Rewilding: history, intervention and the quest for immanence

TL;DR

This paper explores the concept of rewilding, examining its history and the challenges of balancing human intervention with nature's self-organization.

Contribution

The paper critically analyzes the contradictions in rewilding approaches, emphasizing the need for ethical integration of wild elements into daily life.

Findings

Functional approaches to rewilding face theoretical challenges, such as counterfactual reference points.

Preserving immanence and spontaneous organization is central to rewilding but conflicts with some interventionist methods.

The paper recommends deeper historical reflection to ethically incorporate wildness into everyday practices.

Abstract

In recent years, rewilding theories and initiatives have gained momentum as a credible solution to the loss of ecological diversity and stability. However, rewilding remains a controversial theory that draws our attention to the multiple links between intervention, history, and the value of nonhuman capacity for self-organization. Tracing the history of practices and theoretical frameworks of some emblematic projects and proposals in this field, we focus on the shortcomings and theoretical challenges of functional approaches, including notions of functional equivalence, and the difficulties posed by counterfactual reference points. At the heart of this analysis are the contradictions that some of these approaches pose with the crucial goal of rewilding, which is, in principle, to preserve immanence and spontaneous organization. By way of conclusion, the recommendation to deepen reflection on the past for a genuine and ethically sound incorporation of the feral into everyday life is presented.