Abstract
On the face of it, the conservation strategy of rewilding is inimical to human places and the histories and identities that constitute them. ‘We live in a shadowland, a dim, flattened relic of what there once was, of what there could be again’, laments George Monbiot (2013a), a staunch advocate of rewilding and an outspoken critic of the human projects of agriculture , husbandry, and even conservation to blame for Great Britain’s impoverished ecology. But even without pointing fingers, the idea of rewilding (especially laden with the conceptual baggage attendant to questions of wilderness and wildness) is centrally non-human: it is about self-willed landscapes , the return of extirpated species , and the remaking of landscapes in their pre-agricultural forms. Thus, rewilding seems antithetical to the myriad ways humans appropriate the world: our landscapes , timescales, practices , and ways of inhabitation all are thereby challenged. Rewilding unsettles traditional landscapes in that it can exist only in the absence of human settlements , but further, the concept of place—as humanized and humanizing—seems called into question. Others have, in effect, argued against this stance on a practical level by pointing to rewilding projects that do not exclude but foster and even enhance a sense and understanding of place (Drenthen, 2009; Feldman, 2011) . I supplement these examples with a conceptual argument against the stance I have just articulated. I argue that rather than undermining or unsettling the concept of place, rewilding itself is place-making. Though premised precisely on human absence from the landscapes and environments we have previously inhabited, rewilding is not antithetical to human meanings of these landscapes . This is because conceptually, rewilding relies on the specific ways humans are and are not involved in a landscape , ways which have specific meaningful content which has been pre-defined by historical ideas about wilderness and appropriate human relations to it. Rewilding necessarily preserves specific ways of relating (or not) to landscape , for instance, uses like recreation, or as source of inspiration or natural beauty are promoted, agriculture and resource extraction are not. For this reason, I argue that rewilding allows for, and in fact depends on, the kind of meaningful appropriation that makes a place. Thus, despite its emphasis on non-human wildness at the exclusion of humans and our practices , rewilded places will indeed be places, humanized, even if un-peopled.
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Notes
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See Rewilding Europe (no date): https://www.rewildingeurope.com/european-rewilding-network/ .
- 3.
Europe ’s cultural landscapes are the subject of general protection under the European Landscape Convention, and in specific cases, under heritage protection statutes. The formalized interest in these kinds of places, through initiatives like the HERCULES project (http://www.hercules-landscapes.eu), The Permanent European Conference for the Study of the Rural Landscape (http://www.pecsrl.org), the Landscape Research Group, (and http://www.landscaperesearch.org/), speaks to their regional , national, and international importance.
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- 5.
- 6.
See especially Phenomenology of Perception (2003).
- 7.
Lawrence Buell sees this as indication of the significance of the concept of place: ‘Place is an indispensable concept for environmental humanists not so much because they have precisely defined and stabilized it as because they have not; not because of what the concept lays to rest as because of what it opens up’ (2005: 62).
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- 11.
To be clear, Feldman’s entire project, as a historian, is against this dimming: both he and Cronon advocate rewilding in a way that can also encompass human presence and history and is even built on them. Cronon writes: ‘We should be able to encounter an abandoned plough blade in the woods…without feeling that such things somehow violate our virginal experience of wilderness. We would do better to recognize in this historical wilderness a more complicated tale than the one we like to tell ourselves about returning to the original garden’ (2003: 41). My point is that the kind of rewilding they would like to see is not the kind of rewilding that is happening in the Apostle Islands .
- 12.
- 13.
Beavers have been shown to increase biodiversity because they increase habitat diversity (Scottish National Heritage 2015: 11). Beavers are a keystone species , meaning their presence or absence in an ecosystem has disproportionately large effects on other species .
- 14.
Perhaps subsequently the agency of other nonhuman animals, the activity of the river landscape, etc., can also be re-appreciated.
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The author wishes to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions in revising this chapter.
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Gammon, A.R. (2019). The Unsettled Places of Rewilding. In: Pinto, S., Hannigan, S., Walker-Gibbs, B., Charlton, E. (eds) Interdisciplinary Unsettlings of Place and Space. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6729-8_16
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