introduction to the theme issue of Environmental Values on Rewilding in cultural layered landscapes. Rewilding projects, especially in culturally saturated landscapes, are often being opposed by those who deeply care about the old cultural landscapes (for cultural or ecological reasons). Indeed, some proponents of rewilding today fall back on the language that was developed by the early proponents of wilderness preservation, starting off from an opposition between wild nature and culture, and claiming that nature needs to be protected against human (...) domination, while also claiming the importance of wild nature as an antidote to the historical dominance that humans have had over the natural world. However, seeing cultural landscapes merely as ‘disturbed’ by humans fails to do justice to the way that human history and these landscapes are intimately intertwined. Therefore, other rewilding advocates feel that rewilding in cultural landscapes requires a fundamentally different approach. Rather than seeking to restore a situation of the past, for them, rewilding is fundamentally oriented towards the future and seeks to introduce wildness back into society. Despite these attempts to reconcile rewilding with concerns over landscape history, cultural identity and cultural heritage, clear tensions remain. The papers in this theme issue attempt to find connections between different perspectives on landscape and nature protection and contribute to the ongoing debate about the meaning and value of wildness and history in layered cultural landscapes. (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)