Rewilding

Discusses the benefits and risks, as well as the economic and socio-political realities, of rewilding as a novel conservation tool.

Reconnect with your wild essence as you awaken your innate bond with the natural world “Rewilding is a return to our essential nature. It is an attempt to reclaim something of what we were before we used words like ‘civilized’ to define ourselves.” —Micah Mortali In his long-awaited book Rewilding, Kripalu director Micah Mortali brings together yoga, mindfulness, wilderness training, and ancestral skills to create a unique guide for reigniting your primal energy—your undomesticated true self—and deepening your connection with the living earth. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans lived intimately with the earth. We were in the wild and of the wild. Today, we live mostly urban lives—and our vital wildness has gone dormant. As a result, we’re more isolated, unhealthy, anxious, and depressed than ever, and our planet has suffered alongside us. With Rewilding, Mortali invites us to shed the effects of over-civilization and explore an inner wisdom that is primal, ancient, and profound. Whether you live in the middle of a city or alongside the woods, the insights and practices on these pages will bring you home to your wild, wise, and alive self. Highlights include: Practice-rich content—mindfulness exercises, guided meditations, yoga and pranayama, inward sensing, forest bathing, and much moreThe “life-force deficit”—explore how our separation from nature affects us physiologically and spirituallyAncestral skills—such as tracking, foraging, building fires, and finding shelterDevelop a sense of calm, clarity, connection, and confidence in both your daily life and the great outdoorsWhat you can learn from nature’s teachers—lessons from mountains, rivers, trees, and our animal kinRewild in the wild—guidelines around safety, preparedness, appropriate gear, and packing listsA mindful rewilding flow—put everything together in an immersive, step-by-step rewilding experienceAwaken your authentic spiritual connection with the natural world as you come home to your true selfUnderstand the relationship between our health and the health of our planet—and how we can begin to heal both Part celebration of the natural world, part spiritual memoir, and part how-to guide, Rewilding is a must-read for anyone who wants to embrace their wild nature and essential place in the living earth.

As an investigative journalist, Monbiot found a mission in his ecological boredom, that of learning what it might take to impose a greater state of harmony between himself and nature. He was not one to romanticize undisturbed, primal landscapes, but rather in his attempts to satisfy his cravings for a richer, more authentic life, he came stumbled into the world of restoration and rewilding. When these concepts were first introduced in 2011, very recently, they focused on releasing captive animals into the wild. Soon the definition expanded to describe the reintroduction of animal and plant species to habitats from which they had been excised. Some people began using it to mean the rehabilitation not just of particular species, but of entire ecosystems: a restoration of wilderness. Rewilding recognizes that nature consists not just of a collection of species but also of their ever-shifting relationships with each other and with the physical environment. Ecologists have shown how the dynamics within communities are affected by even the seemingly minor changes in species assemblages. Predators and large herbivores have transformed entire landscapes, from the nature of the soil to the flow of rivers, the chemistry of the oceans, and the composition of the atmosphere. The complexity of earth systems is seemingly boundless."

In Rewilding North America, Dave Foreman takes on arguably the biggest ecological threat of our time: the global extinction crisis. He not only explains the problem in clear and powerful terms, but also offers a bold, hopeful, scientifically credible, and practically achievable solution. Foreman begins by setting out the specific evidence that a mass extinction is happening and analyzes how humans are causing it. Adapting Aldo Leopold's idea of ecological wounds, he details human impacts on species survival in seven categories, including direct killing, habitat loss and fragmentation, exotic species, and climate change. Foreman describes recent discoveries in conservation biology that call for wildlands networks instead of isolated protected areas, and, reviewing the history of protected areas, shows how wildlands networks are a logical next step for the conservation movement. The final section describes specific approaches for designing such networks (based on the work of the Wildlands Project, an organization Foreman helped to found) and offers concrete and workable reforms for establishing them. The author closes with an inspiring and empowering call to action for scientists and activists alike. Rewilding North America offers both a vision and a strategy for reconnecting, restoring, and rewilding the North American continent, and is an essential guidebook for anyone concerned with the future of life on earth.

In wildlife conservation, rewilding refers to restoring habitats and creating corridors between preserved lands to allow declining populations to rebound. Marc Bekoff, one of the world’s leading animal experts and activists, here applies rewilding to human attitudes. Rewilding Our Hearts invites readers to do the essential work of becoming reenchanted with the world, acting from the inside out, and dissolving false boundaries to truly connect with both nature and themselves.

Following on from his bestselling The Invisible Church, Steve Aisthorpe finds inspiration for his new book in the ecological concept of rewilding, an approach to the environment that allows nature to break free from the dulling effects of strategic control and bring wonder back into our lives. Applying this thinking to the Church, Steve Aisthorpe imagines what might happen if we put less faith in our strategies and plans, which inevitably depend on our own capabilities and resources, and allow the Spirit to lead us beyond our capacity to imagine. Rewilding the Church explores afresh the compelling invitation of Jesus to ‘Follow me’ and the call to ‘throw off everything that hinders and entangles’. It poses provocative questions and issues a call to contribute to the great rewilding of the Church – and to be rewilded ourselves. The same human instincts that have disrupted our natural environment have also constrained and domesticated the Church and Rewilding the Church commends a rediscovery of the adventure of faith. Steve Aisthorpe is one the freshest and most original voices in the church today.

‘A poignant, practical and moving story of how to fix our broken land, this should be conservation's salvation; this should be its future; this is a new hope’ – Chris Packham In Wilding, Isabella Tree tells the story of the ‘Knepp experiment’, a pioneering rewilding project in West Sussex, using free-roaming grazing animals to create new habitats for wildlife. Part gripping memoir, part fascinating account of the ecology of our countryside, Wilding is, above all, an inspiring story of hope. Winner of the Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Book Shop Literary Prize. Forced to accept that intensive farming on the heavy clay of their land at Knepp was economically unsustainable, Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell made a spectacular leap of faith: they decided to step back and let nature take over. Thanks to the introduction of free-roaming cattle, ponies, pigs and deer – proxies of the large animals that once roamed Britain – the 3,500 acre project has seen extraordinary increases in wildlife numbers and diversity in little over a decade. Extremely rare species, including turtle doves, nightingales, peregrine falcons, lesser spotted woodpeckers and purple emperor butterflies, are now breeding at Knepp, and populations of other species are rocketing. The Burrells’ degraded agricultural land has become a functioning ecosystem again, heaving with life – all by itself. Personal and inspirational, Wilding is an astonishing account of the beauty and strength of nature, when it is given as much freedom as possible. Highly Commended by the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize.

Picture a world where humans exist, like all other living things, in balance. Where there is no separation between "human" and "wild." Unlearn, Rewild boldly envisions such a world, probing deeply into the cultural constraints on our ability to lead truly sustainable lives and offering real, tangible tools to move toward another way of living, seeing, and thinking. Part philosophical treatise, part hard-core survival guide, this unique and thoroughly unconventional manual blends philosophy with a detailed introduction to a rich assortment of endangered traditional living skills, including: Harvesting and preparing unconventional proteins Feral food preservation Dealing responsibly with waste Natural methods of birth control Tanning and processing animal skins Lyrical, humorous, surprising, enlightening, and thought-provoking by turns, Unlearn, Rewild is essential reading for those who wish to heal themselves and the earth, live gracefully into the future primitive and experience their wildest dreams.