Sir, – In asking “how has [nature] restoration become a dirty word in many quarters?”, Paddy Woodworth poses an important question on the reasons behind vehement opposition to proposed solutions to the nature crisis (“The critical distinction between ‘nature restoration’ and ‘rewilding’”, Environment, August 17th).
In a way, he answers the question well in pinpointing the agri-business lobbies, political conservatives and “sinister far-right actors” that are spreading fear and disinformation in order to maintain the status quo, for financial reasons or for simple electoral advantage.
Either way, it is a problem of power structures that have been captured by vested interests working against the common good.
However, Paddy Woodworth is wrong to suggest that discussion of rewilding has assisted this phenomenon or that rewilding is merely a “problematic rhetorical notion”. Although newer than “ecological restoration” as a field of research, it is now firmly established in the scientific literature and has been accepted as a technique for nature recovery by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the leading global authority in this area. That discussion of rewilding can be antagonistic to some is not in doubt, however the discussion on the Nature Restoration Law (the text of which had no mention of rewilding) shows how the terminology used by ecologists in this debate has little to do with antagonism felt by some, which is real enough.
New Irish citizens: ‘I hear the racist and xenophobic slurs on the streets. Everything is blamed on immigrants’
Jack Reynor: ‘We were in two minds between eloping or going the whole hog but we got married in Wicklow with about 220 people’
‘I could have gone to California. At this rate, I probably would have raised about half a billion dollars’
Matt Williams: Take a deep breath and see how Sam Prendergast copes with big Fiji test
Debating the differences between ecological restoration and rewilding, and in truth these are few, is an interesting and important endeavour given the crisis we are in. However, it does not address the reasons why farmers and landowners feel dispossessed and disempowered by an economic and power structure that has systematically devalued their traditions, knowledge and role as custodians of our landscape. Finding new terms, and avoidance of others, for talking about the urgent need to address biodiversity collapse will do little to advance the actions that we know are needed.
Only dismantling the harmful power structures that have led us to this point will do that. – Yours, etc,
PÁDRAIC FOGARTY,
Dublin 15.