I keep coming across the expression ‘rewilding nation’ being used with respect to Scotland. Forgive me for being blunt, but that’s a load of crap, not just as a reality, but as a very concept. Rewilding in Scotland boils down to very wealthy individuals, corporations and NGOs buying up large swathes of the Highlands (mainly) to keep the land depopulated. This got bugger all to do with ‘the nation’, it’s just the lairdship of old reinventing itself for a different age.

A piece on this subject I read yesterday somewhere in the mainstream media mentioned that 80% of Scotland’s population is in favour of rewilding. Sure, rewilding is one of those clever words that’s easy to get behind, without having a clue what it stands for, because its meaning seems so self-evident. It doesn’t help that here in the UK the term is used freely to apply to all sort of things that have naught to do with rewilding (not least due to the uncritical popularisation of the word by the Guardian) — it’s easy to understand why the majority of us have no idea of the misanthropic ideology behind it (thought the fact that rewilding is a favourite pastime of billionaires should ring the alarm bells loud and clear).

While Scotland is, unquestionably, in an urgent need of dramatic, large scale, restoration of habitats to reverse the drastic loss of biodiversity, the fundamental problem with rewilding is that its ecological model is not viable for a world not too far off 10 billion people; no worldview as deeply rooted in human exceptionalism can provide an ecological model fit for this age.

Such critique is not new. The inadequacy of this particular ecological model has been understood for just about as long as the term rewilding has been around, but the supporters of rewilding respond to criticism just like followers of a fundamentalist religion do; their faith in their fundamentals and their saints is unshakable.

Shame really, for as long as we see ourselves as apart from nature instead of an integral part of it, we will keep repeating the mistakes of the past.