I keep six honest serving-men: (They taught me all I knew) Their names are What and Where and When, and How and Why and Who. -- Rudyard Kipling, "The Elephant's Child" (poem), Just So Stories, 1902

Rewilding is comprehensive, often large-scale, conservation effort focused on restoring sustainable biodiversity and ecosystem health by protecting core wild/wilderness areas, providing connectivity between such areas, and protecting or reintroducing apex predators and highly interactive species (keystone species).

The shorthand definition of Rewilding is the "3 C's"--conservation of Cores, Corridors, and Carnivores. The ultimate goal of rewilding efforts is to mitigate the species extinction crisis and restore healthy and sustainable ecosystem function in areas that require little or no human intervention or management. (See: The Science Behind Continental Scale Conservation)

That vision is of dynamic but stable self-regulating and self-sustaining ecosystems with near pre-human levels of species diversity. John Davis observed that "Rewilding, in essence, is giving the land back to wildlife, and wildlife back to the land."