Rewilding as an expression of love: Philosophical perspectives on human engagement

Abstract

Rewilding is a radical approach to environmental restoration that significantly shifts the emphasis away from ideas of wilderness as separated from human existence and all that goes with such a damaging nature-culture dualism, including in particular, the temporal dislocation of deep time and the time of human civilisation. The progress of rewilding towards achieving its aims has become the subject of review in terms of whether such programmes are becoming mainstreamed, and, if so, whether this undermines rewilding’s potential to provide a new ethical engagement with nature that ends our estrangement and recognises how we can live with wildness understood as a radical and autonomous other. Drawing on Derrida’s deconstruction, this chapter seeks to introduce philosophical perspectives on the issues arising out of human engagement with rewilding: Matthias Fritsch’s notion of a double turn-taking with the earth as central to a democracy that is ethically responsible to future generations; and Ted Toadvine’s deconstruction of environmental crisis narratives as apocalyptic and reflecting the anxieties of the present, while also obscuring death as in life. It is through such deconstruction of our historically conditioned ways of understanding that rewilding’s radical aspect is illuminated, as is our way forward in dealing with the inevitable tensions that arise in the implementation of such programs.