methods that aim to increase biodiversity through human intervention whilst severing natural evolutionary chains – nor was I thinking about the supposition that some forms biodiversity could be dependent on agriculture or even more extreme situations of anthropogenic degradation of self-willed land (cf. Anholt). As I return to claim at this end of this essay (§3.2), the distinction between “evolution-first” and “biodiversity-first” conservation ethics turns out to be extremely relevant to the assessment of what’s called ‘rewilding’ in Europe, where the aforementioned ideas are unavoidable. It is also relevant to “Pleistocene rewilding” and “de-extinction” in the US – or anywhere, for that matter – although, fortunately, traditionalist organisations like The Rewilding Institute have not yet been overrun by these perversions.
In Rewilding North America, Foreman stresses the fact that Earth has been in the midst of a major human-caused extinction event since the Pleistocene, when our ancestors hunted charismatic megafauna to extinction with cascading ecological effects. A moral complication here, however, concerns the facts that (i) extinction is forever, (ii) the Pleistocene was a long time ago, and (iii) recovery from extinction is itself a nature-led process. We must, then, be cautious in considering to what extent – if at all – it is morally permissible to intervene to attempt to undo past extinctions and their effects rather than merely prevent future ones. After all, Nature has proven herself more than capable of recovering from even greater extinction events at least five times in the past.
On my view, humility and respect for natural evolutionary processes encompasses respect and deference for Nature’s own creative self-directed process ofrecovery from extinction. Thus, I tend to harbour considerable antipathy toward human obstruction of Nature’s self-recovery from the Pleistocene extinctions, no matter how well-meaning in intent. There is room for moral disagreement here amongst even “traditional” rewilders, and my own position might well be what ultimately gets me in trouble with the rewilding movement – should it decide, say, to converge around introductions of “highly interactive” species, whether they are native wild species or de-domesticated proxies or lab-manufactured prehistorical re-enactments. I will come back to all this later (§3.2.3).
Ecological recovery takes time, and the North American rewilding movement has been known for long-term thinking. Foreman notes in Rewilding North America that the Wildlands Project developed a vision for 100 years in the future. If I were asked how forward-looking conservationists should be, I would suggest something a bit longer still: conservation needs to think 10 million years into the future. I base this on an article published in Nature Ecology & Evolution a few years back that argued that 10 million years represents Nature’s self-imposed extinction recovery speed limit. With an extinction event already well underway, we’d be fools to expect less. We can still try to prolong the life to existing biological lineages, protect more biodiversity for evolution to draw upon moving forward, protect large landscapes to serve as an arena for evolutionary processes, and of course scale back our destructive enterprises (including procreating) as much as possible – but, mostly, we must have patience and confidence that Nature will find her own novel and creative way forward, given time.
Most conservationists would probably respond to my “forward-looking” approach with what is commonly known in philosophical parlance as an incredulous stare. At minimum, however, I believe that someone ought to strive to develop a position that genuinely venerates deep-time evolution; it is not as though Earth herself is going to publish it. Henry David Thoreau’s posthumously published “Walking” (1862) is among my favourite essays ever written, in large part for its depiction of the conjunction of pedestrian-based living and the pursuit of wildness, which so much resembles my own goal in life (see “Around the World for a Ten Miles’ Radius”). In this context, though, I must cite the opening sentences: “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness […] I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization…”
It did nothing to dampen my opinion of Dave Foreman when I learned that he had campaigned for Barry Goldwater. So had my father, after all, who tried his best to raise me in the mould (“Au! H2O!”). So I will further add a slogan that I’ve adapted: moderation in pursuit of ecological civilisation is no virtue; extremism in defence of wild Nature is no vice.
It is important to distinguish my following semantic position (§2) from my moral one. I adopt a moral position that many will find extreme, and I don’t necessarily expect to convert anyone to it, although I will continue to speak in its favour. My semantic position, in contrast, is an entirely mundane descriptive claim: speakers systematically use the word ‘rewilding’ to refer to something different in Europe than in North America. Whether one supports North American rewilding, European nature development (“rewilding”), or neither, this semantic difference needs to be acknowledged, especially as it corresponds to empirical and ethical disagreements.
Postscript
On the evening of 19 September 2022, I was staying with a friend in Columbus, and forcing her to endure my effusive praise for Foreman and his neglected contributions to ecological ethics (fortunately for my friend, she had a glass of wine; unfortunately for her, so did I). Having come for a visit after many months in Europe, I had just retrieved my copy of Rewilding North America to reread and thereby to remind myself why in the hell I ever thought I was interested in rewilding. An hour or so later, I’d retired to my guestroom, and for whatever reason I opened that deuced website called Twitter. Surprisingly, the first item in my newsfeed was not a bird photograph but an announcement from The Rewilding Institute, and I will never forget how shocked and gutted I felt in that instant: “We are deeply saddened to report that Dave Foreman passed away this evening…”
I hope that my reflections on the perversion of the use of the word ‘rewilding’ in Europe, and the need to reclaim the movement’s ethical and ecological foundation (whatever word is used for it), can do something to contribute to his legacy and enormous contributions.
2. Transatlantic Ambiguity in ‘Rewilding’
Ludwig Wittgenstein is often credited with laying the theoretical basis for the idea of a cluster concept in semantics. Some terms (such as ‘game’) cannot be given a precise definition; instead, their denotata share only what he calls family resemblances, “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (see Philosophical Investigations,§66-67).
In Wittgensteinian tradition, I have at times suggested that ‘rewilding’ expresses a clusterf–ked concept, where a “clusterf–ked concept” is a specific type of cluster concept in which the network of associated attributes has become so deeply muddled, confused, and even self-contradictory that the term and concept are essentially worthless. As long as commentators speak as though ‘rewilding’ is univocal rather than ambiguous, that remains my best gloss on the situation. As I describe below, speakers in North America and Europe associate strikingly different conceptual prototypes with the term ‘rewilding’ – different to the extent that the type European use of ‘rewilding’ came off to me as doublethink when I kept encountering it in Denmark (§2.2). The continental divide will be my focus. Alternatively, though, we could consider typologies that commentators have proposed, such as rewilding, Pleistocene rewilding, passive rewilding, and translocation rewilding in Nogués-Bravo et al (2016, “Rewilding is the new Pandora’s box in conservation,” Current Biology).
The conceptual differences here run deep, reflecting fundamentally different aspirations and beliefs concerning the appropriate type and degree of human intervention in self-willed nature. It is a stretch, to say the least, to claim that these four “types of rewilding” are merely four flavours of the same basic thing. Take, for example, the inherent tension between the “do nothing” approach of passive rewilding and the radical interventionism Pleistocene rewilding, which attempt to create analogues of communities of megafauna over 10,000 years extinct, through the use of “proxy species” or even synthetic biology. (Conceivably, a different version of this paper might focus on the division internal to North American between “traditional” rewilding and “Pleistocene rewilding” as popularised by Josh Donlan in a paper in Nature also titled “Rewilding North America” (2005); however, it so happens that it’s been in the European context, not the American one, where I’ve been subjected to the neo-Pleistocene aspirations.)
Nogués-Bravo et al admit the extreme variance here… before immediately proceeding to “advocate reaching a consensus among definitions within the panchreston of rewilding.” That is a decidedly odd request, given the degree of normative and/or empirical disagreement between proponents of the respective four different things. I believe it would be much more sensible to prescribe disambiguation and schisms, not forced unification.
2.1 ‘Rewilding’ Prototypes: North American vs Europe
My claim in this section is that the word ‘rewilding’ does not express the same concept in its dominant traditions of use in North America and Europe. I substantiate this claim with the observation that each tradition of use corresponds to very different prototypes, which systematically lead to different (default) inferences when the term is used.
For example, in Denmark, the country with which I am most familiar, ‘rewilding’ is used to refer to a specific type of conservation grazing (a familiar and widespread practice in the country) that incorporates either native wild animals or (more typically) domesticated animals chosen as analogues or “proxies” for extinct wild relatives, which are “free-living” (minimally managed) in their enclosures year-round (§2.2). The structure of the Danish projects closely resembles globally known European “rewilding” prototypes (like the controversial Oostvaardersplassen), but none of them bear even a family resemblance to prototypes of North American rewilding, such as the proposed continental wildways of the Wildlands Project and the ubiquitous emphasis on the “3Cs” (Cores, Corridors, Carnivores).
2.1.0 Background: “Why the f–k aren’t people already acknowledging this?”
I will not conduct a literature review here. Suffice it to say that, whenever the topic is mentioned, there seems to be nearly unanimous agreement that North American “rewilding” emphasises carnivores whereas European “rewilding” emphasises herbivores, and that European “rewilding” has different roots, specifically as an outgrowth or rebranding of the concept “nature development” (natuurontwikkeling), which originated as an “offensive strategy for nature conservation in the Netherlands” (to use the exact words of Frans Vera and Fred Baerselman in “Nature Development: An exploratory study for the construction of ecological networks,” 1995).
These facts are not in dispute, and they will be salient to anyone who conducts even a superficial cross-continental comparison. The reason I am writing this is that I find it baffling – and disturbing – that so few have taken the step, which seems obvious to me, to posit that the word ‘rewilding’ is simply ambiguous. After familiarising myself with the Danish context, I concluded that proponents of North American and European “rewilding” are no more in the same game than players of North American and European “football” (despite superficial similarities like running around on a field and trying to score goals against an opposing team). Although there is some superficial similarity in the expressed goals and aspirations of natuurontwikkeling and North American rewilding, there are also many salient differences. In any case, they are distinct traditions and ought to be treated as such – not coerced into a forced unity due to their adoption of the same word.
I sometimes feel a bit like the experimental subject in Solomon Asch’s conformity experiment when surrounded by senior colleagues who fail to acknowledge the asymmetry (“you think the lines are the same length?! really?!”). This lack of open acknowledgement is made only stranger by the fact that a few do openly acknowledge it, in no uncertain terms. Mark Fisher, most notably, has been sharply criticising the rebranding of nature development and naturalistic grazing as ‘rewilding’ for years in his blog at www.self-willed-land.org.uk. In a 2013 post speaking directly to the issue (“What is rewilding?”), Fisher writes, “[I]n the absence of any other voice, the agenda that is now attached to ‘rewilding’ is livestock grazing, and will increasingly, through the persistence of the grazing advocates, be the only approach to wilder land that the public will hear.”
Well, that is precisely the situation I encountered in Denmark in 2021-22 (§2.2), and it is rather surprising that is hasn’t generated more concern from those of us allured by the traditional conception of rewilding, for superficiallyit seems in almost diametrical opposition to what we support (as Fisher continues, “Thus whereas the axiom should be of a withdrawal of farming as an absolute pre-condition of moving along the wild land spectrum, this will continue to be disavowed …”). I’ll come back to that in §3.
The failure of Americans to address this issue becomes weirder when one realises that Fisher also contributed a forthright and trenchant piece to The Rewilding Institute’s Rewilding Earth on the “drifting in meaning” in the term in Europe: “Drifting from Rewilding” (2019). When I encountered the piece in the Rewilding Earth: Best of 2019 anthology, I took for granted that it probably represented a consensus position on the semantic ambiguity in the North American and European senses of ‘rewilding’ and their correlative assumptions about ecology. (After spending some time in Denmark, my thoughts evolved into “Oh god I need to find that ‘meaning drift’ piece in Rewilding Earth again; it really is happening and it’s kinda freaking me out…”) I guess I was wrong to assume consensus. Recently, I noticed “Drifting from Rewilding” is called “controversial” by editors of the anthology, and in a later Rewilding Earth post, David Schwartz criticises Fisher for insisting on a “canonical and purist definition” (“European Experiments in Rewilding: Oostvaardersplassen,” 2019).
That strikes me as a strange criticism. From a prescriptivist standpoint, there are good reasons to disavow this European usage of ‘rewilding’ given its semantic associations with grazing projects that seemingly defy basic ecological and ethical assumptions of the North American rewilding movement; Fisher makes this point quite clearly (more on such tensions in §3; see also the critical writings of Helen Kopnina, Simon Leadbeater, and Paul Cryer on this particular case study, such as “Learning to Rewild: Examining the Failed Case of the Dutch ‘New Wilderness’ Oostvaardersplassen,” 2019).
But Schwartz’s is also a strange reaction to Fisher’s piece even from the standpoint of descriptive semantics — my concern for the this section. Insofar as he describes the use of ‘rewilding’ in Europe as a drift in meaning, Fisher seems just to be saying something factually true. Semantic drift is a common phenomenon of natural language, and it does sure look what has happened here, when the word ‘rewilding’ got affixed in Europe to the tradition of nature development and prototypes like Oostvaardersplassen. It is hardly a “purist” point to correctly identify that a word means different things in different contexts, or to insist that this ambiguity be cleared up on pain of rampant confusion.
It is worth disentangling the semantic point from the ecological and ethical ones. My first claim is a descriptive claim about word usage: North American and European speakers tend to use the word ‘rewilding’ to express different concepts. This is a point about how speakers actually use a certain word, not a normative claim about whether any particular concept called ‘rewilding’ should or should not be implemented. The latter is a matter not for semantics but for ecology and ethics. However, recognising this semantic ambiguity in ‘rewilding’ helps to clarify a distinction that does correspond to critical ecological and ethical disagreements (§3).
2.1.1 North American Prototypes
I won’t go into much detail on the prototypes of rewilding in North America [*], since I’ve been imagining myself implicitly addressing North American rewilding proponents as I write this piece, and I since assume that most other readers (if any) will be familiar with the idea of rewilding (if at all) through the North American context – such as the much-heralded example of the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park, the pioneering work of Dave Foreman, or the ubiquitously cited “Rewilding and Biodiversity: Complementary Goals for Continental Conservation” article by Michael Soulè and Reed Noss, which famously articulated the “3Cs” of rewilding: Cores, Corridors, and Carnivores. More recently, even much of the laity will have heard of the much publicised proposal to reintroduce wolves and beavers in the Western US (Ripple et al, 2022, “Rewilding the American West,” BioScience).
In North America, the 3Cs remain the core attributes (no pun intended) of the conceptual prototype. The last I checked, The Rewilding Institute’s “What Is Rewilding?” page continues to state, in big bold letters, “The shorthand definition of Rewilding is the ‘3 C’s’ – conservation of Cores, Corridors, and Carnivores.” The reintroduction of recently extirpated large carnivores like wolves and cougars (or pumas or mountain lions) is prototypical, as is an emphasis on the ecology of trophic cascades and the need for predators to limit overbrowsing and overgrazing by herbivores like deer and elk. Habitat connectivity is a dominant theme in practice as well as theory – with a goal of large-scale “continental wildways” adjoined to the celebration of paradigmatic local successes like dam removals or the construction of wildlife crossings over roadways. Outside of the 3Cs, themes like natural disturbance regimes (e.g. wildfire), removal of livestock from public lands, and protection of old growth forests are common in both past and present discourse. And whether or not non-anthropocentrism is considered to be semanticallyentailed by ‘rewilding’, there is a long-standing close conceptual link between the North American rewilding movement and ecocentrism or biocentrism in morality, manifest in the former journal Wild Earth.
In Europe, on the other hand, the most widely cited example of what is called ‘rewilding’ is probably the Dutch project Oostvaardersplassen (OVP). The distinctive attributes of Oostvaardersplassen included (a) the introduction of high numbers of large herbivores meant to represent indigenous communities of species, especially red deer, Konik ponies (intended as a proxy species for the extinct tarpan), and Heck cattle (intended as a proxy species for the extinct auroch), and (b) the fact that these herbivores were to be free-living, e.g., not provided with supplemental food or cover during the winter. The starvation of large numbers of these “free-living” herbivores resulted in widespread animosity toward OVP and the concept of “rewilding” as used in the Netherlands (and, through expansion, most or all of Europe).
There are many sources describing OVP in more detail, including the previously cited critical pieces by Fisher and Kopnina, Leadbeater, and Cryer and the far more optimistic piece by Schwartz. To learn useful Dutch terms while reading an overview of OVP’s ecological collapse, visit “The Oostvaardersplassen – What went wrong?” (2018) in the Dutch Language Blog.
For now, it suffices to note that Oostvaardersplassen embodies multiple prototypical characteristics of projects labelled ‘rewilding’ in Europe. The practice of “naturalistic grazing” is perhaps most central, and with it an emphasis on conservation of open landscapes and acceptance of Frans Vera’s “wood pasture hypothesis” that open or “mosaic” landscapes, rather than closed-canopy forests, represent the natural landscape of post-glacial Europe. Other tightly associated attributes include the introduction of species and communities of large herbivores – “free-living” in “natural densities” – including non-wild “de-domesticated” breeds meant to replicate the phenotype and ecological role of Pleistocene fauna.
Clearly, OVP is something quite different from prototypical rewilding in North America. Carnivores and corridors are salient in their absence. Carnivore reintroduction was never part of the conversation about OVP, despite the fact that its depletion of vegetation by unchecked grazing and browsing exemplifies the very type of ecological breakdown that the restoration of top-level predators is supposed to prevent (reminding strongly of Leopold’s “Thinking Like a Mountain”). Moreover, the reserve is fenced, precluding movement of animals into and out from the reserve, and surrounded by motorways and development anyhow. Furthermore, unlike stereotypical species reintroductions in the North American context, the Konik ponies and Heck cattle are neither native nor wild species.
It is questionable whether OVP could even be considered a “borderline case” of the North American concept. Certainly, it is not a prototypical case, as even American OVP sympathisers tend to admit. For example, in his apology for OVP, Schwartz states, “OVP certainly is not rewilding in the Foreman/Soule/Noss sense of cores, carnivores, and corridors,” which seems just to make Fisher’s point about drift in meaning: ‘rewilding’ means something different as it’s come to be used in Europe.
What cannot be underemphasised is that in the European context OVP is not considered a controversial borderline case of “rewilding” but acore case, a conceptual prototype. In the European context, that is, OVP is essentially the example that defines the term. It is not that Europeans use the term ‘rewilding’ more broadly or loosely to accommodate more peripheral cases (as Schwartz perhaps implicates?); it is that the concepts differ at the very core. This is further reflected in the transference of the term to other projects throughout Europe.
2.1.3 European Prototypes 2: Knepp “Wildland”
Possibly the second most famous project dubbed ‘rewilding’ in Europe, England’s Knepp Estate – er, I mean, Knepp Wildland– was directly inspired by OVP and Frans Vera, implementing naturalistic grazing by five herbivore species (Old English longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies, Tamworth pigs, red deer, fallow deer, roe deer). In at least one respect, it diverges even farther than OVP from North American rewilding: it is still a working farm. Whereas OVP infamously allowed herd sizes to decrease in winter via the natural processes of starvation, Knepp selectively culls its livestock to enable “our animals to overwinter in sustainable herd sizes” and sells the product (see “The Wild Range Selection”).
To some extent, the semantic divergence of ‘rewilding’ might actually be obscured by the fact that Knepp is undeniably in the business of agriculture. When speaking loosely, some rewilding enthusiasts do say things like that their neighbours “rewilded their lawn” by deliberately ceasing to mow… or perhaps that Sir Charles Burrell “rewilded his farm” by de-intensifying its grazing practices. But in the North American tradition, such usages of ‘rewilding’ can only be regarded as loose use, a liberal expansion or broadening of the original concept, or perhaps a conceptual metaphor, shifting the idea of “to make more wild” from its original domain of entire continents to other domains like lawns, farms, cities, or ourselves. Beneath it all, the core notion of ‘rewilding’ is that of continental-scale conservation with large wilderness cores, habitat corridors for wildlife movement, restoration of large carnivores, natural disturbance regimes, and so on. I personally have no qualms about mere loose or figurative use of the term, as long as the original meaning is not forgotten.
However, as with OVP, the essential point is that the Knepp Estate is put forth in the British and European contexts as a paradigmatic instance of what is meant by ‘rewilding’ – ‘rewilding’ simpliciter, that is, not merely ‘rewilding’ on some loose or metaphorical use. Arguably, this has helped to sharpen the European concept in a way that makes its difference from the American concept even more stark: if enough other prototypical attributes are met (e.g. naturalistic grazing, attempt to replicate indigenous population of herbivores with domesticated proxies, emphasis on restoring an open/mosaic landscape, etc), then even the absence of agriculture isn’t needed for a project to be considered an exemplar of ‘rewilding’.
Now, neither the North American nor the European sense of ‘rewilding’ has a sharp definition. Most terms of natural language do not. I believe that each respect sense of the word is best analysed as a cluster concept, with characteristic attributes defined by their prototypes, but the important claim is that each expresses a different cluster concept. This disentangling of distinct cluster concepts is necessary to resolve the utter semantic clusterf–k that rewilding discourse so often appears, especially in the global context.
Auroch proxy (?). Melby Overdrev, Nordsjælland.
2.2 Impressions of an American Rewilding Enthusiast in Denmark
Due to their relative fame and attention in the international press, Oostvaardersplassen and the Knepp Estate are examples that no commentator can ignore when analysing the use of ‘rewilding’ within Europe. However, neither OVP nor Knepp was the major impetus behind my own concern for the prevalence of naturalistic grazing in Europe, its rebranding as ‘rewilding’, and the failure of American rewilding supporters to recognise this rebranding as ambiguity or misuse of the term. As an autobiographical point, what incited me to care about these issues was my experience in Denmark as a multi-month “tourist” (i.e. digital nomad). Denmark has a special place in my heart as the country in which I became aware of the real-world possibility of car-free rural living – an experience that upended my life by rendering me incapable to accept any other lifestyle, even if it meant leaving my homeland and living abroad on tourist visas (and relocating to a continent with nothing analogous to North America’s rewilding movement).
So, I began with a personal love for Denmark, and this ramified into a desire for involvement with engaging conservation projects in the country. There were two main reasons for this. First, I had begun to experience tremendous “eco-anxiety” and realised that part of the solution, most likely, would require direct involvement in restoration work. I had joined a few conservation-related organisations in my home region, but I found it unsatisfying to focus on efforts in the place I was desperate to leave rather than a place I was longing to live. Second, I knew that the best way to secure a long-stay visa in a place like Denmark – which is what I wanted, not to live nomadically – would be to meet a local who’d hand me a job in the country (I don’t apply for jobs, but that’s another story). The most promising path, I reasoned, would be to begin by volunteering for a cause for which I was passionate, i.e., the protection of wild Nature. Thus, I got in this mindset of hoping that I could find some ambitious, ecocentrically grounded, and ecologically literate conservation effort in Denmark, perhaps akin to the Wildlands Project or The Rewilding Institute in the States.
I never found that. I didlearn that forests are surprisingly unpopular in Danish conservation, that domestic cattle are surprisingly popular, and that one cannot use the word ‘rewilding’ to indicate interest in large-scale conservation efforts involving habitat connectivity, large carnivores, and the absence of agriculture or other human use, since in Denmark the word ‘rewilding’ merely denotes a specific approach to the use of grazing animals to prevent the growth of vegetation (“naturlige græsning”).
In fact, I find myself largely in agreement with an opinion piece titled “Naturnationalparker, nej tak. Rewilding hører ikke hjemme i Danmark” (January 2022), including the specific horror at the thought that Tisvilde Hegn – a forest that has been very inspiring to me – might be ravaged by livestock. And when one reads how the author defines ‘rewilding’, it should be clear why my opposition to that thing is consistent with my support of what Foreman had in mind when he introduced the term: the Danish practice “involves fencing, for example, horses, cows, moose, or bison in forests and letting them live on what they find without any kind of care of supplemental feeding … It is called rewilding, even though neither horse nor cows are wild.”
In retrospect, my entire argument for the semantic ambiguity of ‘rewilding’ could have consisted of nothing but such a quotation followed by a mic drop. Nonetheless, I will describe a few more specific things that I discovered:
1. MANY instances of domestic cattle on “protected” land to “help nature” by “preventing the growth of trees and bushes”. From the outset, I found this both bizarre and off-putting. Granted, I have an aesthetic preference for forests over farms, and a gustatory preference for the avoidance of beef and cow’s milk, and I admit that arbitrary matters of taste are poor bases for conservation decisions. Still, I’d always taken for granted that there was ample scientific evidence that the cattle industry was detrimental to the environment, and that afforestation was generally a sign of ecological recovery. It was a little shocking, in any case, to find signage that presupposed that the regeneration of trees was a bad thing that should be prevented – as though this were simply common knowledge. On the other hand, I did realise that many species do prefer grassland and other types of open landscapes to forest, and back in Ohio I never protested the use of prescribed burns or other forms of human management to maintain such landscapes. So I tried to give conservation grazing the benefit of the doubt, and imagine that the cows were there to set fires. Or something.
I mention this not because these run-of-the-mill conservation grazing plots were labelled ‘rewilding’ but precisely because they weren’t. To understand what is called ‘rewilding’ within Europe, one must also understand how pervasive the practice of conservation grazing is. My American friends find it strange when I tell them tales of foreign lands where conservation areas are full of domestic livestock, yet in Denmark this is an established practice.
2. Anti-afforestation efforts to protect an extremely degraded landscape on the remote island of Anholt (which is otherwise hands-down among my favourite places I’ve lived). In the case of Anholt, there is no doubt that the expansive lichen heath (now called Ørkenen, “The Desert”) was originally covered in forest, prior to its nearly complete deforestation by humans. Despite this history, Ørkenen is now praised as a unique landscape and conservation priority. I describe this case at length in “In Memory of Anholt as I Never Knew Here” (July 2022). My fondness for Anholt, and subsequent heartbreak over the force subjugation of the island’s landscape, left me with deep scepticism of the European conservation industry and its emphasis on the preservation of open landscapes, especially as I now realise that Ørkenen is merely an extreme instance of a general trend of preserving degraded landscapes like heath.
Once again, the relevance here isn’t that the subjugation of Anholt waslabelled ‘rewilding’ – it wasn’t – but that this case study illuminates more background information that may be useful to contextualise “rewilding” in Europe: organisations like Rewilding Europe are helping to perpetuate a longer-standing and more widespread fixation on preserving open landscapes.
3. Molslaboratoriet. Molslaboratoriet, a 120 hectare enclosure in Nationalpark Mols Bjerge, brands itself as a “rewilding experiment” on the basis that Galloway cattle and Exmoor ponies have been introduced into the enclosure, where they live year-round without supplemental feeding. However, in compliance with national law, the fenced livestock are monitored on a daily basis, and sick or starving animals are removed (and park officials accept calls from visitors to check on animals of concern); thus, Molslaboratoriet lacks the particularly controversial aspect of OVP – the presence of sick and starving horses and cows left to die within the enclosure, their carcasses in plain view of visitors. This, of course, also removes part of what might have been said to have made OVP “wild” or “natural” in its original incarnation, moving in the direction of human management and plain ol’ animal husbandry. Despite this, Molslaboratoriet remains controversial for lack of attention to its herbivore herds, with detractors claiming to have seen starving and suffering cows or horses at the park (my main source here is the casual perusal of Danish conservation-related social media pages).
Within Denmark, Molslaboratoriet seems to be the most well-known the prototype of so-called “rewilding” – perhaps along with bison introduction on Bornholm, another stereotypical case of introducing large herbivores (sans carnivores) for the express purpose of preventing the vegetational succession that would naturally occur in the absence of “humans, livestock, or machines” (as described on the linked Naturstyrelsen page). But Bornholm is way out there and really basically Sweden, and thus it was never so much the focus of my thought.
4. Lille Vildmose. Jutland’s raised bog Lille Vildmose was the first European Rewilding Network project that I visited, although I hadn’t realised it at the time of my visit, and the word ‘rewilding’ was not prominent on the park’s signage (that I noticed). What was most shocking to me was the description of the LIFE+ Nature project to restore the bog, which included the entrapment of a population of red deer in a fenced enclosure for the purpose of suppressing the growth of birch trees and other woody vegetation. The reintroduction of moose – the specific project vaunted by Rewilding Europe – was meant to serve the same purpose.
Unlike Anholt’s Ørkenen, the formation of the raised bog was not itself a product of extractivism but natural geological causes, and the LIFE+ initiative does purport to mitigate degradation of the bog landscape by anthropogenic causes, chiefly drainage for agriculture. The claim is that birch and other trees would not have grown on the bog but for the drainage, and that the tree growth leads to further draining of the bog – which is why conservationists desire to remove trees from the area, whether directly or through the service of cervids.
I imagine that the description “reintroduction of moose to Lille Vildmose” would strike a North American audience as a more-or-less familiar example of rewilding – especially in contrast to domesticate-reliant projects like OVP, Knepp, and Molslaboratoriet – since the project does indeed involve the reintroduction of a native charismatic species, Alces alces. But context and motive also matter. As typifies European conservation (in my admittedly still limited experience), the reintroductions are driven by the recognition that large herbivores can be useful organic tools for restoration of an open landscape. The moose, like the red deer, have been introduced not to counteract the extirpation of native species per se, but to counteract (literally) downstream effects of agriculture drainage (i.e. tree growth). As such, they are fenced within the areas of the park that they’ve been enlisted to “restore” (entailing, for one, that the moose are not free so much as wander outside the enclosure to enjoy the more liberal laws on alcohol sales that no doubt enticed them to agree to relocate from Sweden to Denmark in the first place).
Meanwhile, while corridors are thus purposefully absent, carnivores are neither encouraged nor excluded – according to an interview with Aage V. Jensen Naturfond’s Jacob Palsgaard Andersen regarding the sighting of a wolf in Lille Vildmose (“Ulv set i Lille Vildmose”). Andersen admits that Aage V. Jensen Naturfond makes no efforts to attract wolves to its conservation areas and that the organisation is neither a “supporter” nor “opponent” of wolves in Denmark. It is difficult to imagine an North American rewilding organisation declaring such a non-committal position on wolves, especially in an area where wolves have already been beginning to reestablish themselves.
5. Debates about “rewilding” that would seem utterly incoherent or nonsensical if we were to assume that the speakers were using the word ‘rewilding’ in the sense of Foreman, Soulé, Noss, and other American pathbreakers. For me, this linguistic evidence was the giveaway that ‘rewilding’ is simply a semantically ambiguous term. I hope that the descriptions of particular projects and prototypes are also useful for something, but as far as the overarching argument that ‘rewilding’ is an ambiguous rather than univocal term, nothing more is needed than to cite local sources such as the aforementioned “Rewilding hører ikke hjemme i Danmark” article or – the one that first got to me – Danmarks Naturfredningsforening’s statement piece “Ingen rewilding-dyr skal dø af sult eller lide i naturen” (“No rewilding – animals will die of hunger or suffer in nature”). Danmarks Naturfredningsforening (DN) is Denmark’s largest conservation NGO, and although the organisation is a staunch proponent of herbivore grazing in “natural” areas, it is also adamant to differentiate its activities from “rewilding” – on the basis that horses, cows, and other animals should not be left to starve behind fences.
Let’s pause here to reflect on how utterly ridiculous such objections would sound if speakers were using the word ‘rewilding’ in its traditional sense in North America: “Rewilding should not be implemented because it is unfair to allow fenced domesticated animals to go without adequate food and health care.” The appropriate response would be something along the lines of “W. T. F.” But I contend that DN and other Danish speakers who say such things are not necessarily ignorant or confused in their use of the word ‘rewilding’ – although they would do well to familiarise themselves with the American literature for its ecological and ethical insights – but merely using the word in accordance with a different tradition of use, one that has already become entrenched in their country and may be too late to reclaim.
6. Still more open landscape conservation, via horse grazing, at the behest of an organisation calling itself “Verdens Skove” (“The World’s Forests”) – and, oh, it’s also called ‘rewilding’. In the wake of the devastating experience of educating myself on Anholt’s history and conservation status (see my article specifically on this island), I attempted to see if any Danish organisations were actually committed to reforestation. After all, Denmark had without question been extensively deforested prior to 1800, and much of the “reforestation” that has occurred since that time has been in the form of conifer plantations (i.e. not forests).
I discovered the promisingly-named Verdens Skove only to discover that their vision of a “natural forest” in Denmark is, first and foremost, one with herbivores like boar and bison (see “Vi vil have mere vild skovnatur i Danmark”). As an added bonus, I learned that Verdens Skove has its own “rewilding” (its term) project, Tirsbæk Bakker, a 17 hectare enclosure on which Konik horses have been introduced to eat the vegetation. They are not provided with supplemental food during the winter, which means that they will clear the land of blackberry thickets, their winter food source (see “Rewilding ved Tirsbæk Bakker”).
I never visited Tirsbæk Bakker, but, hey, look it’s another instance of what should be boringly familiar by now: in Europe, ‘rewilding’ is used to refer to a practice involving the introduction of (sometimes domesticated) herbivores in enclosed areas without predators to eat up the vegetation. I’m beginning to feel like I’m just beating a dead horse – which, come to think of it, is a really apt metaphor for the context [insert image of horse carcass putrefying at OVP].
7. A “carbon negative” beef farm at Klintholm Gods – and, oh, it too is called ‘rewilding’. In the summer of 2021, I left Columbus, Ohio on a one-way ticket to Copenhagen and headed directly to Møn, a Dark Sky Island and UNESCO Biodiversity Reserve. I remain enchanted by Møns Klint and its surrounding forests, and Stege is quite nice for a “city”, but as a non-eater of beef, I couldn’t help but scoff when I heard that the popular local farm and market Klintholm Gods was peddling “carbon-negative beef” – a phrase that seemed to disingenuously ignore the fact that methane is the greenhouse gas for which the beef industry is notoriously responsible. I didn’t think much else about it at the time, but later I visited the company’s website, only to discover that it also bills its farming as rewilding, on the basis that its grazing animals have access to their full enclosures 356 days of the year (I think they meant 365 days here, but give ‘em a break; Danish numbers are hard!) and that their grazing activity maintains an open landscape that allegedly promotes biodiversity. (Incidentally, ‘kokasser’ actually means faeces, not “coke boxes” as Google translate currently favours.) Never mind that Klintholm Gods, like Knepp, is straightforwardly an agricultural operation.
8. The neo-Pleistocene “trophic rewilding” intellectual leadership of Jens-Christian Svenning (University of Aarhus). The idea of “trophic rewilding” was another thing I discovered while in Denmark, through the work of Jens-Christian Svenning, at time when I was briefly considering whether it would be worthwhile to seek a similar position to my present sinecure in a centre at some Danish university. I eventually decided against the idea altogether, but first I specifically ruled out Svenning’s Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World research centre.
Now, at the time I’d encountered the work of Svenning and his colleagues, I’d already become aware of the seeming ubiquity of conservation grazing, the Danish/European fascination with the conservation of open landscapes (including ones that are openly admitted to be the product of human-caused degradation), and the use of ‘rewilding’ as synonymous with a specific controversial type of conservation grazing that uses “free-living” livestock. However, these practices were seldom explicitly linked to restoring late Pleistocene or post-glacial fauna or landscapes. In the case of Anholt, the anti-afforestation efforts are unquestionably devoted to preserving a human-created landscape, and I suppose I often took for granted that many conservation grazing sites existed to protect “cultural landscapes”.
It was in discovering Svenning that I not only learnt the phrase ‘trophic rewilding’ but was also really forced to reflect on the idea of Pleistocene rewilding (and, eventually, how much I cannot support it; §3.2.3). Svenning defines ‘trophic rewilding’ as “species introductions to restore top-down trophic interactions and associated trophic cascades to promote self-regulating biodiverse ecosystems” (Svenning et al, 2015, “Science for a wilder Anthropocene: Synthesis and future directions for trophic rewilding research,” PNAS). Okay, that so far just sounds like the Yellowstone wolves, but Svenning’s own interest is replicating communities of megaherbivores from the Pleistocene. In the aforecited article, he goes on: “a key development for trophic rewilding has been the proposal for ‘Pleistocene rewilding’, advocated to restore ecosystem function by rebuilding rich megafaunas, thereby overcoming the massive prehistoric extinctions linked to Homo sapiens’ global expansion …” I don’t support Pleistocene rewilding for moral reasons, as we’ll see, and I’ve not delved much into Svenning’s own palaeoecological research or published responses, but this helped to broadened the context in which I conceptualised the Danish herbivore grazing obsession.
9. Femten nye naturnationalparker! Around the same time I last left Denmark, the government announced the establishment of 15 new “nature national parks” in the country – all involving large grazing animals like cows, horses, and bison being released into enclosures in forested areas to eat the vegetation (incidentally, this is all described immediately after the assertion that the forests will be left “untouched” and that no agriculture will take place in the nature parks; huh). Sound familiar?
I stopped following Danish conservation publications and social media around this time, but from what I noticed, most positive publicity seemed to shy away from the use of the term ‘rewilding’ – not because Danish environmental journalists are purists who believe the word should only be used in the sense expounded by Foreman, Soulé, and Noss, but because the word seems to have bad connotations amongst the Danish public, associated as it is with starving horses and cows. Some commenters did use the word. (N.B. It is worth stating again: the word ‘rewilding’ is sometimes deliberately avoided in Danish discourse due to negative associations with OVP and copycat projects. American rewilders shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that there’s some kind of rhetorical and strategic need to embrace that project; the opposite might be true.)
10. Absence of evidence of uses of ‘rewilding’ in any way closer to its traditional North American sense. Despite investigations, I never encountered the term ‘rewilding’ used in Denmark to refer to anything other than naturalistic grazing. Specifically, I never found it used to refer to anything like large-scale connected habitat allowing the movement of wildlife including large carnivores – despite the fact that wolves have made their own way in and around the country, suggesting that something akin to the traditional North American concept of rewilding is indeed relevant in this small and nature-depleted country.
Synopsis – The preceding series of revelations made clear to me not only that ‘rewilding’ means something different – very different – in Denmark, but also that this meaning is embedded in a culture of conservation practices and goals that seemed on the whole rather alien. When speaking to a Danish or European audience, I would no longer dare utter the sentence “I support rewilding,” for I have come to expect that Danish and other European speakers familiar with the word ‘rewilding’ are likely to draw certain inferences that I don’t want to endorse. This seems like strong evidencethat ‘rewilding’ is transatlantically ambiguous.
Disclaimer: It has only been while preparing this post that I discovered the comprehensive report “Biodiversitetseffekter af rewilding” published by Aarhus Universitet in 2021 (in Danish). I’ve not yet read it, but as far as I can tell it really cements the semantic linkage between ‘rewilding’ and ‘naturlige græsning’. It will be interesting, though, to see the authors’ own perspective on why this should constitute ‘rewilding’ in its original sense. Maybe.
Permian Rewilding. Tisvilde Hegn, Nordsjælland.
2.3 Refarming Europe
For now I’ve stopped trying to involve myself in conservation projects in Denmark or elsewhere in Europe, but I still correspond with members of The Rewilding Institute, and I still think I support what they support. Yet I remain surprised and alarmed by the uncritical acceptance that what happens under the ‘rewilding’ label in Europe also deserves support. Once we acknowledge the linguistic ambiguity, we can roughly translate ‘Rewilding Europe’ as ‘Naturalistic Grazing Europe’ and realise that there’s no semantic reason to assume that this organisation is in league with TRI. They are both conservation organisations, sure, but it is well known that not all conservation organisations share the values and motives as TRI and its precursors, and they’re not all allies of the rewilding cause; see, e.g., Dave Foreman’s also excellent Take Back Conservation(2012).
I have tried to think charitably about what – aside from wishful thinking – might persuade thoughtful and intelligent America rewilding proponents that European “rewilding” is cut from the same cloth as their own movement. I presume that, for many or most, the organisation Rewilding Europe is the entry point to learning about rewilding in Europe (considering the name, it would kinda seem the obvious place to start if one lacked antecedent reason to believe that ‘rewilding’ is ambiguous). Now, I suppose I can see how motivational bias combined with a cursory skim of rewildingeurope.com could lead one to conclude that rewilding in Europe indeed is closely analogous to rewilding in North America. Despite a prominent emphasis on grazing and its favourite large herbivores, Rewilding Europe also promotes a variety of other conservation and restoration projects, including much that will sit comfortably with an American audience, such as dam removal, coexistence with carnivores, and partnerships with a few bird-related organisations (let us not forget that migratory bird flyways were one of the earliest recognised types of habitat corridors within the US conservation movement). Furthermore, in describing the organisation’s vision of Wilder Nature, the website’s authors mention not only herbivore grazing but also predation, forest regeneration, and natural fires and flooding. Without a deeper dive into the organisation’s actual work, one might presume that natural grazing is just one small piece of a larger picture that, overall, looks a lot like North American rewilding.
But then I’m still flustered, for one needn’t dive deep at all to see that at its core Rewilding Europe reiterates and entrenches the association of ‘rewilding’ with naturalistic grazing and the maintenance of open landscapes through the introduction of large herbivores, including “de-domesticated” breeds cows and horses meant to roleplay extinct Pleistocene fauna. This is manifested, for example, in the predominance of grazing-related material under the organisation’s Publications – including its megaherbivore-exclusive species publications, the grazing focus of its practical guides, the cringe-worthily titled Herbiforests brochure (which details what Rewilding Europe actually means when it speaks of “forest regeneration”), and four other publications on GrazeLIFE, an EU-funded programme to support “extensive grazing by large herbivores” (with an absence of any complementary publications on carnivory). Naturalistic grazing is the cornerstone of the majority of Rewilding Europe’s nine project areas, and even the organisation’s purported carnivore reintroduction efforts amount to, well, grazing (e.g. “Rewilding Europe supports the comeback of both species [of lynx] by creating more wild nature through natural grazing, which favours the conditions for prey species like the rabbit,” from the Return of the Lynx donation page). The foundation even loans out large herbivores through its European Livestock Bank – I mean, European Wildlife Bank. Meanwhile, to date, I have yet to see Rewilding Europe propose carnivore reintroduction as a means to prevent overgrazing by the investment property – I mean, by the herbivores.
Mark Fisher often refers to Rewilding Europe pejoratively as REFARMING Europe, but this is really more clarificatory than pejorative, given that Rewilding Europe itself has been upfront that its raison d’être is to restore farming-like pressure to prevent the afforestation of abandoned farmland. In describing the foundation’s history, cofounder and director Frans Schepers and then soon-to-be board member Paul Jepson state, “In 2008, conservationists in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Sweden began to explore the conservation opportunities presented by these trends [large-scale land abandonment and wildlife revival]. The group was particularly interested in engaging with the dynamics of large-scale land abandonment of rural areas in Europe. They were concerned that spontaneous reforestation and declines in grazing associated with land abandonment would result in a loss of the rich biodiversity, and that the exodus of skills, experience, and energy from rural areas would undermine opportunities to ‘steer’ these landscapes towards a rewilded future where restored ecological systems supported new nature-based economies” (“Rewilding in a European Context,” 2016, International Journal of Wilderness 22:2). Rewilding Europe continues to make similar declarations on its website: “Today, with the ongoing trend of land abandonment and rural depopulation resulting in declining livestock numbers in many parts of Europe, there is a growing need and opportunity to return free-roaming wild herbivores (or their close equivalent) to European landscapes” (Amazing Grazing; see also GrazeLIFE).
Restoring livestock (“or their close equivalent”), preventing the “spontaneous reforestation” of land cleared for agriculture, reversing an exodus of human activity, and re-employing human labour in “steering rural landscapes” does indeed constitute something closely akin to refarming – and this is all just what the organisation openly says it does.
Contrast this with the common portrayal of spontaneous forest regeneration in New England following the abandonment of farmland. In North American rewilding literature, this is presented as an inspiring success. As Jon Leibowitz of the Northeast Wilderness Trust writes for The Rewilding Institute (“Rewilding Is Not an Exotic Idea”), “The Northeast is witness to one of the great ecological recoveries of the past century. Upon European arrival … Vermont, like much of the region, was largely cleared of natural forest cover in a race for timber and farmland. […] Our home has made a miraculous recovery due to the resiliency of the landscape coupled in-part with the mass abandonment of farms at the turn of last century.”
In his poignant “Rebuilding after Collapse”, John Davis invokes New England’s spontaneous reforestation as a source of hope in the face of certain ecological catastrophe: “The resilience and renewability of life are manifest especially in those landscapes that humans have abandoned or allowed to recover after earlier exploitation. To cycle through the abandoned farm country of northern New England and New York, for instance, is to see Nature healing, rewilding, at a remarkable pace. Vermont has gone from 80% agricultural fields to 80% wooded in a matter of a few human generations. […] If humans can find the wisdom and humility to step back from large parts of the planet, wild Nature will rebound vigorously.”
Granted, the contexts differ, and what Nature wants for New England is not necessarily what Nature wants for Europe. But, in any case, these dissimilar cases are telling additions to our catalogue of conceptual prototypes. In the North American ‘rewilding’ discourse, the spontaneous reforestation of abandoned farmland is accepted as an example of rewilding, if a passive one. In Europe, focal “rewilding” projects are expressly meant to prevent the same, by re-intervening in areas where humans have already stepped back.
To be sure, Rewilding Europe’s claim is not that farm-like landscapes should be maintained merely for cultural preference or historical preservation but that (a) a substantial portion of Europe’s biodiversity is dependent on grazing animals (whether wild or domestic) and (b) the pre-agrarian baseline conditions were ones in which large herbivores grazed the land in a way something like livestock husbandry. On this picture, animal agriculture wasn’t the ecological disaster that it’s often presumed to be, but the saving grace that mitigated wholesale biodiversity collapse in the wake of the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions. Furthermore, if it’s taken for granted that something must be done to prevent afforestation of abandoned farmland, then the introduction of free-living herbivores does seem “wilder” than other options. But the purported effects on biodiversity are empirical claims demanding scrutiny, and for some rewilding sympathisers [raises hand] there may also be ethical concerns surrounding the interventionism of either “refarming” or Pleistocene simulation that don’t arise with respect to wilderness conservation or passive forest regeneration (see §3). In any case, no North American rewilding proponent should be forced to assent to Rewilding Europe’s practices as a matter of semantic entailment. One must be able to express affirmation of ‘rewilding’ in the North American sense at the same time as rejection of ‘rewilding’ in the European sense – or vice versa. To treat the uses of the word as semantically equivalent is to elide significant differences in practice, theory, and context.
Yes, it is also true that Rewilding Europe does promote dam removal and other practices that neatly intersect with the North American concept of rewilding. And there’s no linguistic reason that European speakers shouldn’t or wouldn’t stretch their own concept of ‘rewilding’ to encompass more than naturalistic grazing; language is flexible like that. However, this doesn’t imply that the respective uses of ‘rewilding’ are synonymous any more than ‘flying creature’ should be considered synonymous with ‘mammal’ due to the fact that certain mammals happen also to exemplify flight – for it doesn’t change the fact that the core or prototypical of the European sense of ‘rewilding’ are at best peripheral cases of North American sense of ‘rewilding’ if they are to be deemed instances of the concept at all.
2.4 Semantic Speciation
Some speakers might take for granted that ‘rewilding’ means the same thing in North America and Europe because they implicitly defer to whomever started using the same word in both places. One might think “If it’s not the same thing, why did people start using the same neologism to refer to it?” If that’s what’s behind the curious acceptance of univocality, it seems to give too little credit to the fluidity, flexibility, and openness of natural language – which, yes, includes the potential for new senses of words to evolve from linguistic errors and abuses.
Even if the North American and European uses of ‘rewilding’ have a common ancestor, in some sense, they have taken on their own meanings that are distinct and non-synonymous. Semantic drift is an apt descriptor, but readers who prefer biology to linguistics might prefer to think of semantic speciation. The first writers to apply the term to OVP or other nature development projects might have heard from speakers who’d picked it up directly from the North American lineage. These first uses of ‘rewilding’ in the Dutch context became the most profligate founder population on the European continent. As it happened, these founding word uses also possessed some distinct mutations that they passed on to their progeny – including the associations with naturalistic grazing, taxon substitutions, the non-necessity of carnivores, devotion to Frans Vera’s wood pasture hypothesis, etc – and that are not shared with its ancestral lineage in North America, which itself never evolved these traits. Today, the two continentally divergent species of ‘rewilding’ cannot mate and produce viable offspring.
Okay, the analogy is not perfect, and I am missing details as far as even the linguistic history goes, but the point is that word meanings can drift apart just as populations of interbreeding animals can, and they can evolve in disparate and ultimately irreconcilable ways. It would appear that just this has happened with the importation of the term ‘rewilding’ to Europe, and it is a fool’s errand to force the two divergent meanings to reconcile into a single population.
Although the time spans differ, well-known examples of semantic drift might help to illustrate the ludicrousness of forcing a univocal meaning on a word that has undergone the process. Consider, say, ‘decimate’. Famously, the original meaning of the word ‘decimate’ was ‘to reduce by one tenth’. Suppose a lexicographer attempted to provide a single definition to unite the original and “drifted” meaning of ‘decimate’. What could she do? One option might be to provide a disjunctive definition (“to ‘decimate’ means to reduce either by one tenth or nearly totally”). Another option would be to contrive a definition vague enough to encompass both meanings (e.g. “to ‘decimate’ means to reduce”). No one would do this with a term like ‘decimate’ – yet it happens with ‘rewilding’.
Or consider another example of a transatlantic linguistic import: European colonists used the word ‘robin’ to refer to the thrush Turdus migratorius (family Turdidae). T. migratorius was so-called due to sharing one superficial characteristic – its red breast – with its Old World non-counterpart, the Old World flycatcher Erithacus rubecula (family Muscicapidae). In fact, though, the American robin is much more closely related to the Eurasian blackbird, song thrush, or redwing. The European robin is the only extant species in its genus, and other members of Muscicapidae are also restricted to the Old World. It would seem weirdly disjunctive to publish a scientific book about “robins” or form a global alliance for “robin conservation” devoted to E. rubecula plus one of many species of unrelated thrushes. Americans and Europeans both use the word ‘robin’ to refer to species of bird, but this fact does not imply that the two respective species of birds should be treated as equivalent or as counterparts in the context of science or conservation. There might be some surface similarities in the rhetoric behind the North American and European families of “rewilding”, but in their underlying ecological, implementational, and moral assumptions, they are as dissimilar as Turdidae and Muscicapidae.
In a chapter on OVP, Jozef Keulart asserts that ‘rewilding’ in Europe is synonymous with the Dutch term ‘nature development’ – but, oddly, without noting that ‘nature development’ is not synonymous with the original sense of ‘rewilding’ in North America (there seems to be some basic failure of the transitive property here). Keulartz goes on to “[w]hereas North American rewilders have emphasized the role of predation by large carnivores, Dutch and, subsequently, European rewilders have focused on naturalistic grazing by large herbivores” (“Philosophical Boundary Work for Wildlife Conservation: The Case of the Oostvaardersplassen,” A Guide to Field Philosophy: Case Studies and Practical Strategies). To my ears, that sounds roughly tantamount to saying, “whereas North American biscuit-makers have emphasised breakfast food covered in gravy, British and, subsequently, European biscuit-makers have emphasised sweets to be consumed alongside tea.” I don’t mean to pick on Keulartz specifically here — that’s just a semi-arbitrary quote that I’d happened to have written down; I could have found others — but let me just say again how dumbfounded I am when commentators who are deeply aware of the history and use of the term ‘rewilding’ in Europe nonetheless make such claims without stopping to ask “Hey, wait, is ‘rewilding’ just an ambiguous term?” Are they all graduate student accomplices of Solomon Asch? Will I be paid for my participation and debriefed? For, surely, those lines are not actually the same length!
Note to philosophers – Maybe you are now thinking, “No, ‘rewilding’ can’t be an ambiguous term, because it would be felicitous to say to a European ‘Oostvaardersplassen is not rewilding,’ ‘Knepp is not rewilding,’ ‘Rewilding Europe doesn’t support rewilding,’ and so forth.” That would be a flawed semantic analysis. Speakers could still felicitously do such things with words even if ‘rewilding’ is ambiguous. Most likely, they would be performing what’s sometimes called metalinguistic negotiation – attempting to reclaim the meaning of ‘rewilding’ from its association with herbivores without carnivores, fenced enclosures, proxy species, the wood pasture hypothesis, and so on. Effectively, such speakers would be intentionally discrediting the European sense of ‘rewilding’ and treating the North American sense as the only correct use of the term. That is compatible with accepting that ‘rewilding’ is presently used ambiguously; it’s just to implicate the European usage is illegitimate and should be eliminated from the discourse. (I probably discuss this type of case somewhere in my dissertation, “Feigning Objectivity: An Overlooked Conversational Strategy in Everyday Disputes” (2015), although metalinguistic negotiation wasn’t my focus. Tim Sundell wrote about it back then. I haven’t followed the literature to make new recommendations.)
3. Ecological and Ethical Matters
Once we accept that ‘rewilding’ expresses different concepts in North America and Europe, we realise that semantics doesn’t require us to see our transatlantic non-counterparts as de facto allies. Imagine European projects stripped of the ‘rewilding’ label (and just called something else like, oh, say, ‘nature development’). What would normal American rewilding advocates say about these projects if they weren’t primed by a linguistic association to look for similarities and points of agreement? I suspect that, were it not for the misleading label, the projects are ones that North American rewilders would sharply criticise. After all, they canonically involve the introduction of large herbivores without large carnivores (and, moreover, often for the purpose of preventing vegetation growth, just as rewilders fearwill happen if herbivore populations within a landscape lack sufficient pressure from predation).
From the description of European “rewilding” prototypes in §2, it should be amply clear that the practices and ideology of nature development in Europe is not merely different from rewilding in North America but incompatible with the latter’s basic precepts and assumptions, at least on the surface. Thus, if North American rewilders care at all about the prospects for wild Nature in Europe, they would be well advised to question and critique the prominence of naturalistic grazing, anti-afforestation efforts, the almost complete neglect of Corridors and Carnivores, the use of non-native proxy species, and so forth. Leave aside the fact that Europeans happen to use the word ‘rewilding’ to talk about this stuff. This is not a mere matter of semantic purity. Disambiguation is important for the sake of clarity, but the issues here go far beyond perspicuity in language: the semantic distinction matters because we need space for clear and open debate on what is best for wild Nature.
On occasion, American proponents of rewilding give European nature development projects a pass as worthy restoration activities, even if not “rewilding” in the traditional sense, with the excuse that Europe is much denser and more developed than North America and can’t accommodate the same types of continent-scale conservation projects. And, yes, to some extent – okay, to a large extent – we should expect efforts to protect and restore self-willed Nature to look different in North America and Europe. Overall, Europe is denser and more developed, with a much longer history of intensive exploitation by Europeans, and there are differences between the native biotic communities in the two continents. There are objective differences in the present starting point, and there are objective differences in the past natural history. All of this is undeniable, yet none of this is sufficient to account for the scope of the disparity between nature development and (North American) rewilding, which sometimes seem grounded in incompatible assumptions about how ecology itself works. As Fisher says in his “Drifting from Rewilding” piece, “ecology isn’t something different just because it is taking place in Europe.”
Below, I draw a distinction between ecological (§3.1) and ethical (§3.2) presuppositions. In reality, of course, the debates are an admixture of both at once, and it is not possible to cleanly separate the descriptive or empirical assumptions from the normative ones. Moreover, the following lists should not be taken as exhaustive; they are meant only to gesture to some examples of salient points of apparent disagreement. Finally, I mean only to lay out some groundwork for further enquiry; this is not the place to delve into an extensive review of the literature and research on each point of tension, let alone to attempt to resolve them.
3.1 Ecological Tensions
The (prima facie) ecological disagreements between stereotypical rewilding projects and stereotypical nature development projects don’t really need repeating. They arise directly from the comparisons of the “prototypes” in §2, and if you clicked the links to the articles by Fisher and Kopnina, Leadbeater, and Cryer, you will have learned more.
But, for the sake of summary (with a couple of new additions), the following are some of the empirical issues that seem salient to me, and that seem like they should be salient to anyone who conducts the most casual comparison, say, of the positions of The Rewilding Institute and Rewilding Europe. I charitably call them “prima facie” ecological disagreements, leaving open the possibility that the disagreement is “merely apparent” in the unlikely event that the laws of ecology really do operate differently in Europe – or can otherwise be explained away.
1. Carnivores and top-down regulation of ecosystems. One of the most salient differences of nature development from rewilding is the absence of carnivores. Within the rewilding movement, obviously, little has received more discussion than the importance of carnivores maintaining ecological balance (see, e.g., The Rewilding Institute’s summary “Top-down Regulation of Ecosystems by Large Carnivores”). Nature development, in contrast, emphasises “natural densities” of herbivores, but where the purported natural densities are created and maintained by human-led selection and regulation of population sizes. Predation by carnivores seems to be accepted where it occurs but in no way prioritised, and its importance is downplayed (e.g. the authors of the Rewilding Europe pamphlet “Natural Grazing: Practices in the Rewilding of Cattle and Horses” state, in a short section on the role of predation, “There is a lot of debate concerning the question of whether or not predators can control prey numbers”). Even if the human-managed population sizes equal those predicted for ecosystems with complete food webs, it seems that the nature development projects completely ignore the oft-discussed concept of ecologies of fear, whereby the constant presence of predators in a landscape impacts the behaviour of herbivores (e.g. where they choose to graze) independently of the effect of predation on population size.
2. Connectivity and landscape permeability. Another cornerstone of North American rewilding has always been the establishment of wildlife corridors and connected habitat areas to counteract the deleterious effects of habitat fragmentation (see, e.g., TRI’s information page on “Landscape Permeability”). In my experience, there is simply little discussion of the topic in Europe, where it seems to be ruled out as impractical, but in any case less important than grazing (e.g., the Rewilding Europe pamphlet cited above also states, “In Europe, even some of the largest rewilding areas will have no alternative to fencing. This will prevent animal migration to some extent, but is still preferable to no natural grazing at all”). There is an empirical question as to the extent to which the behaviour of the beloved herds of grazers actually do resemble that of wild populations given the lack of landscape permeability, and of course there are broader ecological questions regarding the full scope of what will be lost if conservationists give up on the possibility for connectivity.
3. The impact of agriculture, including livestock grazing, on biodiversity. In my education, it was always the received wisdom that land conversion to agriculture has been the leading anthropogenic cause of biodiversity decline, and that livestock grazing is especially destructive; this is reiterated in most rewilding discourse in the North American tradition, with the cessation of livestock grazing on protected lands being a central demand. Then I travel to Europe, and there is significant discussion of species dependent on agriculture, with groups like Rewilding Europe claiming that half of the continent’s biodiversity depends in some way on the activity of large grazing animals. It’s an empirical question whether, where, and what type of agriculture and ranching impacts what species of wildlife in what way. Okay, I guess that’s actually many empirical questions.
4. The importance of forests for biodiversity and the impact of afforestation. Where the goal is to adjudicate between the desirable of passive afforestation versus the introduction of herds of large herbivores, this is the flipside of #3: there are empirical questions as to where, when, and in what way which species of wildlife depend on what types of forest habitat. Are there ecological differences between New England and Europe that would explain why the afforestation of abandoned farmland would be hailed as a conservation success in one region of the world but a threat to conservation in the other? What would the ecological and biological effects of passive afforestation in Europe actually be?
5. The role of fire in shaping landscapes (and the role of herbivores in impacting fire regimes). In the North American context, wildfire and other natural disturbance such as windthrow is emphasised in the formation of mosaic landscapes. In fact, the importance of natural wildfire is so often noted that it could almost be a “4th C”: Combustion. Wildfire is frequently mentioned by Rewilding Europe, too, but in a very different context: it is a threat that can supposedly be mitigated by introducing large herbivores to graze the forest understories. The only time I have heard something similar in the context of US conservation was … oh, wait, that wasn’t conservation; I was thinking of when Donald Trump said, “you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests,” and credited Finns for raking and cleaning their forests. So the megaherbivores are being introduced into European forests to complete the work otherwise conducted by humans with rakes and vacuum cleaners? Sometimes, now, I do wonder… Seriously, though, there is a latent empirical disagreement here as to the both the relative importance of fire (and windthrow, etc) versus herbivory in opening forests and creating open or mosaic landscapes, and there is an empirical question as to the historical impact of grazers and browsers (if any) on impacting natural regimes.
6. The relationship between herbivory and invasive species. In Ohio, I always learned that overbrowsing by white-tailed deer was a major contributing cause to the spread of invasive plants in Eastern deciduous forests, since deer typically prefer to eat native plants to invasives like garlic mustard. As the deer gorge on native vegetation, they open the forest floor for the incursion of invasive species, resulting in an overall decline in plant biodiversity (part of the ecological breakdown that is ultimately blamed on the extirpation of wolves and pumas, leading to deer overpopulation; cf. point 1 above). In Denmark, in contrast, grazing by large herbivores was sometimes touted as a way to remove invasive vegetation and thereby give native plants space to flourish. I recall one article about Molslaboratoriet (ah, found it, this one) that stated that the cows and ponies ate the “problematic” vegetation whilst disbursing “other” (native?) plant species; how nifty!
Granted, the United States and Europe have different native plants and different invasive ones. Still, this is a superficial curiosity that merits explanation: if European herbivores really do remove invasive vegetation and propagate native vegetation, we Americans would love an explanation of how exactly this works, given that we seem to encounter the opposite in our experience of grazing and browsing by herbivores in the absence of carnivores.
7. The ecological impact of non-native “proxy species” (e.g. domesticated species, translocated species, synthetically engineering resurrections of the auroch) introduced as taxon substitutes. While I tend to oppose this practice on basic moral grounds as human overreach (§3.2.3), important empirical questions also arise as to what extent such substitutes would really play the ecological roles of their forebears, as well as any potential ecological hazards of the introduction of novel, non-native species. On the flip side, it is an empirical question as to what further ecological degradation will be risked (and on what time scale) if no taxon substitutes are introduced into an ecosystem.
8. The relationship between forests, livestock grazing, and climate change. This is a tangential point that emerges more out of PR than the scientific and moral defence of rewilding: the goal of rewilding is not climate change mitigation. However, given the climate exclusivist focus of the mainstream media, it follows that rewilding proponents sometimes like to talk about the potential for climate change mitigation. For many of us, I presume, the received view is that reforestation/afforestation is the nature-based climate change mitigation strategy par excellence, and that meanwhile cow burps are a horrendous contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. This standard consensus position fits well with a North American rewilding movement that commonly promotes forest regeneration, protection of old growth forests, and a significant reduction in livestock grazing. But European nature developers are anti-afforestation and pro-livestock, and thus they need a different story on climate. One line is that grazing in the arctic can help to mitigate climate change by increasing surface albedo, and there is the insistence that grasslands sequester carbon too. Yet even Svenning et al (2015) admit “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.”
9. Baseline conditions. Foundational to all else, perhaps, is debate about the relevant baseline conditions. This dispute, as in any case of ecological restoration, is partly empirical and partly normative. There is the empirical question of what the historical ecological conditions in an area actually were, and then there is the normative question of whether or not given time in (pre-)history is appropriate to serve as a baseline for present day restoration efforts. North America, like Europe, also had a great deal more megafauna in the Pleistocene, including large herbivores, yet if there is a North American equivalent to the Vera hypothesis, it plays no appreciative role in the work of The Rewilding Institute and its antecedents. This may be partly due to different beliefs about the historical conditions, or it may be partly due to actual differences in the environmental and ecological conditions of the two continents, but it seems to me like that biggest difference is that “mainstream” North American rewilding is not Pleistocene rewilding (despite the work of Josh Donlan and his occasional co-authorship with leading figures in the mainstream movement). The North American rewilding movement tends to work with much more recent baselines, e.g. pre-colonisation. Again, the selection of a baseline for restoration is to some extent normative, yet there are also further embedded empirical questions that may help to settle the normative ones, e.g., questions about the extent to which (if at all) conserving present biodiversity depends on restoring or replicating Pleistocene conditions. Other empirical questions, of course, are simply what these conditions were (e.g. open landscapes versus closed-canopy forests) and how they got that way (e.g. whether openings in forests are attributable to fire and windthrow or grazing animals).
I’m sure there are other points of (apparent) disagreement about the facts, but the above eight issues are ones that have struck me as especially prominent, and that seem like they’d be salient to anyone make a cursory comparison between the work of, e.g., The Rewilding Institute and Rewilding Europe. I am not an ecologist, but I am a philosopher, and it is my job to point out logical inconsistencies – and these are seem that deep enough to make me unsure why anyone who’s genuinely concerned about the protection of wild Nature would ever gloss over them for the sake of some kind of pretence at international coalition-building. Again, I’m a novice here, but getting the facts about ecology right seems like it could be kinda important for successful ecological restoration, and I would hope that insistence on correct science isn’t the kind of thing that gets one dismissed as a purist or idealist.
At the same time, certain empirical questions can be rendered irrelevant by normative premises. For example, if it is simply inappropriate to attempt to recreate ecological communities of the Pleistocene, then it’s a moot question as to what those communities were. And, as a reminder, I am openly idealist as f–k when it comes to ecocentric ethics. It is to a few ethical correlates of the rewilding / nature development divide that I now turn.
3.2 Ethical Tensions
In this concluding section, I return full circle to a discussion of the ethical intuitions that drove my initial fascination with the rewilding movement, especially via my reading of Dave Foreman’s Rewilding North America, as summarised in §1: respect for the autonomy of Nature; reverence for self-willed, non-teleological evolutionary processes; the human virtues of humility, modesty, and restraint. This time, however, I draw upon them for a very different purpose: to explain the foundations of my discontent with nature development (“rewilding”) as well as the ideas of “trophic” and “Pleistocene” rewilding more generally. I maintain that the rift between the North American and European meanings of ‘rewilding’ betrays normative disagreements that potentially strike to the heart of conservation ethics, and do so in a way that is (largely) irrespective of the solutions to the empirical disagreements described above.
I have already noted that an ecocentric worldview, which was (and is) integral to the North American rewilding movement, is not as tightly associated with the concept called ‘rewilding’ in Europe – if it is associated with it at all. In their incisive takedown of the Oostvaardersplassen “experiment”, Kopina, Leadbeater, and Cryer (2019) also take a well-placed strike at the “enviro-resourcism” in the rhetoric of Rewilding Britain and Rewilding Europe: “The first principle of Rewilding Britain concerns ‘people, communities and livelihoods’ and the role for animals is to be sustainably harvested through hunting and fishing. The Rewilding Europe website emphasizes human recreation and seeks business justifications for rewilding areas. The weft and web of this fundamentally anthropocentric outlook supports ecological processes that are ‘useful’ for human welfare.”
Kopina, Leadbeater, and Cryer focus on ethical obligations to individual animals. This is not my focus, and anyhow there’ve been many voices speaking out regarding the animal welfare aspect of OVP and other naturalistic grazing projects. Whereas animal rights advocacy can present itself as ecologically naïve to a fault (cf. Foreman’s chapter in Take Back Conservation), my own interest is holistic ecological ethics, and I am primarily concerned with human moral obligations to self-willed Nature as such. Starvation, suffering, and death are all natural processes in the self-regulation of ecosystems and the open-ended saga of evolution.
The fate of the grazers at OVP was tragic, to be sure, but this is not merely because so many starved or were culled to prevent starvation, but because they were never genuinely “free-living” to begin with. Their environment was hardly natural, constrained as it was by fences, development, and human-selected initial conditions. The introduced animals were not treated as “self-willed beasts” but non-consenting subjects in an unscientific experiment. My central objection is not to the suffering of individual animals but to the imposition of human will under the guise of promoting self-willed Nature, and here it is not merely the treatment of individual animals that is at issue (although it is symptomatic) but the overall structure of the projects and the motives behind them.
3.2.1 Biodiversity is not Bedrock
Before discussing what I perceive as tensions between nature development (European “rewilding”) and moral obligations to self-willed Nature (§3.2.2) and respect for self-directed evolutionary processes (§3.2.3), I want to reassert a point I made near the outset: I deny that preservation of biodiversity is moral bedrock. This, it turns out, is highly relevant to both criticisms. It might also supersede some of the empirical questions regarding the type or extent of human activity that does or does not prevent species loss, although it must be said that good factual information on this score is also critical to honing moral intuitions.
There was, initially, a very simple thought behind my revelation that “biodiversity is good” cannot be the foundation axiom for an ecocentric ethic: if biodiversity was moral bedrock, then it would seem to follow that we ought to bioengineer a whole bunch of different novel forms of life to release into the wild. This, however, seems quite clearly to degrade Nature rather than to enhance it – and it seems to be a degradation in itself, irrespective of the consequences of releasing novel species. Even if bioengineered species could result in an increase in biodiversity on Earth, the act of populating Earth with such human contrivances intuitively seems to subtract value rather than to add it; it seems like pollution rather than enhancement. (The “biodiversity-first” position also seemed like it could imply other counterintuitive conclusions, such as that tropical regions are intrinsically better than polar regions… but, anyhow, I will write a more extensive piece on this topic later.)
Long story short, I eventually settled on the view that the natural process of evolution is what’s fundamentally good in itself, and that the appropriate human attitude towards it is one of deference, restraint, and reverence. We must remain curious and humble, admitting that our young species can’t expect itself to do better than Nature herself at what Nature’s been doing for billions of years. Biodiversity does have intrinsic value, but as the engineer behind Earth’s ever-changing array of diverse lifeforms, it’s the underlying evolutionary process that possesses a more fundamental level of intrinsic value, and when there is a tension between promoting biodiversity and preserving the natural course of evolution – as in my thought experiment in which humans meddled in evolution by introducing a panoply of artificially engineered organisms into the wild – then the latter must trump the former.
Years later, I would think about biodiversity in a very different context, when contemplating the possibility that some biodiversity might depend on degraded landscapes. This became the central topic of “In Memory of Anholt as I Never Knew Her” (July 2022), where I raised the question, “When is the prima facie moral good of preserving biodiversity defeated by the moral obligation to respect the autonomy of self-willed land?” Contemplating the case of anthropogenically devastated island of Anholt, I argued that the greater obligation is to allow the will of the land to assert itself, even though this would entail eventual reforestation and the likely loss of the lichen diversity associated with the present deforested wasteland.
In that piece, I relied on a thought experiment to argue that the moral obligations to self-willed, autonomous landscape can override the prima facie moral responsibility to prevent species extinctions. Serendipitously, however, a Twitter follower subsequently jumped in with an interesting real-world example (see this thread): Ditrichum cornubicum, a critically endangered bryophyte that is known from only two former copper mining sites; to protect this rare moss, conservationists deliberately prevent the land from naturally recovering from the impact of extractive industry. I find it utterly appalling that the resilience of self-willed Nature is suppressed in this way, even if the goal is to prevent the extinction of a rare species.
The upshot is this: I am not necessarily disposed to accept that a conservation action is right even if the goal is to protect biodiversity (and, indeed, even if it does protect biodiversity). Thus, for the purpose of subsequent discussion, it is unnecessary to settle all of the empirical questions raised above; I can even leave open the possibility that Rewilding Europe and ilk are correct that agriculture pressure or natural grazing does safeguard some local biodiversity that would be lost if farmland were allowed to reforest. I focus here not on biodiversity but on what I consider to be more fundamental moral goods: the autonomy of self-willed Nature (§3.2.2) and integrity and authenticity of natural evolutionary processes (§3.2.3).
3.2.2 Nature Development and Self-Willed Land
Despite their rhetoric, I have seen little evidence that proponents of “rewilding” in Europe genuinely aspire to restore self-willed, autonomous land. This is borne out in two ways: (A) the naturalistic grazing projects themselves oftenrequire continuous human intervention, despite which they are often presented as ends in themselves, with no discussion of future steps to natural self-governance; (B) it is at least suspect that the real baseline for restoration is itself a condition of human management, i.e., agricultural landscapes.
A. Human Intervention in Naturalistic Grazing
As we have noted, animal welfare is the near universal theme heard from opponents of OVP, Molslaboratoriet, Tirsbæk Bakker, and other naturalistic grazing projects involving fenced populations of domestic or semi-wild herbivores. Because of such public outcry – and even more because of laws governing the management of kept animals – we are unlikely to see any future occurrences of an OVP-style mass starvation event. In Denmark, and probably throughout the EU, laws require that fenced horses and cattle be regularly monitored for health, and treated, fed, or removed from the enclosure for care as necessary. As mentioned, this is practised in Molslaboratoriet and other Danish naturalistic grazing projects, such as the fifteen new Naturnationalparker. The upshot is that naturalistic grazing is effectively incompatible with self-willed Nature. No one wants to see a recurrence of the OVP famine, yet nature development proponents continue to demand naturalistic grazing (using domestic animals in enclosures); ergo, nature development moves even closer to just being agriculture.
Now, it is commonly accepted that the restoration of self-willed Nature is compatible with some amount of initial human intervention, and often facilitated by it, as in the case of the removal of dams, roads, and other structures and infrastructure. The reintroduction of native wild species typically begins with human action, as does the removal of invasive species. This is also what Rewilding Europe claims to do: “We can give it a helping hand by creating the right conditions – by removing dykes and dams to free up rivers, by reducing active management of wildlife populations, by allowing natural forest regeneration [editor’s note: lol], and by reintroducing species that have disappeared as a result of man’s actions. Then we should step back and let nature manage itself” (“What is rewilding?”). Okay, that sounds good, but many characteristic European “rewilding” projects don’t involve “stepping back and letting nature manage itself” so much as stepping back in to monitor livestock populations.
If we want to maintain a charitable view of “rewilding” in Europe, we might imagine this response, “Sure, this monitoring is practically necessary at present, as are the fences, but that is only because we lack large enough areas of land to accommodate free-roaming megaherbivores. Eventually, we aspire to large areas of contiguous wildlands, where grazers can move freely and rely only on natural food sources. Analogously, you Americans love prescribed burning to maintain open landscapes. That is also not leaving the land of self-governance, but you accept it as practically necessary, since you can’t rely on natural wildfire at the present, even though your simultaneous long-term goal is to restore natural fire regimes in much larger areas of protected land. And as with your fires, so with our grazers.”
That would, at least, clarify the goal and admit the limitations of naturalistic grazing as presently implemented in places like the seeming whole of Denmark – leaving us mainly to the empirical disputes about the relative ecological importance of herbivory, predation, wildfire, and other natural disturbance, as well as practical and implementational questions about how to get from here to there. The thing is, this does not seem to be how the discourse unfolds in reality, at least from what I’ve seen of it (primarily in Denmark). Instead, the naturalistic grazing projects are rolled out… and that’s that. The only question is where to build the next fenced enclosure. The projects remain isolated, with no discussion of how to progress to the conservation of large, connected, and genuinely self-willed landscapes.
B. An Agrarian Baseline?
The other salient way in which Rewilding Europe’s commitment to self-willed land is suspect concerns the selection of the baseline for restoration. As noted above (§2.3), the organisation is upfront about its founding mission to prevent the afforestation of abandoned farmland. The implicature is that it would have been unproblematic had the land remained farmed: it is the end of farming that causes the “problem” to begin with. Rewilding Europe claims that it is restoring the natural conditions prior to the megafauna extinction. Yet the organisation is not alone in the worry that the abandonment of agriculture in some areas will be harmful to biodiversity, and more often I have heard this claim made directly – appealing to the (alleged) importance of agricultural landscapes, that is, not all the way back to the Pleistocene.
If the removal of farming pressure is bad for biodiversity, or bad for certain wild species of conservation concern, then for most conservationists there’d be no real need to appeal to hypothesised prehistoric conditions; the relevant fact is simply that certain species of concern benefit from farming pressure. Appeal to the conditions of the Pleistocene might be an explanation of the curious fact (if it’s a fact) that certain late Holocene species seem to prefer agriculture land grazed extensively by livestock. But it seems tangential to justifying the conservation efforts themselves. For Rewilding Europe too, what appeal to the Pleistocene justifies is not necessarily the practice of replicating agricultural pressure but the “right” to use the word ‘Rewilding’ (instead of the more apt ‘Refarming’).
My intuition is that Rewilding Europe and its ilk face a double bind here. The first bind is that the deliberate simulation of farm-like impact is bad, for it disrespects the autonomy of self-willed Nature by attempting to perpetuate a state of human-caused degradation. The second bind is that the attempt to simulate distant past conditions is also bad, for it disrespects the authenticity of natural evolutionary processes and Nature’s own capacity to heal and regenerate. So whether they’re seen as choosing a recent but human-created baseline for restoration or a baseline 10,000 or so years ago, they’re not acting with humility and respect for self-willed Nature, but merely persisting in human overreach.
Strengthening this case will take additional work that I won’t complete here – but, then, that’s not the point of this present post, is it? This post was just meant to reveal the drastic difference between the moral presuppositions of the rewilding movement that I discovered in North America and the like-named movement I would discover in Europe. And the fact that I’m even suggesting that the latter faces such a moral double bind should be telling.
This idea of farmland-dependent biodiversity is a new latent scientific curiosity and ethical fascination to me. I hope I can write more on this issue sometime in the future, following a great deal more background research into what science tells us, for it is a natural continuation of the moral issue raised in “In Memory of Anholt…” The displacement of natural biotic communities to create farmland is a type of degradation and subjugation of the land, even the consequences are not as extreme as the deforestation of Anholt or copper mining in Bodmin Moor. The domestication of farmed animals was itself a degradation and subjugation of self-willed beasts. The deliberate maintenance of farm-like impact is not the restoration of self-willed Nature, even if native wild herbivores (or non-native domestic herbivores) are introduced to the work of simulating farming pressure. Perhaps the farmers are gone, but it is still forcibly manipulating Nature into replicating the upshot of human activity – not leaving Nature to Nature’s own will and discretion. The structure of the emerging moral dilemma closely resembles that entertained in the Anholt piece, where I came down firmly on the side of respecting the autonomy of self-willed land, even if it meant the loss of rare lichen species.
If saving Ditrichum cornubicum does not suffice to licence the “remining” of Bodmin Moor (as I believe that it doesn’t), then should agriculture-reliant species suffice to licence the “refarming” of land recently freed from direct human impact? Honestly, I do believe that this is a case where one can’t just construct a thought experiment; more empirical research and case studies are needed to properly hone moral intuitions. What exactly is the scope of the potential losses? What species are we talking about, and are they really dependent on farming pressure to the extend hypothesised? Is the impact to biodiversity, if any, merely local and/or short-term? These are empirical questions, but it is admittedly difficult even to form clear intuitions about moral philosophy in an entire epistemic void.
As a general principle, I believe that respect for self-willed Nature requires releasing land from human imposition – including the deliberate simulation thereof – wherever possible. But I also seem to accept some kinds of minimal imposition for the sake of securing other goods, including the preservation of biodiversity (e.g. developing a small plot of land as a captive breeding centre for, say, the critically endangered White-Bellied Heron). I suppose I might say there’s no blanket licence to “refarm” abandoned farmland, and any exceptions granted would be for the equivalent of “captive breeding centres” – hardly the restoration of wild Nature.
But, anyhow, Rewilding Europe doesn’t claim merely to be simulating the continuation of farming on abandoned farmland; they claim to be simulating Pleistocene conditions. And I think that’s even more clearly morally bad, as I argue in §3.2.2.
C. Unsettling and Blurring Binaries?
Sometimes Rewilding Europe and ilk say they also aspire to restoring, releasing, and protecting self-willed Nature; sometimes I’m not so sure this is even the claim.
In Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery, Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe say some things I find disagreeable, beginning with a gratuitous dig against 1970s prog rock. While Jepson and Blythe make connections between the European and North American “rewilding” movements, their portrayal of the latter is almost entirely represented by Donlan and Pleistocene rewilding. Anyhow, some of their rhetoric seems to give up entirely on respect for self-willed land as even as stated desideratum of “rewilding”. For example, they praise European rewilding for “unsettling and blurring” the boundaries between “wild-domestic” and “natural-cultivated” (p. 7), and they indicated that (unlike restoration ecology) what they call rewilding “aspires to integrate” Nature and people (p. 83). This sounds a lot more like New Conservation than rewilding. Respect for self-willed Nature needs to be an axiom of any conservation movement in the tradition of Foreman, Soulé, Noss, et al. This requires hewing to some of the dichotomies that New Conservationists would have us deny.
3.2.3 Nature Development and Respect for Evolution
In his response to Fisher in the Rewilding Earth blog, Schwartz suggests that the accuracy of the Vera hypothesis is a moot point, because regardless of its veracity, it is certain that tarpans and aurochs did once roam Europe and impact the landscape: “Even if Vera may overestimate their effects on the landscape, there is no doubt that aurochs and tarpan functioned in the way he claims. If those functions can be re-established using domesticated proxies, then insisting on ‘wild’ animals seems arbitrary and overly idealistic.”
I disagree with nearly all of that, except that the accuracy of the Vera hypothesis is rendered moot by more fundamental premises. I would say something very different next: regardless of the ecological impact of the Pleistocene’s megaherbivores, those species are extinct, and they’re not coming back (that’s what extinction means). What is thus virtuous is to admit to the irreversible losses and learn to live with them – not to deny them with a human-created simulacrum, a forgery, a fraud. In the post that Schwartz criticises, Fisher specifically calls for on native wild species, by no means “arbitrary” from either an ecological or ethical standpoint.
Critics of Pleistocene or trophic rewilding often focus on the uncertain and potentially ecologically damaging consequences of the introduction of non-native translocated or de-domesticated species (see, for example, Rubenstein et al, 2006, “Pleistocene park: Does re-wilding North America represent sound conservation for the 21st century?” Biological Conservation and the short 2016 follow-up “From Pleistocene to trophic rewilding: A wolf in sheep’s clothing” in PNAS). These are also important worries, yet I believe that the ambitions of Pleistocene rewilding are intrinsically morally wrong. First of all, contra Schwartz, I believe that the (intrinsic) value of authenticity needs to be taken into account, undercutting the accusation of arbitrariness in the insistence on reintroducing only native species, not proxies. In other domains, such as the artworld, authenticityis already accepted as a component of value. Why, then, should this not hold all the more within the domain of ecological ethics, where the objects of our concern are the products of billions of years of natural evolution?
Suppose that you are an owner of a gallery exhibit of original paintings by Vermeer. One night, while drinking in the curator’s office, you fall asleep, forgetting you’d left candles lit in the gallery. A conflagration ensues, destroying the original art. Clearly, you f–ed up, but now the original Vermeer paintings are lost. There is no way to replace them, no way to reverse the loss. What should you do? Should you recreate the gallery using Vermeer prints? Should you replenish the gallery with original van Meegeren forgeries to serve as “proxy artworks”? Or should you just own up to the loss and the fact that priceless artworks are now gone forever? It would be odd to accuse someone of being “arbitrary and overly idealistic” if they maintained that van Meegeren’s forgeries or prints of Vermeer’s paintings do not suffice as replacements to the Vermeer originals. On the contrary, it is a very common intuition that prints and forgeries lack much of the value of originals.
Now, I tend to baulk at analogies between the artworld and Nature, simply because the latter is so much more commanding of our respect, reference, deference, and wonder, and even aesthetic appreciation. Ecosystems have been shaped by millions of years of evolution into awe-inspiring displays of harmony, balance, diversity, and other aesthetic properties – if anything passes David Hume’s “test of time” for objective aesthetic value, surely it is the product of four billion years of evolution of life on Earth – and the fact that this beauty was not intentionally crafted, and not meant for us, makes it only more wonderfully mystifying.
Wes Jackson lays out the following thought experiment in a recent interview with Robert Jensen: “Imagine one acre of never-ploughed native prairie, and think about the Mona Lisa. You’re given a choice: you either have to plough that prairie or you have to burn the Mona Lisa. Which do you do? I say you hang on to the one acre and don’t plough. […] People might say the Mona Lisa is irreplaceable, but it’s more replaceable than the ecosystem of that one acre, which you can never recreate once it’s disrupted with a plough. That landscape is somewhere between 1.8 million years and say 400,000 years old, as the ice pushed down a lot of that ground from Canada and parked it here in Kansas. How old is the Mona Lisa? Maybe 500 years. […] That material on that prairie was there before Homo sapiens.”
I share Jackson’s intuition about the case, although I take no delight in the thought of burning the Mona Lisa, which I (like most people) agree also to be irreplaceable. Most people would aver that a copy of the painting is just not the same, no matter how expertly created with replicas of the very types of paints and canvas that Da Vinci would have used. How much more, then, should we be warranted in denying that taxon substitutes or backbred “aurochs” or other products of “de-extinction” experiments are adequate substitutes for native wildlife?
There is an important disanalogy from the artworld forgeries, but I believe it serves only to highlight a deeper moral problem with the ambitions of trophic/Pleistocene rewilding: evolution is an ongoing process, and I hold that it’s the process more than any particular product that ought to be regarded as sacrosanct. So, described more accurately, what is bad about taxon substitutions and de-extinction is not that the product is a “forgery” of the Pleistocene, but that our creation of unnatural arrangements of “new nature” interferes indelibly with the process. It is something more like, like, smacking a happy face sticker right over the visage of the Mona Lisa before Da Vinci ever has a chance to finish his portrait of Lisa Gherardini in his own style… Hmm, well, maybe I don’t quite have the analogy quite right yet, but what is bad is the severance of natural evolutionary chains, anchored in deep time, with the deliberate insertion of our own grimy fingerprints.
We don’t know what Nature herself will eventually conjure up to fill the niches left unoccupied in the wake of Pleistocene megafauna extinctions, but that is a decision that – in my view – should be entrusted to Nature. Almost certainly, the de-domesticated livestock that trophic rewilders propose as taxon substitutes are not what Nature would eventually produce in the absence of our interference. It is just another type of anthropization of Nature, the imposition of human will onto ecological and evolutionary processes for the sake of short-term human goals, whether the provision of ecosystem services or safari parks or CAP subsidies or assuaging guilt for the sins of our Pleistocene ancestors. It is not so much “playing god” and playing a meta-deity, tinkering with the properties of the Creator herself.
It is, to be sure, a nebulous claim to say that we have a basic moral obligation to respect the natural process of evolution. What does this really mean? As I remarked in my July 2022 post on overpopulation, it could lead to the conclusion that Homo sapiens ought to wantonly and recklessly reproduce until we hit carrying capacity, since that’s what any species would naturally do, and that’s what drives evolution. Since we are creatures capable of conscious and conscientious reflection, however, I think that the appropriate sense of respect does require the engagement of our capacities to regard deep-time evolution with wonder, fascination, awe, reverence, humility, modesty, and deference, and to exercise our capacity to act with self-conscious restraint. This requires that we take care not to intervene in the process of evolution as if we’re just trying out an ad hoc repair of a broken appliance.
“Biodiversity-first” conservationists might lack my qualms concerning the integrity of evolutionary chains. Biodiversity is biodiversity, one might say, whether it’s created by self-willed evolutionary processes, human-led selective breeding, or the mixing of DNA in a sterile, climate-controlled laboratory. But one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens, as they say, and I believe that these cases do differ morally, and that insofar as the biodiversity-first position cannot accommodate this intuition, that is evidence of its falsity. Natural processes will increase biodiversity in the long term if left alone, and given our inability to genuinely reverse extinction, the virtues of humility, deference, and respect are better manifest in trusting Nature to find her own novel path forward from the end-Pleistocene extinctions, not by the impatient desire to see Pleistocene levels of biodiversity restored in our own lifetimes.
Some hold a very different virtue-based ecological ethic, one which postulates that humanity has a duty to make amends for extinctions that our species has caused. This desire to make amends for the misdeeds of our Pleistocene ancestors strikes me as childish and naïve in its denial of the finality of extinction. It is like thinking that one can make amends for manslaughter by mail-ordering a genetic copy of the victim as a gift to the bereaved. It attempts to soothe one’s own guilt by failing fully to confront the enormity and irreversibility of what one has done.
It is not within our power to make amends for extinction, and the most noble action may be to do nothing – as painful as that may be to us guilt-ridden creatures – but to admit our own inadequacies and step back to allow the Earth to move forward according to her own terms and creative powers. We mustn’t repeat the mistakes of our forebears, but it doesn’t follow that we ought to intervene in natural processes again in paltry attempts to make amends for the megafauna extinctions. Indeed, the attempt seems paternalistically meddlesome, effectively signalling that we don’t trust Nature’s own ability to recover from the extinction event – despite a proven track record of recovery from previous extinctions – and that Nature still needs us to step back in to set things right, despite thousands of years of self-directed recovery from the extinctions already underway.
We should, in general, act to prevent extinctions that are within our capacity to prevent. All the more, we must curtail the ill tendencies at the heart of the extinction crises: overpopulation, habitat destruction and fragmentation, direct overexploitation of organisms, and all the wanton destruction in the name of cultural preferences. Mass extinction is a symptom. The root evil is the lack of wonder, reverence, and respect for Nature and her creative powers.
Foreman wrote that the preservation of wilderness and wildlife is “fundamentally about human humility and restraint.” Jepson and Blythe now boast of “‘upgrad[ing]’ ecosystems […] in ways that will help steer societies towards more sustainable and liveable future” and “ecological engineering” (p. 70), “producing natures that are novel from both an ecological and cultural perspective” (p. 7), and having a relaxed attitude toward the creation of “novel ecosystems” (various places), even though the novelty is the result of human tampering rather than Nature’s creativity. Jepson and Blythe even inform me that the “rewilding ethos is redefining the boundaries of extinction from a living animal to living DNA” and excitedly praise the application of synthetic biology to resurrect the auroch (p. 120ff). Okay! If this is the “rewilding ethos” nowadays, it is decidedly a crass perversion of the idea of “human humility and restraint” of which Foreman wrote, nor is it what I signed up for when I belatedly discovered the North American rewilding movement. But I do also have a fondness for 70s prog rock, so probably I am just “out of touch with trends in science and wider society.” Ah, well. As Greg Lake sang, c’est la vie.
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This has been a very long post. Yet there is much more work to do. But I guess at least I’ve that established that, just as I ultimately did in the basic income movement, I take an anti-conciliatory, anti-convergence stance with respect to the “rewilding” movement. Different strands, flavours, and styles of “rewilding” diverge not merely in implementational details, nor in minor disputes to be resolved by scientific enquiry; they are prone to diverge all the way down to their fundamental normative assumptions about morally correct attitudes and actions toward wild Nature, and it is inappropriate to ignore or elide these differences.
