Comments on the relation between rewilding and history

Should we speak of European wilding instead of (re)wilding? Many authors believe that the European rewilding movement is more future-oriented, a form of ‘anticipatory ecologies’ producing the future, whereas its North American counterpart is past-oriented (Prior Wynne-Jones et al., 2020). Indeed, rewilding has a strong relationship to time, encompassing both nostalgia and idealized futures (De Vroey, 2023). During my fieldwork in Vercors, France, I frequently encountered a recurring argument from opponents of a local rewilding project: ‘We are like the Aboriginals, chased from our own lands.’ I decided to take this seriously and believe that, for these people, rewilding means losing their rights as moderns to use and exploit the land, rendering them ‘without-a-world’ in the decolonial sense (Danowski et al., 2016; Latour, 2006). For Jameson, post-modernity is characterized by the domination of space over time. Due to the disappearance of nature and ancient ways of living, moderns become unrooted and transition into post-moderns (Jameson, 1984; Malm, 2018). In this perspective, rewilding can resonate as a theology of liberation from this historical trajectory, realizing the Heideggerian ideal of ‘letting-be’ in coexistence with a letting-go of nature, as suggested by Robert Noss (Noss, 1991). One of the main factors explaining why European rewilding is future-oriented is the absence of remnants of a wild Europe and the pervasive presence of significant human populations and activities. For all these reasons, European rewilding is part of a struggle to make these timeoriented political imaginations exist and become possible (Castoriadis, 2021). Thus, rewilding in Europe can be understood as a form of ‘chronopolitics’ (Esposito Osborne, 1999). Based on the ethnography I conducted and the data collected from three rewilding organizations in France and Belgium, I will explore how they relate to time and politics in their interpretation and practice of rewilding.