Let us imagine a ‘new wild’ that will always surprise and delight us

The conservation charity is deploying Cox this week to get us to sign their new charter, which aims to make Scotland “the world’s first rewilding nation”.

“We now have more than 150 rewilding projects across the country”, says the sonorous one. “Hundreds of people are working to put things right again.”

READ MORE: Worthy aims of rewilding are in need of some honest recalibration

It’s that last line which captures both the idealism of rewilding, and its blitheness. Put what things right again?

The Victorian hunting estates, with their brutal monoculture of flora and fauna? The Highland Clearances, burning families off their land to replace them with sheep? The natural forests cleared to serve both Scottish and English shipyards in the early days of empire (or to fuel the furnaces of the Iron Age)? Or is it the advent of agriculture itself in Scotland 10,000 years ago that we should lament, disrupting ecologies to feed growing populations?

From the rewilding advocates I’ve been reading, there is at least the recognition that the bleak, denuded beauty of Scotland’s Highland landscapes are the consequence of waves of human development.

And look, here comes another. Is this one more advancing phalanx of private landowners, seeking to restore a “primeval” (or at least pre-modern) Scotland on their defensible patches of land?

The veteran land campaigner Andy Wightman (above), in a 2022 interview, said he didn’t have a problem with “the concept of restoring natural processes – letting our rivers and forests do what they want to do”. But he dismissed the idea that this was a return to some kind of purity – “rewilding is a choice, by humans, in cultural environments.”

Whose choice, though? Wightman continues: “The problem lies in the fact that some very wealthy individuals are coming in, buying large tracts of land, and rewilding because it is the modern, popular thing to do. This is reminiscent of how Sir John Ramsden once invented the sporting estate – it was the fashion of the time.

“Today, we see commercial companies globally, not just in Scotland, buying land for carbon offsets and making a lot of money in the process. In many ways, this is just a repetition of historical practices, where external factors, external capital, and external people come in, buy land, farm sheep, develop hunting estates … Or create rewilding reserves.”

Wightman concludes: “They capture carbon, often in their own interest, benefitting from carbon credits and government grants. While there may be some public interest in these activities, they often exacerbate the longstanding inequalities in Scottish land ownership.”

READ MORE: Community rewilding does not result in rural depopulation, says charity

That’s the danger of the term “rewilding”, in the Scottish context. It reinforces the idea of Scotland as an “empty space”, a terra nullius. At worst, we’re an eco-playground for the latest cohort of worldly plutocrats.

So what’s the promise of rewilding? A respondent to Wightman immediately answers: “A lot of rural employment. Deer control, woodland management, conservation grazing, peatland restoration, river realignment, ecologists, non-native species removal, captive breeding and reintroduction programmes, tree planting, etc. Plus all the admin and service jobs that this creates.”

So far, so familiar for the Highland working population – they’re enabling the grand schemes of those with deciding power over land use. What of the communities’ own schemes? In Ben Goldsmith’s rewilding podcast, Trees for Life’s Steve Micklewright admits there’s been a problem: “As an organisation that looks at estates and potentially tries to acquire them for rewilding, if we were to look at acquiring another estate in Scotland, I think we would want to do that quite differently and in partnership with the community, not just go out and buy it as has been the traditional way, both for individuals and for organisations”, says Micklewright.

“We need to find a way of bringing in the community so that they can really benefit from the change that we’re bringing.”

AS you’ll note, the language and intent towards the humans in any rewilding project is still far from perfect.

READ MORE: Scotland to create one of Europe's largest new woodlands at Loch Katrine

Another interview on Goldsmith’s podcast, with the director of the John Muir Trust, David Balharry, reveals a much more subtle view. Balharry is the son of a West Highlands naturalist, and spent his early life wondering about “the actual secret lives of those ravens and pine martens” around him.

However, Balharry is as interested in “re-peopling” as much as rewilding. He fully acknowledges the horror and trauma of the Clearances, and the destruction of culture, flora and fauna it entailed.

But he also notes that Highland life was already, and by any standards, a punishing grind: “There was a significant push factor in terms of immigration to seek a better future for themselves.

“And I’m not saying that either argument is right, but I think there’s enough evidence to say that both arguments were at play.”

Which implies that, when we “restore natural processes” in the 2020s, we must factor in how human society relates to, and stewards these processes.

Balharry notes how tricky ecological restoration might be. If growing trees and restoring “the ancient Caledonian forest” is your aim, you have some stark options. You can cull the iconic deer; you can let wild boar tear up the ground; you can even “scarify” or dig up mineral-rich soil, where leaving a white scar on the landscape, which eventually results in natural woodland.

Balharry also advises us to be cautious about the extent of our ecological understanding. For example, the recognition of “funga” as well as “flora” and “fauna”.

“We’ve recently recognized that a third of the complexity of how ecosystems work has been totally ignored by us.”

There’s an all-too-human tension here. Do Highland and rural populations in Scotland really want to be “servicing eco-tourism…in a service role”, as Balharry suggests?

Or could a post-Covid trend towards remote working meet broadband and enterprise infrastructure – where a beautifying and regenerating landscape greets your family every day?

“Living in these places, you don’t need to have extractive industries”, Balharry expounds. “You don’t need to be damaging the landscape or excavating minerals or resources out of the land itself. You can just enjoy it in lots of different ways, and you can hold down a high-power job because the world’s moving really quickly.”

(Image: Steffan Widstrand)

I understand the deep passions of the rewilders that come to Scotland. Goldsmith’s podcast ranges around the world – this is hardly a phenomenon only surging in a nature-depleted UK and Europe.

There are also outlier trends here that may support rewilding. Animal farming is running afoul of the climate crisis: all major state-of-the-planet reports tell us that plant-based elements must predominate in our diets.

There is also new food tech that can produce meat-equivalent protein in giant vats. Again this reduces the need for endless methane-producing farmlands to be monocultured by cattle, pigs and sheep.

Might these trends and innovations – as well as a general, planet-driven, post-capitalist norm arising – allow us to open up new arcadias in Scottish lives?

Blooming and buzzing zones that exist to restore us, address our long-standing nature-deficit disorder? Provide a different kind of complexity than the experience we get from our technium of devices?

Let’s not go back to some “old wild”, in a spirit that almost regrets that humans have tried to wrest societies out of nature, in a variety of ways.

Let’s imagine a “new wild”, in which we apply our ingenuity to understanding our subtle ecologies, allowing them to always surprise and delight us.

Brian Cox can surely get his sonorous voice box round that too.