How to Rewild
Learn how to bring nature back to your land, no matter how big or small it is. Discover step by step guides to rewilding your garden, field, farm or town.
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How we think About Rewilding
How to Rewild is rewilding, simplified, so here’s a simple explanation of what rewilding means to us…
How is Rewilding Different?
Rewilding is changing the way we think about nature. Over the 20th century, biodiversity was decimated while conservationists desperately tried to protect remaining refuges. This approach helped to stop some species from going completely extinct, but rewilding isn’t about halting the declines – it’s about reversing the trend completely.
Rewilders create new habitats and restore old ones, then connect them up across landscapes with wildlife corridors. Rather than protecting what is there, we work out what isn’t – what has been lost? Then we reintroduce these species, whether they’re wildflowers, trees, herbivores or carnivores. Rewilding is a process of restoring systems, rather than protecting them – we focus on building back an ecosystem’s natural processes and allowing it to begin healing itself.
Rewilding is About People and Nature
But the process isn’t just focused on nature, as people are a crucial part of modern landscapes. We are not only stewards, but ecosystem engineers ourselves, and have been for many tens of thousands of years, with our activities shaping the landscape and ecology – forestry, farming, hunting. We still need to do this, not just for our own sake, but to create habitats which will sustain our environment and economy, reducing flooding and wildfire risk, improving mental health and farm productivity, tackling climate change.
Rewilding and Regenerative Agriculture
Regenerative farming and rewilding blend into one-another – they’re part of the same spectrum of nature-friendly land management techniques. Orchards are an abundant home which replicate our ancient wood pasture landscapes. Mob grazing of cattle mimics the activity found in a natural grassland ecosystem. Coppicing of trees, and forestry in general replicates the behaviour of large herbivores lost from our landscape like the straight-tusked elephant and bison. Hunting of deer and population management of crows and foxes reduces their numbers to the natural carrying capacity that our ecosystems can actually support.
Our nature is out of balance, but there is a solution, and it is both cost-effective and inclusive. Rewilding and regenerative agriculture are two sides of the same coin. Rewilders and farmers can work together to create a sustainable landscape.
– Chris D’Agorne, Founder of How to Rewild
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