REWILDING AND NATURE MANAGEMENT MODELS
Pedro L. Lomas
From the controverted notion of ‘wild nature’ and the yearning to return to nature in North American and European Romanticism during the 19th and 20th centuries, emerged the classical conservation model. Underpinning this model is the idea of preventing massive land-use transformation into urban spaces or infrastructures (through the use of protected areas), and halting the disappearance of species (by means of the re-introduction of species, catalogues of threatened species, habitat restoration, etc.) (Soulé, 1991). This model required large territories, which prevented it from being directly exported to other less extensive locations more deeply transformed in the past, and was therefore adapted to each specific context. Independently of its greater or lesser effectiveness, the strongest critiques to this model denounced the cases of expulsion of the original populations or communities from the territory and their dispossession of its resources that had occasionally occurred (Argrawal & Redford, 2009).
In the 1960-70s, at the height of the Great Acceleration, the harmful effects of development policies for the natural environment began to be clearly observed, and these models started to gain relevance. This, in turn, led to the requirement for greater scientific efforts to correct mistakes and to learn from the accumulated experience. Thus, in the 1980s Conservation Biology emerged, dedicated to setting the scientific foundations for these protection models (Soulé, 1985).
It was precisely in the 1980s and 1990s that a great paradox began to be perceived regarding the effects in protected areas: although these spaces did not disappear, due, among other things, to the protected areas’ success, they seemed to deteriorate steadily and the species they hosted were seriously threatened, since limits of protected areas were administrative and not natural limits. The conclusion reached was that the original competition for space (for conservation or for development) was shifting toward a competition for resources (for ecosystems and species, or for the economy). For example, the water guaranteeing a river’s health was retained at a dam upriver and extracted or polluted, and its quality or level of overexploitation harmed the ecosystem even if it had not been directly transformed.
This gave rise to the Ecosystem Management model (Christensen et al., 1996), which is one of the pillars to the Biodiversity Convention. This model is based on the need to preserve ecosystems’ integrity, that is, not only their structure (species and habitat) but also to safeguard their functioning and dynamics (the material cycles and energy flows that sustain said structure), very often hand in hand with the traditional uses and knowledge of the locations hosting the protected areas.
From the late 1990s to the early 2000s it was found that appeals to slow down biodiversity loss were not being as successful as expected, and that the extinction rate among species and the disappearance of ecosystems had accelerated (MA, 2005). Pessimism invaded the field of ecology, and the need for new models for conservation were discussed.
One of the most significant criticisms to the classical paradigm was its excessive reliance on constant human intervention for the conservation of an ideal that is immutable in time and space. This led to the label ‘command and control models’ (Holling & Meffe, 1996). Countering these, other trends were developed on the premise that human intervention should assist ecosystems’ adaptabiity to stability domains and maintain their stability domain (see Limits), which led to adaptive management models (Allen & Garmestani, 2015). Wherever entire ecosystems were subject to human influence, it was likewise held that the baseline could not be exclusively expert (scientific) knowledge but should incorporate traditional knowledge as well.
A further alternative to the classical model was proposed, consisting in market-based management which, from an instrumental perspective of nature, views its management as a form of capital (natural capital) that yields benefits (ecosystem services) to human wellbeing; and this wellbeing must be maximised and preserved to prevent ecosystems from ceasing to flow. The notion underlying this conceptual framework is to make these benefits market-driven to ensure the efficiency of their management (in the sense of Pareto) and to ensure their optimum use (Kumar, 2010). We find examples of this model in payment for environmental services and the various types of services markets (carbon markets, conservation markets, habitat markets, etc.).
A further model is the ‘new conservation’ model, (Kareiva & Marvier, 2012), in line with the ecomodernist trend, and based on a particular view of the Anthropocene. Given that according to this view, human beings control the planet’s principal processes, to avoid the major problem posed by climate change we should strive for maximum effectiveness of such control, implementing the most advanced scientific and technological knowledge throughout the territory, thus reducing our use of natural resources and soil. This would free up territory and resources for conservation without endangering the flow of services to humans. Other examples of this new conservation type are the use of genetically modified foods instead of natural varieties to feed greater numbers of people, in what is called ‘sustainable intensive agriculture’ to free up land for ecosystems, etc.
Somewhere in between some of these models we find ‘rewilding’ (Soulé & Noss, 1998). By ‘rewilding’ we refer to a full array of conservation techniques that aim to restore ecosystems’ natural processes, liberating them from human pressures and allowing them greater resilience, self-regulation and self-support as the best means for their conservation, as this is currently stated in target 2 of the Global Biodiversity Framework (Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, 2022).
Rewilding is founded on 10 guiding principles (Carver et al., 2021): (1) restoration of trophic interactions; (2) planning on a landscape scale (core areas, connectivity and co-existence among species); (3) recovery of ecosystem structure, functioning and dynamics; (4) ecosystems as changing realities; (5) measures using nature-based tools for mitigating and adaptating to climate change; (6) local participation and acceptance; (7) different valid forms of knowledge; (8) adaptive management; (9) recognition of species’ and ecosystems’ intrinsic value; and (10) paradigm shift regarding the co-existence of human beings and nature.
The term acts as a conceptual umbrella for a wide panorama of specific practices in the territory (PettoCarver et al., 2021). These include passive rewilding models, in which human intervention is minimal (but by no means mere abandonment), and active rewilding plans, in which intervention is greater (despite often being relatively light); they also include land-sharing models, in which co-existence with humans is envisaged, and land-sparing models, in which it is not. A diversity of other approaches are practiced, depending on the point of reference. Thus, given that the aim is to bring back extinct species to reactivate food chains and ensure they are self-sustainable, we might ask what nature or what functioning is being targeted for reactivation. It is debated, therefore, whether the rewilding effort should contemplate species that have existed in the last 12,000 years (Holocenic rewilding), or should go back further to the species present in the fossil register, in a period stretching from the last 12,000 years to 2.6 million years (Pleistocene rewilding). All this also has implications affecting procedures, that is, it is debated whether to introduce species that have simply disappeared in a habitat more or less similar to that in which they theoretically existed, or return extinct species to life in a modern ecological context.
Apart from making the same objections that were made to the classical conservation model, criticism against rewilding as a conservation technique has been extended to certain more concrete aspects, such as those voiced from the spheres of animalism, with regard to animals’ rights (Jaimeson, 2008); from the field of environmental history, arguming that rewilding is equivalent to some sort of attempt to erase human history and its co-evolution with ecosystems (Jørgensen, 2015); or by authors who question their effect on human communities and their livelihoods, owing to potential competitiveness with productive activities (Fraanje & Garnett, 2002; Gordon et al., 2021).
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