Explore the vast range of titles available.

In recent years, the profile of rewilding, a conservation approach emphasising reduced human interventions in ecosystems, restored ecosystem processes and autonomous nature, has increased. This has prompted critiques of how wildness, nature, and non-human co-existence with humans, are conceptualised within rewilding. Yet so far, there has been no detailed empirical exploration of the views held by rewilding advocates on what rewilding is, and how it should be done. Here we present an analysis of the views of rewilding practitioners and advocates across Europe, using Q-methodology. We identify two distinct visions, one focusing on extensive radical transformation of rural landscapes towards wilder states, and another focused on pragmatism, embracing different forms of rewilding in different places. Divisions over pragmatism versus radical transformation have not previously been identified in studies of rewilding but have critical implications for how rewilding is enacted. These differences also map onto distinct positions in whether rewilding compliments or challenges existing conservation practice. Beyond these distinctions, we find important areas of consensus, such as seeing humans as part of nature, which challenges arguments that rewilding strives for people-free wildernesses or facsimiles of past ecosystems. Overall, our analyses suggest greater coherence within rewilding than has previously been identified.

Rewilding has been hailed as ‘radical’ and ‘agenda-setting’ in the challenge it poses to mainstream conservation. This paper questions whether that is still the case, or if rewilding is now being mainstreamed and with what consequences? Our analysis focuses upon developments in Britain, up until 2018, discussing what changes have become manifest and the barriers and restraints that have been observed. As such, we evaluate the extent to which rewilding – in practice - departs from longstanding conservation sensibilities. Discussion is structured around three key questions— Who is now involved in rewilding across Britain? What they are seeking to do, in terms of how nature is conceptualised and managed (or not)? In what ways do their objectives involve people and human-centred aspirations? Our findings reveal three key differences from current conservation approaches. First, rewilding is associated with a proliferation of new actors, new mechanisms of finance and new spaces of conservation interest. Second, rewilding as an approach exhibits clear novelty in its stated aim to be nature-led and, despite challenges, attempts to work through ongoing negotiation and experimentation. Finally, rewilding is currently being advocated and pursued as an agenda for people and nature, which moves beyond earlier nature conservation paradigms of protecting nature from human influence. However, it remains to be seen whether rewilding advocates can realise their ambitions to popularise and create peopled wild spaces across Britain’s landscapes.

Unsanctioned life is often categorised as ‘feral’, a value-embedded term that orders non-humans in relation to various temporal-spatial, genetic or behavioural logics. Such labelling is frequently used to marginalise risky, undesirable life and allow space for strategies of control and regulation. Feral natures, however, might also be understood as an important, though frequently ignored, form of rewilding situated where strategies of conservation and biosecurity converge. Using the example of (re)introduced wild boar (Sus scrofa) in England as ‘feral rewilding’ in action, this paper considers how the politics around their presence are contested by actors who hold different understandings of wild boar and human-nonhuman relations more broadly. After a multi-century absence, over the last three decades farmed wild boar have escaped and been deliberately released, occasionally establishing autonomous and self-sustaining populations. This is most visible in the Forest of Dean where their unfamiliar presence has increasingly reconfigured social relations. Being categorised as ‘feral’ as a strategy of governance is a contributing factor to a fraught political landscape where wild boar belonging is constantly questioned.

Rewilding is a distinctive form of ecological restoration that has emerged quite publicly within environmental policy and conservation advocacy circles. One of the fundamental tenets of rewilding is its emphasis on non-human autonomy, yet empirical examples that examine non-human autonomy are currently limited. While there is a growing body of literature on the biopolitics of broader environmental conservation strategies, there is comparatively little scholarship on the biopolitics of rewilding. This paper argues that autonomy should not be used as a boundary marker to denote ‘wild’ non-humans, but as a situated condition that is variable across locations. It offers an empirical study of the biopolitics that govern the different expressions of non-human autonomy at two different locations in Scotland, where beavers have been reintroduced. The findings reveal how, depending on location and context, modes of governance related to rewilding strategies co-exist and interplay with animal autonomy and forms of power in contradictory ways.

The last forty years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of great cormorants (Phalacrocorax carbo) moving inland away from British coastlines. Britain’s largest inland colony currently reside at Walthamstow Wetlands, a nature reserve and functional reservoir system in northeast London, recently branded ‘Europe’s largest urban wetland’. Here, great cormorants are embroiled in contested ideas of nature. Celebrated by conservationists for their resilience and adaptability, yet hounded by anglers for launching ecological chaos on rivers and reservoirs and disrupting the balance that is imagined for urban recreational spaces. This paper argues for a more nuanced version of rewilding that acknowledges the biogeographical complexity and mobility of nonhumans in relation to radically altered ecologies and post-industrial urban environments. It uses the conceptual frame of more-than-human to examine the increased presence, mobility, and agency of great cormorants at Walthamstow Wetlands in terms of nonhuman autonomy and auto-rewilding. The findings demonstrate that the self-relocation and autonomous occupation of inland cormorants in Walthamstow are intimately entangled with human histories and activities, and that they are active alongside humans in creating novel ecosystems.

Critical scholars have questioned the shifting dynamics of power and governance involved, how these are enfolded in novel spatial and temporal framings, and the ethical and justice implications for both human-human and human-nonhuman relations. By mobilising scientific knowledge and employing mechanisms such as species lists and the concept of biodiversity, compositionalist conservation has demarcated, ordered and valued nature at both a species-population scale and through the bodies of individuals (Biermann and Mansfield 2014; Braverman 2015). Within this collection, the demarcation of life as protected or ‘made killable’ is a subject of discussion for papers by Clancy and Ward; O'Mahony; Ward and Prior, who evaluate the ways in which the lives of birds, boars and beavers (respectively) are ranked, ordered and regulated according to measures such as breeding and physiology, the extent and locations of territory, and behavioural dynamics. Reintroduction is a central feature of the rewilding movement, to enable the enhancement of trophic complexity and enrich depleted system dynamics (Svenning et al. 2016), but it is a fraught objective.