Hollywood backing for Scotland to become a 'rewilding nation' - but what does rewilding actually mean?

Rewilding as a movement has captured the hearts and minds of people all over the world.

It has reached the stars of Hollywood, with Succession actor and Scotland native Brian Cox being the latest to back his motherland in becoming the first “rewilding nation” this week.

Sebastian Sonnen/Getty Images

It comes after Leonardo DiCaprio announced his support for the campaign, launched by the country’s rewilding groups. But what does ‘rewilding’ mean to those behind nature restoration and conservation in 2024.

The term was coined in the 1990s and first entered the Oxford Dictionary in 2010. Its definition - the large-scale management of an eco-system to reinstate natural processes and reduce human intervention so that ultimately 'nature can take care of itself'.

It was then popularised following the publication of George Monbiot’s book Feral in 2013. Given the term is relatively new in the English language, there’s perhaps no surprise it has various meanings for various people.

So what do we mean by a “rewilding nation”?

According to the Scottish Rewilding Alliance (SRA), a collaboration of 20 groups that campaigned for the status, it involves reaching 30 per cent of land and seas restored to nature by 2030. SRA figures suggest only 2 per cent of Scotland is currently rewilded.

Kevin Cumming, deputy convenor of the SRA, said: “This is about choice and opportunity. Declaring Scotland the world’s first rewilding nation would be a powerful statement of intent that we are no longer willing to be one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries – but instead want to be a world leader in nature restoration.

“It's a bold, ambitious and positive vision for a Scotland rich in wildlife and healthy habitats, and full of vibrant communities. We want to see nature’s restoration supporting local enterprises and re-peopling, helping people of all ages to find rewarding jobs, and with nature-rich landscapes accessible to everyone and allowing people to connect with the natural world.”

Rewilding campaigners told The Scotsman “the conversation has progressed from just talking about the wolves and the bears”.

Rewilding Britain claimed there has been a 412 per cent increase in jobs since rewilding began across Scottish land. “These remarkable job creation figures show how rewilding can turbocharge social and economic benefits for people, while offering hope for reversing biodiversity loss and tackling climate breakdown,” added Mr Cumming.

“This is yet another powerful illustration of why the Scottish Government should declare Scotland a rewilding nation.”

While there is evidence of job creation and promise for more jobs ahead with vibrant communities, there remains uncertainty and confusion among some of those living in areas directly impacted by the changes.

Vibrant communities?

Peter Cairns, co-founder and executive director of rewilding charity Scotland: The Big Picture. | Picture: Debbie_Borthwick

The Last Keeper, a documentary, released last year, featuring those from the gamekeeping community, land owners and big names in Scotland’s rewilding sector, including Peter Cairns of Scotland the Big Picture and Nigel Frazer of Trees for Life, showed up a lack of clarity as to what rewilding really means.

Interviews with Mr Frazer and former MSP and land campaigner Andy Wightman both point to how this uncertainty has stirred unnecessary controversy and prevented collaborative conversations from happening.

On releasing the Scottish Government’s Biodiversity Strategy alongside its first Delivery Plan, acting climate minister Dr Alasdair Allan said: “The whole of society has a role to play, but especially the stewards of our land, rivers, lochs and seas such as farmers, gamekeepers and fishers, who have the knowledge and skills to drive the transformation that is needed.”

These stewards of the land, however, have previously claimed to be at risk due to rewilding projects which, in the more extreme cases, have been described as prompting “carbon clearances”.

Protests were staged in the Cairngorms National Park where rural workers said they believed rewilding plans for the park threatened their jobs and some endangered species.

At the time, gamekeeper Leslie George, of the Grampian Moorland Group, said: “No one has seen any plan from the park’s board as to how they intend to replace lost jobs in our sector. We don’t feel the park is working for the people of the land any more. People in authority are pushing agendas, not the residents. Game and farming sectors are being singled out.”

Trees?

But while the uncertainty of the term rewilding appears to be impacting the very people the Scottish Government wants to lean on to support its biodiversity aims, ecologists have also questioned the foundational beliefs on which rewilding is built - the need for more trees.

Peat expert and ecologist Dr James Fenton points to evidence that some of the treeless upland landscapes are largely the results of a natural evolution in upland soil function, not because they were removed.

He explains that after the last Ice Age, soils were nutrient rich [mesocratic] and the climate was warm, making the post glacial uplands ideal for abundant tree growth.

Around 8,000 years ago, he said conditions on Scotland’s uplands became wetter and colder, and their soils became acid and depleted of nutrients [oligocratic], causing woodland fragmentation and eventual disappearance around 5,000 years ago. Dr Fenton suggests this is the primary reason for their treeless state and not because humans cut all the trees down.

He said: “Rewilding in the sense of increasing tree cover is destroying the naturalness of one of the wildest areas remaining in Europe."

Ian Coghill, a conservationist and author of Moorland Matters | Supplied

His comments were echoed by Ian Coghill, a conservationist and author of Moorland Matters.

He said the heather moors were probably the single largest contribution the UK makes to global biodiversity, and, in the name of rewilding, “we’re going to wreck them”.

Speaking to The Scotsman, he said: “What’s going on in Scotland is probably one of the most bizarre things I have seen in my life. You have a landscape, which is one of the rarest in the world - heather moorland. By British standards, you have vast amounts of it.

“And what Scottish Government and rewilders is doing with that is massacring the local wildlife in the form of deer, which are an indigenous species that have shared the landscape with humans since the Ice Age, and planting trees all over it.”

Duncan Orr-Ewing, head of land and species management at RSPB Scotland, however, defended the need for more tree planting.

In response to questions over planting on heather moorland, he said: “We need to recreate more native woodland, provided it’s sensitively planned. You can accommodate other features like ground nesting birds, the curlew for example, providing good areas for curlew are not planted.

“But there’s much more scope for a considerable amount of more planting. We also prefer natural regeneration through managing deer populations reducing grazing pressure. Once the vegetation is restored to a more natural state, you can relax the deer pressure.

He said the charity does not use the term “rewilding”, but rather “eco-system restoration” because “the land owned and run by the RSPB Scotland is managed by humans”.

What’s the plan?

Another question mark conservationists have over rewilding is ‘what is the end goal?’

Mr Coghill said: “If you want to achieve an end, you need to specify what that end is and then come up with a plan to achieve it.

“We’re facing difficult decisions. We need to do something about the species declines. If you look at the 30/30 targets, rewilders won’t make it at all with no serious plan. What do you want? Curlews? Crossbills? They don’t live in the same place.

“It’s great that DiCaprio and Cox like it, but what are they really going to do about curlew? Rewilding is the answer to very little.

“If you want to make a change over most of the land surface of the UK, you need to talk to the people and make plans with the people who own most of the surface of the UK - landowners and farmers. They are the key to solving the problem.”

Mr Coghill pointed to the growth of 'farmer clusters' in England. They are designed to start life at a bottom-up, farmer level, under the guidance of a lead farmer. They devise their own conservation plans, helped by their own chosen conservation advisors, whom they already know and trust.

Farmer clusters exist in Scotland, but those who are involved, including Fred Swift of the West Loch Ness Farm Cluster, said the Scottish Government was “dragging its heels” when it comes to funding and support.

“Farmer clusters are already working,” Mr Coghill said. “It is already turning chronic declines into steady, sustainable recovery for many species of farmland birds, and the plants and insects they rely on.”

Fred Swift and Danny O'Brien working on a great crested newt translocation project as part of the West Loch Ness Farm Cluster | (pic: Danny O'Brien)

In a shock announcement this week, however, the grants promised to farmers in England for planting hedges and cleaning up waterways have been frozen by the government. The capital grants scheme, which was opened by the government to allow farmers to invest in infrastructure such as slurry storage so animal excrement does not go into rivers, has been abruptly paused.

Monbiot said the move has “left farmers high and dry” and is “deeply unfair and highly destructive”.

Posting on X, the rewilding campaigner said: “Two obvious questions: What is the government playing at? Where are the big environmental NGOs who asked for this transition, but are now failing to defend it? Why are they not raising hell about this betrayal?”

Mr Coghill argued the millions of pounds going into the conservation sector should be directed to farmers to improve water systems and biodiversity alongside food production.

“Everyone wants free range eggs on demand,” Mr Coghill said. “That comes with a consequence. We need to spend the money to help with those consequences. Rewilding isn’t going to solve that.”

What about biodiversity that’s already there?

Rory Kennedy, of the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust | Supplied

Rory Kennedy, from the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, said he feels more “middle ground” when it comes rewilding, with Scotland providing vast spaces that can enable exploring projects, including certain species introduction.

“I don’t always agree with it, but we have the space to explore,” he said. But he circled back to the issue of “how do we define rewilding?”

“I think the problem is rewilders can’t agree on what rewilding really means,” he said. “I always take the principle that to be rewilded, it has to be a self-sustaining eco-system.

“Some of these actors who back it don’t know what they’re talking about. They think ‘plant it all with trees and there it is’. It’s not. What you might have done is reduced the biodiversity from what you had before.

“For example, if you look at moorland, it’s wishful thinking that rewilders think by planting loads of trees and getting rid of management, human involvement, that nature will take care of itself. Look at the distortions we have. We have the second highest density of foxes in Europe, for example.

“Also all these rewilding calls are based on human calls. And if you’re having to obliterate our largest herbivore to achieve it - is that natural?

“You might benefit woodland species, but are those woodland species at risk? There’s a lot of booklets from these corporates with a picture of a red squirrel or something.

“But what are the losses from these projects? The existing biodiversity of what’s already there is sometimes rarer of what they are replacing. I think that’s often forgotten about.

“I think what we need to do, if we decide we want a ‘rewilding nation’, it’s not about grabbing every bit of land to rewild where you get these net losses because there’s something there already.”

He said there needed to be a plan on a national level, showing where there were chances of connectivity between projects.

Mr Kennedy added: “A true rewilder who wants to achieve rewilding will work with anyone. We need to remember that some of the first rewilders were the shooting movement. They wanted to have tree cover, so they planted copses. We need connectivity.

“You can pick some really good individual site examples. But we need to come up with a strategic level where we want rewilding and why.

“Just doing it on a piecemeal basis is people trying to virtue signal or people making money in carbon markets. It’s not achieving what the potential could be with rewilding.”

State of Nature

The push for a “rewilding nation” is built on Scotland being regularly referenced as near the bottom of the world biodiversity league following the State of Nature report.

In the rankings, Brazil with mountains, tropical rainforest, grassy plains, the largest river system in the world and an extensive coast line came top of the list.

The UK was ranked 142nd.

Mr Coghill said it was “fatuous” to compare “a vast tropical country with a little island on the Atlantic coast of Europe”. A more meaningful comparison would be with other European countries, he said, with the nearest to the top being Spain at 74th and France at 77th.

“They are part of the immense land mass of Europe and Asia, from which we were separated at the end of the last Ice Age,” he said. “This simple fact of geological life largely prevented species that cannot cross the sea from reaching the UK without human intervention.

“If we take just a couple of groups of animals, the effect of these factors is clear. We have 20 species of reptiles and amphibians, Spain has 114. That's not because we have lost 94 species. They were never here in the first place.

“But as interesting, is the fact that lots of European countries have less biodiversity than we do. Poland, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Hungary, Netherlands, Slovak Republic, Czech Republic, Denmark, Belgium, Ireland, Finland, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, are all lower down the scale than the UK. Interestingly, many of these countries have the 'iconic keystone species' that the rewilders obsess about. Some have the lot - wolves, lynx, bears, beavers and bison, others just a selection, but they all have less biodiversity than the UK.

“Norway is 145th because it's where it is, cold, and covered in conifers, not because it is worse than Spain at conserving it's biodiversity.”

Is there a plan?

Next week, rewilders are presenting their “pathway for a rewilding nation” to the Scottish Government.

The SRA said it “includes action to empower and engage communities, key legislation, and specific recommendations to rewild at scale, including in our protected landscapes and seascapes”.

It seems like progress towards a better plan, and a chance to get the rewilding script right now that Hollywood is involved.