In mid-April I travelled to Western Iberia to visit the Faia Brava nature reserve (Portugal) and meet some of the people responsible for it. The name means ‘wild cliff’ in the Portuguese spoken in this remote, achingly beautiful area. The organisation managing the area, the Transhumance and Nature Foundation (ATN), was started in 2000 by […]
This Auroch skeleton from Denmark dates to around 7,500BC. The circles indicate where the animal was wounded by arrows. Malene Thyssen./Wikimedia, CC BY-NC Rewilding and restoration of land often rely on the reintroduction of species. But what happens when what you want to reintroduce no longer exists? What if the animal in question is not […]
I ended my first blog post by asking what the point of reviving (or trying to) extinct species might be. Here, I want to take this question up and puzzle over it some more. It makes intuitive sense that, in the age of massive human-induced extinctions, the idea of reviving those already gone is gaining ground. […]
The Civil Animal 