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Rewilding: who – what – where?

Round about in Denmark and other parts of Europe, rewilding projects are mushrooming. They involve setting predators and large graminivorous animals free in the wild. But what really is the idea behind this – and was the wolf found in Thy one of the projects? Get the answers here.

2013.06.06 | rasmus rørbæk

[Translate to English:] Elefanter i Danmark er ikke et urealistisk scenarie, hvis man spørger rewilding-tilhængere.

A wolf was found in Thy in 2012, and this kicked off a popular debate that questioned whether we as a society will – and can – have that kind of animal in our vicinity in Denmark. Critical voices said that the animal could not have turned up on its own, and that it must have been released into the countryside by people.

One of those who came under suspicion in the heated atmosphere is Professor Jens-Christian Svenning, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University. For a number of years, he has been working with rewilding, and he is one of the key experts currently assisting Danish decision-makers on issues regarding nature management. The Newsroom editorial team made an appointment with the professor to clarify what rewilding is basically all about.

Jens-Christian Svenning: Were you the one who released a wolf in Denmark?

“No. The wolf turned up on its own as part of natural immigration from Germany. We’d actually been waiting for it to arrive, just as we can see wild boars are starting to do. The wolf from Thy was not released and is therefore no reflection on rewilding – even though it naturally plays the same ecological role regardless of whether it was released or came of its own accord.

The great idea about rewilding is that it’s a nature management approach aimed at the preservation and restoration of large areas with self-managing wildlife. The large predators and herbivores often play an important role in achieving this, and what’s currently lacking is therefore reintroduced. This means that a wolf could have been released as what’s known as a key species if a political decision had been made.

Rewilding involves an active effort for an interim period so that nature can better manage itself once more afterwards.”

Sorry, but now you sound a bit like a hippie ...

“I can understand that the idea possibly sounds a bit hippie-like on the surface, and it’s perfectly reasonable to ask what we need biodiversity for at all in an industrialised society.

Having said that, however, rewilding is a pragmatic way of getting back nature that can maintain a high level of diversity on its own – in contrast to today, where we often regard nature as something requiring expensive nurturing. Rewilding is based on the acknowledgement that nature should not require management.

Rewilding is thus also an alternative to the traditional focus on statically maintaining the situation that happened to prevail when nature preservation was introduced 100–150 years ago.”

There is no doubt a completely natural explanation for the disappearance of animals like the elephant, bison, rhinoceros, etc?

“No, there isn’t. The current situation is unnatural. It’s largely because of hunting in the past – and not the climate, for example – that Denmark lacks a vast diversity of large wild animals. Fossils of animals such as straight-tusked elephants and rhinoceroses dating from the last interglacial period have been found in our region, where we had forests of spruce, hornbeam and oak, etc., and the climate was virtually the same as today.

It’s rather a question of changing our attitude to nature. Our environment can cope with large animals – but can we?”

Why should we change our attitude – after all, we are here now ...?

“It’s more a question of coexistence aimed at getting a more intact and self-managing wildlife. Do we need to have bison roaming around the island of Bornholm and grazing in the wild? Do the wolves in Thy and Central Jutland do us any good? Can wild boars in Southern Jutland contribute to a stronger countryside? Our current species survived for hundreds of thousands or millions of years without our intervention – and they can still do so if we ensure proper framework conditions. And this is where the large animals play a significant role.

Rewilding works to address possible solutions based on that idea – and research into rewilding works on getting the knowledge base in place. There are lots of open questions, such as the habitat requirements of the large animals and their actual significance in the ecosystems. That’s what we’re working on to get a better understanding.”

 


Rewilding means making something wild again. Following the increased environmental awareness in the 1970s and 1980s, a movement arose to restore nature in our part of the world. The concept rewilding comes from Dave Foreman, an American who proposed this thought in about 1990: a method to preserve intact, functional ecosystems and stem biodiversity loss.

The idea has subsequently become an area of international research in which biologists all over the world study correlations between species and their impact on nature, with a focus on the large species of animals that have disappeared in many places.

A number of initiatives have been launched here in Denmark – and elsewhere in Europe – as part of political measures to try and restore balance in the Danish countryside. In 1999, for example, the beaver was reintroduced in the wilderness in Denmark, and the European bison was recently released on the island of Bornholm.

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