Rewilding communities prove the movement isn't 'anti-people'

However, others have grown concerned that rewilding favours wilderness over people. For them, rewilding is associated with ‘green lairds’ and greenwashing, appearing to offer little more than a continuation of the injustices of concentrated land ownership and threatening to precipitate a new era of clearances.

Others are concerned 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.

At the same time, the emergence of the carbon trading market has seen land prices skyrocket, placing land ownership ever further out of reach for ordinary people. Carbon trading isn’t the same thing as rewilding, but because rewilding can contribute to carbon sequestration, the two have become linked. Meanwhile, reservations about the merits of carbon offsetting persist.

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It is important to emphasise that none of these concerns are really criticisms of rewilding itself. Rather, they are criticisms of how rewilding is being carried out in some cases, 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 it’s the who, not the do, that is at the root of people’s scepticism.

Few people object to the goal of nature recovery, or even the need for natural capital to establish 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.

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.

The Northwoods network shows how people and rewilding can co-exist (Image: Scotland: The Big Picture)

That is why rewilding in Scotland is focused on wildness, not wilderness. Wildness is not incompatible with people, only with the total subjugation of nature and the culture of human hegemony. Wildness means allowing nature to chart its own course, freeing it from artificial constraints, 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.

Indeed, restoring wildness to more of our land and seas – as called for by the Scottish Rewilding Alliance’s newly launched Rewilding Nation Charter – promises profound benefits for people as much as it does for nature, including improved health and wellbeing, more nature-based jobs and increased resilience to the growing threats from climate change.

Unsurprisingly then, there are a growing number of examples where rewilding is not just being informed by, but is being actively led by, local people. And perhaps nowhere is this trend more evident than within Scotland: The Big Picture’s Northwoods Rewilding Network. This is a nationwide community of landowners dedicated to rewilding principles, where one in five of the network’s land partners are now community-owned landholdings.

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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.

And these are places like Comrie Croft in Perthshire (below), 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.

(Image: Scotland: The Big Picture)

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.