ARTE is set to air (though you can already watch it online) the first full-length documentary on European rewilding. While I was researching the reintroduction of European Bison to the Souther Carpathians (you can read about that here) I had the pleasure to meet the film crew and talk with them about my work. Some […]
Tag: rewilding
Trial of Fire
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 […]
Land Abandonment in Europe
We usually think of the American and African continents as the places of big, untouched, wilderness. Whatever the merits of this view (amply and ably disputed), it at least serves to make a negative point: in Europe, the kind of nature that superficially looks untouched doesn’t really exist. What Europeans call nature is a deeply […]
Of Bison and Men
A couple of posts back I wrote about the introduction of the European Bison (wisent) to the forests of the Southern Carpathians, in Romania. This is part of a European push towards the rehabilitation of the species, and I explained in that post how the idea of rehabilitation is interestingly and questionably tied to ideas of […]
Looking back to go forward
Before humans domesticated wild animals, meaning before we managed to control the reproductive cycle of animals with the goal of using their abilities for our gain, there was a wealth of beasts that might have become servants of the human project. Only a fraction of them were amenable to domestication (as Jared Diamond has argued […]
The Civil Animal 