Rewilding As Solution and Problem of Climate Crisis

Rewilding has emerged as one of the most widely popular interventions to climate crisis under the banner of ecological reparation and nature-based solution. At the same time, rewilding has come to be experienced by many populations living around resource frontier and protected areas as the inevitable prospect of land abandonment and the reiteration of traditional exclusionary models of wilderness protection. The history and present of conservation around temperate rain forests of southern Chile exemplify the twofold nature of rewilding. I explore experiences, discourses and projections of rewilding with a focus on the potential of crisis for rethinking environmental justice in a future conjured through both utopian and apocalyptic images of rewilding. Anthropocene thinking can help us to reimagine new practices of conservation in which rewilding projects and ecological reparations are jointly developed to revitalize not wilderness but rather all those fragile instances of more-than-human cohabitation through which multiple forms of life can endure a crisis with no end in sight.