Rewilding and Relearning in Ireland and Elsewhere

Eoghan Daltun on his farm in West Cork, Ireland, which he is rewilding into a temperate rainforest (photo by Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times, published at featured link below).

By Marcy Rockman, Lifting Rocks Climate and Heritage Consulting, for the SHA Climate Heritage Initiative

Efforts are underway to rewild Ireland. While Ireland is known for the abundant and green vegetation its rainfall supports, recent assessments are showing this lushness is not equivalent to biodiversity and ecosystem health. Some rewilding work is now underway to try to address this.

The threads I want to pull from this here are those of shifting baselines and how deep histories of human experience and emotion are interwoven with our understandings and perceptions of how environments can work and what it can mean to live with them. As the featured article notes, English colonization saw forests, bogs, and wild fauna in Ireland as elements to be subjugated – along with its people, a value system and process later followed as well in the Americas. In Ireland, this dispossession is linked to fierce attachment to the land, but the hardships it engendered in turn led to further pushing out of nature in order to survive with farming.

The concept of wilderness has been, since the mid-later 19th century, as eloquently outlined by environmental historian William Cronon, focused on nature as being where humans are not and have not been. Knowledge of Indigenous peoples around the world and the archaeological record across millennia show that there are few places that meet this criteria. Rewilding as developed here reflects this, as do several other recent books (English Pastorale, by James Rebanks in the English Lake District, The Book of Wilding by Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell in Sussex, England). In these, rewilding is not about creating new places where people are not, but relearning ways to live within a range of environments in ways that try to move beyond these histories of dispossession and values that created them.

If you know of books on rewilding work in the US, please let me know.

Featured Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/18/climate/ireland-ecological-desert-rewilding.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Y04.r3oA.bqjGSeiS6Sd1&smid=url-share (gift link)

For a listing of all blog posts in this series, visit our Climate Heritage Initiative page.