Tag Archives: rewilding

Rewilding the Wild Wood

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It was a blustery afternoon in early spring, a few months after the Mole’s adventure in the Wild Wood. The short cold days of winter were gone. With them had passed the recollection of his fear on that expedition, when the Rat had brought him through the snow to the sanctuary of Badger’s house.

The Mole sat, now, in a comfortable chair in front of a cheery blaze.

‘Ratty’, he said tentatively, ’do you remember when you rescued me, when I was lost in the snow in Wild Wood?’

The Rat poked the coals ‘of course’, he said.

‘There were a lot of creatures in the wild wood’ said the Mole, ‘I saw them – or sort of saw them’, said the Mole cautiously.

‘Yes’, said the Rat.

‘I wondered what they were’ said the Mole in a small voice.

‘All sorts’, said the Rat, briskly. ‘Hedgehogs, shrews, squirrels, rabbits. Bats probably; voles’. He numbered them off on his fingers. ‘Lots of different kinds. Mostly pretty decent sorts.’ He hesitated. ‘And others, of course’. Continue reading →

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Rewilding as Process

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To his many readers, George Monbiot’s book Feral has come to encapsulate the idea of rewilding.   His mix of gritty wilderness autobiography and sharp well-researched polemic is compulsive. His sheep-skepticism and his fluency (epitomized in the wonderful word ‘sheepwrecked’ to described Britain’s bare and long-grazed uplands) are a publisher’s dream, and it is unsurprising to find the book selling well on both sides of the Atlantic.

But Monbiot is a relative latecomer to the rewilding party in the UK. Its doyenne is the British Association for Nature Conservation, BANC. Since the 1990s, BANC’s journal ECOS: A Review of Conservation has been planting and watering ideas about the wild in conservation, and how to get more of it. BANC published Peter Taylor’s book Beyond Conservation, which set out the case for large wild areas in the UK, and for reintroducing carnivores to its busy pocket-handkerchief countryside. In 2011, Peter edited Rewilding, a collection of ECOS articles on wildlands and conservation values. The Autumn 2014 issue carried a series of articles on the wild and rewilding arising from the meeting Wilder by Design in Sheffield (the first of a pair: the next is in September 2015)

Continue reading →