Rewilding is American. This Is Why It’s Wrong for Europe.

American wilderness and Oostvaardersplassen

Figure 1: ‘Mastodon’ by Charles R. Knight (1897). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In a nutshell, rewilding refers to large-scale conservation projects to restore ecosystems to their natural condition. This conservation policy emphasizes habitat connectivity, restoration of historical species groups and their trophic interactions, with the ultimate goal of creating vibrant ecosystems where natural processes take precedence over man's impacts, based on a certain historical standard (pre-industrial, Pleistocene, etc.). It is often opposed to biodiversity conservation, which focused on "the representation of vegetation of physical features diversity and the protection of special biotic elements" (Soulé and Noss, 1998). Strategies for rewilding often comprehend the reintroduction of large carnivores (like bears, wolves, lynx) and herbivores (deer, birds, cattle), in large swathes of land that allow for foraging and seasonal movement. Yet, packed into this biological understanding of rewilding are numerous cultural and ethical underpinnings, and in particular a separation between man and wild nature.

American origins of the rewilding concept

“Rewilding” is a concept imported from North America, and is closely tied to the idea of wilderness. Wilderness is integral to the North American ethos, traced back to the discovery of a vast and bountiful continent with savage humans. In colonial America, the virgin lands were viewed as a wilderness to which the colonists had been transported to prepare for God’s second coming (Samuel Danforth sermon). Early captivity narratives, like Mary Rowlandson’s, portrayed Indians as wild, yet also presented colonists removal into the wilderness as a place of temptation and spiritual epiphany, similar to Jesus’ 40 days of temptation by the devil out in the wilderness. North America was a new Eden, an opportunity for man to recover from the Fall from Heaven.

With the rise of transcendentalism and thinkers like Emerson and Thoreau, wilderness evolved into a non-space concept where the individual might climb back to a former utopian state of wholeness within nature (Emerson, Nature, Ch.8). The transcendentalists accentuated the false nature/society dichotomy, and rearticulated nature as a baseline for human unity.

Figure 1: Thomas Cole's A View from Mount Holyoke, emblematic of the Hudson River school landscape paintings; example of the panoptic sublime, which places the tourist in a position of power in relation to the landscape, presiding over both extensive and intensive modes of vision, and achieving a new form of symbolic expression in landscape painting; Mount Holyoke became a tourist attraction starting in 1821. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Landscape painting in the early 1800’s led to the notion of wilderness as a Romantic and sublime object to be commodified and admired from afar. The Hudson River Valley school depicted landscapes showing “the hand of God… in the wilderness” (David Schuyler). The narrative of progress was also gradually introduced; initially, man was portrayed as the man of the Old Testament, taking possession of and subduing the earth. However, the wild popularity of landscape paintings generated a new wave of tourism and expeditions into the wilderness for each individual to lay his eyes on nature in person, a new tourism in search of the picturesque, leading to exploitation and development in a utilitarian perception and absorption of the beautiful. Artist Thomas Cole wrote that the “most noble scenes are made desolate [...] with a wantonness and barbarism scarcely credible in a civilized nation" – in just one sentence, the civilizers became the modern barbarians, artists and writers articulating the early preservationist ethic.

Slavery complicates the vision of wilderness in the North American imagination. In Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, Dred takes refuge in the swamp, a breeding ground for new thought and self-creation outside of slavery, paralleled by the swamp itself as a potent, pestilential, exotic, dark, dismal and mystical space. The slave in the dismal swamp is a recurring theme in escape narratives, pitting the swamp against the Southern plantation myth of control and purity. The horror experienced by antebellum aristocratic Southern psyche in the face of the swamp, the impossibility of its control, distilled the swamp into a pure wilderness, an uncontrollable element in the Southern plantation's pastoral garden. The swamp became a haven for those living outside of Southern society, escaped slaves living off the land and outside of culture; essentially, the swamp is the essence of nature, unassimilable into the Southern cultural construct and threatening its foundations.

The rewilding movement in North America comes from a desire to restore the emotional essence of the "wild," tying into an atavistic obsession with the resurrection of Eden, or a romantic pursuit to heal the land. Access to inherently "wild" land becomes core to man's own integrity and might. Jack London's Call of the Wild shows Buck as coming into his own only in the wilderness, celebrating an animal protagonist not because he is moral, but because he is mighty, achieving mastery and dominion over his enemies, in a celebration of social darwinism. According to Gail Bederman, Roosevelt's hunting accounts and the celebration of male power and the strenuous life portrays man as being great, fulling progressing only in his ability to enter into wilderness, in the knowledge of his own potent control of his surroundings.

The concept of rewilding that has been imported into Europe is therefore a term with a hefty history, and with it comes implications of control, personal redemption, preservation, and utopian pursuits.

Frans Vera and Oostvaardersplassen

Pioneer thinker Frans Vera first dreamed of rewilding Europe, leading to the famous Oostvaardersplassen project in the Netherlands. Pulling on recent ecological theories of a dynamic nature, sustained by large scale interactions between key species, rewilding in Frans Vera's view translates to the introduction of large herbivores and “letting nature do its thing.” The first host to the European rewilding experiment, Oostvaardersplassen is a 56 square meter nature reserve, located in Flevoland just an hour from Amsterdam. In Oostvaardersplassen, Vera created a “Serengeti behind the dikes,” putting into action his theory that large grazers trimmed European landscapes into large grasslands and meadows in the Pleistocene era. Humans, in Vera’s hypothesis, then killed off grazers and predators, allowing forest succession to take place and create Europe’s dense Holocene forests.

Figure 2: Photograph of wildlife in Oostvaardersplassen by Ruben Smit. Source: NXTLandscapes.

In a series of introductions — Heck cattle (bred by Nazis to resemble aurochs) in 1983, Konik horses from Poland (similar to extinct wild tarpans) in 1984, and red deer in 1992 –, Vera has sought to recreate an authentic Pleistocene era ecosystem. Following these introductions, other species have flourished, including foxes, white-tailed eagles and spoonbills. The Dutch government has since taken up Vera’s approach to environmental conservation, with the creation of a "new nature" or "new wilderness" (de nieuwe wildernis).

It is interesting to note that this idea of rewilding as production of “new nature” is championed in the Netherlands, a country where land itself is already the product of human creation, through the dredging of the waterlands, extending the already “artificial” aspects of the new wildernesses.

Additionally, although the goal is restore natural processes, Oostvaardersplaassen continues to be an actively managed site, exemplified by the cullings of its herds; given the absence of predators in the system and the small scale of the site, the Heck cattle, deer and horses rapidly outstrip the reserve's resources, leading to the need to kill portions of the population each year to avoid starvation from over-grazing. These die-offs can account for 30 to 60 percent of population mortality each year, and in 2005 led to public outcry against alleged animal cruelty.

In sum, rewilding draws heavily on the North American perception of natural spaces, and is slowly being introduced to Europe as a conservation strategy alternative to the classic biodiversity conservation paradigm. Rewilding implies a specific view of the relationship between man and his natural environment, which raises a number of questions we will be exploring.

Source:

Gail Bederman, "Theodore Roosevelt: Manhood, Nation, and 'Civilization'" in Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (University of Chicago Press, 1996) 170-216.

Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery” (1836)

Samuel Danforth, “A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness” (1670)

Jack London, Call of the Wild (1903)

Mary Rowlandson, A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1862)

David Schuyler, “The Mid-Hudson Valley as Iconic Landscape: Tourism, Economic Development, and the Beginnings of a Preservationist Impulse” (2005)

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856)