Rewilding Quotes

“Naysayers at their polite best chided the rewilders for romanticizing the past; at their sniping worst, for tempting a 'Jurassic Park' disaster. To these the rewilders quietly voiced a sad and stinging reply. The most dangerous experiment is already underway. The future most to be feared is the one now dictated by the status quo. In vanquishing our most fearsome beasts from the modern world, we have released worse monsters from the compound. They come in disarmingly meek and insidious forms, in chewing plagues of hoofed beasts and sweeping hordes of rats and cats and second-order predators. They come in the form of denuded seascapes and barren forests, ruled by jellyfish and urchins, killer deer and sociopathic monkeys. They come as haunting demons of the human mind. In conquering the fearsome beasts, the conquerors had unwittingly orphaned themselves.”
― William Stolzenburg, Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators

“In your cultural prison, which inmates wield the power?"
"Ah," I said. "The male inmates. Especially the white male inmates."
"Yes, that's right. But you understand that these white male inmates are indeed inmates and not warders. For all their power and privilege - for all that they lord it over everyone else in the prison - not one of them has a key that will unlock the gate."
"Yes, that's true. Donald Trump can do a lot of things I can't, but he can no more get out of the prison than I can. But what does this have to do with justice?"
"Justice demands that people other than white males have power in the prison."
"Yes, I see. But what are you saying? That this isn't true?"
"True? Of course it's true that males - and, as you say, especially white males - have called the shots inside the prison for thousands of years, perhaps even from the beginning. Of course it's true that this is unjust. And of course it's true that power and wealth within the prison should be equitably redistributed. But it should be noted that what is crucial to your survival as a race is not the redistribution of power and wealth within the prison but rather the destruction of the prison itself.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

“I longed for church to be a place where Mystery is experienced, not explained.”
― Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred

“Methane emissions are lower in biodiverse pasture systems largely because of fumaric acid – a compound that scientists at the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen identified as leading to faster growth and reducing emissions of methane by 70 per cent when added to the diet of lambs. Fumaric acid occurs widely in many plants and herbs of the field and hedgerow, including angelica, common fumitory, shepherd’s purse and bird’s-foot trefoil.”
― Isabella Tree, Wilding

“Purple emperor-watching with Matthew and Neil is not your average butterfly entertainment, ethereal and somewhat effete. Theirs is a raucous, adrenaline-fuelled spectator sport. The emperors themselves seem to play to the crowd. Pugnacious males dart around the crowns of oaks, staking out their territory, jetting about with muscular flicks of their wings, twirling on their own axes, elevating a hundred feet into the air. They are the SAS of butterflies, fit, fearless and chemically armed.”
― Isabella Tree, Wilding

“People often wondered what it was that made her so very compelling. Why she drew people in again and again? It wasn’t her beauty or her talent, though many, including myself, found those impossible to argue. I believe it was because she refused to deny the storm of her. She wasn’t all sunny days and brightness, and she knew it. Most people shy away from their own darkness, but she cast it across the sky without shame and it turns out none of us could resist the raw truth of that.

- for women who harness the storm”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“If you wish to bludgeon badgers or beavers or remove peregrine falcons and hen harrier chicks from their nests, a way can be found. If you wish, on the other hand, to restore fading species for nature conservation purposes, then you have to fill in 90-page documents which will be thoroughly scrutinized eventually and returned to you with a further suite of impossibly complex questions.”
― Derek Gow, Birds, Beasts and Bedlam: Turning My Farm into an Ark for Lost Species

“An attraction to large predators often seems to be associated with misanthropy, racism and the far right.”
― George Monbiot

“Think testosterone,’ says Matthew, ‘multiply it by πr2 and double it. Forget boys locked in boarding schools. They’ve spent ten months as a caterpillar waiting for this. They’ve pupated, they’re mature and they’re desperate. They’re squaddies in the disco on a Saturday night. They’re sailors in port after a nine-month voyage.”
― Isabella Tree, Wilding

“walking in the Cambrian Desert, it sometimes seems impossible to imagine trees returning there, the emptiness stands as an incontestable fact, as if it were a matter of geology, not ecology”
― George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

“Wolves don't need forests, they grow them.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“A common misconception is that rewilding seeks to return land to an idealised previous ecological state. In reality it would never be possible to go back in time to some arbitrarily chosen baseline - and it would be arbitrary, because healthy living systems are always changing naturally over time, even if that's often difficult for us to perceive. The real objective is not to go back to the past, but forward: to complex, vibrant ecosystems that actually work by themselves, and are therefore more resilient in the face of climate breakdown and other shocks coming down the line. As has been said before, the aim of rewilding isn't to turn the ecological clock back in time, but to allow it to actually start ticking again.”
― Eoghan Daltun, An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A Personal Journey into the Magic of Rewilding

“We all share the challenge to enter the abyss, tame our demons, discover our power, and return with the light.”
― Brian S Woods, The Codex Bellum III: The Observer Effect

“Action does not get one to the destination, action IS the destination.”
― Brian S Woods, The Codex Bellum III: The Observer Effect

“There’s talk of them clear-felling the forest; the purists want to return it to indigenous heath, like it would have been in Thomas Hardy’s day… But the pines have been here for so long. They’re as much a part of the landscape now a the old woods are. I know it’s too dark for much life in here, but there’s buzzrds, they nest here every year, and foxes, badgers, woodcock, and sloe worms and adders in the heath at the edge and in the clearings. Where will the buzzards go? It’s their home.”
― Raynor Winn, The Salt Path

“She grew not on the land so much as out of it, like cottonwoods and bear grass. Each fall a part of her collapsed and withered alongside the wildflowers and grapevines she loved and used for healing. Each spring some new part of her erupted just as the mallows and poppies did, spreading her toes like roots in the truth and sustenance of ground, while branching out to the rest of the living world and stretching upwards towards the light.”
― Jesse Wolf Hardin

“Without the herbivore, grass is without value. Without the valuable cover of grass, the soil is without life. Without life, the terrestrial world becomes valueless and simply unhappy. The uniform diversity of the meadowland demonstrates that value co-creates the valuable via the tool of time. Time and value. Seeing and being. Grass is nothing at all. The community of grass is all.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Dark Cloud Country: The 4 Relationships of Regeneration

“we can probably, as a nation, loose all our birds, and there is an increasing number of people who wouldn’t even notice. as we become more urban, we’re loosing out attachment”
― George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

“we can probably, as a nation, loose all our birds, and there is an increasing number of people who wouldn’t even notice. as we become more urban, we’re loosing our attachment”
― George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

“most human endeavours, unless checked by public dissent, evolve into monocultures. money seeks out a region’s comparative advantage, the field in which it competes most successfully, and promotes it to the exclusion of all else. every landscape or seascape, if this process is loosed, performs just one function. this greatly taxes the natural world”
― George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

“Mindfully communing with the forest is a profound practice of self-discovery. Every tree, stone, plant, insect, movement of wind, shaft of light, patch of shadow, and flying bird have something to teach us if we can empty our minds and open ourselves to them.”
― Micah Mortali, Rewilding: Meditations, Practices, and Skills for Awakening in Nature

“The physical reclamation of the floodplain of the Spey involved a hugely ambitious series of localised engineering projects, surely equal to any undertaking in lowland Britain - perhaps more so considering the region's remoteness and economic difficulties.

...Around 40 miles of banks were constructed over five decades, reclaiming some 4,000 acres of the most fertile land in Badenoch, dramatically increasing the region's pastoral and arable yields to the benefit of all. Many of these floodbanks still protect the riverside fields, a monument not just to the ideology of Enlightenment and improvement, but to the vision and labour of all involved - lairds, tacksmen, tenants and labourers. Ironically, the huge Invereshie reclamation scheme, the great drain and riverbanks, are now - in response to a new ideological vision being re-converted into wetlands, the Invereshie Meadows reverting to the Insh Marshes.”
― David Taylor, 'The People Are Not There': The Transformation of Badenoch 1800 - 1863

“Create a space that mimics the natural world—where your senses are awakened and your spirit can roam free.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity: A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“What was once a barren patch of earth is now alive with hummingbirds and butterflies… It didn’t take much money, just time, energy, and the willingness to care.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“Imagine a world where humans are completely captive… Over time, people lose their creativity, vitality, and sense of freedom.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“Now imagine the opposite: a world where humans are free to roam in nature, create with their hands, and connect with their surroundings.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“By stepping out of our mental and physical cages, we can rediscover the joy, creativity, and vitality that come from living as nature intended.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“We are meant to move, play, explore, and connect.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“If our primate relatives can teach us one thing about play, it’s this: play is primal.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction