Land Conservation

The word ‘rewilding’ has had its day and now needs to slip gracefully into retirement. That, at any rate, is the polite suggestion I’m going to make in this post, which is the last in my recent mini-series on ‘wrecked’ land and what to do about it. It’s not that, for the most part, I object to a lot of the practical activities that are done in the name of rewilding by conservationists, land managers, farmers, ecologists and so on.  In that sense, I agree with most of what Ian Carter says in this recent article, except for his concluding remarks endorsing the term. I got to thinking about this when I gave a Q&A talk recently and made a flippantly negative reference to the term while making the case for low-impact, peopled, agrarian landscapes.