The Emptiness They’re Selling You

I live somewhere that gets called “wild” a lot. People picture me sat outside a cave in rural Spain, goats wandering past, and they assume I’ve bought into some pure, untouched idea of nature. I haven’t. Every hillside near me has been grazed, terraced, burned and rebuilt by human hands for two thousand years. There’s no “before” to get back to. There’s only what we do next, and who gets to decide it.

Which brings me to rewilding, and to the particular species of righteous nonsense currently being marketed to well-meaning people in wealthy countries under that banner.

I want to be careful here, because this isn’t a piece where I tell you rewilding is a con and development is the answer. That’s the lazy version, and it’s just as dishonest as the glossy fundraising email it’s reacting against. What I actually want to do is show you three real places where this idea has been tried, at scale, with real consequences, so you can see what “let nature decide” costs depending entirely on who’s holding the pen when the decision gets written down.

Ngorongoro, or: who gets called overpopulated

Start in northern Tanzania, because this is the sharpest version of the argument and it deserves to be sat with rather than skimmed past.

Since 2022 the Tanzanian government has been running a relocation programme moving Indigenous Maasai out of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Human Rights Watch has documented a scheme that has moved over 82,000 people roughly 600 kilometres away to Msomera village, officially to make way for conservation and tourism. The government’s justification is that the land was becoming overcrowded, that people and livestock were “overwhelming” the wildlife. One Maasai activist, describing his own family’s earlier displacement from the Serengeti, called the whole thing “a cultural genocide, a crime against humanity.”

Now here’s the detail I can’t stop turning over. The same man pointed out that the luxury hotels, safari campsites and lodges going up around the conservation area are doing more environmental damage than the people being moved out to make room for them. Read that twice. The land isn’t being emptied for nature. It’s being emptied for a better class of visitor to nature. That’s not conservation, that’s a change of tenant.

And it isn’t an isolated case of one overzealous ministry. In January this year, the World Bank pulled funding from a separate project that would have expanded Ruaha National Park, a scheme that would have evicted 44 Indigenous villages and displaced over 84,000 people. Same script, different park, same word doing all the moral heavy lifting: conservation.

I’ll give the story its due complexity, because that’s the whole point of this piece. In December 2024, under sustained pressure and following a court order suspending evictions, Tanzania’s president announced two committees, one to investigate resident complaints and one to examine the relocations themselves, and ordered the evictions halted. That’s not nothing. Governments don’t usually reverse course out of sentiment. Somebody made them.

But sit with the arithmetic for a second. Roughly a hundred thousand people living somewhere for generations get reframed, almost overnight, as the “overpopulation problem.” That word never gets applied to a five-star lodge with air conditioning and a heated pool in the same square kilometre. Funny, that.

The 30×30 problem, or: a target with no maths behind it

Zoom out from Tanzania, and you’ll find the same pattern: wearing a suit and addressing the UN. The “30×30” pledge, to protect 30% of the planet’s land and sea by 2030, sounds unimpeachable. Nobody’s against protecting nature. That’s precisely why it’s such an effective slogan and such a dangerous one to leave unexamined.

Here’s the bit that should stop you in your tracks. The scientific paper most frequently cited as the basis for that 30% figure was written by a man named Eric Dinerstein. Asked directly, later, whether the number had scientific grounding, he admitted there’s no scientific basis for 30 percent, it’s arbitrary. The man who wrote the paper. Arbitrary. That’s the load-bearing statistic behind a policy campaigners estimate could directly displace and dispossess up to 300 million people.

And here’s what really ought to sting anyone who assumes more fences automatically means more nature. Research gathered by conservation economists has found equal or higher biodiversity on Indigenous-managed lands compared with formal protected areas in some regions. Even the World Bank, an institution not exactly famous for sentimentality towards Indigenous land rights, has acknowledged that traditional Indigenous territories cover up to 22% of the world’s land surface and coincide with 80% of the planet’s biodiversity.

So let’s be honest about what’s actually happening in a lot of these cases. The people currently doing conservation’s job, for free, generation after generation, are the ones being asked to leave so an NGO with a nicer logo can take formal credit for it. If that isn’t colonialism wearing a high-vis vest, I don’t know what is.

Oostvaardersplassen, or: what “hands off” actually costs

Right, and now the counterweight, because I refuse to let this become another one-sided rant dressed up as analysis. There’s a Dutch case that should give every rewilding enthusiast pause, including me.

In the 1980s, ecologists reclaimed a Dutch polder called the Oostvaardersplassen and released large herbivores onto it with the explicit philosophy of minimal human interference. Let nature find its own balance. For years, it was held up as a European model. Then a bad winter came, and the animals had nowhere to migrate to and nothing regulating their numbers, and they starved. Visibly, publicly, on camera. One animal welfare activist who visited described the scene in three words: “a cemetery, without burying.”

The fallout forced a total reversal of the original philosophy. Population caps, mandatory culling, animals shipped to reserves abroad, and foresters required to physically assess every animal’s body condition multiple times a week. One long-time observer of the project summed up the irony perfectly, calling the new regime a giant step backwards, essentially a glorified zoo.

The lesson here isn’t “rewilding doesn’t work.” It’s that “let nature decide” is a sentence doing an enormous amount of unexamined work, and inside a fenced reserve with no room to migrate and no predators to keep numbers in check, nature’s decision was mass starvation. Somebody still has to hold the pen. Pretending otherwise is just outsourcing the cruelty to weather.

Knepp, or: proof it can actually work

And then, right at the other end of the same idea, you get Knepp.

A former loss-making farm in West Sussex, rewilded from 2001 onward with free-roaming grazers and, crucially, no fixed targets for what “success” should look like. A twenty-year ecological review published this year found breeding birds up 900%, with nightingales up 500%. Turtle doves, a species that has declined 98% nationally since 1994, went from two singing males in 2008 to 22 singing males by 2024. Butterflies, dragonflies, purple emperors, all climbing, year on year.

Isabella Tree, who runs the project with her husband, put the whole philosophy in one disarmingly honest sentence: “We were literally sitting back and seeing what would happen.”

So why did the identical basic idea, hands off, let the ecosystem lead, produce a minor miracle in Sussex and a cemetery in the Netherlands? Space, mostly. Connectivity. Knepp isn’t sealed off from the surrounding countryside the way the Dutch polder was, and Britain doesn’t deliver the same brutal winter die-offs. Rewilding isn’t one policy with one guaranteed outcome. It’s a design problem, and it lives or dies on details that never make it into the fundraising brochure.

So what do we actually do with all this

Here’s where I land, and it’s not a comfortable place, which is usually how you know you’ve arrived somewhere honest.

Rewilding, done properly, with enough room to breathe and without a boot on anyone’s neck, can genuinely be one of the more hopeful stories conservation has to offer. Knepp proves that. But “done properly” is doing enormous work in that sentence, and right now, in far too many places, “properly” has quietly become code for “somewhere else’s ancestral land, evicted in the name of a target one of its own authors admits was arbitrary.”

The people telling you rewilding is an unambiguous good, and the people telling you it’s all a Western land grab dressed up in green, are both selling you a slogan instead of a landscape. The actual answer, as ever, is slower and less shareable than either. It’s about who holds the land title when the last herbivore has been reintroduced, and the last photographer has gone home. Everything else is decoration.

I’ll leave you with this. Out here, nobody’s rewilding anything. We’re just living on land that’s been worked, abandoned, and reclaimed by scrub more times than anyone’s bothered to count. Nature was never waiting for us to leave. It was waiting for us to stop pretending we could plan our way out of the mess we made, deciding who gets to belong somewhere in the first place.

Until Next Time