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golden age in which people lived in harmony with nature. Neither do
I wish to return to the hallows and gallows of the civilizations we
have left behind.
Nor was it authenticity I sought: I do not find that a useful or intel-
ligible concept. Even if it exists, it is by definition impossible to reach
through striving. I wanted only to satisfy my craving for a richer,
rawer life than I had recently lived. Yet somehow I had to reconcile
this urge with the life I could not abandon: bringing up my child, pay-
ing my mortgage, respecting the rights and needs of other people,
restraining myself from damaging the natural world. It was only when
I stumbled across an unfamiliar word that I began to understand
what I was looking for.
So young a word, yet so many meanings! By the time 'rewilding'
entered the dictionary, in 2011,
4
it was already hotly contested. When
it was first formulated, it meant releasing captive animals into the
wild. Soon the definition expanded to describe the reintroduction of
animal and plant species to habitats from which they had been excised.
Some people began using it to mean the rehabilitation not just of par-
ticular species, but of entire ecosystems: a restoration of wilderness.
Anarcho-primitivists then applied the word to human life, proposing
a wilding of people and their cultures. The two definitions of interest
to me, however, differ slightly from all of these.
The rewilding of natural ecosystems that fascinates me is not an
attempt to restore them to any prior state, but to permit ecological
processes to resume. In countries such as my own, the conservation
movement, while well intentioned, has sought to freeze living systems
in time. It attempts to prevent animals and plants from either leaving
or - if they do not live there already - entering. It seeks to manage
nature as if tending a garden. Many of the ecosystems, such as heath
and moorland, blanket bog and rough grass, that it tries to preserve
are dominated by the low, scrubby vegetation which remains after
forests have been repeatedly cleared and burnt. This vegetation is
cherished by wildlife groups, which prevent it from reverting to wood-
land through intensive grazing by sheep, cattle and horses. It is as if
conservationists in the Amazon had decided to protect the cattle
ranches, rather than the rainforest.
Rewilding recognizes that nature consists not just of a collection of
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