1

Wilderness Values in Rewilding:

Transatlantic Perspectives
Linde De Vroey & Arthur R. Obst

Abstract

This article re-investigates the underlying values driving the rapidly growing
rewilding movement in Europe and North America. In doing so, we respond to a
common academic narrative that draws a sharp distinction between North
American and European approaches to rewilding. Whereas the first is said to
promote a colonial vision of wilderness, European rewilding is claimed to value
a more inclusive notion of wildness. We challenge this narrative through a
genealogical investigation into the wild(er)ness ideas that inspired rewilding,
showing that North American and European rewilding draw from similar
philosophical sources with cross-continental origins. Thus, we contend that a
linguistic shift from ‘wilderness’ to ‘wildness’ fails to engage substantively with
the colonial critique it alleges to resolve. Through two case studies, we show
how both wilderness and wildness concepts have been employed to support
either colonialism or decolonial resistance and draw attention to the need to
consider specific socio-political contexts when assessing rewilding. Ultimately,
we propose that reclaiming a liberatory meaning of wild(er)ness, articulated in
a critical tradition of wild(er)ness advocacy, will be an essential step in
decolonizing rewilding.

1. Introduction

In October 1983, at the 3rd World Wilderness Congress in the seaside eco-village
of Findhorn in Scotland, the Indigenous American philosopher Jay Hansford
Vest presented an idea that would change how environmentalists across the
continents talked about wilderness. In Vest’s view, wilderness is ‘self-willed
land’— representing land free from human domination (Vest 1983: 324). In the
years to follow, his idea prompted Roderick Nash to re-define wilderness as
“self-willed land” in the 5th edition of his classic text Wilderness and the
American Mind (Nash 2014: xx), and captivated the American environmental
activist Dave Foreman who would coin the word “rewilding” less than a decade
later (Foreman 2000: 33).1 In Europe, too, Vest left his imprint through British
journalist George Monbiot’s endorsement of the “self-willed land” notion to
promote rewilding in his influential best-seller Feral (Monbiot 2013: 10). In this
way, an idea of wilderness first presented by a Native American philosopher in a
European setting was stamped into academic esteem by Nash, woven by
Foreman into the North American origins of rewilding, and repackaged for
Europe by Monbiot.

Vest’s presentation provides a fine starting point for the three-pronged aim of
this article. Firstly, we seek to show how North American and European
rewilding draw from similar philosophical sources with cross-continental
origins.2 In defending this view, we diverge from a common academic narrative
that separates North American from European rewilding by emphasizing their
conceptual differences rooted in distinct histories, baselines and meanings of
wild(er)ness (Hall 2014, Corlett 2016). Secondly, we contend that the outcome
of this debate has crucial ethical and political significance. Some scholars have
emphasized these continental distinctions to claim rewilding in Europe lacks the
colonial basis often assigned to North American approaches. Such an argument
is predominantly based on the alleged normative implications of employing
different baselines: restoring American wilderness excludes people from the
landscape, but restoring European wildness includes people in the landscape
(Ward 2019). We contest that such a simplified philosophical distinction evades
prominent critique of the colonial roots of rewilding and (wilderness)
conservation (Cronon 1995, Jørgensen 2015). Drawing attention to shared
genealogies of the wild(er)ness concept across the continents, we argue that
rewilding cannot avoid advancing colonial ends merely by performatively
distancing itself from North American wilderness thought.3 Rather than
discarding wilderness concepts altogether as colonial constructs, however, we
1
Nash clarifies Vest’s influence in a footnote in the Preface to the 5th Edition: “In the
first, 1967 edition of this book I used the term "self-willed" but applied it mainly to
animals (see below, pp. 1—2). In 1983 Jay Vest read a paper at the Third World
Wilderness Conference which suggests that in early Celtic cultures "wilderness"
signified land that had its own "will power”.” (Nash 2014: xx)
2
For the purposes of this article, we limited our research to these two continents,
although rewilding is also implemented in Central- and South-America, Africa, Asia,
Australia and New-Zealand and remains worth investigating philosophically in these
other contexts.
2
stress their motivational and transformational potential in contemporary
conservation. Thus, thirdly, we aim to establish that reclaiming the liberatory
meaning of wild(er)ness is an essential step in decolonizing rewilding.

We open our argument with a brief overview of the history and definition of
rewilding in Section 2, before in Section 3 reconstructing the common narrative
that cleaves rewilding between the continents. We then challenge this narrative
in two ways. First, in section 4, we show how European and North American
approaches to “wilderness” and “wildness” are conceptually and genealogically
entangled. Second, drawing on case-studies in section 5, we distinguish a
colonial and elitist framing of wild(er)ness as something to be conquered or
controlled from wild(er)ness as an important liberatory concept. To be
decolonial, rewilding should carefully distance itself from the first colonial
meaning while advancing the liberatory ethic implied in the second.

2. Rewilding: a short introduction

The word “rewilding” originated in the 1980s in North American primitivist

counter-culture, but was allegedly coined in 1992 by environmental activist
Dave Foreman in a column for Wild Earth. One year before, Foreman and the
conservation biologist Michael Soulé founded the Wildlands Project with the
aim to preserve and restore wildlife and wilderness areas in the United States
(Humphrey 2018). It was Soulé who, together with his colleague Reed Noss,
then introduced rewilding to the scientific academy in a now iconic paper
published in Wild Earth in 1998. Drawing evidence from the successful
reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park two years earlier, Soulé
and Noss argue that restoring biodiversity requires the reintroduction of
keystone species in big, interconnected protected areas. Their argument is
mainly based on the theory of trophic cascades: the indirect (top-down)
interactions between keystone species, like large predators, and their
environment, influencing entire ecosystems.

Translating the philosophy of “self-willed land” into ecological science, the

authors define rewilding as “the scientific argument to restore large wilderness”
based on the restoration of “self-regulating” land communities and a reduction

3
Throughout, we adopt “wild(er)ness” as an abbreviation of “wildness and wilderness”–a
shorthand that foregrounds their conceptual and historical intimacy.
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of human control (Soulé and Noss 1998: 22). They identify three primary
features of this approach, which would become known as the “three C’s” of
rewilding: cores, corridors, and carnivores. Since these origins, rewilding has
split into sub practices, including Pleistocene rewilding, passive rewilding, and
translocation rewilding (Nogués-Bravo et al. 2016). Though this heterogeneity
has prompted critique, scholars have pointed to a persevering “common ethos”
or overarching vision in rewilding: an emphasis on “autonomous” or “self-
sustaining” nature–reflecting the original premise of self-willed land (Lorimer et
al. 2015, Tanasescu 2017, Gammon 2018).

In 2021, the IUCN commissioned 33 practitioners and scientists from around

the world (among them Foreman, Soulé and Noss) to formulate a unifying
definition and a set of guiding principles for rewilding:

“[Rewilding is] the process of rebuilding, following major human

disturbance, a natural ecosystem by restoring natural processes
(...). This will involve a paradigm shift in the relationship
between humans and nature. The ultimate goal of rewilding is
the restoration of functioning native ecosystems containing the
full range of species at all trophic levels while reducing human
control and pressures. Rewilded ecosystems should—where
possible— be self-sustaining.” (Carver et al. 2021: 1888).

While the paper replaces Soulé and Noss’s “3 c’s” with 10 guiding principles–
including attention to socio-cultural aspects and local stakeholder engagement–
the core premises of this rewilding definition remain almost unchanged from
the 1998 original: self-sustaining ecosystems (involving the restoration of
natural processes) and the reduction of human control (constituting a paradigm
shift in the human-nature relationship). Thus, the definition connects
rewilding’s common ethos, identified earlier as an emphasis on restoring and
sustaining a self-willed element in nature, to transformative social change
(Ibid.: 1890). However, the scope of this envisioned “paradigm shift” remains
unclear. What is the “relationship between humans and nature” that must be
altered? Without specificity, the authors neglect a crucial element of rewilding,
merely scratching the surface of its potentially profound implications for
contemporary culture and politics.

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In our argument, we take rewilding to constitute a paradigm shift in the
hegemonic human-nature relation in the West: one where nature is valued
merely instrumentally— when it is valued at all— for the services it can provide
to people. Importantly, this relationship is predicated on dominance and
nature’s servility. In section 4, we will further elaborate how rewilding’s
common ethos, originating in a shared transatlantic idea of “self-willed” nature,
is therefore inconceivable within this overarching cultural logic. In section 5, we
will illustrate more specifically how rewilding’s potential for transformative
change is brought forth by its liberatory wild(er)ness ethos. First, however, we
examine a common narrative that sharply divides European and North
American approaches, outlining some of the related critiques on rewilding’s
connections to wild(er)ness.

3. The common narrative: a rivalry between worlds

At first, the distinction between European and North American rewilding may
seem obvious. While North American rewilding at its origins called for
“continental conservation” (Foreman 2004), Europe’s lack of large, unpopulated
natural areas—especially in Western Europe—resulted in an emphasis on local
biodiversity restoration and functional processes rather than on large
wildernesses (Drenthen and Keulartz 2014, Corlett 2016). Following famous
scientific experiments like the Oostvaardersplassen, European rewilding
increasingly adopted a focus on the reintroduction of natural grazing by large
herbivores to (re)create a mixed ‘wood-pasture’ landscape (Drenthen 2018).
Contrary to North America’s iconic rewilding vision, many European rewilding
projects therefore appear rather modest and even tame (Marris 2013).

According to some scholars, however, the distinction is not just empirical or

contextual but rather conceptual. This prompted some scholars to consider
European rewilding a “distinct type,” rooted not just in a different
implementation of rewilding principles but in a distinct ethos. This ethos is
connected to different baselines: i.e., the reference ecosystems rewilding seeks
to restore, reflecting not only historical realities but also a set of values and
assumptions about wild(er)ness (Jørgensen 2015). While we concede some of
the aforementioned differences, we contest a sharp distinction presenting these
rewilding baselines, and thus underlying values, as fundamentally different on
both continents.
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The distinction between North American and European rewilding baselines is
generally presented in two, related, ways as: as (1) a contrast between
“primitive” and “pastoral” baselines shaped by divergent cultural histories and
values; and (2) a related contrast between “wilderness” and “wildness” values.
In the introduction of an edited volume on North American and European
approaches to conservation, Martin Drenthen and Joseph Keulartz (2014)
invoke the work of the British historian Simon Schama. According to Schama
(1996), the European mind historically constructed two main wild(er)ness
imaginaries or “Arcadias”: the dark, primitive forest Arcadia of Northern and
Western Europe; and the lighter, pastoral Arcadia of the Mediterranean
imagination. Connecting Schama’s primitive and pastoral Arcadias to
predominant wild(er)ness views on the different continents, Drenthen and
Keulartz argue that European conservation has mostly preferred the pastoral
baseline, while North America embraced the primitive baseline. As prescriptive
ideas of what “wild nature” should look like, these Arcadias are tied up with
contrasting value judgments: “(w)hereas primitive Arcadia is inhabited by
people who behave like wild animals, pastoral Arcadia is a place from which all
dangerous creatures (such as the snake and the lion) have been banned and the
ideal animals (such as the cow and the bee) behave like conscientious and
industrious citizens” (Drenthen and Keulartz 2014: 2). Thus, North American
conservation has been more tolerable of “dangerous” and “wild” creatures, such
as large predators, while European conservation preferred a more “civilized”
hybrid landscape.

In the same volume, Marcus Hall (2014) supports a similar narrative in

suggesting that the continents might be divided into “wilders” and “gardeners.”
While gardeners integrate and inject nature into culture, wilders exclude and
extract human culture from nature. Hall puts the difference like this: “North
Americans who see themselves surrounded by more pure Wilderness aim to
remove culture; whereas Europeans long surrounded by humanized systems
attempt to reintroduce nature” (Hall 2014: 29-30). This history reflects,
according to Hall, America’s widespread hostility to hybrid ecologies that
endures today in rewilding. “America’s (…) rewilders still have mythic
wilderness in mind (…) but Britain’s rewilders keep the wild adjective in their
mind. In the Lake District and in the Highlands, restorers seek to bring back the
essence of the wild: wildness not wilderness” (Hall 2014: 33). Another way to

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put this point is that North Americans, broadly speaking, seek to restore a place
(wilderness) rather than a quality (wildness); “Europeans pursue the adjective
while the Americans chase the noun” (Hall 2014: 33).

Thus, the primitive baseline of North America, pursuing wilderness, is

connected to a dualist interpretation of conservation which is ultimately
determined to push humans and their culture out of the wilderness. The
pastoral baseline, on the other hand, in pursuing “mere” wildness, allegedly
supports a form of nature/human mutualism in shared landscapes. Though its
outcomes may be much more “tame” and cultivated, this type of rewilding is
believed to be more inclusive, less dualist, and therefore less colonial than its
North American counterpart (Drenthen & Keulartz 2014, Ward 2019). While
this distinction does not engage with the economic and political structures
which drive colonial and neoliberal conservation (Büscher & Fletcher 2020), it
provides a ready response for (European) rewilders today to fend off
accusations of dualism and colonialism like those advanced in an influential
paper by Dolly Jørgensen (2015).

Essentially, Jørgensen applies to rewilding a well-trodden critique of American

wilderness conservation first pressed in environmental ethics by the Indian
scholar Ramachandra Guha in 1989. Guha targets the colonial implications of
the “anti-human” standard in American conservation that disregards and
displaces indigenous and local populations. In contrast, he applauds German
and Indian models for allowing “greater integration of ecological concerns with
[human] livelihood and work” (Guha 1989: 6). Baird Callicott and William
Cronon later affirmed and bolstered Guha’s critique, prominently casting
wilderness as dualistic and ethnocentric (Callicott 1991, Cronon 1995). But
where Guha also emphasized the ongoing colonial context of conservation,
Callicott’s and Cronon’s critiques increasingly targeted the concept of
wilderness as a “received idea” and a “cultural construct” which became
enshrined in the Wilderness Act of 1964. Callicott offered this act, and its
phrasing, as the paradigm of colonial wilderness, judging the Act’s famous
definition of wilderness as an untenable bifurcation between man and nature;
not only naive, but also an erasure of the longstanding presence of Indigenous
peoples (Callicott 1991: 351-352).4
4
The act defined wilderness as “in contrast to those areas where man and his works
dominate the landscape, (…) an area where the earth and its community of life are
untrammeled by man, where man is a visitor who does not remain” (see United States
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Rewilding, in Jørgensen’s view, is wilderness zealotry rebranded. Because
rewilding remains rooted in the ideology of wilderness, it too “disavows human
history and finds values only in historical ecologies prior to human habitation”
(Jørgensen 2015: 487). Similar to the American preservationist movement,
rewilding’s “erasure” of human history from the land thus ultimately serves
colonial ends. However, in a direct response to Jørgensen, Jonathan Prior and
Kim Ward invoke Hall’s distinction to argue that European rewilders sidestep
the pitfalls of traditional wilderness thinking by pursuing wildness— “more than
human autonomy”– rather than wilderness (Prior & Ward 2016: 133). A few
years later, Kim Ward makes the point more directly in a book chapter subtitled
“decolonizing rewilding.” Ward contends that there “are significant
philosophical differences between the types of rewilding advocated in America
and those in Europe,” depicting North America as infatuated with a “mythical
‘pristine’ Wilderness” which is inherently dualistic and colonial (Ward 2019: 14).
Yet, in a philosophical move to save rewilding, Ward draws a contrast between
this model and a European, “open-ended” vision of wildness “premised on non-
human autonomy within plural and hybrid spaces” (Ibid.: 12). If rewilding is to
be decolonized, it must severe itself from the historical North American
wilderness movement and instead embrace the wildness Europe has long
prized: “a more hybrid, open-ended and ‘borderland’ version” (Ibid.: 2). If
rewilding is to be decolonized, it must be European in character.

But at least to American ears, a clear divide between wilderness and wildness is
fraught. In common parlance, these two words occupy a prominent stature
among a family of phrases that Indigenous scholar Kyle Whyte calls “wild
concepts”. Adjective or noun, Whyte insists that wild concepts have all been
used historically to “denigrate indigenous peoples’ land management practices,
land tenure systems, science and knowledge systems, and political sovereignty
and self-government” (Whyte 2024: 74). Whyte is specifically concerned about
those who fail to acknowledge the painful history of wild concepts, and worries
continued use will hinder reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. Thus, he
recommends discarding not only wilderness but all its conceptual cousins,
including wildness.

Whyte’s objection challenges the simple narrative advanced by Ward and others
that a noun-quality pivot can redeem European rewilding. While the next

Congress 1964).
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section bolsters his argument that wildness and wilderness cannot be easily
separated, it also challenges his conception that these concepts are necessarily
tied to colonialism. By reviewing the complex, distinctly intercontinental history
of wild(er)ness thought, section 4 demonstrates that neither wildness nor
wilderness are necessarily tied to fixed sets of values (whether mutualism,
dualism, or colonialism). On the contrary, we show wild(er)ness values fluctuate
according to particular contexts. Hence, our genealogical response will deeply
challenge the ‘common narrative.’

4. A genealogical response

The words “wilderness” and “wildness” entered written English around the 12th
century. Wild (from Old English wilde), meaning "in a natural or uncultivated
state” but also “uncontrolled” or “unruly,” delivered the root for wilderness.5
According to Nash’s etymological account, the adjective wild can be traced back
to the English willed, meaning “self-willed.” Thus, wilderness indicates a place
(ness) where wild or “self-willed” beasts (wil-deor) roam free. Inspired by Jay
Hansford Vest, Nash adjusts his definition of wilderness for the 2014 edition of
Wilderness and the American Mind, taking wilderness to mean “self-willed land”
(Nash 2014: xx).

But this meaning, though perhaps philosophically fitting today, is anachronistic

to earlier uses of these concepts. Nash’s and Vest’s account is contradicted by
other etymologies which traceback the English wild to the Old Teutonic root
walthus, meaning “forest” (Macfarlane 2007). This account is supported by
etymological connections in other Western European languages and accords
with the similar introduction of “forest” and “wilderness” as legal concepts in
the ius forestense ("Forest Law"), encompassing not only forests but every
predominantly uncultivated area, such as moors, marshes and heather
(Andreassen 2022). In Flanders, Forest Law was known as wildernisregaal,
“regal wilderness” (Stein 2022). This etymology reflects an earlier conceptual
connection between the wild and the wood, already forged by the Romans and
captured in the Latin silva, meaning both “wild” and “forest” (Macfarlane 2007).
Situating the wild beyond the boundaries of the city or the Empire– which was

5
The earliest record of the word wilderness dates from around 1200 and is found in the
Trinity College Homilies, a collection of devotional chants in which “wilderness” is used
to denote a hospitable, uncultivated and deserted place.
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perceived as the symbolical Roman civitas or city at large– the Romans equated
the wild with the territory of the “barbarian” tribes who lived “in the forests”
(Tacitus, Germania). The Roman admiration for the wild and the tribes’
primitive strength and bravery gave birth to the myth of the “noble savage.”
However, the general Roman attitude was one of conquest or “pacification” of
these outer areas, incorporating them into the Empire’s mechanism of
civilization. Tellingly, the Romans did not only invent the noble savage, but also
the colony (from the Latin colonia, “settlement, farm”): a system in which
patches of conquered lands were given to retired soldiers to be brought under
productive cultivation (Bendik-Keymer, 2020).

Thus, the Romans first established a pattern in which the— positive or negative
— framing of land and people as “wild” is accompanied by an attitude of
conquest and colonization. Western European Medieval Forest or Wilderness
Law expressed a similar ambivalent attitude. Forest Law set aside dedicated
natural areas from common law for the protection of game and other wildlife,
with hunting and other exploitation rights reserved for the king or highest
sovereign (Andreassen 2022). By setting aside certain areas from common law,
it could curtail commoner’s rights over previously used lands, excluding certain
people (Stein 2022). Thus, while Wilderness Law served to protect natural areas
from common exploitation and deforestation, it equally enshrined elite land
privilege. Moreover, instead of protecting wilderness, the supreme ruler could
decide to hand out the rights of exploitation to their vassals or allies (Kos 2005).
In the 12th century, Wilderness Law became increasingly important as a
political instrument in the aftermath of the Investiture struggle between the
Pope and the Emperor (Belaen, in preparation). Through claiming jurisdiction
over wilderness areas, secular rulers could hand out these rights to vassals and
monastic orders to bind them to their own authority. The 12th century shows a
significant increase in the foundation of monasteries in “wilderness” areas in
Western Europe. The main aim, however, was not to preserve but to cultivate
these wildernesses.

Still, particularly in remote areas, medieval wildernesses continued to defy the

implementation of law and control, remaining places of relative lawlessness,
danger, and freedom. Myths of the “wild man” or "wild woman” were told and
reenacted in folk customs throughout Europe with a mixture of fear and
fascination and stories of bandit gangs living in the woods were later glorified in

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tales such as Robin Hood. In these customs and stories, the wild was a place of
escape, from which one could challenge civilization (Oelschlaeger 1993). Early
Romantics, such as Michel de Montaigne, and later Jean-Jacques Rousseau or
Friedrich Nietzsche, reflected these critical aspects of the wild in their critiques
of modern society.6

From the late Middle Ages, a growing population and increasing deforestation
to provide timber for the ships bound for the “New World” heralded the retreat
of wilderness in Western Europe. This coincided with an increased protection
and validation of small wilderness areas used for hunting and other forms of
recreation by the elite. Simultaneously, wilderness became increasingly sought
in the newly established overseas colonies, at the “frontier,” the boundaries of
the world known to white settlers. And again, from the moment of encounter,
wilderness was under threat from colonization and exploitation. Upon arrival in
what they perceived as an “unimproved” continent, American settlers saw
wilderness first as something to be colonized– in a similar sense of “civilizing”
dating back to the Romans.

In the early 19th century, American “Founding Father” Thomas Jefferson took
the vast swathes of (seemingly) uncultivated nature to offer a unique
opportunity for America to blaze its own path. In opposition to the densely
populated Europe, where opportunities for acquiring land were scarce, he
encountered in the United States “an immensity of land courting the industry of
the husbandman.” Jefferson took the farmer, the cultivator of the land, to be the
moral ideal (Marx 1964). Hence, Jefferson advanced the political ideal not of
preserving untouched nature but of cultivating agricultural landscapes. Andrea
Wulf argues that the founding fathers believed “ploughing, planting and
vegetable gardening were more than profitable and enjoyable occupations: they
were political acts, bringing freedom and independence” (Wulf 2011: 10). Yet,
the founders largely reserved such freedom and independence for white, land-
owning men. A common perspective at the turn of the 19 th century considered
the continent’s wildernesses not as unpeopled but rather wasted by their
Indigenous inhabitants (Purdy 2012: 109). An agricultural ideal, then, justified a

6
See Michel De Montaigne’s 1580 essay Des Cannibals (Of Cannibals) for an early
example, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous 1762 treatise Emile, ou de L'Éducation.
Likewise, Nietzsche’s critique of modern culture implies a return to nature and a wilder
state through the concept of the “Dionysian”.
11
paradigmatic case of colonization at a continental scale. 7 Whether in Ancient
Rome or 18th century America, wilderness was valuable for imperial society
primarily for its potential to be developed.

For Wulf, this agricultural ethic– a dream of “cultivating” the wild– constitutes
the cradle of American environmentalism. However, there are several missing
elements in this early “environmentalism” which will be essential for the later
preservationist movement. First, while early American settlers explicitly
pursued an agricultural “middle landscape” as part of a colonial project, later
wilderness advocates came to value non-human nature left relatively
uncultivated or unexploited. Secondly, influential politicians, including
Jefferson, believed that their agrarian ideal would serve the young United
States economically, and moreover, that the technological industry would be
critical to the cultivation of the new continent. Thus, while this early American
idea idealized husbandry and agricultural life, it lacked the critical attitude
towards industrial development that became an essential component of
wilderness preservation.

One of the earliest critics of the economy of the industrial revolution was Henry
David Thoreau. “To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is
equivalent to grading the whole surface of the earth,” he would write in 1854 in
Walden (48-49). Thoreau’s critique does not imply that he rejected all
technology, or that he conceptualized the natural and the artificial dualistically.
In fact, the wild(er)ness of Walden Pond to which he famously retreated in 1845
was a paradigmatic ‘middle landscape’— half-wild/half-cultivated. The nearby
train kept him company as much as the birds and squirrels. Still, Thoreau
exhibits acute sensitivity to the costs of technology, and in particular to its
destructive effects not only on wild nature but also on human beings: “When the
smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few
are riding, but the rest are run over” (Ibid.: 49). Integral to Thoreau’s thinking
is the value of human and nonhuman freedom, an ethos that deeply challenged
the industrial economy of his day and one that cannot be reduced to a colonial
imaginary.

7
In the words of 6th U.S. president John Quincy Adams: “Shall the lordly savage… forbid
the wilderness to blossom like the rose? Shall he forbid the oaks of the forest to fall
before the axe of industry, and rise again, transformed into the habitations of ease and
elegance? Shall he doom an immense region of the globe to perpetual desolation?”
(Oration at Plymouth, 1802).
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The convergence of Thoreau’s twin principles– wildness is valuable as a source
of freedom, but increasingly threatened by exploding industrial capitalism–
exemplifies the liberatory ethos of American wilderness philosophy. This critical
tradition stands in stark contrast to a different orientation towards
conservation, personalized by the “sportsman” Teddy Roosevelt, which was
much more favorable to economic “development” of natural areas. The clash
between these traditions is exemplified in the dispute between preservationist
John Muir and U.S. Forest Service director Gifford Pinchot over the damming of
the Hetch Hetchy valley in northwestern Yosemite during the early 20th
century. Claiming that public land should be managed for the benefit of people,
Pinchot advocated for changing the valley into a reservoir— exhibiting
indifference not only to the unique ecosystem but also to its cultural
significance for the Miwok and Paiute tribes. Tellingly, then, what Pinchot
understood as “the benefit of people” mostly served certain people, namely
private interests in San Francisco which priced the city out of affordable local
water (Obst 2023).

While Roosevelt and Pinchot’s standpoint reflects a dominant tradition in US

environmentalism (encompassing, in part, the creation of the National Parks),
his approach is not to be conflated with the entire wilderness movement (Woods
2017). Inspired by Thoreau and Muir, the prominent 20th-century wilderness
advocate Aldo Leopold criticized society’s fixation on economic health. Instead,
he called for a shift of values to be achieved by “reappraising things unnatural,
tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free” (Leopold 1949:
ix). Much like Thoreau, Leopold encounters in wild(er)ness a moral
counterweight against the destructive excesses of industrial capitalism.
Wilderness preservation, for him, reflected a larger “land ethic,” one that
changes “the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to
plain member and citizen of it” (Leopold 1949: 204). Leopold’s “community of
the land” replaces the capitalist concept of nature as recourse with a relational
idea of wild(er)ness as a place of human-nature encounter, interdependence
and responsibility— a view akin not to the colonizer’s outlook but rather to
longstanding indigenous ontologies (Whyte 2015, Martin 2024).

Recognizing the liberatory ethos of wild(er)ness is integral in understanding the

early North American rewilding movement. Dave Foreman, sometimes dubbed
the “father of rewilding,” was deeply inspired by Thoreau and Leopold when co-

13
founding the Wildlands Project and introducing the word rewilding in a column
for its journal Wild Earth in 1992. Using the word “rewilding” as shorthand for
“wilderness restoration,” Foreman set rewilding’s goal as restoring “self-willed
land.” Foreman is clear that his vision was directly inspired by Jay Hansford
Vest, writing that the “self-willed land meaning of wilderness overshadows all
others,” denoting a place “beyond human control” (Foreman 2000: 33). When
Soulé and Noss clarified rewilding’s principal premise as “restoring self-
regulating land communities” in their 1998 foundational paper, they re-
formulated Vest’s and Foreman’s definition in scientific terms. Rewilding’s
central goal to restore “self-regulating land communities” through a diminution
of human control, ultimately points back to an ethic of respecting the self-willed
and free character of the land. This ethos, almost unchanged, was integrated
into the 2021 IUCN definition of rewilding.

The same ethos made its way into popular discourse through George Monbiot’s
2013 best-seller Feral. Monbiot quotes Vest to define rewilding’s end-goal as
“self-willed” nature. However, Monbiot strangely turns Vest’s and Foreman’s
arguments on their head by contrasting “self-willed” ecosystems with
“wilderness”:

“The ecosystems that result (from rewilding) are best described

not as wilderness, but as self-willed: governed not by human
management but by their own processes. Rewilding has no end
points, no view about what a ‘right’ ecosystem or a ‘right’
assemblage of species looks like. (...) It lets nature decide.”
(Monbiot 2013: 10)

This rather strange upheaval— separating wilderness from its self-willed

meaning– serves Monbiot’s pragmatic agenda to advocate for rewilding. By
discarding “wilderness,” he tries to diminish potential controversy evoked by the
word. A similar move is made by scholars (Ward 2019) and organizations
(Rewilding Europe) who abandoned the term wilderness for a “self-willed”
meaning of wildness, suggesting only the latter is non-dualistic, non-colonial,
and non-problematic.

As suggested above, this rhetorical pivot was prompted in part by increasing

attacks on the wilderness idea, not just advanced by environmental historians
but also by social ecologists, eco-feminists, and environmental justice advocates

14
(Petersen & Hultgren 2020). Indeed, for many critics, Foreman himself became
the personification of the dualist, primitivist wilderness idea which should be
opposed at all costs (Cronon 1995, Monbiot 2013, Jørgensen 2015).
Undoubtedly, Foreman’s rejection of justice-inclusive environmentalism in favor
of a hardline attachment to ecocentrism instigated his critics— evident in his
anti-population-growth and anti-immigration arguments he developed later in
life (most notably in Man Swarm, 2014). In our view, then, Foreman failed to
grasp the full liberatory meaning of wilderness. The critical core of wilderness
can extend beyond resistance to logging, mining, and other extraction to
challenge capitalism and colonialism as driving forces of domination and
destruction across both human and natural communities. 8 Yet, the outsized
focus by wilderness critics on some of Foreman’s more reactionary views
pushed its liberatory potential to the margins and motivated some (like Cronon
and Monbiot) to abandon the wilderness concept entirely in favor of wildness.

While this conceptual move may render some rhetorical advantages, it implies
some serious dangers for the rewilding movement. 9 At a minimum, it risks
dishonesty and deception, obscuring some of rewilding’s true aspirations. But
worse still, it results simultaneously in the double failure to grasp the true
meaning of wild(er)ness and to substantively address the decolonial critique
wilderness has faced. Monbiot, Ward and others attack North American
wilderness as dualist and colonial, but their “alternative,” allegedly decolonial
notion of “wildness” as “self-willed” stems from this same wilderness tradition.
This results in a paradox, but also in a choice: either abandoning all “wild
concepts,” as Whyte suggests, or re-embracing the wilderness tradition as a
part of rewilding. We suggest the latter, but this comes with an essential
imperative: to guard against wild(er)ness being weaponized for oppressive
ends.

We therefore believe it is crucial to distinguish critical wild(er)ness values from

the colonial context of their implementation. Historical injustices, done in the
name of conservation, may not intrinsically result from the concept of
8
For an argument to this conclusion, see Murray Bookchin in debate with Dave
Foreman (Bookchin & Foreman 1991). See also Malm 2018. For an overview, see
Petersen & Hultgren 2020.
9
It is worth noting that rewilding organizations may have additional strategical reasons
to abandon the wilderness rhetoric, such as specific negative associations local
residents could have with the word “wilderness,” which may not be connected as much
to colonial or dualist ideas as to associations of wilderness with danger, discomfort, or a
lack of order.
15
wild(er)ness, as Whyte argues, but rather from a colonial context dominated by
a (racist) logic of domination, seizure and exploitation of wild nature. To a
significant degree, National Parks as instruments of land dispossession stand
contrary to the liberatory ethos of wild(er)ness. 10 It is important, then, to
recognize wild(er)ness’ dialectical relationship to colonialism: whereas wild
concepts have been employed as a legitimation for land seizure, they have
equally been utilized to resist colonial attitudes. The genealogy of wild(er)ness
reveals concepts permeated by internal contradictions, which— perhaps due to
their paradoxical and uncontrollable character— have nevertheless always
retained the potential to criticize hegemonic attitudes and structures of
oppression and exploitation. Throughout history, this critical wild(er)ness
meaning has alternately remained underdeveloped or has been articulated in
various ways (as a critique of industrialism, capitalism, colonialism,
extractivism, neoliberalism). Nevertheless, it is always there as a liberatory
potential. In the next section, we will turn to some of these concrete historical
and contemporary instances.

5. Towards the liberatory wild: lessons from two case-studies

The previous section demonstrated that decolonizing rewilding means more

than shifting terminology, but rather requires attending to the varied concrete
uses of “wild(er)ness.” In what follows, we discuss two case-studies (one in
North America, one in Europe) that demonstrate the complex reality of
wild(er)ness in practice. The first study, set in mid-20th century Montana,
demonstrates that the notion of wilderness can colonize and liberate depending
primarily on the socio-political context. The second study of a leading European
rewilding organization reveals that the idea of wildness risks neo-colonial
outcomes even in a contemporary European setting. Both case studies provide
important lessons for rewilders, pointing towards the need to seriously assess
and preserve rewilding’s liberatory stance across contexts.

10
Brian Petersen & John Hultgren (2020) make a similar point: “However, much like the
American system of government in general, wilderness has always been characterized
by a disconnect between its lofty de jure ideals of radical democracy and the de facto
realities of social exclusion that characterized access to wilderness in practice” (232).
16
The Mission Mountains Wilderness

On October 29, 1937, American conservationist Bob Marshall drafted a policy as

an agent of the Office of Indian Affairs that declared 16 Indian areas “roadless”
or “wild.” About a third of the way into his order, Marshall explicitly addressed
“the standpoint of the Indian”:

“Almost everywhere they go the Indians encounter the

competition and disturbances of the white race. Most of them
desire some place which is all their own. If, on reservations
where the Indian desire privacy, sizable areas are uninvited by
roads, then it will be possible for the Indians of these tribes to
maintain a retreat where they may escape from constant contact
with white men.” (U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs 1938)

Ostensibly, then, Marshall argued for wilderness because it might secure

indigenous people a “place which is all their own,” protected from the
“disturbance” of white society. Far from officiating a wilderness absent of
Indians, Bob Marshall argued for roadless wilderness to enshrine aboriginal
sovereignty.11 Yet, Marshall failed to consult and incorporate indigenous
perspectives in his plan. While the plan found widespread support among white
preservationists, the tribal members on the Flathead Reservation protested that
they were never asked if they ‘desired privacy,’ whether that privacy was worth
the economic exigencies the policy would entail, or if they wanted their lands
roadless (Krahe 1995).

Hence, Marshall’s policy enacted the very domination it was supposed to

prevent. Marshall’s order ordained the “Mission Range Roadless Area,” a land of
125,000 acres within the Flathead Reservation in present-day Montana. While
the Confederate Salish and Kootenai Tribes formally protested the unilateral
setting aside of the Mission Range Roadless Area since March 1939, their
complaints went unheeded. The injustice, then, amounted to a violation of tribal
consent— one in a long history of corroding indigenous sovereignty. In this way,
the wild(er)ness rhetoric came to serve colonial ends imposed by white
conservationists. Tribal opposition in the Mission Mountains endured for
11
This commitment to the value of human freedom is consistent with Bob Marshall’s
radical politics. According to the environmental historian Robert Gottlieb, Marshall
believed “the liberation of society… was a condition for the liberation of Nature, and the
liberation of the natural environment from its would-be exploiters was an essential
condition for social liberation” (Gottlieb 2005: 47).
17
decades, sustained by desire on the part of many tribal members to open the
Missions up for lumbering. In 1958, the Mission Mountains were finally
declassified as roadless. Almost instantly, intensive logging began. Thus,
Marshall's order resulted not only in the moral failure to recognize tribal rights,
but also in political failure: top-down conservation failed to endure.

By the 1970s, however, plans for logging and clearcutting in the Missions
Mountains became sufficiently ambitious to concern many members of the
Salish and Kootenai. Some wanted no logging of any kind, believing that the
forests were worth “far more in cultural and recreational value than in
stumpage” (Krahe 1995: 71). One tribal member explained that the Mission
Range was important as “a place to gather a lot of the herbs and berries and
plants and… a place that the Indian people link with home and with Indianness”
(72). Despite some tribal members defending the ongoing extraction, the
opposition to logging picked up momentum. Wilderness suddenly was put back
on the agenda. Thurman Trosper, drawing from his unique position both as a
member of the Salish-Kootenai and of The Wilderness Society, advocated for a
Mission Mountains Tribal Wilderness: an act of legal preservation administered
by the tribes. On June 15, 1982, the tribal council voted overwhelmingly to
approve the Tribal Wilderness Ordinance and adopted the Mission Mountains
Tribal Wilderness Management Plan (Native Lands and Wilderness Council
2005).

This case demonstrates a clear divergence between lofty philosophy and messy
practice: Marshall and his wilderness allies designated the Mission Mountains
roadless for liberatory reasons, and yet these noble intentions enacted— rather
than resisted— the colonial status quo. Then, only twenty years later, the tribe
created their own Tribal wilderness for expressly preservationist reasons: the
primacy of cultural significance over economic exploitation. With the decision
finally theirs to make, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai collectively chose
legal wilderness, a decision that endures to this day.

Though a historical case, the Mission Mountain Wilderness teaches lessons for
decolonizing rewilding and conservation in North America and possibly beyond.
First, it shows that colonial and even dualist implications are not tied to the
concept of wild(er)ness itself, but rather result from the position, blind spots,
and general attitudes held by those who have the power to employ and

18
implement wilderness. Marshall’s case shows that even when wild(er)ness
protection reflects a critical attitude towards some aspects of hegemonic
culture (logging, roads and exploitation of nature), this alone is not a guarantee
that wilderness conservation, nor rewilding, will be liberatory for all. In the
context of North American conservation, entangled with broader colonial
history, it is important to exercise vigilance against lasting colonial
presumptions. However, the subsequent employment of wilderness discourse by
the Confederated Salish and Kootenai shows that these presumptions are not a
fundamental part of the wilderness concept itself. Indeed, at least when freely
employed by historically oppressed minorities, wilderness can be used as a
powerful liberatory tool.

Rewilding too can be employed in this way, as a force of emancipation and

counter-hegemonic resistance (De Vroey 2023). However, its liberatory
potential is not dependent on a “wildness” versus “wilderness” baseline but on
the beliefs and blind spots of rewilders and the structural forces they accept or
challenge. Rewilding, like wilderness, is equally prone to corruption of its
liberatory ethos by colonial or other adverse contexts. This caution applies to
North America and Europe. Given its recent history, it may be easier to detect–
and criticize– the colonial implications of wilderness conservation and rewilding
in North America. However, rewilding in Europe may be prone to similar
exclusionary dynamics even within a different context, a history of “mutualist”
conservation, and a rhetoric of inclusive “wildness.” To see this, one need look
no further than its largest rewilding organization.

Rewilding Europe

Rewilding Europe (RE) was established in 2011 in the Netherlands and is

governed by a Dutch CEO and a supervisory board mostly based in Western
Europe. Yet, its main operations overwhelmingly take place in the European
“periphery”.12 Despite its common claim of working closely with local
organizations, RE is illustrative of a rewilding model where a large part of the
financial recourses, expertise and executive decisions are centralized in a place
far removed from most rewilding areas. Avoiding “wilderness,” RE adopted a
positive, inclusive rhetoric of “wildness, “defining rewilding as “a progressive

12
As of 2024, of its 10 flagship “Rewilding Landscapes”, 4 are situated in Eastern Europe (Croatia, Romania,
Bulgaria, Moldavia and Ukraine), 3 in Southern Europe (Spain, Portugal and Italy), 1 in Central Europe
(Germany/Poland), and 2 in Northern Europe (Scotland and Lapland).
19
approach to conservation” which “is about moving up a scale of wildness” from
which “both people and wildlife will benefit in the long term” (Rewilding Europe
2024). In this way, RE stands out as an exemplar of the approach many
rewilding scholars endorse today. Accordingly, its political shortcomings can
demonstrate the theoretical and ethical shortcomings of existing rewilding
scholarship we previously pressed.

Despite RE’s inclusive rhetoric, many of the prominent pictures on their website
show large, unpeopled and spectacular nature— the paradigmatic image of
“pristine” wilderness contrasting with the mutualist values implied by the
“wildness” rhetoric (Tanasescu 2017, Ward 2019). These observations point
towards the practical difficulty of separating “wilderness” from “wildness”
baselines. However, given RE’s centralized model, they also imply the more
serious danger of imposing on certain places an idea of wilderness which may
diverge from local attitudes. Through a case-study of RE’s rewilding project in
the Romanian Danube Delta, Mihnea Tanasescu (2017) identified the troubles
that arise from this divergence of wild(er)ness meanings. Since “(w)hat the
Delta means for (local residents) is not what it means for RE,” conflicts and
difficulties arise over land use, the treatment of reintroduced animals, or the
foraging of natural resources. Though RE centers the idea of participation as
fundamental, local participation will remain limited and often counterproductive
if wild(er)ness meanings do not align.

Addressing the gap between inclusive theory and exclusionary practice,

Tanasescu points towards an important weakness of the centralized rewilding
model: the failure to account for and include local relationships to the natural
world in rewilding projects. When foreign wild(er)ness concepts are
superimposed on local contexts, this reinforces a power imbalance caused by
different access to economic, legislative and epistemic resources between
Western European institutions and the “periphery.” Thus, RE uninentionally
repeats a long-standing historical pattern of framing its periphery (whether the
borders of the Empire, European colonies or Eastern European countries) as a
wilderness, positively or negatively defined and regulated by the ideas of those
in the center. As we have seen, this unilateral attitude is concurrent with
colonial ideas of wild(er)ness.

20
Moreover, to locally promote its projects, RE adopts a development discourse of
rewilding areas reminiscent of the same colonial attitudes. Emphasizing the
economic opportunities and benefits of rewilding, RE promotes rewilding as a
chance to develop ecotourism and other “livelihoods and income linked to
nature’s vitality” (RE 2024). However, such an over-emphasis on “shallow
commodified encounters” and “market-based conservation approaches”
reinforces dominant capitalist structures, promotes the further commodification
of nature, and seriously undermines decolonial conservation in the long run
(Büscher & Fletcher 2020, Fiasco & Massarella 2022: 2). When local
engagement is disproportionately bought off through economic promises and
financial compensation, rather than achieved through substantive stakeholder
engagement and democratic decision-making, rewilding remains at risk of
reproducing unequal power dynamics.

Returning to our initial argument, the main issue with RE’s “wildness” rhetoric
is that it rests on a shallow interpretation of wildness/rewilding as a program of
development, whether economic or ecological. In this respect, it shares
similarity with Roosevelt’s and Pinchot’s conservation strategy that underpinned
the colonial and commercial aspects of the early American environmental
movement. In such an interpretation, rewilding still serves– and reinforces– a
capitalist industrial system based on the exploitation and oppression of nature
and people. Ignorant of this broader political-economic context, this rhetoric
fails to incorporate the liberatory meaning of wild(er)ness and the original
rewilding ethos. By detracting from this critical core, Rewilding Europe risks
refusing the IUCN’s admirable call for a “paradigm shift” in the human-nature
relationship (Carver et al. 2021). As we have intended to show above, such a
“paradigm shift”— in one form or another— is not new to rewilding but has
been a guiding principle in the wilderness movement from its very origins.
Rewilding’s potential to bring “transformative change” to society, then, depends
on its ability to reinvigorate the liberatory ethos of wild(er)ness as a
countervailing force against oppressive systems and values.

6. Conclusion

Safeguarding rewilding’s liberatory ethos is essential for detaching rewilding

from the colonial or otherwise exploitative structures it operates within. While

21
there are valuable philosophical European sources inspiring this ethos, it was
most famously and profoundly articulated within the liberatory North American
wilderness tradition, notably by Thoreau and Leopold. Recovering this critical
stance and liberatory ethos constitutes the true moral challenge for rewilders in
North America and Europe. In this venture, it is crucial to extend freedom not
only to nonhuman nature but also to the people who have historically been
living on the land. “Self-willed” land, then, encompasses not just the nonhuman
wild but also these people insofar as their activities are not based on
exploitation, extraction, or domination. Bringing wilderness under a program of
“development,” on the contrary, ultimately subdues its self-willed character and
continues a long-standing Western tradition of cultivation, colonization, and
conquest.

These two different approaches, then, reflect two contrarian historical and
philosophical strains within and beyond wilderness: on the one hand, the
colonial conquest of land framed as wild(erness) by those in power; on the
other, the defense of wild(er)ness as a source of moral significance and an act of
cultural and political resistance. The philosophical significance of this second
meaning provides an important justification to defend such recently
controversial concepts as wilderness, wildness, and rewilding. For even though
these concepts originated in Western culture and have been– like many
concepts– implemented in a colonial context, they also have long challenged
Western hegemonic thinking, colonialism, and industrial capitalism. It is this
liberatory meaning, rallying people not just to the cause of wild nature but also
to social and cultural emancipation, which we wanted to bring to the forefront
again.

“Why should anything have to be called wild?” We believe the answer to this
question lies precisely here: to denote its right to freedom, self-expression and
autonomy, as opposed to imposed control. And why should anything be called a
wilderness? Never to point towards any purely presupposed “pristine”
character, but rather to indicate a core community strictly preserved from
industrial development. Wild creatures, after all, are not abstractions but need
a place to safely regenerate. Perhaps other words, especially in non-Western
cultures, can perform a better job in denoting these qualities and spaces. But in
the English language and for a Western audience, we believe wild(er)ness is
still a powerful concept to point towards this liberatory quality.

22
Yet, for all its merit, we should heed the warning that celebrating the freedom
of the wild has not always historically prevented colonial conservation.
Ultimately, rewilding today faces all of the obstacles to environmental justice as
yesterday’s wilderness. Awareness of this history, then, could help rewilders
today to not sacrifice wild(er)ness’s critical core to the powers of domination,
exploitation, and “development.”

23
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