The concept of rewilding is to look at the past as a reference to create new ecosystems (68). It is not recreating ecosystems into how ecosystems were before Europeans arrived, as many ecologists believe. It is to recreate an environment into its condition before humans laid their hands on the environment. It is also called Pleistocene rewilding, restoring nature to the way it was 13,000 years ago before human caused any extinction. As Vera states, “the only thing man did was create the conditions, and nature filled it in” (71). Rewilding creates an environmental condition by introducing proxies that resembles long-extinct large predators in a particular area. These proxies include Heck cattle for auroch and konik horses for tarpan horses. These predators would conduct population control on herbivores and its preys. As a result, plants would remain their diversity when no herbivores would dominate to reduce the population of their favorite plants. The habitat would eventually evolve in a cycle of forest, plain, and shrubs as organisms in the ecosystem interact on their own.
I think the concept of rewilding is feasible in theory. It is restoring the nature using natural force. All human would do is to find proxies to put into the ecosystem for it to regulate and to restore itself to the condition 13,000 years ago. By restoring predators in an ecosystem and by regulating it for a sufficient amount of time, it is relatively low cost compared to the primeval conservation that plans to maintain ecosystems the way it was before its baseline. It is to keep in mind that ecosystems constantly urge to change because of climate changes and evolution, making primeval conservation difficult. Rewilding is also an alternative conservation method to achieve the goal of restoring the environment to as pure as possible. Setting a baseline before European arrived is useless because, according to chapter 3, inhabitants have changed ecosystems already by killing predators and causing many species to extinct. That baseline is not pure, thus rewilding should work better than primeval conservation if it is successful. Not only can we use proxies to restore our environment, we can help these proxies by giving them a wider range of habitats to grow their numbers and solve their danger to extinction. In the theoretical standpoint, I think it’s feasible.
Scientifically, rewilding is still an experiment. Although it had some initial success like reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone, which reported unexpected and significant ecosystem shift (62). Introducing predators can create substantial changes to an ecosystem. However, it takes time and many experiments to find out whether it would turn out to be the way as planned in the rewilding. Based on the initial successes in Oostvaardrrplassen and Yellowstone, I think it is scientifically feasible until experiments reveal the plan’s failure later on.
However, I don’t find rewilding ethical. I think the experiments are cruel because they would kill the introduced species if they become invasive or if they do not work they way as expected (65). They are lives also. It is not ethical to kill them with our strategies and weapons when they are innocent and introduced without their own will. Although population control by introducing predators works great, it is cruelly forcing deaths upon some of the population of lower-of-food-chain species. Lastly, I think by connecting the rewilded ecosystem with the human world (less populated) and let farmers and residents to put up fences up their properties on their own wills to protect from wild invasion is irresponsible. Rewilding can cause casualties and destructions as non-specialized human population are not used to living with large species. Saying that the introduced predators will not become invasive to human population is irresponsible on ecologists’ parts.
