The abandonment of the ideal of wilderness: Rewilding as the consequence of the Anthropocene metaphysics on restoration ecology

Abstract

The idea of wilderness is being abandoned in restoration ecology due to metaphysical changes in the conception of nature. These changes are associated with the hybridization of nature and culture, an ontological distinction of modernity that touches its end in the Anthropocene. The notion of wilderness is falling because it was based on a static idea of nature, inherited from the modern conception of nature as passive, and this is affecting ecological restoration practices. The pursuit of wilderness has been abandoned in favor of wildness, vindicated by the so-called “rewilding philosophy.” Both restoration ecology and rewilding are based on the same corpus of ecology, but the first has historically operated in a period under the modern ontological distinction between nature and culture, while the second operates already in the hybridization of both categories. Rewilding does not pursue wilderness, no longer possible in the hybrid Anthropocene, but aims to restore the spontaneous order of the wildness.