Rethinking rewilded futures: Co-wilding as vibrant care and lively collaboration

Abstract

Rewilding efforts have been extensively employed to return nature back to its natural rhythm, increasing biodiversity, allowing ecosystems to restore themselves, and mitigating the effects of climate change as human impact is slowly reversed. Rewilding, however, has also been described as a plastic word loosely applied across ecological science and environmental activism, and has been blamed for further perpetuating dualisms of nature and culture, wild and unwild, and unpeopled and peopled. The designation of an Anthropocene era in which humans have irreversibly transformed landscapes across the globe, however, has consequently challenged traditional conceptions of the wilderness while blurring the boundaries between the human and nonhuman world. Similarly, recent rewilding efforts around the globe reveal a unique story of enduring human care, underscored by the strengthening, rather than severing, of relationships between humans, nonhumans, and their shared landscapes. This paper therefore provides a critical review of recent ‘plastic’ rewilding interpretations and strategies that have led to a disconnection between policy and practice as well as the term’s expansion into popular nature writing and mainstream consumer marketing. Following calls for more inclusive rewilding futures, the concept of co-wilding is suggested as a form of vibrant care and lively collaboration to help mobilize new possibilities for coexistence on a damaged planet.