Article: Dispelling The Myth Of The Wild

“In seeking to make wilderness, have the managers at Knepp instead strayed merely into a facsimile of age-old pastoralism? The project employs and harvests meat from a variety of hardy domestic breeds — longhorn cattle, Tamworth pigs — which does little to shake the accusation. Yet there is, perhaps, something else, something deeper, at play. If Knepp’s supposedly rewilded vistas challenge our deep-rooted preconceptions of wilderness and the wild, then it is perhaps our preconceptions, and not Knepp or its cattle, that demand revision.”

My 2025 piece for Noema on the concept of agricultural rewilding, the deep history of the European landscape, and the surprising overlap between certain forms of megafaunal rewilding and extensive farming.