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Paper short abstract

This paper reframes rewilding as “rewriting”: a political ecology of multispecies life shaped by infrastructure and compensation. Using a Wadden Sea case, it shows how plants, animals, and sediments are mobilised in restoration, stabilising extractive regimes while also producing friction.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on the Horizon Europe project REWRITE (Rewilding and Restoration of Intertidal Sediment Ecosystems), this paper brings multispecies ethnography into dialogue with political ecology to examine rewilding not as a return to nature but as a contested practice of environmental governance. I argue that coastal rewilding operates as a process of “rewriting”: a reconfiguration of human–nonhuman relations through infrastructures, legal frameworks, and sedimentary ecologies that materialise new regimes of value, responsibility, and legitimacy.

The analysis is grounded in a case study of Langenwarder Groden (Jade Bay, Wadden Sea), a tidal compensation area created in the context of large-scale port expansion. Here, dikes, dredged sediments, pioneer vegetation, invertebrates, and bird populations are mobilised to produce “new nature” that offsets industrial damage elsewhere. Rather than treating multispecies relations as inherently ethical or resistant, the paper traces how plants, animals, and sediments both stabilise extractive logics and generate frictions within them.

Building on the concept of sedimented narratives, I show how ecological processes, historical memories, and governance rationalities accumulate across temporal and material scales, shaping what kinds of futures become thinkable. Rewilding appears not simply as care for damaged environments but as a political ecology of slow violence, compensation, and infrastructural continuity—one in which multispecies life is enrolled in projects of mitigation and legitimation, yet also produces unexpected forms of contestation.

By moving beyond empathetic or celebratory multispecies accounts, the paper contributes a critical, place-based perspective on how power, value, and ecological transformation are materially enacted in contemporary restoration regimes.