Rewilding

What is rewilding?

Rewilding is an approach to ecological restoration that seeks to rebuild functioning, self-sustaining ecosystems by restoring natural processes and reducing ongoing human control. Where classic conservation often works to hold a particular landscape in a fixed state (mowing a meadow, coppicing a wood, maintaining a target list of species) rewilding aims instead to restore the conditions under which nature can shape itself: natural grazing, predation, natural water movement, decay, and undirected plant succession.

The term entered scientific use through the conservation biologists Michael Soulé and Reed Noss in the 1990s, who linked large core areas, connectivity between them, and the presence of keystone species. In the following decades the idea spread through European practice: abandoned farmland returning to forest, rivers freed from canalisation, large herbivores reintroduced, and was popularised by writers such as George Monbiot.

Rewilding exists on a spectrum. At one end are large projects reintroducing missing animals across whole regions; at the other, small landholders simply stepping back and letting a corner of land go wild. What unites them is a shift in the human role from controller to enabler.

Rewilding and active restoration are not the same thing

Both aim at healthy ecosystems, but they take opposite paths, and confusing them creates false expectations.

Rewilding withdraws the human hand. It restores the conditions under which nature governs itself: natural grazing, predation, undirected succession, free-moving water. Success is measured by how little ongoing management is still needed. Whatever landscape emerges is whatever nature makes of it, self-willed and unpredictable.

Active ecological restoration (renaturalisation, Italian rinaturazione, German Renaturierung) actively restores degraded land to a living, functioning state, and keeps the human being involved as gardener and steward. Soil is rebuilt, water is retained, trees and companion species are planted, systems are designed. Success is measured by returning fertility, biodiversity and abundance. The human hand does not withdraw; it learns to work with natural processes instead of against them.

Must rewilding mean native species only?

This is where the field argues with itself, and it is worth setting out honestly, because the answer decides what a rewilding project may plant.

The best known definitions carry a restriction: natural processes lead, and the species that lead with them should be native, measured against a historical reference state. On that reading a plant that arrived with human help is a problem to be removed, whatever it does for the soil.

There is a substantial counter-position, and it is older than it looks. Bill Mollison's Designers' Manual selects species by the function they perform in a system rather than by their origin. Ecologists working on novel ecosystems have since argued that in landscapes altered beyond return, and in the face of accelerating species loss, the honest goal is not a reconstructed past but a functioning future, assembled if necessary from new or recombinant ecologies drawn from the whole global pool of species.

Neither position is a slogan. The native-species rule exists because introduced species have caused real damage to real ecosystems. The counter-position exists because a reference state from before human influence is, in the Mediterranean, four thousand years out of reach.

How Terra Humana reads this

We work from the second reading, and we do so deliberately.

Vigorous pioneer species, including those commonly called invasive, exist where they exist because something is out of balance, and in this landscape that imbalance is human work: cleared woodland, grazed slopes, burnt cover, soil carried off by winter rain. Such plants are the response of a system trying to close a wound. Read from the pattern language of nature, their vigour is not a defect to be fought but a force that can be directed. Used in Götsch's sequence, they build shade, biomass and soil faster than any list of well behaved natives could, and they hand the ground on to the longer lived species that follow.

That is why our planting decisions ask what a species does here, not where its ancestors stood. Nitrogen, shade, deep roots, mulch, fodder, pollen, timing in the succession: those are the criteria. A plant that performs and then steps aside has earned its place.

For a future rewilding project on land that calls for it, this changes what the work looks like. It would not mean drawing up a native-species list and removing everything else. It would mean building a system robust enough to carry itself, from whatever species do the job, and then progressively taking our hands off it. Less management, not less thought.

What Terra Humana does today

Terra Humana works on active ecological restoration. That describes our path; it rules nothing out.

In the scientific literature rewilding is itself counted among restoration approaches; both share the goal of functioning ecosystems. What separates them is the method, who does the work, and how much the human hand stays involved.

Our work at Sa Medada near Jerzu in Sardinia is active cultivation: Mediterranean food forests, syntropic agroforestry, permaculture design, soil regeneration, water retention, and an open academy for ecological learning. We plant, we tend, we observe, we intervene. A Mediterranean landscape shaped by four thousand years of human presence does not heal by being abandoned: it needs hands that know what they are doing.

Rewilding is a real and valuable practice. For the land we tend today, active restoration is the fitting path, and that is why we describe our work that way. It is not an exclusion: where a site and its circumstances allow for it, letting natural processes run further can be exactly right, and we keep that space open for future projects. The concept is explained here because it belongs to the vocabulary of ecological restoration and because it names work that others pursue with goals of their own.