Ian Coghill: Rewilding - a Great Tool but a Dangerous Religion [20 min listen]

Voices of the Countryside

Rewilding is swiftly becoming a religion - a belief system with little evidence to support its claims - but is this a sane way to manage our landscapes?

Re-wilding is a very clever idea. It is very difficult to be against re-wilding. It would be a bit like being against nostalgia. It has a vague warmth about it. It has no downside because whatever happens, it will be what nature intended.

It has another trick. It is whatever you want it to be. Anything from the local council stopping cutting the kerbside grass, through bison in pens, to planting vast forests on land that has been naturally treeless for millennia can be called re-wilding. There is a definition, but it is rambling, vague and that dreadful thing, 'a journey', and no one is really interested enough to check, so it's Liberty Hall.

In old-fashioned conservation, you try to conserve a habitat, a species, an ecosystem, or a natural or cultural landscape. To do this you did things. It required continuous, regular or occasional action, and that needed management and the continuing commitment of resources. It also had the further handicap that because you had an objective your success in attaining that objective could be assessed and sometimes people might see that you had failed.

Happily with re-wilding all that failure nonsense is completely avoided. If the curlew go because the heather is waist deep, the redshank chicks are all predated, or the peat is dried out by invading birch and leaks CO2 like a tap, it is not your fault. You bear no responsibility. It is what nature intended.