In Chapters 3 and 4 of Rambunctious Garden, author Emma Marris introduces us to a new concept, “rewilding” – proposing that “the main factors necessary to keep ecosystems resilient and diverse are the regulation provided by large, top-of-the-food-chain predators; the room for these predators to do their work; and connections between predator ranges so they can meet, mate, and maintain a healthily diverse gene pool” (60). In this way, radical conservationists in favor of rewilding intend to create ecosystems that resemble an extremely distant era without human interference. Rewilding as conservation is truly radical, in that in previous chapters, we learned of the pristine wilderness that conservationists have continually envisioned; yet, rewilding introduces a place of true wilderness, although it is paradoxically controlled by humans and scientists like an experiment.
Rewilding is a new concept to ecology, led as a movement by scientists and conservationists who adore a past when “nature lived wild and large, when hairy mastodons and elephantine sloths heaved their bulk around the continent, and when deadly predators were big, fast and ubiquitous” (61). However bizarre this may sound, rewilding has its appeal in reintroducing animals to the islands “they formerly inhabited” and preventing them from going extinct in their current location (61). Relocation of these animals assumes that one animal would play another “lost” animal’s part in a new place, where predators could regulate themselves as they would have in an ancient wilderness; yet, this is risky and precarious, as it relies on these assumptions far too heavily for them to succeed. One professor that Marris quotes says that “(a)ttempting to fill gaps that closed long ago with proxy animals could generate unpredictable results” (65).
Also, in order to maintain such a wild ecosystem, the “rewilded animals would be carefully separated from human habitation and intensely managed…the concept tends to reinforce the line between humans and nature, rather than blurring it” (63). Why should humans continue to interfere with animals if the purpose of rewilding is to go back to a time of no human interference? If anything, animals and ecosystems have adapted and evolved, as Marris showed in previous chapters. All this does is reinforce Marris’s point of working with an urban landscape and forgetting the idea of a pristine or wild wilderness.
Nevertheless, rewilding isn’t all bad. It encourages biodiversity and the protection of animals that are at risk of going extinct. In the Netherlands, ecologist Vera maintained a hands-off approach initially by successfully letting geese graze and cattle and horses mow to prevent the growth of a forest in the Oostvaardersplassen, a huge landscape that is controlled to look as it is supposed to look as it did 10,000 years ago. Certainly rewilding is a little bit redeemable, in how it intends to protect rare species – and it may be successful in doing so. However, the ultimate goal of rewilding concerns a warped world of nature conservation, where humans control and experiment with animal interactions – and what does it all prove?
