It’s a fashionable word that you seem to hear everywhere these days, but if you ask 10 people to define what rewilding means, you’ll get 10 wildly different answers. To some it might be a matter of leaving nature to its own devices, while to others it suggests a more deliberate process of clearing, replanting and redefining a landscape. More yet will see it as a matter of tipping wolves or other large, and usually predatory, mammals into the countryside and seeing what happens. What is certain is that rewilding can be a much misunderstood, divisive and potentially seriously damaging business.
The widest understanding of the term ‘rewilding’ is that it is a process that seeks to return the countryside to a natural uncultivated state, usually along with the animals and plants that once inhabited it before they were driven out or exterminated. These may include apex predators that have long since disappeared for a number of reasons —
