Re-wilding for Environmental Re-storation

“We have become strangers to Nature and the best way to live longer healthier lives is to Re-wild ourselves by returning to Nature whenever we can.”

Re-wilding is the new Pandora’s Box in conservation!! Today, humans have encroached upon a majority of Earth's lands. The current extinction crisis is a testament to human impacts on wilderness. If there is any hope of retaining a bio-diverse planetary system, we must begin to learn how to coexist with, and leave space for, other species. The practice of “re-wilding” has emerged as a method for returning wild lands, and wildness, to landscapes we have altered for our selfish gains. Concept of reforestation has been in vogue for quite some time for environmental conservation. Reforestation is the natural or intentional restocking of existing forests and woodlands that have been depleted, usually through deforestation.  Reforestation is a planned or deliberate movement to re-grow vegetation lost due to human activity, natural calamity or sudden climate change. However, practice of re-forestation was one of the means to an end-ultimate re-habilitation of lost flora and fauna. Whereas, rewilding is large-scale conservation aimed at restoring and protecting natural processes and core wilderness areas, providing connectivity between such areas, and protecting or reintroducing apex predators and keystone species. Rewilding is a progressive approach to conservation. It's about letting nature take care of itself, enabling natural processes to shape land and sea, repair damaged ecosystems and restore degraded landscapes. Through rewilding, wildlife's natural rhythms create wilder, more bio-diverse habitats. The concept of rewilding has evolved from its initial emphasis on protecting large connected areas for large carnivore conservation to a process-oriented, dynamic approach. The restoration of this process, and its interactions, can lead to increased self-sustainability of ecosystems and should be at the core of rewilding actions. Building on these concepts, we develop a framework to design and evaluate rewilding plans. Alongside ecological restoration goals, the framework emphasizes people’s perceptions and experiences of wildness and the regulating and material contributions from restoring nature. These societal aspects are important outcomes and may be critical factors for the success of rewilding initiatives. The concept of rewilding challenges us to rethink the way we manage nature and to broaden our vision about how nature will respond to changes that society brings, both intentionally and unintentionally.

 

The effects of rewilding actions will be specific to each ecosystem, and thus a deep understanding of the processes that shape ecosystems is critical to anticipate these effects and to take appropriate management actions. In addition, the decision of whether a rewilding approach is desirable should consider stakeholders’ needs and expectations. To this end, structured restoration planning—based on participatory processes involving researchers, managers, and stakeholders—that includes monitoring and adaptive management can be used. With the recent designation of 2021–2030 as the “decade of ecosystem restoration” by the United Nations General Assembly, Assembly, policy- and decision-makers could push rewilding topics to the forefront of discussions about how to reach post-2020 biodiversity goals. Wildlife conservation, rewilding, restoring wild habitats should be at the centre of the climate talks, not at the margins. Rewilding is not about us saving wild species or restoring wild lands, it is about the wilds saving us. Rewilding is the reintroduction of missing, locally extinct plants and animals to a landscape, which has the potential to restore ecosystems

 

Astounding as it may seem, 40,000 years ago, not very long in geological terms, straight-tusked elephants — closely related to the Asian elephants in India — were part of the European ecosystem. In fact, if your London tour itinerary included the popular Trafalgar Square, it might interest you to know that you likely walked over the bones of now-extinct elephants, lions and hippos (the kind that still live in Africa), which were unearthed when Trafalgar Square was excavated in the 19th century. Elephants need vast landscapes and as forests shrink, they increasingly cross paths with humans, which sometimes results in conflict. For instance, in India some 400 people are killed annually by elephants, which, in turn, are routinely chased, harried, injured and killed in retaliation for loss of crops, life – or for their presence in human habitation.

 

Elephants are not really part of the vibrant rewilding debate in Europe. On a viability scale of 10, Monbiotic scale rates it a low ‘2’ for reintroduction in the U.K., but they raise vital questions: What are the animals we seek to re-wild, and further, is our vision limited to only rewilding animals we want to? How far back in time do we go when we are considering rewilding locally extinct animals? Is rewilding feasible in degraded, destroyed ecosystems, and in a crowded, hungry planet? Does it conflict with interests of local communities and the current paradigm of development and growth? Indeed, what is rewilding? Rewilding has been described as reintroducing the missing, locally extinct plants and animals to a landscape, restoring ecosystems. It is also about “abandoning the ethos of human dominion over nature,” as feminist icon, author and conservationist Germaine Greer noted in her keynote address at a conference. It is about reversing damage to ecosystems, restoring nature. It is certainly not merely planting trees, or the futile notion of “compensating” the loss of old growth forests by planting new trees, which seems to be the way of the world, including in India where destroying forests for infrastructure and industry is legally permissible when ‘compensated’ with planting a new forest.

 

Why we should re-wild? What are the reasons for rewilding?

 

Rewilding is an ecological idea that is gradually gaining traction within environmental circles, and it bears significant comparison with some of permaculture’s guiding principles. Permaculture emphasizes the preservation of natural ecosystems and making efforts to repair ecosystems that have been damaged by human activity. Rewilding also proposes people taking a proactive approach to assisting natural ecosystems retain their former diversity and abundance – which have been curtailed by human encroachment on the land. Whereas much wilderness management as it is currently practiced seeks to somehow contain or suppress natural processes, or managing the environment for the benefit of a single species, rewilding proposes letting nature re-find its own balance – in many ways letting the land turn feral, so that nature itself can work out what is best for it. Rewilding is about making a whole wilderness ecosystem truly wild – self-sustaining, abundant and diverse. It is about creating a future in which humans and nature are equal parts of a global ecosystem, rather than separate and often antagonistic elements. Given the damage that man has done to many natural environments, and the atomization of landscapes that would have once been joined by human activity, we must take active steps to help the rewilding process. There are several methods for doing this. The one that tends to get the most media attention in discussions about rewilding is the reintroduction of megafauna, typically apex predators, into environments from where they have been absent. The idea is that by, say reintroducing wolves into an area where there are a lot of deer, the wolves will naturally keep the deer population in check so that they do not decimate the native plant life, which in turn will create a more diverse ecosystem as more animals will be supported by the available plant life. Other methods of rewilding include creating corridors that link areas of wilderness that were once part of the same landscape but which have become separated by human construction which allows different populations of animals to interact and thus breeding between family groups, which creates for a more biodiverse species and re-growing native plants where invasive species have become dominant. This in turn should lead to the reinvigoration of native insect species and, in turn, the food chain that develops from them. Then, once such steps have been taken and the ecosystem is able to function independently i.e once the toxins we have introduced into the soil through agricultural practices have disappeared, for instance, or the invasive species have been eliminated, human interference is actively withheld and nature takes over. And given what we know about nature as permaculturists we can be certain that once that situation is reached nature will find the correct balance for that ecosystem, and will eventually reach abundance. There are several reasons why rewilding is an appealing prospect.

Biodiversity: Human activity has been incredibly destructive in terms of the biodiversity of the plant. A 2014 report by the World Wildlife Fund detailed how in the last 40 years alone, humans have caused the disappearance of half the number of animals on the planet. This is through hunting, destroying habitats and pollution. Rewilding gives nature a chance to reestablish it natural state of abundance and biodiversity.

Self-Sustaining Systems: As we know from permaculture design, when ecosystems are allowed to blossom in their biodiversity, they naturally create a system that is self-sustaining. The elements of the system will eventually find a natural balance that allows all the elements to thrive. This means a system that does not require human intervention to support it. In permaculture, we seek to minimize the energy and time input we give to our site; by doing the same with natural ecosystems we allow them to form the balance that is their natural state.

Protect from Extinction: Reintroducing species to an area where they were once native is a way of protecting species from extinction. The large mega fauna in many areas, from the wolves and lynx in highland areas, to the bison on the American plains were reduced to near extinction by human activity (either deliberately through hunting or indirectly through destruction of habitat). By essentially giving them back land, and land that is their native environment and where they are best adapted to survive and thrive, we protect them from extinction again. This is also true of plant species and smaller organisms, from butterflies to beetles. All are potentially threatened by human activity (particularly in the case of insects and microorganisms by the impact of chemical use in agriculture). By allowing environments to return to natural states we protect the natural heritage of our countries.

Commercial: Many critics of rewilding claim that it would harm the commercial interests of people that depend upon the land. They claim that by returning highland areas, say, over to wild animals you destroy the livelihood of the sheep farmers that currently use them. However, rewilding does have commercial potential that could help finance its implementation. The best correlative is whales. Many former whaling communities now realize that there is more commercial viability in whale watching than in hunting whales. Safaris are another example where natural ecosystems can provide financial gains – which should

then be used at least in part to finance the continued protection of the re-wilded area.

Types of rewilding

 

Pleistocene rewilding entails reintroducing species or descendants of mega-fauna species from the Pleistocene era, more commonly known as the Ice Age. The term is especially associated with the Pleistocene megafauna – the land animals often larger than modern counterparts considered archetypical of the last ice age, such as mammoths, the majority of which in northern Eurasia, the Americas and Australia became extinct within the last forty thousand years. Among living animals, the term megafauna is most commonly used for the      largest extant terrestrial mammals, which are elephants, giraffes, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, and large bovines. Of these five categories of large herbivores, only bovines are presently found outside of Africa and southern Asia, but all the others were formerly more wide-ranging. Mega-faunal species may be categorized according to their dietary type: mega-herbivores (e.g., elephants), mega-carnivores (e.g., lions), and, more rarely, mega-omnivores (e.g., bears).Towards the end of the Ice Age, approximately 12,000 years ago, there was massive extinction of mega-fauna, known as the Quaternary extinction event, which affects almost all mega-fauna species. Proponents of the idea to reintroduce these species argue that this extinction event left an unbalanced ecosystem. Pleistocene rewilding has a greater potential for uncertain impacts than translocation rewilding. Rather than the reintroduction of a species that recently disappeared from the area, Pleistocene rewilding potentially involves introducing a completely foreign species to an ecosystem.

 

Passive rewilding takes quite a different approach, aiming to reduce human intervention in ecosystems, giving human cultivated land back to nature and restoring nature, with the goal of letting nature develop and flourish on its own. It entails passive management of ecological succession with the goal of restoring natural ecosystem processes and reducing human influence on landscapes.

 

Translocation rewilding is a more active approach, also involving the reintroduction of species, but the species it focuses on reintroducing are of more recent origin. It seeks to restore missing or dysfunctional processes and ecosystem functions by reintroducing current descendants of lost species. Two types of translocation are recognised in conservation: (1) reinforcements, involving the release of a species into an existing population to enhance viability and survival, and (2) reintroductions, where the goal is to reestablish a population in an area after local extinction in order to restore ecosystem processes. This is also called trophic rewilding. Most rewilding approaches fit the concept of trophic rewilding, defined as: “an ecological restoration strategy that uses species introductions to restore top-down trophic interactions and associated trophic cascades to promote self-regulating bio-diverse ecosystems”.

 

India’s experiment with rewilding has been a mixed bag with conflicting ideas and the given socio-economic backdrop. Idea of rewilding in India may not match with the European or American concepts. Presence of as many as 105 national parks or reserves does not actually justify rewilding theory. It needs commitment, and there is no better story to illustrate this than that of Jadav Molai Payeng, an unschooled Mishing tribal. Distressed by the severe denudation of the riverine island – Aruna Sapori – where he lived, adjacent to Assam’s Kaziranga National Park, Payeng at 16 started to plant grasses, shrubs and trees, native to this region, favoured by wildlife. Three decades later, the island is a dense 500 hectares forest and a refuge to rhinos when the lowlands flood, elephants stranded in human habitation, and the occasional tiger, among other animals. Payeng stated that protecting and planting forests is the key to prevent damage and erosion from the increasingly frequent floods. “If we all do it, no more global warming”, he said.

 

The Bisalpur Re-wilding Project has been devised to protect & ecologically restore the natural habitat for indigenous flora and fauna in Jodhpur. This unique conservation program currently covers around 350 acres of privately owned land, on the outskirts of the Blue City in Rajasthan. Within the past few years, the team at Bisalpur has re-introduced many native species, including but not limited to over 2000 indigenous trees. What was once an unviable wasteland is slowly but surely transforming into a natural haven, teeming with wild life. A well-known environmental journalist and a conservation biologist, Bahar Dutt has written extensively on conservation issues for over a decade and recalls in the Preface to her new book “Re-wilding- India’s experiments in saving Nature”, a moment of epiphany while watching birds and insects in her garden: “Nature was constantly attempting to push its shoots out to renew itself wherever it could. And in that instant I realised that it was time to renew my interpretation of nature as well.” She also explains why just releasing animals into an ecosystem cannot be considered re-wilding. And then having set the stage, she plunges right in. Her idea of rewilding projects are not just high-profile species like the tiger and rhinoceros but also the pygmy hog in Assam, turtles and gharials(Fish-eating crocodile) in the Chambal Valley, the mahseer(Carps) that was once endemic in India’s rivers, vultures across the country with specific focus on the work being done at a breeding and conservation centre in Haryana and urban projects such as the establishment of the Aravali Biodiversity Park in Gurugram(Gurgaon) and the restoration of the Kaikondrahalli Lake in Bengaluru. The pygmy hog, for instance, has a much lower tolerance to human-induced changes to its habitats and other disturbances. The decline of the vulture due to the indiscriminate use of the drug diclofenac in the veterinary world has been the main reason for its alarming decline. Dutt also explains how the introduction of a non-native species of the mahseer in the Cauvery in Karnataka led to the decline of an indigenous species.

Can we re-wild our degraded environment? Recent case studies in Delhi and adjoining Gurugram show that forests can rebound within city limits if the government, civic agencies and civil society have the vision and will. The Aravallis in Delhi were plundered for red silica, sandstone and gravel. The area known as Bhatti Mines is now part of the Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary, adjoining south Delhi’s Chattarpur area; the Aravalli Biodiversity Park between Vasant Kunj and Vasant Vihar in south Delhi, and the Aravalli Biodiversity Park in Gurugram, too were once mines and quarries supplying minerals and building material to the National Capital Region (NCR). After the Supreme Court’s ban on mining in the NCR (2002), the Delhi government initiated a programme to turn the barren mining pits into biodiversity parks. The Bhatti Mines area (2,100 acres) was entrusted to the eco-task force of the Territorial Army, while the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) took charge of the abandoned mines in Vasant Kunj. DDA also developed two other green spaces, the Yamuna Biodiversity Park and the Tilpat Valley Biodiversity Park (near Asola Bhatti) which was opened in 2018. In Gurugram, concerned citizens came together to form “Iamgurgaon", an NGO, and proposed to the municipal corporation that the quarry be developed into an urban park. Today, these sites are all micro-forest habitats sheltering not only a large number of birds and butterflies but also large carnivores such as leopards, hyenas and jackals.

 

Rewilding and restoring both influence biodiversity, and common management actions such as species reintroductions (e.g. beavers or wolves) can be integral to a re-wilding project. Re-wilding and restoring both have their places in biodiversity conservation. In each case, their respective merits should be weighed in relation to stakeholder priorities, prevailing and predicted environmental conditions, the level of biological organization targeted for management, and existing and future management capacity. Mother Nature has ways of bringing ecosystems back into balance. Given the relatively recent evolution of humans of planet Earth, most of us know that nature was doing just fine at creating and maintaining a multitude of ecosystems long before we began to have an influence over the environment. And while the changes we've contributed to have had a significant impact on both plant and animal biodiversity, nature's resilience is powerful enough to bounce back - if we just get out of the way. Animals like wolves, jaguars, elephants, bears, cougars, and the like play an outsized role in regulating ecosystems. They ensure species lower down on the food chain do not overpopulate and throw nature off balance. Despite their importance, these species are often the first to be targeted and culled as they are seen as a threat to human activities like recreation or livestock grazing. But it is the very facet of removing human activities from these wild spaces that are required for re-wilding efforts to be successful, and the reintroduction of keystone species is critical to these natural holistic systems. As re-wilding continues and intensifies, studies are showing that the conservation trend is actually working; the fewer human inputs to a tract of land, the greater the success of an ecosystem. One prime example of how key re-wilding principles can be impactful is the wolves of USA’s Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park.

 

Today, re-wilding projects are taking off around the world. Across the pond, organizations like Re-wilding Europe are promoting large-scale wild spaces from the Iberian Peninsula, to the coldest frontiers of Swedish Lapland, and the wetlands on the coast of the Black Sea in Ukraine. Even in just a short period of time, these projects are seeing bears, ibex, and wolves return to the landscape after decades of absence. Further east, India has taken a keen interest re-wilding and creating an environment where the wild and humans co-exist. In parts of the country, leopards and tigers are left to roam unhindered despite their threat to livestock and villagers. The trade-off coming in the form of a healthier ecosystem and an increase in tourism, creating jobs and improving livelihoods. Re-wilding is all about giving back the land to the creatures, plants, and trees of the world - and we are all for it. There are a lot of ways you can give back to the planet: you can plant trees, clean up the oceans, reduce your carbon footprint, or stop using single-use plastics. But just letting the wild be wild is proving to be one of the best ways to protect the environment and all the different flora and fauna who call it home.

 

“Re-wilding is not an attempt to go back towards our past- that time is behind us forever-but rather it is moving forward towards a more luminous future.”     -Daniel Vitalis

Let's keep nature wild!!!!!!!!!