Dispelling The Myth Of The Wild

There are certain places in the world where the boundaries between past and present seem porous, almost arbitrary. The air is cool and quiet in the mornings on the Knepp estate in Sussex, England — quiet, that is, except for the lilt of birdsong and the rumbling beat of hooves. The landscape is one of fields and copses, of dense, tangled shrubbery and shifting, murky pools.

The green sward is low and neatly cropped, churned up in many places by the tread of heavy animals. The decade is the 2020s, but it might as well be the 1820s — or a far more ancient era yet. A woman gazing out over the Knepp estate one misty morning might imagine herself looking over a medieval common, or even a vista out of the long-lost Neolithic, and her intuition would not be much wrong. Yet at Knepp, of all places, this deep sense of antiquity is an illusion.

The Aurochs & The Friesian

An old European wood-pasture, of the sort Knepp evokes, is an odd thing. It is neither a meadow — with its trees, brambles, high thickets and muddy wallows — nor a forest, being too open, grassy and filled with drifts of budding wildflowers. All across the European continent, from the mountain pastures of Romania to the dehesas of Spain, the first impression is almost savanna-like, open, yet wooded, and well-marked by animal tracks.

Similar scenes can be found in northwestern Europe’s British Isles too, but one must look harder. Its old pastoral landscapes have been greatly battered and contracted by the 20th-century Green Revolution — both through intensifying agricultural practices and a drive to plow and cultivate previous meadowlands that was galvanized by the world wars — such that their remnants are often mere fragments. It is an unexpected thing, then, that such archetypally agrarian vistas should have begun once more to spread, incipiently, hectare by hectare, driven by a seemingly improbable source: the radical rewilding movement. 

More than 20 years ago, the Knepp estate, for all its primordial airs, was intensively tilled farmland, of the sort one might spy almost anywhere in the English lowlands. True, it was marked by certain picturesque hedgerows and some venerable oaks, but a survey at the time would not have found many grounds for ecological optimism.

Yet grounds there were. One thing is trajectories; another is potential. Prompted by the influence of Dutch ecologist Frans Vera, Knepp today has been transmuted into a lush, changeable, self-willed mosaic of shifting habitats, burgeoning with (often threatened) life. The transformation that has since enveloped the estate and made it famous, proved the Lazarus potential of what had seemed like spent and emptied land.

That, in brief, is the story of Knepp, which itself has been discussed often enough: however, what is fascinating is that the estate, today christened “Knepp Wildland,” seems to resemble increasingly those classical European wood-pastures of Romania, or the cork dehesas of Spain. Though seeking the ideal of a rewilded, self-propagating ecosystem, the resulting vista is a strikingly traditional one.

In seeking to make wilderness, have the managers at Knepp instead strayed merely into a facsimile of age-old pastoralism? The project employs and harvests meat from a variety of hardy domestic breeds — longhorn cattle, Tamworth pigs — which does little to shake the accusation. Yet there is, perhaps, something else, something deeper, at play. If Knepp’s supposedly rewilded vistas challenge our deep-rooted preconceptions of wilderness and the wild, then it is perhaps our preconceptions, and not Knepp or its cattle, that demand revision.

For decades a specter has shadowed nearly all conversations around what makes a “true” European wilderness. The concept of the wildwood, of the blanketing, primordial forest, has been utterly engrained in both academic and popular perceptions of ancient prehistory, so much so that it has fundamentally shaped our notion of how genuine nature ought to appear.

Like the ocean, the wildwood is an intuitively primordial space: It is dense, chaotic, labyrinthine and untamed. The unmanaged forest, unlike the cultivated pollard or coppice, such as in England’s Epping Forest, constituted a sort of negative space in the Medieval mind. It was the haunt of the wolf and the raven, the formless morass from which fields and habitations were carved. In this sense, there has always been a notion that the wildwood was “prior” to the ordered, human landscape.

With the advent, however, of archaeology and deep time, and the related discovery of prehistory as we now know it, a new significance was placed on this sense of antiquity. For well over a century, the dense, enveloping old-growth forest has stood as our reigning image of Europe’s primordial condition, as it has for much of North America. This, we intuit, was the natural state of affairs, before the first agriculturalists began their great work with the axe and the plow. 

This perception did not, it must be said, come about without reason. It has long been observed that ecological succession in temperate biomes, if uninterrupted, trends toward the development of what American ecologist Frederic Clements termed “climax communities”  in the early 20th century. On the traditional model, these are characterized under fertile, temperate conditions by the existence of closed-canopy woodland cover and associated floras. 

Humans have generally been regarded as the main culprits for disrupting such succession because (it is reasoned) events such as naturally occurring wildfires or storms are too infrequent in many places to have an effect at scale. The logical inference, it follows, is that in lieu of such “unnatural” influences, closed climax conditions would otherwise prevail. These ecological predictions were only bolstered by early surveys of prehistoric pollen records, which seemed to indicate substantial forest cover in the early millennia following the last Ice Age and up until the rise of agriculture and the advent of the axe, the plow and grazing livestock.

Related to these predictions was the belief, continuing until well into the 20th century, that the aurochs and wild horses went extinct in Europe around the end of the Ice Age. With the warming, wetting climate, so the thinking went, the landscapes of Europe were gradually overtaken by the inexorable rise of dark, closed-canopy forests, and the great, grazing beasts of the fields and steppes were simply shaded out, unable to survive in these dense forests.

Even when it was discovered that the aurochs had, in fact, survived far beyond this point, into the 17th century in Poland, the notion prevailed that these animals had been naturally infrequent. Remains of horses discovered from the Neolithic period (beginning 7000 BC) were habitually presumed to represent domestic animals. The survival of these species, and other big game, even if some, perhaps, did linger in remote, misty woods, was essentially incidental: mere zoological anecdotes, fanciful beasts in the marginalia of old manuscripts.

Between the aurochs in the wildwood and the Friesian cow in the field, there was no relevant relation — the former was unimportant, the latter an intrusion. For decades, this was the dominant thinking, from popular culture to the heights of academia. Then, everything began to change.

Athens & Jerusalem

The view is wide and open across the fields of the Dutch Oostvaardersplassen. For much of the year, the air is filled by the cacophonies of geese and the countless sights and sounds of other birds as well, some rare enough to bear remark: there are white-tailed eagles, for whom the Oostvaardersplassen, the so-called OVP, was their first bridgehead to recolonizing the Netherlands; and there are flocks of spoonbills, a bird paradoxically odd, yet elegant. Then there are the grazers — horses, cattle and deer — in vast, almost Serengeti-like herds (if now rather reduced from their erstwhile peak nearly a decade ago). Yet 100 years ago, this savanna-like vista, with its thick reedbeds and wide meadows, was nothing but muddy seabed. 

Before Vera was a key influence on Knepp, he made his name as a young ecologist helping to establish a radical and experimental nature reserve from what had been a failed land-reclamation project. In origin, it was a preserve for geese and other waterfowl in the Netherlands that had been threatened due to the country’s long history of draining waterways and wetlands to make way for farmland and habitation.

Here, while the young Vera observed the behavior of the vast flocks of geese that had settled in the half-drained polder, he made a striking observation. He believed the geese were altering the inevitable ecological processes of the area: what should have naturally, as it was thought at the time, become closed with overgrown thickets of reed and willow were instead developing into mosaics of vegetation and open water, creating a kaleidoscope of habitat types.

The impact of the geese alone, however, was not enough to halt this natural progression entirely, only to slow and change its course. The area was still, very gradually, becoming overgrown. As this posed a danger to the still-vulnerable waterfowl, Vera and a colleague, Fred Baerselman, sensing an opportunity, approached the reserve’s authorities. They eventually succeeded in convincing them to initiate an experiment on a massive scale: to test Vera’s theories around grazing and succession, local authorities would release feral horses, cattle and deer into the swampy polder and leave them to live like their wild ancestors. What followed, as they say, was history, though certainly not one void of controversy.

From this research was born the field of modern, megafauna-centered grazing ecology. Academic debates continued for many years over the exact applicability of Vera’s ideas, or whether the OVP could be a true model for original nature. However, the fundamental tenets of his thesis have ultimately been vindicated: Prior to the arrival of the first humans around 54,000 years ago, and to the subsequent decimation of the megafauna, the landscapes of Europe were, to a substantial degree, open, varied and dominated by a savanna-like mosaic.

This picture would have been, in many ways, strikingly akin to the old, rural vistas of the continent today. Even where woodlands did win out, they were characterized by trees associated with the presence and impact of large herbivores. It was, in fact, the dark, tangled, blanketing wildwood, a product of the megafauna’s collapse, that was “abnormal,” compared to the situation both before and after. In all these matters, the rise of Vera’s field of grazing ecology over the last several decades has been central to our understanding of pristine nature, and the functioning of wild ecosystems before the arrival of Man.

And yet, it is a fact that the term “rewilding” was coined, not by any European, but by an American — the conservationist Dave Foreman — in 1992. For as intimately as the Oostvaardersplassen is now associated with the science and image of rewilding, neither Vera nor any of his colleagues had even heard of the term when they first began their grand experiment some 40 years ago.

Though any long excursion into the evolution of the rewilding movement as such is beyond the scope and topic of this essay, it is relevant here to note that Foreman was a very different figure from the ecologists behind the OVP. He was not a scientist, so much as an activist, who co-founded the radical environmental activism group Earth First! in 1980.

The group drew on the more philosophically rooted American environmental tradition and was influenced by figures such as the conservationist and writer Aldo Leopold and poet-naturalist Henry David Thoreau. For this “American school” of rewilding, the wilderness of Yellowstone was the great ideal. The vision they articulated was based on the so-called “3Cs” — standing for “Cores, Corridors and Carnivores,” that is, a focus on cores of untouched wilderness, the need for habitat corridors and large, wild predators — and was markedly different, though not exactly contradictory, to the “European school” that developed around figures such as Vera.

As exemplified by the OVP, this latter tradition was instead typified by scientific experimentation, smaller-scale conservation and a greater focus on grazing and the function of large herbivores. These two movements, though initially separate, would eventually merge to form the groundwork of “rewilding” as we think of it today — always, however, a sort of polarity has endured, between the “spirit of the Oostvaardersplassen” and the “spirit of Yellowstone,” respectively the Athens and Jerusalem of the rewilding movement — empiricist and rational on the one hand, mystical and visionary on the other.

All of this is significant because it helps explain the fundamental tension that has long surrounded projects like Knepp. A key conceit of the OVP itself was that the animals would not be tame, with even the feral domestics left to “grow wild,” but many of the projects that have since followed its lead have been more pragmatic (and less able to procure legal exemptions from livestock regulations for the animals they employ). Examples include places such as Wild Ingleborough and Geltsdale Farm in the UK, which employ hardy landraces like Belted Galloway and Luing cattle respectively, Sjælegård and Molslaboratoriet in Denmark, which also both employ Galloway, and a large number of other, similar initiatives. All have embraced the moniker of “rewilding,” yet not, it seems, in a way that Foreman likely would have recognized or accorded the label.

The unifying principle is one of pragmatism, of working with what is possible toward what is attainable. One might ask, however — and people have — whether there does not come a point when, however noble and ecological one’s intentions, concessions to agrarianism might stretch the meaning of “rewilding” until it breaks. Here we verge, dangerously, into an area not merely of academic but also of philosophical disagreement.

There has always existed in the rewilding movement a divide between a more aesthetic, philosophical impulse, perhaps inherited from the “Jerusalem” of Yellowstone, and a more functionalist, process-oriented impulse — deriving, arguably, from the “Athens” of the OVP.

As one might deduce, the use and acceptance of livestock for natural grazing is one area that has repeatedly brought the two to loggerheads. Recent years have seen something of a quest to define and academically ground rewilding as a concept, staunching the potential “buzzwordification” of the term. A central question this project has raised, pertinent to everything hitherto discussed, is whether rewilding is fundamentally to be understood as a binary or a continuum. That is, should “rewilding” be seen as a state that a project can either attain or fall short of, a goal with clear criteria, like Foreman’s “3Cs,” or is rewilding a process, an ongoing move toward a wilder, more self-willed state, that can, therefore, be implemented even under agrarian or “domestic” conditions?

Though many online polemics have trended toward the former, it is the latter that has largely won out in academic conversation and now shapes so many of the projects being implemented across Europe and the wider world. Thus, we arrive at a fascinating, seemingly paradoxical conception — that of “agricultural rewilding.”

Tamed & Untamed

At its simplest, the concept of agricultural rewilding has been described as a “form of rewilding which aims to restore ecosystem functions using low-intensity human interventions involving the introduction, management, and harvest of livestock.” The boundary between this and other types of rewilding is not a hard one; the OVP uses domestic horses and cattle, even culling them when their numbers are perceived as having grown too high; however, their meat has not then also been sold. For this reason, it cannot meaningfully be considered agricultural. As with all subdivisions of rewilding, the term falls along a spectrum of practices rather than marking some starkly delineated approach. 

In certain projects, such as Wild Ennerdale in the English Lake District, grazing Galloway cattle share the landscape with roe and red deer, and perhaps in the future even beavers and pine martens, as a small but key part of a wider, wild assemblage. By contrast, in the relatively nearby Geltsdale preserve, multiple breeds of cattle, sheep and semi-feral horses combine with some non-introduced deer to form a complex guild of different species, made up of mostly domestics. Both aim to promote self-regulating ecosystem processes, the very hallmark of rewilding, yet the manner in which they economically integrate traditional, regional livestock, marks them apart.

At Knepp, around 75 metric tons of live-weight meat are sold every year, totaling 120,000 pounds (nearly $148,000) in profit, and thereby contributing substantially to the project’s bottom line. The typical product of agricultural rewilding is high-quality, high-welfare, high-value meat. As far as a steak or pork chop goes, it can hardly be sourced more sustainably, or ethically, than from an animal that lived and died as a feral, keystone species. There is, of course, a catch, as there always must be, and it can be summarized in one word: scale.

Though extensive “rewilded” grazing effectively squares the circle when considering animal welfare, environmental impact and quality meat, it does so at the expense of efficiency. It is altogether undeniable that a global transition to such systems would radically reduce the world’s food production. But the critique that agricultural rewilding could not scale to sustain the world’s populations and ensure food security, rests on the assumption that such scalability was expected to begin with. Yet this is not a demand we impose on other luxury foods, such as wagyu beef, caviar or white truffles, nor does it seem reasonable that we should.

Already today, meat sold by projects such as Knepp commands a premium in price and quality. Unless we are to idolize monoculture, we must embrace a diversity of methods with a diversity of goals. Produce generated by agricultural rewilding may never prop up the mass markets, but perhaps it does not need to. To suggest that some portion of our land areas might be given over to such projects does not mean that every inch of arable soil must be taken out of conventional production. Plurality is the rule in nature, and human history is not set apart; it is no good demanding a one-size-fits-all solution through rewilding. Agricultural rewilding, like all types of land management, is a tool, not an imperative.

Few would deny the economic and biodiversity successes of Knepp, nor the promise of its newer imitators; yet detractors for such projects overall do remain. Among certain corners of rewilding and conservation, voices have warned of agricultural rewilding risks becoming, as it were, all things to all people, diluting the radical potential of the movement.

Nor have all voices from the agricultural half of the equation been altogether supportive. If a thing is to be done, an ardent interlocutor might proclaim, then it should be done fully; let us have rewilding to the max, or not at all! Between the natural and the cultural, a middle ground may be accepted where necessary, but are we truly to desire such compromise, if we are serious about either agriculture or rewilding? 

The lexicon of conservation is a jungle of partially overlapping terms: “ecosystem,” “habitat,” “wilderness,” and that most elusive, aesthetic concept of them all, “nature.” Not all wildernesses host ecosystems — quite famously, the Moon is neither domesticated nor a major biodiversity hotspot — nor are all ecosystems “wild.” A growing percentage of the Earth’s surface is covered by so-called agroecosystems, communities of plants and animals subsisting under conditions altered by and for human food production.

From this awareness has arisen the field of agroecology, defined as “the application of ecological concepts and principles to the design and management of sustainable agroecosystems,” with agroforestry, permaculture and regenerative agriculture as related, if at times vaguely articulated, concepts. All these fields share in common the notion that the anthroposphere and biosphere cannot be neatly set apart. Even by growing a genetically modified crop, as artificial as it may seem, we are fundamentally partaking in the biological systems of this planet — humanity may rearrange the components to our liking, but we cannot create them ex nihilo, nor tend to them in isolation.

There is, then, no hard and total boundary between the conservation of resources and the conservation of the natural world. So far, so pragmatic. Nevertheless, the Cavendish banana and the polar bear seem to belong in rather different categories; those who value wild nature do so for more than merely utilitarian reasons.

If agricultural rewilding exists on a spectrum with other rewilding types, it evidently also forms one with the practices just discussed. Indeed, it has been described in one paper as the step “beyond agroecology.” If one stops to think, this reveals itself as something fascinating — radical rewilding and conventional agriculture are so often starkly contrasted across an almost Cartesian divide, yet here we find a practice that segues organically into both. Perhaps, then, this simply highlights the falseness of this dichotomy.

Nevertheless, there is one point that marks a qualitative divide between the two, with agricultural rewilding firmly on one side: Their primary objectives. Even though regenerative agriculture, in its most ecologically conscious expression, and agricultural rewilding, in its most pastoral and domestic, may seem so similar as to be essentially the same, they fundamentally are not. Agricultural rewilding and regenerative agriculture both place a great focus on the twin concerns of biodiversity and agricultural production, but they are crucially distinguished by the ultimate order of their priorities.

The question is one of teleology, of final ends: the fundamental goal of all rewilding, its summum bonum, is the restoration of self-willed ecology, while the fundamental goal of all agriculture is the production and sale of food. Regenerative agriculture may hold, as a very important secondary goal, the stewarding of farmland ecology, but it is necessarily secondary; the same, but inverse, holds for agricultural rewilding. All the beef, venison and pork sold by Knepp, Ennerdale, Sjælegård and their fellow rewilding projects are merely a means to one end— the very same as what Vera was pursuing when he first began the grand experiment at the OVP.

Agricultural rewilding is, in one sense, inherently a compromise approach. This is quite necessary to concede, but only in this one sense — that it may be the best accommodation to a particular set of circumstances. Pure, “unfettered” rewilding à la Yellowstone is simply not a practicable reality throughout much of the world. If this may seem in some ways unsatisfactory, all the same, there are benefits of this approach beyond mere pragmatism. It offers some means of rapprochement across that growing divide that many perceive between the world of human culture and cultivation, and that of nature.

For example, the gradual return of the grey wolf throughout Europe is a discomforting prospect for British farmers and a frustrating reality for many of their Danish and Dutch equivalents; it is not hard to see — whether one concurs or not — why a livestock owner from one of the few European nations still unvisited by the renewed numbers of these predators might prefer to keep them on the far side of the English Channel.

At the same time, it must be considered that there is more to debates about rewilding than “merely” matters of economies and livelihoods. If landscapes are shaped by people, then people and their cultures are just as much the products of their landscapes. The physical character of a region — its vistas, its vegetation, its neatness or its starkness — becomes a pillar of local identity, every bit as much as dialect, architecture, faith or folk costumes.

Indeed, the physical is intimately interwoven into all these aspects of identity; therefore, to suggest a radical transformation of an area’s landscape into a wild and unfamiliar one is no little thing. What is to be said to those who raise this objection, who find the prospect of rewilding a frightening one, seeing it as a threat to their heritage and self-understanding?

All priorities must be weighed and regarded, but insofar as it is genuinely possible, a degree of compromise here is surely the ideal. To the degree that they are perceived as being opposed, we cannot altogether abandon the natural for the cultural, nor the cultural for the natural. This balancing act is the challenge that agricultural rewilding seeks in part to meet.

Gazing back across this essay, a throughline forms. With the mythos of the wildwood dispelled, and the value of wild grazing acknowledged, an opening is made for a meeting of the tamed and untamed. The temperate savannas of prehistory and the old pastures of today are not, of course, one and the same: we should not exaggerate their likeness.

Nevertheless, conclusions may be drawn: a Friesian cow is nothing if not a domesticated aurochs — people may forget, but the wild fields do not. Particularly in places like Europe and Asia, where the roots of human agrarianism go deep, the prospect of agricultural rewilding offers at least an interesting avenue for the future. It is not without difficulties and downsides, nor a silver bullet, but it is an option that is increasingly gaining traction among researchers and practitioners alike.

It is an amusing paradox that arguably the most radical, experimental form of rewilding — the “Athenian” school, with its grazing ecology and more than 50,000-year timeframe — is also that which offers, in places, the most chance of rapprochement with the old, pastoral countryside. Look sufficiently far into the past, and time’s arrow, it seems, loops around. If rewilding is a process, and self-willed ecology is the goal, then nature and culture may walk some distance together.