As humans are temporarily excluded from public and open spaces, nature has become more visible and our collective impact on landscapes more noticeable by its absence.

To an extent, this reduction in human activity is the very essence of rewilding, which seeks to reduce human influence on landscapes to allow natural systems to regenerate. However, as food security is pushed right back to the forefront of the public conscience, abandoning food-producing areas to wildlife could be seen as foolish. What’s the likely balance that these two paradigms will take?

Bestselling books from the likes of Isabella Tree and George Monbiot have captured imaginations and sparked debates, but despite all the noise, the concept of rewilding remains elusive. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as ‘the practice of helping large areas of land to return to their natural state’. But what do we mean by natural state? 

Is a dairy cow natural? Can water meadows, created by humans, be wild places? Some may argue that it is oxymoronic to believe that land can ever be ‘turned back’ to its natural state, particularly in a small and crowded place like the British Isles.

An alternative way to grasp the concept of rewilding is to consider what it looks like on the ground. Rewilding can mean arable reversion – turning arable fields to species-rich grassland, allowing trees to naturally regenerate, the rewetting of fenlands, or the creation of other biodiverse habitats.

Species introduction can be an important element of rewilding. Ardent rewilders may have aspirations of landscapes with top predators such as wolves reintroduced to manage the natural ecosystem, taking over the role from humans without making us a new prey species.

Beavers have been reintroduced to change rivers and create new habitats, and animals such as lynx have been reintroduced with the aim of rebalancing species populations.

Introducing these ‘star species’ is often seen as a condition of rewilding, to increase biodiversity and stimulate natural processes.

Scale is particularly important in rewilding. The charity Rewilding Britain defines rewilding as ‘the large scale restoration of ecosystems where nature can take care of itself’. Rewilding projects are frequently proposed at a landscape scale, large enough to allow whole ecosystem processes to take place. This landscape approach is often reliant on collaboration and partnerships. Smaller scale projects are also possible though, by adopting rewilding ‘principles’ within land management practices. Lots of smaller scale rewilded areas across the whole of the countryside – bigger, better and more joined up – is arguably more beneficial than a couple of really big projects.

Rewilding isn’t just about spatial scale though, it is also about time – understanding the timescale of projects, and long-term nature of rewilding, is crucial.

The elephant in the room is, of course, the role that humans play in both shaping the management of landscapes, and in making them economically viable. Different projects will have different motives for rewilding, some driven by altruism but most intended to derive an income stream to support the project.

Rewilding safaris, glamping and wildlife retreats are all part of the growing ‘nature tourism’ sector. As rewilding becomes more common, increasing amounts of imagination will be needed to avoid ‘glamping saturation’ and create diversifications that continue to enable rewilding. Future possibilities may include wild fitness, corporate sponsorship and high-value meat production.

Despite the notion that wilderness often implies ‘human-less’, people are in fact key to enabling rewilding and projects in turn educate and inspire communities to restore wildlife. How people cope with a crisis like the coronavirus lockdown is likely to teach us how important access to nature is.

The key to reconciling our need to eat with our need to protect nature going forwards is likely to be a much better understanding and utilisation of landscape capacity. Taking away area-based payments from 2021 removes the incentive to cultivate to the edge and technology enables a consideration at micro-scale of whether nature or food production is better suited to a particular site.

Regenerative agriculture can take place alongside rewilding and in a future where less calorie-productive land is farmed for environmental benefits, rewilding could be seen as an optimal and non-exclusive land use, rather than as a practice that jeopardises food production potential. Balancing this with the evolved dependency of British nature on human management and our own need for contact with natural spaces will be vital.

Further information

Contact Savills Rural