[LINK] "Rewilding projects aim to turn back clock on environment"

[rfmcdonald]

The CBC's Anik See has an article up about the idea of rewilding the world, something to be explored in a CBC Ideas documentary tonight.

The human impact of centuries of destruction and manipulation of the landscape to extract resources and build communities is taking its toll on the planet, even in areas still considered "wild." However, a global movement known as "rewilding" is gaining traction, with the goal of returning areas to a more natural state.

"Rewilding is the act of making a place more wild again ... it's taking landscapes and somehow bringing back qualities of wildness that have been lost,” says J.B. MacKinnon, author of The Once and Future World: Nature as it was, as it is, as it could be.

“We've lost these very healthy, abundant, resilient ecosystems we had in the past when ecosystems had all of their components and were in full operating condition,” says MacKinnon. “It’s absolutely critical that we do rewilding, preferably on a global scale. But I think it's also very important for ourselves.”

The question is, what does wild really mean?

One of the reasons we need rewilding, MacKinnon says, is because of “shifting baseline syndrome.” The notion of what is "wild" is often measured against previous reference points or baselines, which themselves may represent significant changes from an even earlier state of wildness.

For example, the state of the natural world that a 40-year old grew up with and uses as his or her reference point to define what is "wild" or "natural" is substantially different from the baseline of the next generation. In the period between those two generations, nature gets degraded further by human influence, but the younger generation views this degraded nature as still being "wild," because it's their reference point.