Rewilding

Abstract

This chapter starts by analysing the changing views on the relationship between humans and nature. Opposing views on the return of iconic wild animals like wolves express this. Some celebrate their return as part of successful rewilding policies, but others oppose them as threatening their rural way of life. It analyses their arguments as to why the return of the wolf is valued in cosmopolitan identity discourses but is opposed and devalued in parochial identity discourses. Then attention shifts to the rewilding of agricultural lands by studying the resistance against the flooding of a polder on the Dutch-Belgian border to rewild this area to expand a nature reserve. The last section of this chapter analyses the rewilding of the Dutch region De Peel. It was a marshy scrubland cultivated into a modern agricultural area dominated by industrial livestock farming. It is currently transformed again through the extensification of farming and rewilding and the transformation of some of its villages to accommodate the housing needs of people working in the Eindhoven metropolitan region. It shows how many polarisations about iconic places discussed in the different chapters of this book can reinforce each other.