Re-wilding

Re-wilding is an appealing project: Let's step back from our domination of the world and invite the non-human other, the Wild, to step forward and meet us. It feels like an act of mature self-restraint, humbly acknowledging value beyond current human concerns. Many conservationists work hard to defend, or recreate, wild spaces: checking non-native invaders; reintroducing departed natives from nearby populations; preserving and recreating precious habitats.

I am much in sympathy with this work, but it is not re-wilding. It is gardening. Wise, wonderful, gardening. Gardening which appeals to me morally and politically, and usually aesthetically. But still just gardening. Because the wild is what happens all by itself.

The wild is not any particular species, not even wolves. It's not any particular ecosystem, not even old-growth forest. Wild is the state of being unmanaged. We confuse Wild - the unmanaged, with New or Untouched - the un-interacted-with, which is something quite different. And it's a dangerous mistake.

When we identify wild as untouched-by-humans, it becomes distant and loses relevance to our lives. It subsides into fodder for documentaries - awesome, but not our world.

But unmanaged wildness is an intimate part of our daily lives. It's the familiar buddleia scrub alongside the railway track, moss on your roof and nettles in the park. It the microbes in your body and the pigeon which hops onto the circle line train.

We have set up a false opposition between the everyday things and the marvellous ones. The more we share with each other images of the exceptional, the distant and the fantastical, the more we need to cultivate appreciation of the familiar beauties which are beside us all the time. Let's attend to the wonder of valerian blossoming out of a wall; the sun-warmed skins of a garden harvest; the companionable calling of a skein of geese travelling across the autumn skies, living in a bigger world than most humans, for all our petrol engines.

This small, familiar wild may not have the majesty of virgin rainforest, but it has wonder. And it has something the virgin rainforest doesn't: it has touchability. We can live here and it doesn't crumble. It is our ecosystem. It tells us that we really belong in the world, living alongside other species, doing our human things. And our human things include gardening, doing science and otherwise managing our environment, even making documentaries about the precarious virgin ecosystems that remain.

Maybe, too, if we more clearly experience our inescapable involvement in our own ecosystems, we'll find it easier to find a way to live both joyfully and respectfully in the world.