What is Rewilding?
Once again, the summer turns slowly into autumn… The leaves are starting to fall and the Sourwood and Sumacs offer us a taste of the reddish wine color that will soon be joined by yellows and browns to paint our landscape. While the transition is beautiful, it is also a reminder to think of things that need to be done in preparation for colder months that lie ahead, such as food storage and preservation and establishing warm dwellings. As other bioregions experience the wrath of hurricane season, we are experiencing the driest couple of months of the year. This seems to work out well, allowing us one last chance to partake in more physical activities before winter when we’ll be spending most of our energy just trying to stay warm. The dry weather is also convenient for all sorts of autumn activities like cutting firewood, gathering and processing feral apples, persimmons, Autumn Olives, (our favorite late-season fruit), and we plan to soon reap the harvest of the abundant supply of fre
Rewilding, when taken in the context of modern day human society, refers to a process by which the domestication of people is undone. The philosophy behind rewilding is based on the idea that over time, the changing civilization of humans has resulted in the domestication of the human being. Rewilding practices seek to reverse this domestication, and return human beings to a pre-civilized, wild state of being. Within rewilding theory, domestication is considered to be negative, the effect of unnatural influences brought by the constant and accumulative modernization of society. Rather than view modernization and civilization as the progress of human society, rewilding theories see these forces as a digression from the natural and correct state of human life. Rewilding considers the natural state of humans as the pre-civilized, wild, primal state of life, wherein complex social structures, technology, and other markers of civilization do not have a place. Rewilding criticizes these mode
(Adapted from Dave Foreman’s Rewilding North America) Six areas of recent ecological research—extinction dynamics, island biogeography, metapopulation theory, natural disturbance ecology, top-down regulation by large carnivores, and landscape-scale ecological restoration—are the foundation for all informed protected area design. They are brought together in the idea and scientific approach of rewilding, developed by Michael Soulè in the mid-1990s. Rewilding is “the scientific argument for restoring big wilderness based on the regulatory roles of large predators,” according to Soulè and Reed Noss in their landmark 1998 Wild Earth article “Rewilding and Biodiversity.” Three major scientific arguments constitute the rewilding argument and justify the emphasis on large predators. First, the structure, resilience, and diversity of ecosystems is often maintained by “top-down” ecological (trophic) interactions that are initiated by top predators. Second, wide-ranging predators usually require
Most basically put, to rewild means to return to a more natural or wild state; it is the process of undoing domestication. It involves the rejection of civilization, and for lack of better terms involves becoming ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’, but in our own way (“neo-indigenous”). What this means isn’t going to be incredibly clear to everyone, so some vocabulary clarifications are needed. Civilization can be defined as the hierarchical cultures that exist as a direct result of agriculture, and involve the creation of cities as centers of resources. Hierarchy probably needs to be explained some, since it’s been my experience that people don’t know what hierarchy is. Some even go so far as to state that all human cultures have hierarchy, and then give as examples cultures that do not. Having a social structure doesn’t mean a hierarchy is in place. Even having designated jobs like ‘chief’ and ‘medicine person’ doesn’t mean there is a hierarchy. A true hierarchy involves at least one person, t
