Domesticating rewilding: combining rewilding and agriculture offers environmental and human benefits

Abstract

Despite, or because of, the debates surrounding it, rewilding remains a polarising concept, especially with respect to its (perceived) connotations of removal of human activity, particularly productive agriculture, from land. It is possible to reconcile rewilding and farming, however, thus helping to overcome concerns surrounding rewilding, and to produce win-win outcomes in terms of environmental and human benefits. By ‘domesticating’ rewilding (i.e. adapting it to be more compatible with human needs), ecological restoration can be combined with food production. The most straightforward way of achieving this is ‘agricultural rewilding’, a form of rewilding which aims to restore ecosystem functions using low-intensity human interventions involving the introduction, management, and harvest of livestock. For example, rewilding advocates the introduction of large herbivores for the ecological benefits they deliver within ecosystems. A purist view of rewilding would require that these herbivores be wild, or at least surrogates for wild species: they would provide ecological benefits but play no role in productive agriculture. In agricultural rewilding, however, these herbivores could be domestic species (typically hardy, native breeds), which would act as analogues for their wild counterparts: they would have the same ecological benefits and could contribute to food production. Combining rewilding and agriculture in this way helps to address some of the key concerns related to rewilding, such as that it excludes people and their livelihoods from the land, or that it can reduce food self-sufficiency, therefore outsourcing food production (and its related environmental impacts) to other areas. In addition, agricultural rewilding delivers environmental benefits associated with rewilding while also producing high-quality, high-welfare, high-value food in the form of meat that is environmentally, ethically, and financially sustainable.