In “Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post Wild World” Marris talks quite a bit about the prospects of rewilding in chapters three and four, however before I get into what she said about it, first I’m going to give a small explanation as to what it is. Rewilding as I understood in the text, basically is the idea of taking a particular type of species from one environment and putting it in a new environment; more specifically an environment where an animal relating to the ‘new’ animal has gone extinct or is no longer around. The reason they want to do this is to keep a little bit of nature pure to make it ‘wild’ again; to the extent where it looks like it did before humans interacted with it.
Now technically rewilding is scientifically feasible for a few reasons. The first reason is because scientist don’t have to worry about the fact that nature has changed since a few thousand years ago and that it has been affected by man, since nature changes regardless of man’s presence or not. Furthermore in order for them to make a certain environment ‘wild’ again they would have to do what the book says and release top of the food chain predators. By releasing these types of predators into said environment it will cause greater competition amongst the other species. By this I mean there will be more intra-species competition that they will have to avoid being eaten and it will lead to survival of the fittest and better the species in general. Furthermore, it will decrease the amount of food competition, which allows one certain type of species to consistently eat a plant it likes and it will lead to fewer species entirely. However, bureaucratically it is not possible for rewilding to occur. For one thing there is always people who are unwilling to give up land at could just become another debate of conservationism versus people who don’t care about nature. Secondly, there is another problem which the book mentioned regarding racism where sending African animals to the United States might prove problematic mainly because the citizens of the United States might not want to live with African animals and this might look like racism which isn’t a good thing.
Rewilding might also help nature in general by preventing extinction because if animals are dying out due to human interaction, by placing them in these secluded environments they may have a better chance of survival. However, in my opinion though, we should not do rewilding because for one thing it is almost like “we are playing god,” as the book says. The book answers this by saying we are influencing nature regardless so what the difference. The difference is that this approach of rewilding is much more direct. Furthermore by adding a species to a new environment we might be creating invasive species that might end up ruining the environment and it’s not like that hasn’t happened before. So, to conclude whilst rewilding does have its perks, all in all I think it is a bad idea.
