How Does Rewilding Work?

What do you think of when you hear the word rewilding? Chances are it could be different to the next person. For many, it conjures up images of the Serengeti, Alaskan wilderness or windswept moors. However, in Britain two of the most celebrated locations for rewilding are not in dangerously remote places, but rather in lowland farmland. The Knepp Estate near Gatwick, and the base for BBC Springwatch for the last two years, Wild Ken Hill in Norfolk.

The reason for this is that you attract more species to an area with a wide variety of appropriate habitats, rather than an expanse of one, and you can achieve this almost anywhere. That is the key to rewilding. It's a conservation technique that seeks to help as many species as possible, to re-establish nature's abundance, diversity and balance. Not to the exclusion of humanity, but around and amongst us, so we are once more part of nature.

Rewilding has been phenomenally successful at increasing wildlife abundance and diversity, and thus has grown in popularity. To the point now where it is becoming policy for governments, the UN and conservation bodies. But you needn't feel you have to be a professional to help nature in this way. You can easily use this technique at home in the garden, or on your land.

However, if you are going to use rewilding, you’ll find it much easier if you understand how rewilding works. It is really very simple, you just need to get to grips with these four key principles that underpin this revolutionary approach to conservation.

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1. THE WEB OF LIFE

Firstly you need to recognise how nature actually "works". This is the field of ecology; the study of how living things interact with each other, and their environment. Consider the trillions of individuals that live on earth; animal, plant, fungal and microbial. Then try to conceive the hundreds to millions of interactions each individual will have in its lifetime, with its own species, other species and with the earth itself. A basic interpretation of this would be a food web. But you could equally make a web of species affected by (and therefore connected to) beavers as they create (or remove) habitat as ecosystem engineers. Imagine a single wildebeest for a moment…..

It fights amongst its own for a mate. It mates and produces offspring. It walks over numerous plants and invertebrates in its lifetime. Its migration route creates bare tracks in the earth to benefit many insects. It's dung equally is food for dung beetles, fungi and bacteria, nutrition for plants. And eventually after being chased and eaten by lions, its carcass is recycled and sustains vultures, hyenas, flies, and more….

Now multiple this by a hundred thousand wildebeest in the herd. Then again by the thousands of species across the African plains. Then repeat across the thousands of ecosystems on earth. This infinitely complex web of life, with each organism connected, directly or indirectly, to a myriad of others, is nature. This is how it operates.

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2. NATURAL PROCESSES AND ECOSYSTEM SERVICES

The second principle to embed is an appreciation of what we call natural processes. Which are, ….what? Well we've already alluded to them in the first point. When animals, plants and/or their environment interact, the interaction itself, or the result of it, is a natural process. If a lion eats a wildebeest, that is the process of predation. What the lion doesn't eat is recycled by the clean-up crew, this is the process of decomposition or sanitation. If a wildebeest eats seedlings, this is herbivory. If due to herbivory, trees only grow in certain patches, possibly protected by thorn bushes, it may lead to the creation of mosaic habitats, which will support a great variety of species. Some of the most important natural processes are these above, along with, pollination, pest control, disturbance, filtration of particles from air or water, availability of dead wood and the aeration of soil. Natural processes allow nature to be self sustaining, by recycling nutrients and creating or supporting new life.

Natural processes often result in great benefits to humanity, which is the reason we are far more dependent than we realise upon the natural world. These benefits are called ecosystem services. For example, tree and other plant roots prevent storm runoff from land, protecting us from floods. They also filter out pollutants, keeping our water clean. And plants are responsible for much of the oxygen we breathe. Pollination is essential for many of the crop plants we depend on for food, whilst pest control from birds, bats and insects helps us grow those crops. So ultimately, nature helps us eat, drink and breathe.

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3. HUMAN CIVILISATION'S IMPACTS ON THE WEB OF LIFE

The third realisation is the burden that humanity has placed on nature. Almost every step forward in our civilisation, whilst benefiting us, has shackled the natural world. From the dawn of time we have hunted, directly removing individuals, species and their effects, from the tree of life. Today, from culling badgers, wiping out insects with pesticides, to emptying the seas for food, we continue. Throughout history we have increasingly travelled the globe, taking hitchhikers along for the ride, that predate or compete with local species. Millennia ago we started farming, hacking out habitat to build and create space for our permanent dwellings, our livestock and our crops. A huge percentage of the land grab has occurred in the last century, as our population and economies have grown exponentially. The habitats we have conserved have been repeatedly fractured into smaller and smaller parcels, distanced from their neighbours by roads, fences, wind turbines and shipping lanes. And then we have altered the global climate, largely driving species northward, often separating them from their food; an extinction time bomb that has only just started to explode.

So what bearing do all these human pressures have on the web of life and natural processes? Well naturally every missing individual leaves a hole in the network of interactions. Individuals are then less likely to interact with numbers of their own species or others, so the resulting natural processes become less common. Take out a species and the impacts are many times greater, stopping some processes altogether. For example, pigs rootle in the earth, disturbing it, exposing food for many, and allowing new plants a chance to grow. If wild boar went extinct, there would be no other species that would turn over earth in the same way, resulting in the decline of beetles, plants, birds and more, right across the northern temperate biomes. And naturally, all these resultant losses will cause their own impacts - there is a ripple effect right across nature. Humanity has caused wholesale loss of species and habitats, or fragmented the remainder to the point where species cannot meet to interact, so natural processes are lost, and little of the earth is unaffected. For many species, populations are less than a third of those that existed even 50 years ago. And even that is thought to be a small fraction of the population density that ecosystems would have supported before we started meddling. And as natural processes stall, so do the ecosystem services we rely on. We are shooting ourselves in the foot.

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4. REMOVE BARRIERS AND GIVE BACK TO NATURE

So what can be done about it? Is there a solution to this biodiversity crisis? Well an increasing groundswell of practitioners, scientists and conservation bodies are turning to rewilding as a feasible solution. Not in isolation, as the only approach, but the keystone to a raft of ecological, economic, climate and social movements.

Why? Well, once you grasp the first three points above, it's not a great leap to understand the final principle behind rewilding. We need to reverse the millennia of human actions that constrained nature, to kickstart natural processes. 

• If you remove a fence, animals can roam and intermingle more freely. Likewise corridors between remaining chunks of habitat allow connectivity across the landscape. Some efforts to restore habitat in these corridors or stepping stones will pay dividends for local species, helping them connect with each other.
• If you reintroduce a lost species to an area, whether it be tree planting or releasing water voles, many of those missing links in the web of life are once more filled in, reestablishing natural processes. If reintroduction is not appropriate, at some scales these missing processes could be mimicked, or you could use similar species to achieve the same effect on the ecosystem
• We're we to stop euthanizing with pesticides, in the garden or on the farm, then those species will once more exert their effects
• The habitats most impacted by humanity are wetlands. Drained for agriculture, rivers straightened, dammed and their water diverted. All living things need water, so try to connect, repair and restore water features wherever you can
• Finally, nature needs space, but unfortunately we have excelled above all else, in re appropriating the earth for our own ends. So this is the other key to rewilding. Whilst it can happen on any scale, it has the greatest effect over landscapes. We need to return unneeded land to nature, join these patches together with favourable habitat connections, and embed it all, where possible, in a matrix of nature friendly farmland, forestry and urban spaces. Were we to give back 30% of the space we use, we could live in harmony with a much happier natural environment. One that is sustainable for the future, ours, and the planet's.

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So that's rewilding in a nutshell - removing or reversing our traditional barriers and mismanagement, occasionally stepping in to give nature a helping hand, to allow wildlife to become more diverse and abundant, thus re-establishing healthy natural processes. 

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If you fancy having a go, or if you would like to find out more, explore the rest of the website or hop over to our contact page and send us a message.

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