For most of the twentieth century, conservation meant control: managing habitats, maintaining landscapes, keeping ecosystems in a state humans decided was correct. A growing movement across Europe is doing something different. Rewilding — the deliberate withdrawal of human management to allow natural processes to resume — is producing results that conventional conservation could not. Bison are back in eleven countries. Beavers have returned to Portugal after 600 years. Wolves are recolonising landscapes that have not hosted them in living memory. The question the movement is asking is not how to protect nature, but how to let it function.
The Difference Between Conserving and Rewilding
The distinction matters. Conservation, as traditionally practised, tends to freeze ecosystems in a particular state. It maintains landscapes that humans have decided is desirable, managing species populations, removing invasive elements. It is fundamentally an act of sustained control.
Rewilding starts from a different premise. Rewilding shows that large-scale nature recovery is not only possible, but profoundly beneficial — for ecosystems, climate, and people. What began as pioneering work has ignited into a global movement, reshaping how we restore nature and our relationship with it. The goal is not a particular landscape or species composition. It is the restoration of ecological processes — predation, grazing, flooding, decomposition — that allow ecosystems to organise themselves.
In practice, therefore, this means reintroducing keystone species that perform ecosystem-engineering functions: beavers that rewet landscapes through dam-building, bison that graze in ways that restore grassland diversity, wolves that alter the behaviour of prey species and thereby reshape vegetation patterns. The animals do the work. The humans step back.
What 2025 Actually Delivered
In 2025, Rewilding Europe supported four bison translocations through the European Wildlife Comeback Fund, in Spain, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, and Azerbaijan, resulting in 39 bison released. Over the past decade, the wild European bison population has grown from 2,500 to 7,000 animals. Rewilding Portugal celebrated the return of the European beaver after 600 years. The event was seen as a powerful sign of river recovery and ecological resilience.
In the Oder Delta, new funding secured the removal of three dams in Poland, with preparations for a fourth underway. Wolves, Eurasian lynx, elk, bison, and beavers are in various stages of recolonising the delta and helping to kick-start natural processes. In the Apennines, a network of “Bear-Smart Communities” expanded — working not to exclude bears from human landscapes but to enable coexistence. In the Southern Carpathians, “Bison-Smart Communities” began forming on the same model.
Indeed, the coexistence work is not incidental. It is increasingly central to the rewilding approach. You cannot restore apex predators to a continent where humans live without also restructuring the human relationship to those animals. The ecological and the social dimensions are inseparable.
The Tension at the Heart of Rewilding
The movement is not without critics — and the criticisms are serious enough to deserve attention. Farmers in areas where wolves and bears have returned experience livestock losses. Conservation organisations often struggle to compensate for these losses adequately. The reintroduction of large predators is experienced differently by a shepherd in the Carpathians than by an urban donor in Amsterdam funding the project from a distance.
In the Iberian Highlands, Rewilding Spain is scaling up natural grazing across 30,000 hectares of land. Increasing numbers of Tauros, Przewalski’s horses, European bison, and local horse breeds help reduce wildfire risk and restore biodiversity. The wildfire argument is significant — managed rewilding is being positioned not just as ecological recovery but as climate adaptation infrastructure. Heterogeneous, grazed landscapes burn differently from monocultures.
Moreover, there is also a philosophical critique: if you are deliberately introducing species, removing invasive plants, and managing which animals go where, how much of this is genuinely “wild”? The rewilding perspective holds that all contemporary European landscapes are human-modified. It reframes the question from removing human influence entirely to changing its character—from intensive management to facilitated recovery.
A New Economy Built on Absence
Perhaps the most culturally interesting aspect of rewilding is the economic argument. The movement is developing a case that recovering ecosystems generate more economic value — through ecotourism, carbon sequestration, flood regulation, and biodiversity credits — than the marginal agricultural land they typically replace.
For instance, in Portugal’s Greater Côa Valley, the shift from subsidised farming to wildlife-based tourism and natural grazing is producing a measurable economic transition. In Scotland’s Affric Highlands, the rewilding investment rationale combines carbon market participation, native woodland restoration, and the return of species like white-tailed eagles and Atlantic salmon. The University of Manchester launched the world’s first MSc in Nature Recovery, Restoration, and Rewilding in 2025 — a signal that the field is professionalising and that the career pipeline is being built.
As explored in “Europe Is Increasingly Defined by What Has Disappeared,” the absences in contemporary European life — the species, the sounds, the ecological processes that quietly vanished — are increasingly being named and, in some cases, reversed. Rewilding represents the most ambitious version of that project. It does not express nostalgia for a lost landscape. Instead, it argues that landscapes function better with less direct human management.
Wildness is no longer what is left untouched. It is what is allowed to function.
Key Sources
- Rewilding Europe, “Rewilding Highlights 2025”: https://rewildingeurope.com/rewilding-highlights-2025/
- Rewilding Europe, “Wilder by the Year: European Wildlife Comeback Fund’s 2025 Highlights”: https://rewildingeurope.com/news/wilder-by-the-year-european-wildlife-comeback-funds-2025-highlights/
- Rewilding Europe, “Why 2026 matters for rewilding in Europe”: https://rewildingeurope.com/blog/why-2026-matters-for-rewilding-in-europe-building-solidarity-for-nature-recovery/
- Global Rewilding Alliance, “The Wild Side of 2025”: https://globalrewilding.earth/the-wild-side-of-2025-celebrating-the-years-many-successes-in-the-global-rewilding-movement/
- Rewilding Europe, Greater Côa Valley landscape: https://rewildingeurope.com/landscapes/greater-coa-valley/
- Ecological Restoration Fund, “Rewilding Europe”: https://ecorestorationfund.org/grants/rewilding-europe/
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