What kinds of issues does the global crisis of climate change present to aesthetics, and how will they challenge the field to respond? This paper argues that a new research agenda is needed for aesthetics with respect to global climate change (GCC) and outlines a set of foundational issues which are especially pressing: (1) attention to environments that have been neglected by philosophers, for example, the cryosphere and aerosphere; (2) negative aesthetics of environment, in order to grasp aesthetic experiences, meanings, (...) and dis/values in light of the catastrophic effects of GCC; (3) bringing intergenerational thinking into aesthetics through concepts of temporality and ‘future aesthetics’ (4) understanding the relationship between aesthetic and ethical values as they arise in regard to GCC. (shrink)

This dissertation is based around conceptual conflicts introduced by the notion of rewilding and the challenges rewilding poses to place and cultural landscapes. Rewilding is a recent conservation strategy interested in the return of wilder, less human-managed environments. Often presented as an antidote to increasingly homogenized, organized, and managed environments, rewilding deliberately opens up space for the return of wild nature, typically by removing human elements that have obstructed or diminished its free reign or by reintroducing locally extinct species to (...) re-activate trophic cascades. There is, however, an increasing awareness that rewilding in many places will threaten cultural landscapes that are prized for their human meanings and histories. This dissertation does not attempt to resolve this conflict but instead takes a hermeneutic interest in it and tries to understand better what is at stake in such a conflict. This is attempted by means of a hermeneutic detour through the concepts of place and of wilderness, and ultimately the dissertation argues that instead of understanding rewilding simply as undermining notions of place, we should understand rewilding itself as placemaking. This conceptual work is informed by actual cases of rewilding and an examination of the conflicts arising out of the various modes of placemaking rewilding performs. Three modes of placemaking are demonstrated: wilderness placemaking, experimental placemaking, and place-regenerative placemaking. Taken in total, these reveal ways in which rewilding confronts us with relations with nonhuman others and with questions of belonging and not belonging that are increasingly at issue. (shrink)

This paper investigates the concept of rewilding by looking at its uses so far and its implementation by Rewilding Europe, one of the leading rewilding organizations today. Juxtaposing theory with...

In this paper, I (1) offer a general introduction of rewilding and (2) situate the concept in environmental philosophy. In the first part of the paper, I work from definitions and typologies of rewilding that have been put forth in the academic literature. To these, I add secondary notions of rewilding from outside the scientific literature that are pertinent to the meanings and motivations of rewilding beyond its use in a scientific context. I defend the continued use of rewilding as (...) a single term, despite its seemingly disparate usages, and I advance a clustered concept of eight overlapping characteristics as a way to conceptualise these. I argue that this breadth helps in understanding the wider interest in rewilding as an emerging environmental phenomenon. In the paper's second part, I turn to three key issues in environmental philosophy in order to connect rewilding with the historic themes of: (1) the exclusion of humans from wild or wilderness places, (2) the ontological purity of wilderness areas through their non-human origins and history, and (3) cultural landscapes and notions of place. I suggest that rewilding carries on some of the main themes of the wilderness debate, but considering rewilding broadly allows tensions and novel questions to manifest that are important to how rewilding should be discussed and understood going forward. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of ethics in addressing aspects of ecological restoration in culturally-saturated landscapes. Do we have the ethical tools to respond to the complex questions that restoration poses? We can see valued landscapes, such as the English Lake District, as culturally rich or as ecologically denuded. This paper will juxtapose the demands of retaining rich cultural narratives and those of rewilding (which would allow for greater self-sustaining biological diversity and space for unrestrained nature). Using the ethical theory (...) of responsive cohesion, this paper will explore the cultural narrative vs wildness question in the context of the English Lake District. (shrink)

This paper describes the disorienting aesthetics of some environments that are characteristic of the Anthropocene. We refer to these environments as ‘mashed-up’ and present three dimensions – phenomenological, epistemological and narrative – of the aesthetic disorientation they can trigger. We then advance the suggestion that a rich, nuanced and meaningful aesthetic experience of mashed-up Anthropocene environments (MAEs) calls for a mode of appreciation grounded on performative practices of aesthetic familiarisation with particular MAEs and entities and processes thereof. Familiarisation with MAEs, (...) we further note, can have disorienting codas of its own. It can reveal and highlight, rather than eliminate or alleviate, the solid strangeness of Earth even in the systemically humanised world of the Anthropocene, and it can expose and tie at least some of our agency, identity and sources of meaning in life to the same unstable evolvability of particular MAEs. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed growing concerns about how we should conduct conservation activities in a world of human-altered biophysical conditions. The ‘novel ecosystems’ perspective has emerged as a way to meet this challenge. Yet its focus on accepting ‘new natures’ as the ‘new normal’ has drawn much criticism from those wedded to conventional forms of conservation, such as ‘ecological restoration’. This paper: 1) provides a much needed review of this dispute; 2) formulates and deploys an original analytical framework, which draws (...) on Thomas Kuhn's ‘theoretical history’ of science and Charles Taylor's moral philosophy to extricate the entangled moral and material ontologies of nature which conflate facts with values in the world-building activities of disputants; and 3) identifies and examines the processes underlying these world-building activities. The paper closes by offering an initial suggestion on how to explore options for resolving this highly contentious debate. (shrink)

There are many different forms and interpretations of rewilding: the concept and its practice vary from country to country, with distinct interpretations according to its geographical location. Despite the term rewilding having been present in the lexicon for three decades, the concept of rewilding in England has experienced a prolonged developmental stage. This paper argues that a unique form of English rewilding is now emerging, which is distinct from rewilding in other parts of the world. Compared to other locations rewilding (...) in England operates at smaller spatial scales; its ambitions to increase biodiversity, restore ecosystem functioning and increase natural autonomy are somewhat curtailed; it involves higher levels of human intervention; and, perhaps most tellingly of all, it goes by another name – ‘wilding’, ‘wild’ or ‘wilder’ with little mention of the much-maligned prefix ‘re’. This conclusion has been developed following a comparative case study of two English ‘rewilding’ sites (the Avalon Marshes and Wild Ennerdale) involving 49 semi-structured interviews: twelve expert interviews and nineteen and eighteen stakeholder/practitioner interviews at the Avalon Mashes and Wild Ennerdale respectively. (shrink)

This paper is about rewilding and the tensions it involves. Rewilding is a relatively novel approach to nature conservation, which seeks to be proactive and ambitious in the face of continuing environmental decline. Whilst definitions of rewilding place a strong emphasis on non-human agency, it is an inescapably human aspiration resulting in a range of social conflicts. The paper focuses on the case study of the Cambrian Wildwood project in Mid Wales (UK), evaluating the ways in which debate and strategic (...) action to advance rewilding is proceeding, assessing the extent to which compromise and learning has occurred amongst advocates. As such, we provide an important addition to the field, by detailing how conflicts play out over time and how actors’ positioning and approach shifts, and why. In this case, tempers have flared around the threat that rewilding is seen to pose to resident farming communities. Tensions discussed include the differing social constructions of landscape and nature involved; the distribution of impacts on different stakeholders; and the relative power of different actors to make decisions and gain representation. Responding to these, the paper outlines how rewilding advocates have sought to advance a more peopled and culturally responsive vision, which seeks to champion sustainable livelihood strategies. The changes in approach detailed demonstrate a reflexive stance from rewilders, which suggests that learning and adaptation can occur. Nonetheless, caution is expressed regarding the extent to which rewilding can truly advance inclusive opportunities for rural change, given a continued return amongst stakeholders to exclusionary narratives of belonging and authenticity, suggesting substantive difficulty in moving beyond longstanding concerns over identity and the re-imagination of place. Rewilding, it would seem, is about who we think we are and how we co-constitute our sense of self. We, therefore, close by arguing that tactics and politicking can only have so much bearing, tensions over rewilding are unavoidably emotional. (shrink)

The key role that animals play in our aesthetic appreciation of the natural world has only gradually been highlighted in discussions in environmental aesthetics. In this article I make use of the phenomenological notion of ‘perceptual sense’ as developed by Merleau-Ponty to argue that open-ended expressive-responsive movement is the primary aesthetic ground for our appreciation of animals. It is through their movement that the array of qualities we admire in animals are manifest qua animal qualities. Against functionalist and formalist accounts, (...) I defend and develop an account of expressive-responsive movement as the primary perceptual sense of animals. I go on to suggest that the primacy of movement in the aesthetic appreciation of animals is also the primary sense of animal ‘wildness’, and that a key part of the rewilding paradigm should be the development of such appreciation. (shrink)

As incoming Editor and Deputy Editor we describe our impression of the current situation that those committed to understanding and upholding environmental values find themselves in. We consider some of the factors that make enviornmental concern difficult to maintain, including conditions that affect us as academics, publishers, global citizens and activists. We describe some of the emerging trends that have appeared in Environmental Values in recent years, in philosophy, ecological economics, critical social science and widening interdisciplinarity in the environmental humanities. (...) We highlight the journal's commitment to engaged, plural and open investigation of environmental values and consider what we might expect and hope for in the coming years. (shrink)

Rewilding is positioned as ‘post’-conservation through its emphasis on unleashing the autonomy of natural processes. In this paper, we argue that the autonomy of nature rhetoric in rewilding is challenged by human interventions. Instead of joining critique toward the ‘managed wilderness’ approach of rewilding, however, we examine the injustices this entails for keystone species. Reintroduction case studies demonstrate how arbitrary standards for wildness are imposed on these animals as they do their assigned duty to rehabilitate ecosystems. These ‘Goldilocks’ standards are (...) predicated on aesthetic values that sanction interventions inconsistent with the premise of animal sovereignty. These include culling, relocations and sterilizations of animals that demonstrate the kind of autonomy championed in rewilding rhetoric. Drawing from Donaldson and Kymlicka’s framework for political animal categories, we conclude by arguing that rewilding needs to re-position itself in one of two ways. Either it should align itself more closely to mainstream conservation and embrace full animal sovereignty without Goldilocks conditions, or it should commit to taking full responsibility for reintroduced animals, including supplementary feeding and care. (shrink)