Rewilding the World

How an evening spent nose-deep in World Cement magazine spurred me to launch my Rewilding the World podcast series.

I recently found myself scrolling World Cement, as one does, in search of news of a massive rewilding project in northern Mexico created and funded by cement giant, Cemex. The rewilding movement is a strange one, in that a growing number of on-the-ground successes across the world are simply unknown to most people. There are places that are wilder, more vibrant, more teeming with life now than they have been for centuries, and hardly anyone outside of the movement knows anything about them.

A nature-loving chief executive of Cemex two decades ago decided that the company would acquire 140,000 hectares of degraded land on Mexico’s border with America, an area larger than Los Angeles, renaming it the El Carmen Nature Reserve. Working in cooperation with neighbouring landowners on both sides of the international border, miles of barbed wire fencing have been removed; invasive trees and other plants cleared out; concrete dykes, culverts, dams and other hydrological infrastructure broken apart and now water is free to flow, eddy and pool as it likes across the land. A great, vibrant mosaic of grasslands, savannah and forest is reawakening and wildlife is pouring back in. Desert mule deer, white-tailed deer and black bears have returned of their own accord, while the team has carefully reintroduced pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep and even American bison, now numbering in the hundreds. These are the first free-living bison in the plains of northern Mexico for nearly two centuries, and they are a source of immense pride and satisfaction for Alejandro Espinosa Trevino who has led this project from the start. I learned all of this in an obscure cement industry publication.

Two thousand miles to the north, in northern Montana, the American Prairie Reserve is quietly rolling out a prairie restoration on a scale never previously attempted, with a goal of piecing together, opening up and restoring to a wild state an area comparable in size and splendour with Africa’s mighty Serengeti. Already hordes of school children and other visitors flock to spend time in landscapes of a kind that have not been experienced in America since the arrival of the Europeans. Just to the west, the ambitious Yellowstone to Yukon initiative seeks to create a corridor of wildlife habitat stretching two thousand miles up through North America’s rugged north-west. The inspiration came from a lone female wolf who managed to make that perilous journey south, dodging traffic, infrastructure, farms and hunters, before being shot on arrival in Wyoming. One of the main achievements of the initiative has been the establishment of wildlife crossings over highways, so-called green bridges, which have the added benefit of dramatically reduce road traffic collisions with wildlife. The results are already astounding. Caribou and elk migration routes that have been severed for decades are open once more, and grizzlies are making a steady recovery southwards and eastwards. The State of Florida too is devoting significant resources to recreating its own wildlife corridor up into Georgia, and there’s even now talk of reintroducing vital cougars to tackle surging deer numbers and an ecosystem that is tipping dangerously out of balance in America’s Atlantic north-east.

It's not just in America that rewilders are on a roll. The recovery of iconic wildlife in Europe has been one of the greatest conservation success stories every told. European brown bears, wolves, wolverines, lynx, bison, moose and beavers, some of which were on the brink of extinction just a few decades ago, are reconquering huge swathes of their former range. Legal protection played a big part in this, alongside farm abandonment and the unintentional rewilding of the continent’s least agriculturally productive landscapes, and the establishment by communities, nature organisations and governments of core rewilding areas. At least two dozen of these can now be found from Swedish Lapland, to Spain’s Iberian Highlands, to Italy’s Apennines, to the wilds of Romanian Carpathia. A growing body of evidence tells us that it doesn’t take much for nature to come dramatically back to life. All we need do is take our foot off its throat and ensure that dynamic natural processes are permitted to play out. Often this means proactively restoring missing keystone species, such as European bison, which by their grazing, browsing, trampling and dung engineer complex, sun-dappled woodland mosaics that simply abound with life. Or beavers, which by their damming of the smaller creeks and streams create strings of pools, awash with the colour of wildflowers, magnets for creatures of all kinds, and vital to the healthy functioning of watersheds for the benefit of wildlife and people alike.

It is hard to think of a movement more overbrimming with optimism, joy and meaning than the one that is dedicated to restoring wild places, of which so few remain. Rewilding may be the most powerful tool we have for restoring equilibrium to our ecosystems, to the climate and to our own individual and collective lives. We need nature not only for everything we have and everything we do, but on a more visceral level, in ways that we barely understand. A brief time spent in nature, walking, swimming, hunting or turning the soil to plant potatoes in the backyard is restorative in a way that nothing else can be. We are nature. And nature is us. Any separation that we perceive is a dangerous illusion. This is why instinctively it feels to right to people that rebuilding what we have broken should be the over-riding task of our time. And it’s happening, from the Caribbean to Kazakhstan, from Chile to China, from Spain to Saudi Arabia, new initiatives are being born and efforts are being ramped up. Bit by bit we are rewilding the world. But hardly anybody knows about all of these extraordinarily inspiring stories. Which is why I found myself nose deep in Global Cement Weekly that winter’s evening, and why I decided there and then to launch my Rewilding the World podcast series. So, please, tune in!