What is Rewilding?

What is Rewilding?

Reclaiming Sovereignty.

Rewilding is an approach that supports the overall recovery of wildness. Rewilding acts as a counterbalance to complex modern challenges by providing a pathway to reclaim sovereignty. Rewilding has three main branches: Conservation, Human, and Community Rewilding. These branches offer practices that work to restore nature, empower people, and revive localism. Rewilding is hopeful, forward thinking, and has shown clear results for innovative change in the arenas of conservation, sustainability, and economy.

What is Conservation Rewilding?

Restoring Nature.

Rewild Land.

Conservation Rewilding is an approach that prioritizes nature-first, nature-led ecological restoration strategies that enhance biodiversity. Conservation Rewilding drives balance by maximizing the health of ecosystems with focus on coexistence, ecological relationships, low management, and habitat connectivity. While historically associated with megafauna reintroduction, wilderness conservation, and the Three Cs Model (Cores, Corridors, and Carnivores), Conservation Rewilding in practice is now seen as any restorative act that increases in biodiversity regardless of scale.

Definitions from Around the World

“The process of rebuilding, following major human disturbance, a natural ecosystem by restoring natural processes and the complete or near complete food-web at all trophic levels as a self-sustaining and resilient ecosystem using biota that would have been present had the disturbance not occurred.” -International Union for the Conservation of Nature

“Rewilding is the process of restoring and protecting natural ecosystems, and allowing them to develop and function without human intervention.” -Rewilding Academy

“Rewilding is comprehensive, often large-scale, conservation effort focused on restoring sustainable biodiversity and ecosystem health by protecting core wild/wilderness areas, providing connectivity between such areas, and protecting or reintroducing apex predators and highly interactive species (keystone species).” -Rewilding Earth

Conservation Rewilding Principles

Conservation Rewilding Organizations

What is Human Rewilding?

Empowering People.

Rewild Self.

Human Rewilding is an approach that reconnects people to the innate wildness of primitive human origins. Human Rewilding is defined by the practice of reskilling or lost ways which promote well-being and self-sufficiency in the modern world. These activities include foraging, herbalism, homesteading, hunting, fishing, ancestral knowledge, weaving, permaculture, holistic wellness, composting, beekeeping, textile making, astronomy, wilderness survival, primitive lifeways, orienteering, music, art, bushcraft, and more. Human Rewilding in practice is an active connection to nature through traditional use of resources.

Definitions from Around the World

“Rewilding isn’t about trying to go back to living as hunter-gatherers. Rather, it is about examining our cultural paradigms, seeing how they affect our physical, mental, and emotional health, and reclaiming our birthright as human beings.” – ReWild University

“The process of undoing and reversing industrial domestication, then it is at least, basically, a process of reconnecting with nature-based life-ways. Rewilding is the process of encouraging, allowing or otherwise assisting natural regenerative growth patterns on the land. On a personal level, rewilding could be defined as the process of reconnecting with more natural and unbridled ways of being alive.” -Rewild Maine

Human Rewilding Principles

Human Rewilding Organizations

What is Community Rewilding?

Reviving Localism.

Rewild Communities.

Community Rewilding is an approach that reestablishes place-based connections by applying rewilding efforts in community centers such as schools, workplaces, places of worship, parks, civic centers, and more. Reviving localism, Community Rewilding shifts power back to local people by strengthening civics, stewardship, agency, and access to wild land, shared resources, and communal networks. Community Rewilding in practice reconnects local environments with the people who live there.

Definitions from Around the World

“Rewilding also means changing the way we think. Humans are part of the wild. We are one species among many, bound together in an intricate web of life that ties us to the atmosphere, the weather, the tide, the soils, the freshwater, the oceans, and all living creatures on the planet. The Earth is our home. Together, we can protect and restore it.” -re:Wild

“Community Rewilding project brings the ideas and principles of rewilding to urban environments and communities. It applies them to small scale greenspaces such as public parks, school grounds, vacant and derelict land and gardens.” – The Conservation Volunteers Scotland

“Rewilding, a positive reframing for nature conservation, involves holistic solutions to remove barriers and reestablish vibrant wildlife populations and intact, functional, and resilient ecosystems that effectively integrate people.” -re:wild

“We have internalized ecological impoverishment with a consequence of “shifting baselines” where each generation assumes the nature that they experienced in their youth to be normal and unwittingly accepts the declines and damages of the generation before.” – Paul Jepson in Rewilding: A New Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery