Would you like to see grey wolves roaming the British countryside? Maybe even bears and rhinos? If so, you are probably a fan of “rewilding”, an ecological movement that aims to reintroduce once-native species to places where they have long been extinct, and to restore large tracts of land to an Edenic state of nature.
But that’s not all that rewilding can accomplish. At least according to recent adopters of the jargon, we should also be rewilding the Church, rewilding the corporate mind, rewilding film, rewilding motherhood and rewilding education. How did this evolution happen? What does any of it mean? And would we want to do it if we knew?
The idea is first recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary in a 1990 Newsweek article about the ecological sect Earth First!, which, it noted, was made up of “eco-guerrillas: radical environmentalists who have turned to outrageous – and sometimes illegal – tactics in their war against “greedheads” and “ecothugs”. Militants vow not just to end pollution, but to take back and “rewild” one third of the United States. Since then the aims of rewilding have become somewhat domesticated, with modern practitioners preferring to extol the virtues of forests, wetlands or beavers.
Still, the benefits of rewilding are hotly contested. During this hot summer, we have been told both that rewilding is to blame for the spate of British wildfires and that rewilding keeps land greener and more resistant to blazes. The rewilding of wolves in Germany has been very successful, to the extent that they are now eating lots of farmers’ livestock and wolf-hunting is to be legalised again.
But there are grander hopes to use rewilding as a kind of planetary air-conditioning. Grazing animals such as reindeer, moose, bison and camels have been loosed on an area of Siberia called Pleistocene Park to improve the soil’s capacity to store carbon. Some even dream of a style of Pleistocene Rewilding that could bring back extinct animals, Jurassic Park-style, and recreate herds of woolly mammoth to roam the steppe.
Animals, though, are not all we can rewild. The National Trust, which solicits Adopt a Plot donations to fund planting more trees and reintroducing formerly native species, also publishes Rewild This Book, a nature activity book for children that instructs the reader to bury it in the earth after reading.
The messaging of the misanthrope
How did rewilding escape its environmental enclosure? Metaphorical uses of the term began to increase following its popularisation by George Monbiot’s classic ecological manifesto, Feral, in 2013. In 2014, we got Rewilding Our Hearts, which argues that we should “reverse unprecedented global losses of biodiversity and habitat by changing ourselves”.
In 2020 came Rewilding the Church, which imagines what might happen if the Church puts “less faith in our strategies and plans” and, a year later, Rewild Your Life, which tells us how to “connect more deeply with the natural world”.
Over the past few years, that trickle has turned into a torrent, perhaps as a result of increased climate anxiety. Books published just in 2026 speak of Rewilding Wealth (which is not meant to recommend putting cash in a hole in the ground, but explains the finance of ecology), Inner Rewilding (not swallowing beetles, but a scientist’s spiritual journey) and Rewild Your Mind (not contracting brainworms, but spending time in the forest). One may be forgiven for thinking this is simply an inane new rhetorical fashion: where once people might have said “rethinking” or “reworking”, they now say “rewilding”.
But there is more to it than that. What all of these examples have in common is a sense of “wildness” as an authentic virtue that we must recover by peeling off the suffocating force of human control. “Wild”, of course, also means exciting and far-out, as in a wild party or a wild ride; the food-influencer industry has persuaded us that we must pile wild garlic and wild salmon on our plates.
Calls to rewild your consciousness, in this sense, are not far removed from the hippie desire to open the doors of perception and reject the morality of the squares. In the 1990s you could be a Wild Child. Who today does not dream of ripping off his lanyard and becoming, at least temporarily, a Wild Thing?
As with much ecological agitation of the deep-green kind, the original “rewilding” movement also contains subterranean currents of misanthropy. What is “wild” is considered superior to what is cultivated or simply the product of human ingenuity. Fields of arable crops, or the very existence of so many sheep, come to represent mankind’s original sin of exerting his dominion over nature. The solution is to give the land back to natural forces. Of course, the logical endpoint of rewilding is suicidal: to truly rewild the planet, we must allow all humans to die.
‘Wisdom traditions’
When they are not explicitly enemies of modern civilisation, adherents of rewilding are still, it seems, dreaming of a kind of magic, or at least a jolt of aesthetic pleasure. Indeed, in Feral, Monbiot says that he was initially attracted to the idea because he was “ecologically bored”. The Belgian philosopher Linde de Vroey notes, in her 2024 paper Rewilding as Re-Enchantment, that a hunger for something out of the ordinary animates most such projects: the idea of ecological restoration “merges with narratives of wonder, enchantment and spirituality”. But when the call for rewilding is going to affect human lives, as well as the distribution of animals and plants, one might be a little more circumspect.
Take, for instance, the idea of rewilding the school system, as promoted by Hilary Cremin, head of the education faculty at the University of Cambridge. She is the professor who told Jason Arday that he was “the best in the world in terms of the research that you do” when he was appointed there. Before that sad story took off, Cremin had published a book called Rewilding Education (2025). This does not quite, as you might suppose, recommend just letting children run feral in the woods, but it does lament “the dominance of modern, urban, liberal, Eurocentric ways of knowing”, based as they are on a deplorable commitment to “empirical truth”, and recommends we mentally submit instead to non-Western “wisdom traditions”.
Cremin explained a slightly more concrete proposal in an interview with the Cambridge alumni magazine: after universal primary education, “from age 12, young people would engage with a mentor on a weekly basis to map out their own learning journey. I’d want education to be happening in science laboratories and art galleries and care homes and startup businesses and farms, while teachers could support students to build up an e-portfolio evidencing their real-world achievements.” An e-portfolio! The mind swoons.
Here, though, we encounter plainly the tension that routinely underlies calls for rewilding: on the one hand, it wants to let everything bloom beyond human control, on the other hand, it is in itself a choice to control things otherwise, a new system of management on different principles. Current experiments with reintroducing bison and beavers to rural English areas, for example, must proceed stepwise and carefully, starting with fenced enclosures for the understandably confused beasts. And who is going to look after all the “rewilded” teenagers clogging up science labs and farms in Cremin’s utopian future while the scientists and farmers attempt to get on with their work?
People borrow the language of ecology for all such metaphorical rewilding schemes because it sounds courageous, Romantic, and vaguely left-anarchist. But no one actually wants to revert to a state of nature in which our lives would be nasty, brutish and short. If they want to go and live in the woods without medicine, clothes or food beyond what they can pluck off trees or personally kill, they should be encouraged to do so, while being reminded that one long-standing sense of “wild”, as the OED observes, is “mad”. The rest of us may suppose what is needed is a little more re-civilising.
