IELTS Academic Reading passage: The Case for Rewilding

The Case for Rewilding

A. Rewilding is a word that has travelled a long way in thirty years. It emerged in North America in the 1990s among biologists who argued that protecting nature meant more than fencing off what remained of it: large areas should be connected, and the animals that shape them, above all the big predators and grazers, should be brought back. In Europe the term has come to describe something broader and more modest, a way of managing land by managing it less. Instead of maintaining a landscape in a chosen state, cutting, draining, mowing and stocking it to keep a particular set of species in place, a rewilded site allows natural processes to decide what grows where. It is not the same as neglect, and it is not a return to some imagined past; supporters describe it as giving nature the lead and accepting the result, whatever it turns out to be.

B. Two sites did more than any others to make the idea concrete. Oostvaardersplassen, in the Netherlands, is a stretch of land reclaimed from the sea in 1968 and never built on. From the 1980s it was stocked with hardy cattle, ponies and red deer and left largely to itself, and within a few years it held one of the largest concentrations of breeding birds in the country. The second is Knepp, an estate in West Sussex whose heavy clay soils had made arable farming unprofitable. In 2001 its owners took the land out of production, removed the internal fences and introduced free-roaming cattle, pigs and ponies. Scrub spread where crops had been, and with it came species that were vanishing elsewhere in Britain: nightingales, turtle doves and the purple emperor butterfly, none of which had been planted, released or planned.

C. The reason animals matter so much to rewilders is that a few of them alter everything around them. The most famous case is the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the United States in 1995. The story usually told is that the wolves changed the behaviour of the elk, which stopped lingering on open river banks; willows and aspens recovered, beavers returned to build dams in the regrowth, and the rivers themselves changed course. Ecologists call this a trophic cascade, an effect that runs down the food chain from the top. In Britain the animal of choice is the beaver, absent for four centuries and reintroduced on trial in Scotland in 2009. A beaver does not eat anything of value to farmers, but its dams hold back water after heavy rain, create pools and wetlands, and slow the flow of a river in ways that engineers spend millions trying to reproduce.

D. Not everyone is persuaded. Farmers point out that land taken out of production still has to feed people, and that food grown elsewhere carries its own environmental cost. Communities near proposed sites worry about predators, about flooding from beaver dams, and about the loss of landscapes that were made by people and that only survive if people keep making them: a flower-rich hay meadow, for instance, disappears within a decade if nobody cuts it. There is a social objection too. Rewilding in Britain has largely been the work of wealthy landowners with the means to forgo an income, which has led critics to describe it as a hobby for the rich imposed on the rural poor. And the Dutch experiment supplied a warning of its own. In the hard winter of 2018 thousands of animals at Oostvaardersplassen starved in full public view, because there were no predators to keep their numbers down and no fences to let them move on; after protests, the authorities began culling the herds.

E. What does the evidence show? Less, so far, than either side claims. The Yellowstone story has been challenged by researchers who find that the recovery of the willows owes as much to changes in rainfall and to the hunting of elk outside the park as to the wolves, and that the neat chain of cause and effect has run ahead of the data. The positive results from Knepp are real but come from a single estate that is monitored more closely than almost any farm in the country. Two limits recur. The first is scale: a small site cannot hold a predator, and a species will only return if it survives somewhere within reach. The second is time. Most rewilding projects are less than twenty years old, and the processes they hope to restore, the growth of a wood or the settling of a river, take longer than that to run their course. The measurable gains, in stored carbon, in reduced flooding and in the number of species present, are encouraging, but the long-term studies that would settle the question have barely begun.

F. The practical question, then, is not whether rewilding works but where it belongs. Governments across Europe are moving towards paying farmers for public goods, clean water, flood protection and wildlife, rather than for output alone, and on poor land that has never paid its way the numbers may favour letting go. On productive soil they do not, and nobody serious proposes rewilding the wheat belt. The projects that have lasted share two features: they were large enough for natural processes to operate, and they were agreed with the people living nearby rather than announced to them. Rewilding, on this view, is one tool among several, valuable on the margins of farmed country and at its edges, and dependent for its future on consent as much as on ecology.