Concept
Rewilding is a form of ecological restoration aimed at increasing biodiversity and restoring natural processes. It differs from ecological restoration in that, while human intervention may be involved, rewilding aspires to reduce human influence on ecosystems. It is also distinct in that, while it places emphasis on recovering geographically specific sets of ecological interactions and functions that would have maintained ecosystems prior to human influence, rewilding is open to novel or emerging ecosystems which encompass new species and new interactions. A key feature of rewilding is its focus on replacing human interventions with natural processes. The aim is to create resilient, self-regulating and self-sustaining ecosystems. While rewilding initiatives can be controversial, the United Nations has listed rewilding as one of several methods needed to achieve massive scale restoration of natural ecosystems, which they say must be accomplished by 2030 as part of the 30x30 campaign. The term rewilding was coined by members of the grassroots network Earth First!, first appearing in print in 1990. It was refined and grounded in a scientific context in a paper published in 1998 by conservation biologists Michael Soulé and Reed Noss. Soulé and Noss envisaged rewilding as a conservation method based on the concept of 'cores, corridors, and carnivores'. Cores, corridors and carnivores (or the '3Cs') was based on the theory that large predators play regulatory roles in ecosystems. 3Cs rewilding therefore relied on protecting 'core' areas of wild land, linked together by 'corridors' allowing passage for 'carnivores' to move around the landscape and perform their functional role. The concept was developed further in 1999 and Earth First co-founder, Dave Foreman, subsequently wrote a full-length book on rewilding as a conservation strategy. Rewilding was developed as a method to preserve functional ecosystems and reduce biodiversity loss, incorporating research in island biogeography and the ecological role of large carnivores.
