Rewilding the World by Caroline Fraser: book review

Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution (2014) is about the importance of biogeography, the biodiversity of nature, and the implications of biodiversity loss.

It is about the environment, climate change, and why a diversity of animal and plant species matter: ‘Of the 45,000 species evaluated in the 2008 Red List, issued by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, 17,000, or nearly forty percent, may vanish’ by 2050. What about the subspecies of species? Fraser answers the question: Do we have to save every subspecies? And the question: Why are predators so important?’ – this includes foxes, wolves, coyotes, bears, jackals, lions, sharks, and crocodiles.

Fraser highlights Michael Soule’s 1990 paper on complementary goals for continental conservation: cores, corridors, and carnivores. For example, core protected areas; corridors for animals to roam freely, migrate, and disperse; and carnivores (meat-eating predators) to maintain healthy ecosystems because they regulate other predators and prey.

Rewilding – a biodiversity campaign (since the 1990s) – aims to restore species by protecting and restoring habitats, creating migration corridors, and promoting peace between people and predators. It’s about equilibrium in nature.

Unlike environmental campaigns that oppose dams, construction, drilling and so one, rewilding focuses on the positive – a connectivity of animals with their own environment, and a connectivity between humans and animals.

Fraser discusses the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative (Y2Y), launched in 1997, to forge a single wildlife corridor connecting isolated parks, national forests, and some of the largest roadless areas left in America. She discusses the Panther Path in South America, launched in 1994, a corridor for the wild cat; the European Green Belt established in the 1990s replacing the barbed wire of the former Iron Curtain with nature reserves; the wildlife corridors in Africa (an Africa without fences) and the trans-frontier Peace Parks; and Nepal’s Terai Arc Landscape project to reconnect a ‘green necklace’ for the Bengal tiger, one-horned rhinoceros and Asian elephant – to name a few mentioned.

It includes the conservancy movement, communities and poverty, rangelands, and sustainable conservation.

This is a fascinating comprehensive exploration of the rewilding philosophy. With example after example, Caroline Fraser presents a landscape of biodiversity conservation from grassroots to governmental levels, and globally from Africa to Asia to Australia, reinforcing the fact that rewilding is about making connections. Rewilding also connects science with social movements that realign human behaviour with the environment.

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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