WildCard Guest Blog

WildCard is a people's movement, mobilizing thousands of ordinary people to call on the UK's largest landowners to rewild their land. Below is the blog post written by Symbiosis for WildCard's website, introducing the project.

Enjoy!

Rewilding, taking the traditional view, conjures up images. A caramel flash of a Lynx, backdropped by Scots Pine. Herds of Tauros, rumbling across Portugal. Maybe even elephants, reintroduced into Europe, as some suggest is needed.1

Sit 100 people in a room and ask them to define Rewilding. You’ll hear some overlap, some of these common themes, but most likely receive 100 different responses, recited back at you.

It is widely accepted that in the UK, our landscapes are denuded. Our hairy, tusked, and hooved stewards are largely extinct, as are the shifting worlds they created. An absence of life hangs heavy on our country, the silence deafening. We have, for all intents and purposes, domesticated our lands, cheating them of their essential wildness.

And in the tandem with this, is something little talked about. A domestication of ourselves. Our minds.

Like our landscapes, perhaps our minds, bodies, and cities are denuded. Cheated of an essential wildness.

Technology moves faster than biology, and despite feeling detached (or even worse superior) to nature, the modern-day human has only prevailed for an eye-blink in deep time.

In 2016, a study at Nagoya University took images of several animals and blurred each into a grey smear. Stage by stage, they then unblurred each, and asked a group of pupils when they could identify each creature.

Remarkably, snakes were identified first across the board.2 An evolutionary hack, programmed for when we had to forage on the ground? That was only yesterday, in deep time!

In Britain we also have an infatuation with the big, black, cat. Theories that Puma and Pantha roaming our island. However, decades of military searches on, it’s clear these are false.3 So, why are some people still desperately insistent that they exist? That they’re being stalked by a predator.

Well, perhaps because they are. Perhaps there is a big black cat, but in their minds. Stalking the shadows of a predator, an evolutionary paranoia, that has since vanished, extinct. As Author George Monbiot says: “maybe, we are ecologically bored”.

Our own brains are calling to be rewilded, but so is our land. And by that, I don’t mean fortress rewilding, the notion that “humans go here, and nature goes over there”. Like Beavers and Boars, we are ecosystem engineers, an integral part of the modern-day ecosystem. If anything, we’re the greatest ecosystem engineers yet. Too good.

Even in the 21st Century, people unintentionally steward the land for good. Urban green spaces are far more biodiverse than surrounding landscapes.4 In some seabird colonies, locals provide an anti-predator service; affording other species respite.5 In the Bronze Age, when farming was prevalent, pollen cores reveal it was the most biodiverse period in recent history, due to the ways humans and livestock managed the land.6

So, when we talk about rewilding, we should refer not only to the glens and scrublands, the tundras and wood pastures, but also our gardens, cities and farms, with us as the ecosystem engineers, where it may not be possible to have Bison and Lynx.

Such that a mycelial body nurtures the subterranean world of a woodland, which in turn provides it with a suitable habitat, we as human beings must nurture our anthropogenic world back to health, so that it can provide us with the habitat we need. But, to rewild our surroundings, we must first allow our surroundings to rewild ourselves. The ultimate Symbiosis.

If this topic interests you and you’d like to get involved, you can find out more/get in touch with the Symbiosis project here:

References:

1. Wells, H., Ward, N. and D. Crego. (2023) Rewilding: Conservationists want to let elephants loose in Europe – here’s what could happen, theconservation.com. Available at: https://theconversation.com/rewilding-conservationists-want-to-let-elephants-loose-in-europe-heres-what-could-happen-168212 (Accessed: 03 March 2024).

2.  Neuroscience News. (2016, November 8). Humans recognize partially obscured snakes more easily than other animals. https://neurosciencenews.com/snake-recognition-vision-5460/ 

3. Monbiot, G. (2014). The never-spotted leopard. In Feral (p. pg. 49-61). essay, Penguin.

4. World Economic Forum. (2021, February 21). Why urban gardens are a lifeline for the world’s pollinators. www.weforum.org. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/02/urban-gardens-pollinators-biodiversity-nectar-study/#:~:text=Our%20findings%20suggest%20that%20urban%20landscapes%20are%20hotspots,the%20farmland%20and%20nature%20reserve%20sites%20we%20measured.

5. Unknown. (2022, July 17th). Word of mouth from ornithological conservationist. Thetford; The Global Birdfair 2022.

6. Woodbridge , D. J. (2023). Biodiversity and land-use change in the British Isles. University of Plymouth. https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/centre-for-research-in-environment-and-society-ceres/biodiversity-and-human-land-use-change-in-the-british-isles