REWILDING

CAN IT SAVE OUR WILDLIFE AND TEMPER CLIMATE CHANGE?

- JOCELYN TIMPERLEY

We’ve pushed nature to the brink, but it may be capable of repairing the damage, provided we step aside and let it go back to doing what it does best

Dotted through the Scottish Highlands there remain fragments of Caledonian pine woodland whose origins can be traced back to the temperate rainforest that covered much of the country after the last ice age. Often surrounded by Scots pine plantations and land overgrazed by deer, they’re a last refuge for many threatened species.

Abernethy National Nature Reserve includes one of the largest remnants of this ancient woodland. Decades of work by RSPB Scotland and others is restoring and expanding it.

The project, which now has a 200-year plan, is based on carefully encouraging natural processes to flourish, making it perhaps Britain’s most successful example of the ‘rewilding’ concept so far. “With the [ancient] pine wood expanding, that’s allowing other species to expand their range and spread as well,” says Tors Hamilton from Cairngorms Connect, a large-scale ‘habitat restoration’ partnership between Abernethy and neighbouring land managers. “There’s been a lot of work and research going on – and it’s still continuing today – looking at how we enable those natural processes to expand and continue.”

With this focus on restoring natural processes, such as allowing trees to seed and spread themselves, the Abernethy reserve encompasses many of the aims of the rewilding movement. At the same time, Abernethy’s hesitancy to call itself a rewilding project gives an inkling of the underlying tensions that often surround this approach to regenerating wilderness.