I started my PhD research in 2019 in social sciences, and focused on rewilding as an area of research. I applied for this PhD largely because of reading Monbiot’s Feral and Tree’s Wilding and was interested in understanding how to promote rewilding in the UK.
However, my research has (as happens in a PhD) down unexpected paths. I have seen that while local voices and rural livelihoods are often promoted in rewilding today, it is very vague how this happens and who gets a voice. Alison Martin’s article, “Taming Rewilding” is a great paper that shows through interviews how rewilding advocates have no real idea what coexistence between rural people and rewilding actually looks like, and that in fact, “coexistence” may be used as vague phrase to cover up the lack of any real vision. As a result, the way local voices are included varies hugely from project to project, with some making people an important part of the project design, while others may involve people in a more tokenistic way, or even ignore them altogether.
Additionally, elite rewilding, based on the Knepp Estate, is increasingly popular. While the Knepp owners are committed to furthering research and knowledge about rewilding, partnering with many academics in their work, other elite rewilders appear to copy their model without much knowledge, and some appear to be more interested in rewilding as a fashion, like a modern version of the Capability Brown garden (Williamson, 2022). Elites rewilders, and rewilding advocates, media, NGOs and members of the public that support them are often uncritically reproducing neoliberal discourses as Joyce (2024) shows. These will further commodify nature, alienate people, and mean rewilding will be used for a model of continuous economic growth that is leading us toward environmental disaster (Buscher & Fletcher, 2020).
It also raised questions due to landownership in the UK. With Shrubsole’s book Who Owns England it became clear that a tiny number of people owned most of the land. Rewilding advocates in many cases did not see any possibility of changing ownership patterns, and saw these private owners as key to enabling rewilding. They often saw financial incentives as key to bringing them on board, and as such, this means that government money would go do the wealthiest people in the UK, at a time of enormous social inequality, where many people are having to choose between heating and eating, are having to live in terrible housing conditions, and austerity is destroying public services and welfare. Social justice is something rarely mentioned by influential rewilding projects, and appears to be absent from discussions about the new ELMS subsidies, with DEFRA hiding the impact on small farmers who are struggling to survive. Recently, the UK government abolished inheritance tax for rewilders which is likely to encourage more millionaires and billionaires to buy into rewilding in the UK and will likely increase the already big divide between owners of the capital and wage labourers in the UK, which as Piketty shows in Capital is already reaching breaking point.
I also looked into the possibilities of more convivial alternatives. These included projects that didn’t separate low intensity farming from rewilding, where local people were an important part of the project design, where land was held in common, where other perspectives and forms of knowledge were respected, where people were not kept out by fences and barriers, where difficult conflicts were discussed openly instead of hidden, and where alternative political systems were imagined. I used the concept of Convivial Conservation to examine these alternatives.
In my previous research in my MA in International Political Economy, I focused on a different area entirely. This was on Facebook and the construction of subjectivities in the company that led employees to believe that they were saving the world through their mission of connecting everyone via their platform, and I show how this started to break down during the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I used Zizek’s psychoanalytic concepts to examine this area. This MA thesis is available to download.