Rewilding projects are national meaning-making projects in many cases for they seek to bring back local animal species to revive/reinforce national identity
By Pramod K Nayar
The Global Charter for Rewilding the Earth was released after the 2020 ‘Wild 11’ Congress, as the 11th Wilderness Congress held in Jaipur. The document stated:
Rewilding means helping Nature heal. Rewilding means giving space back to wildlife and returning wildlife back to the land, as well as to the seas. Rewilding means the mass recovery of ecosystems and the life-supporting functions they provide. Rewilding means restoring and protecting specific places — on land and in the ocean … Rewilding is about allowing natural processes to shape whole ecosystems so that they work in all their colorful complexity to give life to the land and the seas. Such wild lands and waters are critical to sustain ecological vitality …
Rewilding, then, is projected a recuperative initiative. It aims to bring back the lost wilds, a ‘recall of the wild’, to pay homage to Jack London’s classic. Expressions of human guilt, human peril and human restitution abound in this broad theme of the recall of the wild.
The Wildness Pleases
In the 18th century writers announced their (feigned) tiredness with the city, and declared that ‘the wildness pleases’. Popularised by the pedestrian — because he walked so much around the Lake District! — poet Wordsworth and the rest, the wild was an escape, a therapeutic, because it was ‘pure’. Walking in the countryside and the wild, the critic Robin Jarvis argues in Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel, was a key component of the 18th-19th century European ethos.
The wild was exactly what ‘culture’ was not. Wordsworth’s ‘Nutting’, although deeply troubling in its politics, praised the forest. In ‘There was a Boy’ and elsewhere, he glorified untrampled Nature. The wild represents Nature at its best. It was even spiritualised in the late 18th and 19th century. ‘The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness’, said America’s pioneering environmentalist John Muir. It was a solace, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning describes it in ‘The Deserted Garden’:
I call’d the place my wilderness,
For no one enter’d there but I.
The sheep look’d in, the grass to espy,
And pass’d it ne’ertheless.
The trees were interwoven wild,
And spread their boughs enough about
To keep both sheep and shepherd out,
But not a happy child.
In the United States, this fascination for the wild, uncharted spaces valourised by writers like HD Thoreau and Muir, eventually produced the National Parks movement. Forests and woods were also made famous by poets like Robert Frost. Women authors like Dorothy Wordsworth and travellers like Sarah Murray — who explored the Loch Ness area on foot in the late 18th century — also saw in the wilderness a means of inverting gender roles (Murray speaks disparagingly of ‘four travellers, males, not very active in body, who came tumbling and slipping down the banks, with fright and dismay, that made me smile. They stared at me, as much as to say how came you there!’). The aesthetic of awe and fright in the lap of Nature — the sublime — developed, as critics have noted, a feminine sublime as well.
Parks, Wilderness, Identity
Enclosing the wild as National Parks was an integral part of modernity from the late 19th century. Yosemite was inaugurated in 1872, and was the first example of wilderness conservation as a public good.
As Roderick Nash pointed out in an early essay, the very idea and creation of National Parks was an instantiation of American identity. Nash argues that the creation of Parks required democratic values to be in place, large acres of land, a unique experience of Nature (the pioneers in American culture, or the ‘frontier’ movement) and the ‘affluenc[e] to afford the luxury of preserving nature for its non-utilitarian values’. Similar projects have emerged in Australia, Philippines and many European nations. In other words, the conservation of ‘untouched’ Nature — although, with climate change, it is debatable whether there is any corner of the planet that is ‘untouched’ — becomes a means of securing national identity.
In this context, the wilderness ideal is accompanied by an emphasis on what critics call ‘faunal endemism’ — the association of specific species with national identity. Examples would be of the bison in America, the mouflon in Sardinia, the thylacine of Tasmania. And this is where the recall of the wild becomes significant.
Rewilding the Nation
Genese Marie Sodikoff writes in the introduction to The Anthropology of Extinction: ‘Indigeneity and endemic biodiversity are analogous; their intrinsic value intensifies as they are perceived to be endangered’. Thus, rewilding projects are nation-building and national meaning-making projects in many cases. Rewilding seeks to bring back local animal species to revive/reinforce national identity.
Writing about the mouflon rewilding project in Sardinia, critic Tracey Heatherington says:
her Sardinian citizenship was constructed through metaphors that conflated biological heritage with indigeneity… The mouflon is now simultaneously an emblem of distinctive national heritage and identity, proof of living national wealth in biodiversity…
Auroch revival is projected as a European project. In The Aurochs: Born to be Wild, The Comeback of a European Icon, Ronald Goderie et al write nostalgically of ‘the aurochs, the King of the Wilderness, who had once dominated and shaped the vegetation of the landscapes all-across Europe, was no more’, and call for cloning the species back into life. The Pleistocene Park project in Siberia is working towards bringing back the iconic mammoth. Similar projects for the ibex and other species are under way.
Rewilding is, however, not only about nation-building. It is an attempt, as Harvard geneticist George Church and others spearheading the science of de-extinction argue, of restoring a Nature which the apex predator, humanity, has destroyed. While humanity was not responsible for the destruction of the dinosaurs, it was certainly responsible through hunting and other practices for the loss of planetary biodiversity. There is also the argument that bringing back megafauna like the mammoth will restore balance because they were the keystone species in the food chain, but also because, theoretically speaking, they would slow down the permafrost melting in the northern zones.
Ethical issues abound, of course, as de-extinction projects proceed. The promise of a rewilded nation, even planet, may pose problems when we bring back species from long ago, into biomes that are alien to those species. In the cult novel on the subject, Jurassic Park, the opponent to such projects, Ian Malcolm warns: ‘you cannot make an animal and not expect it to act alive. To be unpredictable’. What Woolly will do when s/he starts being alive in the wilds of Siberia remains to be seen.
The recall of the wild is something to wait for, with hope and trepidation.