Rewilding is almost as conceptually unstable an idea as E.O. Wilsons Half-Earth dream. The semantic provenance of these ideas lead us down a path of treacherously contested ontologies, post-colonial, post-activist, pre-regenerative.
Yet rewilding is hip. Most can grok the feeling of wildness, the awe, the beauty, the tranquility, and its absence, put together we can imagine making a place wild again. Countless articles, interviews and Youtube documentaries claim to define it as this but not that.
My stab at a definition tends to be more sub-movement inclusive, rather than inter-movement competitive:
Rewilding - Restoring the biological economy of a pre-industrial planet, i.e. a human-land and water relationality that recognizes flora and fauna as the primary modulators of ecosystem function.
It is much less ivory tower-wonky next to the term ecological restoration which is a close relative, if not identical twin, but has a lot more syllables and as per the current zeitgeist has had to create a sub-category of T.E.K., traditional ecological knowledge, because embarrassingly when the ecologists put together the maps of our remaining biodiversity, it was mostly on indigenous land.
Altogether, ecological restoration as a term is just a bit clunky.
Implicit within rewilding, as per my interpretation of the aggregated momentum of practitioners espousing its vernacular, is its inclusiveness of humans having a latent regenerative biology, tis only the industrially mediated culture and education that has stripped us of its wildness’ fecundity and density of beauty.
Which begs the question, can industry be rewilded?
Absolutely. If it can submit to a pre-industrial biological economy, and re-center flora and fauna, human and non-human, as the primary modulators of ecosystem function. Biocentrism before technocentrism.
The inverse of our current dominant paradigm.
