Rewilding a Community

The two previous entries in the series on rewilding have looked at relatively contained initiatives, both taking place on privately owned land. The aim of this post is to highlight some of the impacts that a rewilding project is having in the context of a community initiative, which can sometimes be more complex terrain to navigate.

A local project

The Cambrian Wildwood programme is a community project currently focused on restoring and rewilding 300 ha of degraded upland valley in an area north of the Cambrian Mountains. There is a look to making future land purchases with the participation of other local landowners to scale up to an area of 3,000 ha in the medium term.

The Cambrian Wildwood is the major scheme being run by a charity, the Wales Wild Land Foundation. In partnership with the Welsh government, the Wales Wild Land Foundation is responsible for managing, restoring, and creating wildland in the Cambrian Wildwood area. They hope to lead by example, demonstrating to members of the local community that the process and results of rewilding can be a win-win for people and the environment.

Included in the charity’s Mission Statement are its commitments to working in partnership with landowners in its wider long-term project area of around 30,000 ha, which it will eventually expand to from its present day holding area. It also expresses the aims of enabling public and particularly youth access to the wild land and providing educational activities and volunteering opportunities in conservation.

The initial community programme aims to reconnect people with nature, through creating trails, wild camping zones and activities to provide deep experiences in wild landscapes. Schools and other groups who don’t often interact meaningfully with nature, including the urban youth, are invited to learn about how ecosystems function and about the native species of Wales.

Regional Distinctions Affecting UK Rewilding Efforts

The long term aims of the Cambrian Wildwood Programme seek to involve only 1.25% of the land area of Wales, which at first glance seems like not very much considering that they form a significant proportion of the country. Much of Wales is grazed by the sheep of farming families who have been there for generations and as such, rewilding on a large scale could be very challenging. Doing so would mean having to convince those whose identities are strongly interwoven with the practice of sheep-grazing that rewilding is a better, alternative practice, or indeed convincing them to sell their land.

In a paper published by the British Association of Nature Conservationists an important distinction is made between the Welsh uplands and the Scottish Highlands. These areas have received a lot of attention from groups looking to rewild British landscapes in recent years as both have been stripped of their native trees to provide land for sheep grazing. While once they supported an abundance of wildlife and buffered against flooding, now they are comparatively bare and do little to slow the flow of water.

The paper points out that much of the Scottish landscape consists of large estates where landlords are often absent and deer and grouse shooting are prevalent. This context provides a simpler means of rewilding vast tracts of land in one go, as only one person or family need be convinced, while the Welsh landscape is peppered with smallholdings and common grazing areas. Rewilding does provide an opportunity, as it is a potential way for communities to form and develop around the notion of restoring environments and landscapes for the common good, but it should be debated and experimented with, which will take time.

As the prospect of rewilding is still very much a contested idea, with critics viewing it as an idealistic and “eradicative” intervention that counters the interests of people who live on the land, it seems realistic that even the long term goal of the Wales Wild Land Foundation appears conservative. This accounts the political nature of the concept and for the deliberation that will surround the notion of rewilding the uplands.

The Cambrian Wildwood Rewilding Process

The Cambrian Willdwood Programme will begin with a dynamic stage. This will allow natural processes to take hold alongside some specific interventions, for example tree-planting and other habitat restoration work, to create the right conditions for the eventual introduction of large herbivores such as wild cattle and roe deer, and other lost animal species including red squirrel.

Not only will the project work to restore natural forest cover, but other types of habitat including moorlands and wetlands will be reestablished too.

You can view a project timeline here, which includes information about the plans to provide public access and promotion of the site to encourage tourism and educational activities.

Experimentation is Key

It is experiments such as this which will provide evidence of the impacts that rewilding can have upon communities and landscapes. The Wales Wild Land Foundation should be congratulated for their pioneering efforts to provide an alternative future for the people and wildlife of the Welsh uplands and I look forward to learning about the results of their work.

The next and final post in the series will be a more personal reflection on my own experience of rewilding in an urban context, as well as some suggestions for how we can begin to rewild our lives.