Rewilding: Restoration by Letting Go

Frans Vera, is a Dutch biologist who claims that rather than closed-canopy forest, primeval lowland Europe was mostly savanna. He says that large herbivores like wild horses (tarpan) and cattle (aurochs) helped sustain a woodland-pasture system that was productive and diverse and allowed for sun-loving trees like oak and hazel to thrive. This challenges a long-held notion that in Europe ecological succession inevitably leads to dense forest.

Vera is known for his rewilding experiment at Oostvaardersplassen, dubbed the “Dutch Serengeti,” in the Netherlands. In the 1980s he began bringing cattle, horse, and deer that best approximated their extinct, wild counterparts to a five-thousand-hectare (twelve- thousand-acre) tract of land east of Amsterdam. In many ways it has been a success. Birds, including rare raptors and marsh species, showed up, as did foxes and muskrats. Oostvaardersplassen became an attractive wetland preserve.

However, the hands-off management of herbivores led to dramatic population fluctuations. With mild winters, animal numbers grew. Harsh weather meant starvation and death. In 2018 there was a public outcry. People protested and brought in bales of hay, while Dutch state foresters culled animals so that they wouldn’t suffer.¹ One complication is that Oostvaardersplassen was only partially wild: The site lacked large predators to manage the population of grazers. Currently beset by lawsuits, Oostvaardersplassen’s fate is unclear.

Still, Vera’s insights remain compelling and the reserve, which demonstrates interdependence among herbivores, trees, and wetland birds like geese, provides useful lessons. British author Isabella Tree was inspired by Vera’s work, and undertook a similar project at her Knepp Estate in West Sussex, which she describes in her book, Wilding.

In 1987 Tree’s husband, Charles Burrell, inherited fourteen hundred hectares (thirty-five hundred acres) of arable land, parkland, and historical buildings. The couple moved there to raise their children and set up a conventional grain and dairy farm. By 2000 they realized that it made no economic sense to continue farming conventionally, and they let the operation go. Two years later the property was returning to prairie conditions. She writes,

“The land, released from its cycle of drudgery, seemed to be breathing a sigh of relief. And as the land relaxed, so did we.”²