Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers

Conservation has traditionally meant protecting particular species or habitats by managing them closely: cutting back scrub, controlling grazing animals and planting trees where they are wanted. Rewilding takes a different approach. Its supporters argue that, wherever possible, natural processes should be allowed to shape the land, and that the return of missing species, especially large animals, can restore ecosystems more effectively than human management. The most famous example is the return of grey wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the United States in the mid-1990s, about seventy years after they had been wiped out there. In the following years, elk numbers fell, and in some places willows and aspen trees began to recover along riverbanks. These changes were widely presented as proof that a single predator could transform a whole landscape. More recent research has been more cautious, suggesting that other factors, including hunting by humans, drought and the growing number of bears and cougars, also played a part, and that the recovery of vegetation has been patchy. Rewilding also raises practical questions. Farmers worry that predators such as wolves and lynx will kill their livestock, and some rural communities feel that rewilding schemes are imposed by outsiders who do not depend on the land for a living. Supporters respond that compensation payments, tourism and new jobs can share the benefits more widely. What most ecologists now agree on is that rewilding is not a single method but a range of approaches, from releasing beavers into a river valley to simply allowing abandoned farmland to return to forest.