Paper short abstract:

Models that imagine rewilding as “anywhere” can not account for more-than-human historical contingencies that shape rewilding when always happening “somewhere.” With the Oder Delta as a case, I explore how rewilding differentially materializes and the importance of more-than-human description.

Paper long abstract:

Why might environmental management strategies in the Anthropocene—such as rewilding—need to take seriously descriptions of more-than-human historical contingency? Rewilding as a restoration and conservation strategy in European settings attempts to (re)invigorate self-sustaining biodiverse ecosystem processes through approaches such as managed-unmanagement (e.g. infrastructure removal and infrastructures of containment), the installation of keystone species (e.g. releasing disturbance-creating large herbivores), and natural succession (e.g. ecologies emerging from such disturbances) to increase ecological heterogeneity and biodiversity. Such implementations are often authenticated and universalized through scientific narratives, practices, and models that decontextualize human and non-human relations to craft transportable restoration strategies of “letting nature go.” While useful for grounding new imaginings for post-Holocene world-building of noticed ecologies, such knowledge claims tell only a partial story, as these claims cannot account for the contingent socio-ecological histories of emergent relationships that make rewilding possible. To attend to this friction, I investigate the Oder Delta, an official Rewilding Europe site situated on the border of Poland and Germany. Through landscape histories and ethnography, I explore the two contrasting sides of the Delta and how rewilding’s ecologies, politics, and historicity are circumscribed by, reflect, and emerge out of contingencies of economic progress, state-making infrastructures, and more modest human projects that entangle and collaborate with non-human worlds. In sum, I show that by taking seriously and attending to more-than-human historical contingencies that unsettle nature/culture divides and determine where and how rewilding differentially materializes—such as in the Oder Delta—a more ethical reconstituting of rewilding in environmental management might be possible.