Rewilding by the people, for the people
The Northwoods Rewilding Network supports more than 75 landholdings to commit to nature recovery, including those managed by communities. There are a growing number of Northwoods sites where rewilding is being led by local people, delivering nature-based jobs and improved health and wellbeing.
This is rewilding by the people, for the people.
Rewilding is growing in popularity across Scotland, offering hope that some of the damage we have wrought on our nation’s natural heritage might be reversed, that the wilder aspects of life – which many find so inspiring – might be reawakened, and that native wildlife might be restored to more of its former abundance.
However, there are persistent concerns in some communities that rewilding favours wilderness over people; that ‘green lairds’ and greenwashing appear to offer little more than a continuation of the injustices of concentrated land ownership.
Carbon trading definitely isn’t the same thing as rewilding.
In parallel with these anxieties, the emergence of the carbon trading market has seen land prices skyrocket in many areas, placing land ownership out of reach for ordinary people. Carbon trading definitely isn’t the same thing as rewilding, but because rewilding is an effective tool to lock away carbon, the two have become linked.
There are also concerns that tourism – so often touted as an economic silver bullet – brings problems with littering, disturbance and traffic. Worse, the perception that tourism is contributing to a lack of affordable homes, forcing young people to leave their communities.
Such concerns are rarely criticisms of rewilding itself. Rather, they are criticisms of how rewilding is perceived to be carried out, and very often, by who. In cattle farming, which is increasingly subject to its own criticisms, there is an expression: it’s the how, not the cow. Similarly, for rewilding, it might be observed that often it’s the who, not the do, that is at the root of people’s scepticism.
In truth, rewilding is carried out by a diverse community, motivated by a range of factors, and operating at different scales across different settings.
Few people object to the goal of nature recovery, or even the principle of establishing a recognised value for things we have undervalued for too long. However, what people do object to is not having a say, to not benefiting fairly from profits extracted from the landscapes they live in, and to having change forced upon them by remote, external forces.
Within the Northwoods Rewilding Network, rewilding is focused on wildness, not wilderness.
Such concerns helped motivate a recent joint statement between Community Land Scotland and the Scottish Rewilding Alliance, calling for the land reform and rewilding movements to work together, to unite around common ground and help Scotland become a country where empowered communities and wild nature thrive together.
That is why within the Northwoods Rewilding Network, rewilding is focused on wildness, not wilderness. Wildness is not incompatible with people. It means allowing nature to chart its own course, freeing it from artificial constraints and overly prescriptive management, but it doesn’t set people apart from nature; rather it reconnects us with the natural world, our place within it and our reliance on it.
Northwoods is a nationwide community of landowners, brought together by SCOTLAND: The Big Picture, dedicated to rewilding principles. One in five of the network’s land partners are now community-owned landholdings, where rewilding is being actively led by local people, delivering nature-based jobs, improved health and wellbeing, and increased landscape resilience to the growing threats from climate change.
This is rewilding by the people, inspiring individuals and supporting local organisations to lead the way.
These are places like Tiroran on Mull, where regenerating native woodland provides educational and recreational amenity for both the local community and visitors, where a sawmill provides much-needed employment, and where the establishment of woodland crofts promises to help keep people in the landscape.
Comrie Croft is a community-owned rewilding initiative, which combines ecological recovery with nature-based business, such as a farm shop, a mountain biking hub and a venue for meetings and events.
And these are places like Comrie Croft in Perthshire, where community shareholders laid the foundations for establishing the croft as a model of rural regeneration, or Glenan Wood in Argyll and Bute, where the community is organising the removal of invasive non-native species from a precious patch of Atlantic rainforest. And then there’s Uigshader on Skye, where locals are determined to restore nature in a way that benefits their community, with plans to host volunteer days and develop a modern clachan.
Atlantic rainforest owned by Northwoods partner Friends of Glenan Wood, surrounding the village of Portavadie in Argyll & Bute.
This is rewilding by the people, for the people, empowering communities, inspiring individuals and supporting local organisations to lead the way, demonstrating how rewilding can deliver a wilder, more sustainable future, with benefits for all of us. Rewilding not only can deliver all these things; it must. Increasingly, it is.
