Until fairly recently, the concept of “rewilding” was largely unheard of outside of environmental extremist circles. ”Rewilding” first emerged in Nazi Germany, and resurfaced in the early 1990s when members of EarthFirst, a group with confirmed ties to ecoterrorism, began promoting it in America. Alarming due to its Nazi and ecoterrorist origins, rewilding is being championed by numerous private investors, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and government entities worldwide, in a concerted effort to advance globalist and environmental extremist agendas.
The title of an article published by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2022 illustrates this well: “How a project to rewild the American West could help tackle climate change.” Perhaps not coincidentally, WEF founder Klaus Schwab was born in Nazi Germany and his father worked for Escher Wyss AG, a company that supplied military flamethrowers to the nation’s fascist war machine during World War II. Today, rewilding is an important element in the Biden administration’s 30X30 initiative, which eagerly seeks to acquire enough land to conserve 30 percent of America’s total landmass and waters by 2030.
The administration is using any means available to secure land to meet its 30X30 goal, including eminent domain condemnation to procure land from private parties, regardless of their unwillingness to sell. It is estimated that land already conserved equals the size of California and New York combined. To reach its lofty 2030 goal, the Biden administration would need additional land twice the size of Texas, much of which would be removed from private ownership. If successful, 30 percent of America’s landmass owned by “we the people” would be largely off limits to “we the people.”
Today, a plethora of rewilding efforts are taking place around the world, at great cost to land ownership, use, access, existing wildlife populations, and sustainable food production.
Rewilding has been broadly and innocuously defined as “ecological restoration aimed at increasing biodiversity, restoring natural processes, and reducing human influence on ecosystems.” It is ironic that despite many thousands of years of human interaction with the animal kingdom, rewilding zealots deem human influence to be completely “unnatural.” Those advocating rewilding want people to embrace a level of self-loathing and guilt bordering on masochism.
Norwegian environmental historian and professor Dolly Jorgensen argued that the current pervasive rewilding theory “seeks to erase human history and involvement with the land and flora and fauna. Such an attempted split between nature and culture may prove unproductive and even harmful.”
In an article in The Lead, a United Kingdom media outlet, Richard Smyth wrote:
“Our ideas about non-human life are incomplete if they don’t come to an accommodation with the facts of human adjacency…A strong anti-people streak is evident not only in old-school get off-my-land types, but also among the carefully curated hills and vales of the rewilders, a queasy tension, in the latter case, between ‘look at these splendid landscapes!’ and ‘stay they hell away from these splendid landscapes!’. Accommodations, though, must be made at some point. We can’t theorise people out of the ecological equation.”
Active vs. Passive Rewilding: Two Sides of the Same Coin
Rewilding can be active or passive. “Active” rewilding uses direct human intervention, such as reintroducing species or tearing out dams in rivers, while “passive” rewilding is basically the reduction or elimination of human activity in an area. Active rewilding is often thought of as being the reintroduction or introduction of apex predators, such as wolves or grizzly bears, to an area, but there are also various smaller-scale projects around the world that are centered on other species, ranging from reptiles and amphibians to wild horses.
The assumption is that the introduction of so-called “keystone species” (animals that heavily influence an ecosystem disproportionately to their population numbers) creates a ripple effect of “naturally” managing other wildlife populations in the natural food chain, therefore creating the wild utopia so romanticized by the antihuman movement. The technical term for this often desired, yet rarely achieved, effect is “trophic cascade.” It’s heavily influenced by emotion, less so by facts and science.
Vital to rewilding are the three Cs: carnivores, cores, and corridors. In other words, populations of apex predators in protected, human-free core wilderness areas, and the ability for wildlife to freely move between core areas. There have been attempts to enact legislation, such as the Wilderness Act of 2019, to legally codify human-free wildlife corridors in United States land use plans. A glaring problem is both existing and potential cores and corridors are in rural areas where the vast majority of food is produced in the United States.
Conveniently, active rewilding campaigns can facilitate passive rewilding. For example, a rancher who can’t stay in business because of reintroduced wolf predation could be forced to sell his ranch, thereby removing domestic livestock and human influence on once-grazed and productive lands. It’s all part of the grand rewilding design to eliminate people and productivity from the land. Rewilders tend to ignore enriched biodiversity and reduced erosion on lands where livestock roam. Instead, they salivate about the false wilderness utopia that features reintroduced wolves and grizzlies in romanticized, yet unrealistic and dangerous scenarios.
Antihumanism is Inherent to the Rewilding Movement
Agriculture, human advancement, and prosperity are the primary targets of the rewilding movement. Rewilders have referred to agriculture as “Earth’s 10,000-year-old problem.” Notable environmental extremist Tom Butler stated in a 1998 issue of Wild Earth:
“Ultimately, any solution to the problem of agriculture that fully addresses ecosystem health will entail a conscious stepping back – a reduction in both the intensity and amount of manipulated acreage.”
In Butler’s altruistic world, less food and fewer people are the goals. Considering the origins of rewilding, it could certainly be argued that eugenic motives are in play. At least one notable elitist billionaire has publicly stated his desire to see billions fewer people on the planet.
The inherent antihuman sentiment of the rewilding movement has not usually been well publicized. After all, it’s difficult to widely recruit support if a cause is too radical, but writings within the extremist crowd openly advocate against humanity.
In Nazi Germany, the intended purpose of their project was to revive the Aurochs (an extinct cattle species) as part of creating a pristine and pure Aryan homeland similar to the early Medieval Germanic Empire. The animals produced were called Heck cattle, named after the brothers who headed the breeding aspect of the project. Based in Nazi eugenic philosophy, “the idea was not just to restore the native flora and fauna,” but also remove the “degenerate” (we would say “invasive”) species, according to philosopher Erik Katz. Katz also maintained that rewilding is infused with human purpose and is simply another form of human domination of nature.
Writer and University of Wyoming Professor Frieda Knobloch once wrote:
“For conservationists, agriculture is a compelling subject because it sustains growing human populations…”
Knoblock is the author of a book titled The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture As Colonization in the American West. Founders of Wildlands Network, Dr. Michael Soule and Dr. Reed Noss, stated in an article that without apex predators being present in wild spaces, “human opportunities to attain humility are reduced.”
Rewilding Devastates Agriculture and Hunting
As Protect The Harvest has reported in the past, the adverse impacts of rewilding on farms and ranches are numerous and often devastating. Apex predators attack livestock and bison spread diseases such as brucellosis to domestic herds by wild ungulates displaced by the newly established presence of apex predators.
Another impact of rewilding is its impact on hunting and the hunting/outdoor tourism industry. For example, the reintroduction of wolves in Idaho has dramatically reduced elk herds and quality hunting opportunities, and has also served to displace remaining elk, pushing them onto ranches and farms where they wreak havoc on fencing, crops, and haystacks with little recourse for farmers and ranchers. Financial compensation programs for livestock producers related to wolf kills are nonexistent or notoriously difficult to utilize.
While the “reintroduction” of wolves to Idaho and Yellowstone National Park are nearly always referenced as species being brought back to their native lands, the reality is gray wolves brought to Yellowstone in the 1990s were not native Northern Rocky Mountains wolves that were originally present in the area. They are an entirely different sub-specie: larger, more aggressive, Canadian timber wolves. Thus, the introduction of non-native wolves means the widely publicized “rewilded” scenario is fiction because it created a significantly different dynamic than what was “natural” to the area.
More Fiction: Landscape Benefit of Wolf Reintroduction in Yellowstone
To rationalize their cause, environmental extremists engage in propaganda efforts that would have made Joseph Goebbels proud. Their euphoria is over the alleged success of the “reintroduction” of wolves to Yellowstone. Their claim has been that wolf predation on elk reduced over-browsing on willows and other plant life along rivers and creeks, consequently resulting in the return of beavers. Beavers returning is said to have resulted in rejuvenation of other flora and fauna. This hollow assertion has been propagated by numerous environmental extremist groups.
A 2014 “documentary” film by Sustainable Human, titled “How Wolves Change Rivers,” has been viewed on YouTube more than 45 million times. EarthJustice published an article titled: “How Wolves Saved the Foxes, Mice and Rivers of Yellowstone National Park.” The Yellowstone Park website itself perpetuates this fantasy, stating: “Wolves are causing a trophic cascade of ecological change, including helping to increase beaver populations and bring back aspen, and vegetation.”
A recent study by Colorado State University researchers, published in early 2024, reveals the long-suspected reality, as stated in the study’s abstract:
“We conclude that the restoration of large carnivores to the food web failed to restore riparian plant communities on Yellowstone’s northern range, supporting the hypothesis that this ecosystem is in an alternative stable state caused primarily by the extirpation of apex predators during the early 20th century.”
Rewilding Critics Pull the Fire Alarm
Rewilding is not without critics in the scientific community. Authors of a 2016 study titled “Rewilding is the new Pandora’s box in conservation” offer pointed criticisms, and maintain any benefits of rewilding have not been proven and drain funding from more scientifically sound conservation projects.
Co-author David Nogués-Bravo of the University of Copenhagen stated:
“Scientifically we are in the dark about the consequences of rewilding, and we worry about the general lack of critical thinking surrounding these often very expensive attempts at conservation…Practitioners mustn’t assume that scientists are able to predict the full consequences of introducing novel species to dynamic and ever-evolving ecosystems.”
Co-author Carsten Rahbek stated:
“We don’t know what the consequences of rewilding may be, and it may also bring de-wilding in the form of local and global extinctions.”
Daniel Simberloff, a biologist from the University of Tennessee rebutted the supposed prevalence and beneficial effects of trophic cascade:
“Only in some cases do you find evidence of strong cascading effects of large mammals, while other examples show only weak effects or even unexpected, but dramatic, negative consequences… Therefore, we advocate caution and careful consideration both for the animals that are rewilded and the ecosystems they are placed into.”
Failed Rewilding Attempts
Some efforts at rewilding have failed miserably, and have even been called abusive to the animals involved. For example, in 2018 in the Netherlands, thousands of red deer, Konik horses, and Heck cattle were shot by the Dutch government to prevent them from starving to death.
In North Carolina, a program began in 1987 that bred red wolves in captivity and released them into the wild. It was halted in 2015 due to the species’ failure to thrive. Nevertheless, despite the established pattern of failure, in 2023, environmental extremist groups won a lawsuit that forced the release of more red wolves. The red wolf is listed as a species threatened with extinction by the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Since being enacted in 1973, fewer than five percent of species listed by the ESA have been delisted. Delisting does not necessarily mean successful recovery. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, out of all delistings to date, 11 were delisted because they went extinct, and nearly 30 were mistakenly listed due to data errors.
Despite such powerful evidence, numerous “return to nature” schemes continue across the nation and around the world. These range from regional rewilding plans involving apex predators to smaller-scale attempts to reestablish populations of amphibians in specific marshes and ponds.
From Wolves to Wooly Mammoths–A Snapshot of Current Active Rewilding Campaigns
Several current rewilding efforts in the U.S. are of great concern to agricultural production, livestock welfare, food security, and private property rights.
- Since the flagship event of putting wolves back in Idaho and Yellowstone, wolves have been reintroduced in several other states, with predictable results. Recently, wolves were gleefully reintroduced to Colorado by democrat Governor Jared Polis. In December 2023, 10 grey wolves from Oregon were released in Summit and Grand counties. This release came about as a result of a ballot measure (Proposition 114) that enabled urban voters to unleash destruction on rural communities. By May 2024, there were six verified wolf kills of cattle. As it’s been said, direct democracy is two wolves and a cow voting on what’s for dinner, and the problem is only going to get worse. Since their reintroduction to Idaho in 1995, wolves have killed thousands of head of livestock. In October 2018, the Idaho Farm Bureau reported that since 1995, wolves had killed 3,114 sheep, 757 calves, 184 cows, 86 dogs, and 9 horses. Wolf-kill numbers continue to rise, even though hunting wolves is legal in Idaho.
- As if wolves weren’t enough to deal with, grizzly bears are set to be reintroduced to the North Cascade Mountains in the state of Washington. This is one of six sites in a federal Grizzly Bear Recovery Program. The plan in the North Cascades is to release three to seven bears annually, with a goal of reaching 200 bears within 60 to 100 years.
- In a number of states across the nation, dams are being slated for removal to restore wild fish populations, at great cost to affordable energy and to agriculture. Most recently, the focus has been on dams in the Pacific Northwest, including four hydroelectric power dams along the Snake River in Washington. When announced by the Biden administration and state in late 2023, no replacement source for the lost renewable electricity had been identified.
- In eastern Idaho, a New York-based group called Rewilding America Now partnered with a private investor who holds four grazing permits on nearly 70,000 acres of so-called public land in the Birch Creek Valley. Oblivious to laws covering wild horses, and the existing on-range wild horse crisis in the west, this group’s plan is to release horses onto that land to start their own “wild” herd. It is unclear where the horses will be obtained or how the herd will be managed to prevent over-grazing, erosion, disease, and other challenges.
- In an eerie similarity to the Nazi effort to reincarnate aurochs, a company named Colossal Biosciences plans to resurrect species such as dodo birds and wooly mammoths using ancient DNA. The company bills itself as “the de-extinction company.” The behemoth western lifestyle company, Teton Ridge, is a partner in producing a multi-year de-extinction docuseries.
True Success of Rewilding Means Extinction of Food Security
Measured strictly by population numbers of introduced animals, the actual success of rewilding is widely varied. However, if its success were to be measured by its progress toward limiting land use and human prosperity, rewilding could be called a resounding success.
Considering apex predators, including wolves and grizzly bears, are not endangered globally, it becomes clear that reestablishing populations of them in targeted geographies is an irresponsible and dangerous weapon in the environmental extremist movement’s anti-human toolbox.
While extremist zealots and naïve naturalists lament the extinction of prehistoric animals, the very real threat is to America’s safe, nutritious, abundant, accessible, and relatively affordable food supply and to the overall population reliant on that food. At Protect The Harvest, we are about promoting and defending A Free and Fed America™. We’ll continue to advocate for that and inform people of threats, including rewilding.
Helpful links:
More about rewilding HERE
More about rewilding’s Nazi origins HERE
About American Prairie Reserve HERE
More on American Prairie Reserve HERE
About dam removal in the Pacific Northwest HERE
About effects of dam removal HERE
