THE HOPES OF REWILDING
                    By
             Charles B. Hayes
           A DISSERTATION
                Submitted to
        Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
             for the degree of
  Philosophy — Doctor of Philosophy
                   2023


                                            ABSTRACT
         Rewilding, as a form of ecological restoration and as a much broader environmental
ethos, has dramatically risen in popularity and use in mainstream global environmental
initiatives. In many circles, the term “rewilding” has even come to replace broad umbrella terms
like “conservation” and “environmentalism,” serving to sum up the purpose and work of global
environmental work as a whole. Not too long ago, however, rewilding was fringe in the science
of ecological restoration and environmental thought and writing more generally. This dissertation
tells the story of the rising prominence of rewilding as both a body of ecological restoration
methods and as a rallying cry for environmental causes more generally. This story of
popularization marks a shift toward what many have called a positive environmentalism – a
movement that focuses less on defensively protecting a remnant of healthy ecosystems and
habitats and more on actively transforming existing ecosystems in ways that encourage more
diverse, less managed ecological functions. As such, rewilding is a movement marked by hope,
not of saving what remains, but of transforming what has been lost. I show that these hopes of
rewilding are importantly hopes, not simply for healthier lands, but for happier lives. This
eudaimonistic focus of rewilding is the key to understanding both its rise to prominence and its
radical diversity as a movement, as well as a helpful model for better understanding the
dynamics of collective environmental decision-making in the Anthropocene.


                                       TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................1
CHAPTER 1: REWILDING LAND...................................................................................7
CHAPTER 2: REWILDING LIFE.....................................................................................33
CHAPTER 3: REWILDING ANTHROPOCENTRISM..................................................58
CHAPTER 4: REWILDING GOODS................................................................................79
CHAPTER 5: REWILDING DISCOURSE.......................................................................102
CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................................123
BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................................125
                                                           iii


                                         INTRODUCTION
         In their 2020 introductory text on the science of rewilding Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe
made a prediction: “As rewilding gains momentum we predict that a new term will gain
ascendancy over ‘conservation’ and ‘environmentalism.’ Rewilding is, without doubt, the current
frontrunner.”1 They argued that rewilding – not simply as a word spreading in popularity, but as
a general ethos of the conservation community – will come to characterize mainstream
environmentalism. Environmentalism will simply be rewilding. That prediction was coming true
even as they published. Jepsen and Blythe’s book, simply titled Rewilding, was at least the fourth
book with the same one-word title released since 2019, not counting appearances in longer titles
and subtitles. Cambridge Press released their Rewilding the same year, an interdisciplinary
anthology collecting the state of the science for use as a standardizing textbook. The word gained
prominence outside academia as well. Influential environmentalists the world over, including E.
O. Wilson and David Attenborough, made rewilding a central message in their work. Global
environmental organizations like National Geographic and The Nature Conservancy are actively
supporting large-scale rewilding projects, even branding their work as a whole in terms of global
rewilding efforts.
         Such mainstream acceptance was quite absent 15 years ago when the first proposal for
“Pleistocene Rewilding” appeared in scientific journals.2 Reaction was critical, sometimes quite
harsh. The basic theory proposed then was that conservationists cannot continue simply
protecting wild lands and threatened species as they currently exist. Conservation must be more
proactive, more interventionist, at least at the start. This is because remaining preserves are both
too small and already too simplified from their evolutionary complexity to sustain themselves.
1
  (Jepson & Blythe, 2020, p. 150)
2
  (Donlan J. , 2005, pp. 913-914)
                                                    1


True sustainability, they argued, requires returning a level of ecological complexity that has been
absent since the extirpation (or extinction) of large animals from the land. Most eye-catchingly,
the Pleistocene proposal was a plan to return the biggest animals – bison and bears, wild horses
and wolves – to their historic ranges. While the idea may have been fringe, at least it was being
discussed in journals, in Nature and The American Naturalist. A decade before this, rewilding
was a goal restricted to a few circles of radical environmentalists.3 In this origin, rewilding was
less defined. It was a hope for much larger areas of less managed land, sure, but it was also many
other diverse hopes of how to shape human life and society to live with more complex, less
managed ecosystems. And this meant a lot of things to the different people, and that diversity has
only grown.
          My first goal in the following chapters, then, is initially descriptive. I will chart the
history of rewilding’s rise to mainstream environmentalism. In doing so I specifically stress the
positive hopes of rewilding. More than restoring ecosystems, rewilders are hopeful about finding
better ways to live in and with these environments. It is a movement in search of not simply good
land, but the good life. My argument is that, despite the messiness of a broad movement,
environmental thought does well to commit to holding these two sides together. My ultimate
argument is not a defense of any particular kind of rewilding, rather that the rewilding movement
models a kind of eudaimonistic environmental thinking that is better suited to understanding the
environmental issues of the Anthropocene. The second half of this work is then dedicated to
defending the kind of eudaimonistic concerns that mark the rewilding movement against
significant objections in environmental ethics.
3
  This history is given more detail in Chapters 1 and 2. The term is widely said to originate in the journal Wild Earth,
founded by Dave Foreman. The conversation is present from the very first issue of Wild Earth in 1991. The term
had become standard by 1998 when Michael Soule and Reed Noss coauthored what is often cited as the first fully
formed rewilding proposal in the same journal.
                                                           2


        Chapters 1 and 2 work together with a two-fold goal. First, their task is to provide a fuller
description of what rewilding is. Unlike many topics, there is a good bit of history and synthesis
required to adequately describe rewilding. This is because rewilding is not a single kind of
ecological restoration intervention, or even a collection of methods. Rewilding is much more of a
broad social movement that has moved from various fringe initiatives and come recently to into
mainstream conservation, with various changes along the way. To this end, I’ve separated the
topic of rewilding under two kinds: Rewilding Land and Rewilding Life. Chapters 1 and 2
describe each type in turn. Second, these chapters establish my overall argument that rewilding,
and environmental thinking more generally, is improved by combining the questions of the
quality of environments along with conceptions of the quality of human life. In short, ecological
considerations alone significantly underdetermine the shape that restoration should take.
Similarly, conceptions of the good life that lack clear and tangible understandings of the kind of
environment that fosters such a life are too empty for practical application. The trend of
rewilding to hold both questions together – a better land and the better life that land affords –
offers an important example of the most promising shape of environmental thinking in the
Anthropocene.
        Chapters 3, 4, and 5 consider objections in environmental ethics. In chapter 3 I address
the charge of anthropocentrism. Centralizing a conception of the good life into environmental
ethics may appear the very definition of anthropocentrism. And, as many have argued, it is
anthropocentric thinking, of prioritizing only human interests over anything else, that lies at the
root of all modern environmental problems. Moreover, environmental ethics as a specific
philosophical project was founded and has long been understood as a search for a non-
anthropocentric ethical norms to address environmental action. It was the supposed lack of non-
                                                  3


anthropocentric ethics that led philosophers in the 20th century to agree that new ethical thinking
was required to properly address environmental issues. The project of environmental ethics was
to look outward, away from human interests, to identify features of the world – of non-human
life, of ecosystems as a whole – that demanded moral consideration, that commanded respect in
their own right. With this history in mind, it seems my suggestion is a double step backward,
against both the project of environmental ethics as well as back to the kind of thinking
responsible for environmental destruction in the first place.
         I appeal to one of the founding figures of environmental philosophy, Holmes Rolston III,
as a consistent voice against prioritizing human interests in environmental ethics. Rolston argues
that the intrinsic value of nature should be the foundation of an environmental ethic, and not
whatever goods nature may provide humans. In my response, I argue two points: First, a concern
for human goods, or even a eudaimonistic ethical framework centered on achieving the good life
for humans, is not at all the same as anthropocentrism. Indeed, Eudaimonistic thinking is not
guilty of the pernicious features of anthropocentrism. Second, I argue that environmental ethics
is improved by eschewing the binary framework of anthropocentrism vs non-anthropocentrism.
The framework is not useless, but it is too blunt and general to provide the kind of guidance and
understanding of human action to adequately evaluate environmental action. Centralizing talk of
specific goods found through specific relationships to one’s environment, which is what a great
deal of recent rewilding literature is doing, offers far more adequate ways of evaluating and
justifying environmental action.
         In chapter 4, I consider a different kind of objection. Some have argued that
environmental ethics should eschew thinking in terms of achieving goods altogether. Instead of
pursuing goods, for land or for life, environmental ethics should be concerned primarily with
                                                    4


justifying right reasons for action. This critique cuts against both a eudaimonistic approach as
well as the focus on intrinsic value from earlier non-anthropocentric approaches. The idea is that
environmental ethics goes awry when any idea of environmental good – whether it be a vision of
the good life, a claim of intrinsic value, a standard of ecological health, etc. – is allowed to
sidestep a discursive and democratic decision-making process. Environmental ethics should turn
away from promoting specific visions of the way the world should be, and instead focus on
making environmental decisions in the most fair, inclusive, and publicly justifiable ways. In this
view, fair processes matter more than end products. Put in slightly different terms, right reasons
are more important than good ends.
        The authors I review for this challenge, primarily Benjamin Hale and Luc Ferry, are very
concerned about promoting open democratic decision-making in environmental matters. They
understand dogmatic commitments to environmental goods, whatever the good, can be harmful
to democratic processes, even opening the door to far worse forms of eco-authoritarianism. In
this commitment to open democracy, I find this objection laudable. I do not think the
environmental movement in the Anthropocene is in any position to so clearly know what must be
done environmentally that one can dispense with democracy. Indeed, I open my work with the
idea that ecology alone significantly underdetermines the shape environmental action should
take. My response, then, is an argument that the kind of democratic discourse these authors
promote is best served by rich, detailed testimony of exactly what kinds of life, what kinds of
environments, and what kinds of environmental relationships are most choiceworthy, and why.
This is the opposite of dogmatism, and far different than breezy utilitarian calculations about
achieving good ends. Instead, it is a discussion that recognizes that our polities are in the
important position of making environmental decisions that will shape, not simply the health of
                                                   5


ecosystems, but the character of human life to come. To this end, the rich testimonies of
rewilders serve as good models of the kind of detailed considerations this conversation must
include.
        Chapter 5 is dedicated to clarifying my call for rich, detailed testimony. I consider the
work of Steven Vogel, who offers another warning of how speech about environmental goods
can undermine democratic discourse. In my response I introduce Albert Borgmann’s idea of
deictic discourse. This kind of speech – which usually takes the form of personal testimony, and
which requires a kind of listening with a willingness to try – offers a model both for
understanding a good deal of rewilding discourse as well as a model for how to better introduce
the topic of the good life into environmental discourse.
         In this work rewilding is not so much my topic, as my test case. In the rewilding
movement I have witnessed environmental thinking unite ecological science with detailed
eudaimonistic considerations that provide a model the kind of broad environmental thinking
necessary in the Anthropocene.
                                                 6


                                     CHAPTER 1: REWILDING LAND
“We can no longer accept a hands-off approach to wilderness preservation. Instead, we want to
reinvigorate wild places, as widely and rapidly as is prudently possible.”
          - Josh Donlan4
          Rewilding is a growing thing. As it grows in popularity it transforms in meaning. In the
first decade of this century, I knew of two distinct arenas of rewilding discourse, one was on the
fringes of ecological science, the other on the fringes of social and political theory. The first was
about the science of restoring ecosystems, the second about the ethics of reorganizing society.
The first was about the complexity of ecological communities, the second about the quality of
human relationships with and within ecosystems. These were almost two separate topics, the
goal of rewilding land versus the hope of rewilding life.
          The story from then to now is one of popularization, a movement from the fringes to the
mainstream. In ecology and conservation rewilding gained legitimacy and prominence as a
vision of global ecological restoration. Outside ecology the word simply spread. People are
currently rewilding footwear, rewilding diets, rewilding their homes and gardens, rewilding their
hearts and minds.5 It is hardly a unified project. It is young growth, dense and disorienting. And
while I want better definitions and clear demarcations, there is much to be gained from sitting in
the weeds awhile, trying to hold it all together.
4
  (Donlan J. , 2005)
55
   This chapter and the next provide examples of each of these. For some quick examples that will receive much less
attention see: “Natural lifestyle coach” Tony Riddle advocates “rewilding running” and “rewilded diets” (Riddle,
2022). Products like Ka’chava, a plant-based supplement shake, advertise “rewilding your gut” (Ka'Chava, 2022).
Rewilding one’s “gut” – through dietary changes, supplements, or even fecal transplant – is a topic I do not address
in the following chapters, but it gets quite a lot of attention in popular media. For the disputed science, one might
start with Jeffrey Gordon’s 2012 article in Science (Gordon, 2012) and a more recent, more cautious review by
Rachel N. Carmody, also in Science (Carmody, 2021). The intuition behind rewilding for human health is that
humans will be healthiest in conditions similar to how the species evolved. My present work will focus more on
human relationships with environments, but this intuition connecting health with evolutionary time is a theme
arising in multiple areas.
                                                              7


         At first glance, however, what is rewilding? Over the next two chapters I will give a
fairly messy answer. In sum, I say rewilding is two interwoven projects: it is the project of
restoring ecosystems to healthier, less managed states (rewilding land) and it is the project of
championing forms of human life that flourish most in relationship with this rewilded land
(rewilding life). In this chapter I will focus on the former, introducing the ecological concepts
that inspired and justified a new branch of ecological restoration called rewilding. In the second
chapter I consider the ways in which the rewilding movement has always been more than the
science and practice of ecological restoration; it is a movement full of very human hopes for a
better life. Ultimately, my argument throughout is not really for or against any particular kind of
rewilding. Instead, I want to defend the importance of environmental thinking that holds these
two sides together – the question of the good land as well as the good life.
         The rise in popularity of rewilding is an interesting example how this is being done. The
movement as a whole is marked by hopes, by real optimism that has often been absent from
environmentalism. The hope expressed by many rewilders isn’t simply about successfully
ameliorating environmental woes, but about discovering happier, more choiceworthy lives in the
process. As I’ll address in chapter 3 and 4, environmental ethics has often made little room for
considering human happiness. Indeed, it’s the anthropocentric concern for human interests that is
so often blamed for environmental destruction in the first place. I will argue that there is a way of
centralizing the question of the good life in relation to one’s environment that not only avoids the
pitfalls of a pernicious anthropocentrism, but also enriches environmental thinking.
         But first, what does it mean to rewild land?
                                                    8


Ecological Origins
         A fine start to the story of rewilding, is to review the trends in ecological science that
give shape to the most well-known rewilding projects. These are (1) the concept of trophic
cascade, (2) a focus on the importance of ecological function, rather than a focus on the exact
species makeup of ecological communities, and (3) the use of longer timescales in evaluating
ecological health and damage. In this section I introduce these basic parts of the ecology behind
rewilding and discuss how rewilding has come to prominence in global environmentalism. I hope
I can offer at least a sense of the ecological justification and goal of rewilding. In the next
chapter I’ll look more closely at the human side of rewilding, and the vast array of projects and
practices that have been intertwined with these projects. Understanding both sides together is the
best way to understand the optimism of rewilding.
         If it wasn’t the origin, rewilding at least found its first detailed action plan in the “3Cs”
framework popularized by conservation biologists Michael Soulé and Reed Noss in their 1998
proposal.6 The three Cs stand for Cores, Corridors, and Carnivores. The vision was of an
interconnected wilderness system that could support the top predators that were most recently
extirpated from much of North America – wolves, mountain lions, grizzly bears, lynx, etc. These
species require large habitats. For this reason, wilderness Cores are needed as large areas these
species can roam unhindered. But a Core on its own leads to inevitable problems. It’s an island
where inbreeding reduces genetic diversity and prey and other resources can quickly dry up. To
prevent these Cores from becoming unsustainable islands, they needed to be connected by
wilderness Corridors to allow carnivores to travel in search of resources, without depleting the
prey of one area, and for the mixture of genetically diverse communities. It’s easy enough to
6
  (Soulé & Noss, 1998)
                                                     9


agree that big Carnivores need cores and corridors, but why is there such a focus on big
carnivores in the first place?
         The 3C’s plan arose from increasing attention to the theory of trophic cascade, the
documented phenomenon that the composition and regulation of ecosystems are primarily
influenced by the behavior of creatures nearer the top of an ecosystem’s food web.7 In other
words, small numbers of large carnivores do nearly as much to shape an ecosystem as the
climate and plants of a given area. This can seem counterintuitive. In some sense, ecosystems
must be built from the ground up, as it were. The foundation of an ecosystem is surely its abiotic
features: the climate, the amount of water, the availability of nutrients. Plants grow were
nutrients and climate allow, herbivores come where the plants are, and carnivores follow the
herbivores, seemingly the least influential actors on the character and sustainability of the
system. The phenomenon of trophic cascade shows otherwise. It is not a rejection of the ground-
up model (indeed, if the climate dramatically changes or the water runs out, ecosystems surely
collapse), but a very important amendment. That is, the actions of small numbers of creatures at
the top of a food web have cascading effects on everything else. Large carnivores influence the
numbers prey, surely. But they also influence prey behavior, particularly how large herbivores
move across the landscape and what they eat along the way. In turn, large herbivore behavior
influences patterns of plant growth that, in ever complex turns, both shape the diversity of
habitats needed for smaller creatures and dramatically influence how water and nutrients move
through the system.
7
  Today, the concept of Trophic Cascade will show up in every ecology textbook. Although a great deal of diverse
research coalesced to form the modern concept, the origin of the theory is often associated with the work of Nelson
Hairston in the mid 20th century, see (Hairston, Smith, & Slobodkin, L. B., 1960). Hariston’s argument was that
carnivores, through their regulation of grazer populations, played a larger role in determining plant abundance than
previously thought. For usage and history of the concept see (Ripple, 2016), (Schmitz, 2000).
                                                          10


          George Monbiot’s short film on the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone may be
the most evangelical call for the benefits of top-down regulation of an ecosystem.8 He testifies
that the simple addition of wolves solved problems as widespread as the erosion of riverbanks
and diminishing Aspen groves.9 Another textbook example of top-down regulation is the
reintroduction of sea otters into the kelp fields off the coast of California, Oregon, and Alaska.10
Without otters, sea urchins decimated the kelp, removing important habitat for a host of other sea
life. Returning the otters controlled the sea urchins, which brought back the kelp, which restored
habitat for everything else.
          But as promising as these examples are, extrapolating to a general rule about ecosystem
regulation is still fraught. In one of the most complete recent reviews of trophic cascade
literature, researchers conclude that “whether rewilding can restore top-down control of
ecosystems remains equivocal.”11 The most promising stories take place in fairly simplified food
webs with very recent predator extirpation. Perhaps, then, trophic cascade isn’t the kind of silver
bullet it appears to be in popular conservation materials. Things are complex and what works in
one system might not somewhere else. But even with the admission of ecological unknowns, the
authors still claim there is ample reason to move forward with large carnivore reintroductions
even if it isn’t the regulatory silver bullet as it has sometimes been heralded.12
8
  (Monbiot, How Wolves Changed Rivers, 2014)
9
  See (Mao, 2005) (Mossotti, 2012) for overviews of the research. A history and review of the Yellowstone wolf
reintroduction was published by the project directors on the 25th anniversary of the reintroduction (Smith, Stahler,
& McNulty, 2020). Retired National Park ranger and wolf researcher Rick McIntyre has published a series of books
documenting more intimate histories of particular wolves in Yellowstone, The Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone Series,
most recently The Alpha Female Wolf (McIntyre, 2022).
10
   See (Silberstein, 2022), (Raymond W. W., 2021), (Raymond W. e., 2021). For popular overviews of Sea Otter
reintroductions see (McLeish, 2018).
11
   (Hayward, 2019, p. 344)
12
   Ibid. p. 346
                                                          11


         But 1998 was hardly the beginning of something like a 3C’s plan. In fact, the proposal is
famous because it provides a succinct summary and defense of what was already the decade-old
plan of the Wildlands Project, an initiative spearheaded by environmental activist Dave Foreman
(one of the founders of Earth First! and now President of the Rewilding Institute). Foreman
started the journal Wild Earth in 199113, dedicated to promoting a larger and more
interconnected Wilderness System in North America. Soulé and Noss’ 3C’s approach was
published in this journal seven years later. It is worth noting here that the biggest plans and on-
the-ground activism around managing very large swaths of North America as an interconnected
wilderness were underway well before the explicit 3Cs framework and the ecological
justification of trophic cascade. This shouldn’t be surprising. Projects get started for all sorts of
reasons, usually for very tangible reasons, and more theoretical justifications develop along the
way.
         The 3Cs approach, though fairly popular and taken very seriously, remained largely a
subject in conservation biology and radical environmentalist circles. The broader public’s first
introduction to rewilding may have been another particularly bold plan. In the early 2000s the
journals Nature and The American Naturalist published earnest proposals for so-called
“Pleistocene Rewilding.”14 In “Re-wilding North America” – authored by Josh Dolan and
collogues in conservation biology, including Soulé and Forman – the authors argued that
conservation required, as trophic cascade theories suggest, the reintroduction of large animals.
But in this case, it wasn’t just the animals extirpated in the last couple hundred years, like wolves
and bison, but animals that had gone extinct over the last few thousand years.
13
   (Foreman, 1991) All editions of Wild Earth Journal are now archived by the Environment & Society Portal,
accessible at www.environmentandsociety.org (Wild Earth, n.d.).
14
   See “Re-wilding North America” (Donlan J. , 2005) and the larger proposal in “Pleistocene Rewilding: An
Optimistic Agenda for Twenty‐First Century Conservation” (Donlan J. e., 2006).
                                                         12


         Tropic Cascade explains how the function of larger carnivores is vital for the diversity
and sustainability of an ecosystem. But the ecological functions of these recently lost carnivores
are not the only important functions missing. Pleistocene rewilders went a step further than the
3Cs framework (although, it should be mentioned that pretty much all the same people were
involved in promoting both) to stress that the dramatic loss of megafauna since the last ice age is
still having detrimental fallout on the stability of ecosystems. Current ecosystems evolved with
large creatures roaming in large numbers across the land – including mammoths and mastodons,
Camelops, ground sloths, extinct relatives of lions and tigers, and many more. While returning
extinct species may be impossible (though this has become its own rewilding project),
Pleistocene rewilders proposed to introduce functional equivalents of extinct species. That is,
they imagined that certain current large herbivores and predators from Africa or Asia might be
successfully brought to North America to fulfill the ecological role of their extinct relatives. And
more than returning lost ecological functions, this importation of large animals might also aid the
conservation of these animals themselves, whose habitats abroad face increasing threats.
         Some time ago the word “rewilding” was often exclusively associated with Pleistocene
Rewilding. As mentioned above, the proposal for “Re-wilding North America” appeared in
Nature in 2005, now often cited as the first time rewilding was introduced to a global scientific
audience.15 Harry Greene, a co-author of that proposal, described the aftermath of its publication
as, not simply a matter of academic controversy, but of widespread public scorn.16 The media
sensationalized the proposal, painting it as a new Jurassic Park, more mad science than
conservation. Large environmental NGOs charged that such an experimental project would
siphon scarce resources from existing, proven conservation efforts. As a specifically Pleistocene
15
   (Greene, 2015), (Johns, 2019)
16
   (Greene, 2015)
                                                   13


vision, then, rewilding entered the spotlight as fringe science, intriguing at best, but largely
unwelcome as a practical proposal.
         The science behind Pleistocene rewilding, however, had been gaining steam for decades
prior. Paul S. Martin’s Twilight of the Mammoths summarizes a 30-year career of studying the
ecological implications of mass extinction at the end of the Pleistocene.17 As, early as 1982,
Martin’s research was showing that New World ecosystems were missing key functional
elements from how they evolved, most notably the megafaunal seed dispersers.18 His work led to
the concept of “anachronistic fruit.” That is, plants bearing large fruits usually evolve in a
relationship with large animals that eat the fruit and disperse the seeds. With the large seed
dispersers gone these large fruits are living outside their time, as it were. Without their
evolutionary partner species, they are doomed to slowly diminish in range. Many of these fruits
come from trees that humans have decided to propagate, such as the Osage orange, black locusts,
Kentucky coffee tree, avocado, and the ancient Ginkgo. Without human planting the range of all
these species did (and will again) dramatically shrink. The insight that there is continuing
ecological fallout from extinctions as far back as 10,000 years ago suggested to Martin and
others that ecological stability may require reintroducing the kinds of megafaunal functions
present in the ecosystem over evolutionary time.
         In Europe, the work of Franz Vera came to similar conclusions. Focusing less on the
function of carnivores, Vera theorized that the ecology of Europe has been historically
dominated by the presence of large herbivores. Instead of dense and dark primeval forests, Vera
argues that prehistorical Europe was most likely park-like, a patchwork of forest, wetland, and
17
   (Martin, 2007)
18
   See “Neotropical Anachronisms: The Fruits the Gomphotheres Ate” (Janzen & Martin, 1982).
                                                     14


meadows that supported very large herds of free-roaming herbivores.19 Although largely
published in the early 2000s, Vera’s research on this topic began in 1979 with the formation of
the nature reserve Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands. Here Vera studied the ecological
impact of reintroducing free-roaming herbivores, a watershed experiment in rewilding. Most
notably for the Pleistocene proposal, Vera introduced Heck Cattle, a variety of cattle that had
been back-bred in the mid 20th century to resemble the ancient Auroch (Bos primigenius), the ice
age ancestor of modern European cattle.20 Oostvaardersplassen and the reintroduction of wolves
in Yellowstone thus became the two most famous and promising test cases of dramatic
ecological interventions that seemed to promote ecological stability with more hands-off
management of reintroduced species.
          Both the 3Cs approach and the Pleistocene proposal require dramatic interventions at the
start (namely, moving the big animals in), but the further goal of these interventions is to
minimize future management. These interventions are about returning complex ecological
functions, then letting those functions play out as they will. Simply abandoning land might
produce similarly complex and stable results, but over a much, much longer time. Aiding
reintroduction jump-starts these processes.
          The ecological science supporting the Pleistocene project was a major part of these early
proposals, but even more central was an ultimatum that conservation, if it is going to be
effective, must change strategies. They argued that traditional defensive conservation methods,
even if individually successful, are inadequate to address the global environmental crises of the
19
   Vera’s work is compiled in his 2000 book Grazing Ecology and Forest History (Vera, 2000).
20
   For a history of Heck Cattle and their use in Oostvaardersplassen and other project see “From ‘Nazi Cows’ to
Cosmopolitan ‘Ecological Engineers’: Specifying Rewilding Through a History of Heck Cattle” (Lorimer &
Driessen, From “Nazi Cows” to Cosmopolitan “Ecological Engineers”: Specifying Rewilding Through a History of
Heck Cattle., 2016), as well as a fuller history in (Lorimer & Driessen, 2016). Heck Cattle have also been introduced
in various locations in the United Kingdom. A history and review of these British projects can be found in (Hall &
Bunce, 2019).
                                                           15


sixth mass extinction21 and a rapidly changing climate. It will not be enough to save what is left,
even if it is all saved. Saving the wild requires expanding it, in terms of acres, and also
enhancing it – that is, adding ecological complexity, adding species that provide the full gamut
of ecological functions and relationships that evolved together in a given ecosystem. It is this
evolved complexity that provides sustainability. Simplified systems, even if left alone, will
continue to collapse.
           Of course, expanding and enhancing the wild is seemingly at odds with the very meaning
of wildness as untouched and unmanaged land. Yet this was the turn rewilding saw itself taking.
And this turn is what has come to define it in the world of conservation, even as the specific
Pleistocene dreams have become less central.22 The optimism of rewilding is that conservation
can succeed by transitioning from saving the disappearing wild, to bringing wild ecosystems
back.
Mainstream Acceptance
           While the first call for Pleistocene rewilding was seen by some as fringe science, today
rewilding has become a prominent rallying cry of mainstream environmentalism. In their 2020
introductory text on the science of rewilding, Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe made a prediction:
“As rewilding gains momentum we predict that a new term will gain ascendancy over
‘conservation’ and ‘environmentalism.’ Rewilding is, without doubt, the current frontrunner.”23
They argued that rewilding – not simply as a word spreading in popularity, but as a general ethos
of the conservation community – will come to characterize mainstream environmentalism.
21
   The now classic popular argument that Earth is currently experiencing its sixth mass extinction is presented in The
Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Kolbert, 2014)
22
   I will discuss this transition more in the next chapter. Johan D. du Toit argues that the Pleistocene project has
become more of a “heuristic” for approaching ecosystem functional complexity, and less a specific baseline for
ecosystem health. See du Toit’s “Pleistocene rewilding: an enlightening thought experiment” (du Toit, 2019).
23
   (Jepson & Blythe, 2020, p. 150)
                                                             16


          The prediction was coming true even as Jepson and Blythe published. Jepsen and
Blythe’s introduction addressed a general audience through Icon Books’ “Hot Science” series,
appearing alongside popular introductions to genetics, epidemiology, artificial intelligence, and
particle physics. Rewilding was included not simply as a growing environmentalist movement,
but as a mainstream science. Moreover, their book, with the main title simply Rewilding, was at
least the fourth book with the same one-word title released since 2019 (not counting appearances
in longer titles and subtitles).
          National Geographic’s Enric Sala published The Nature of Nature: Why we Need the
Wild in 2019.24 The work is an approachable, extended argument for a global vision of
conservation that is, as Sala understands it, largely a project of global rewilding. Sala has
summarized his goal as the “30 by 30” project (or now “30x30”), that is, a global project to
reserve thirty percent of Earth’s land and oceans as essentially wild preserves by the year 2030.25
His claim is that the sustainability of the Earth’s ecosystems as a whole depend upon the
ecological processes that occur only where ecosystems are left relatively uninfluenced by human
activity, especially industrial human ways of living. These wild refuges serve to sequester
carbon, cycle nutrients, protect biodiversity, and actually replenish the nutrients and biodiversity
of bordering areas that are not protected. So, let’s say some state has 100 square miles of
coastline supporting fisheries. At current pace, fishing is depleting all 100 square miles at
drastically unsustainable rates. One solution might be to simply reduce the amount of fishing
across the whole area. Salas’ argument is that a simple reduction across the board will not work.
24
   (Sala, The Nature of Nature: Why We Need the Wild , 2020)
25
   The source for most 30x30 plans comes from a 2019 article in Science Advances co-authored by Sala, introduced
as a “Global Deal for Nature” (Dinerstein, 2019). Many conservation organizations and governments around the
globe have adopted “30x30” as a goal for their regional planning, including the European Union and the United
States as of 2021 (Executive Office of the President Joseph Biden, 2021).
                                                         17


Even reduced industrial fishing will still simplify the whole ecosystem in ways that continue
collapse. For instance, as explained in the discussion of trophic cascade, disturbing the influence
of top predators, only a very small part of the ecosystem, has cascading effects that disrupt the
sustainability of the whole system. For this and other reasons, a better solution is to reserve half
the coastal waters, permitting no commercial fishing at all in that half. Where this happens, the
un-hindered and un-simplified ecological processes that have supported the ecosystem
throughout time, may serve to sustain the other half where industrial fishing still occurs. In the
best cases, the same number of fish that were once taken from the whole can be sustainably taken
from the half.
         But protecting 30% of the planet, at this point, is not a matter of defensive preservation of
untouched places. There aren’t that many supposedly untouched places left (if there were the
goal would already be achieved). Thus, a lot of these reserves must be rewilded reserves – land
that was previously agricultural, or coasts that have been heavily fished for decades. As Sala puts
it in his TED talk on the topic, “No place is safe anymore unless we rewild our planet. … Thirty
percent of our planet by 2030. Only that amount of wild nature, together with a massive
reduction in carbon emissions, will be able to get us back on track.”26
         Far from fringe, Sala’s book comes with a forward by HRH The Prince of Wales and an
introduction by E. O. Wilson. Far bigger than that, the 30x30 goal has been adopted by the High
Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, a coalition of 90 countries working to protect 30
percent of Earth’s land and oceans as wild reserves.27 Mainstream global conservation is no
26
   This comes from Sala’s 2021 Official TED Conference presentation, “A Bold Plan to Protect 30 percent of the
Earth’s Surface and Ocean Floor” (Sala, TED, 2021).
27
   See www.hacfornatureandpeople.org/home
                                                     18


longer a matter of preserving what’s left, it’s the hope of rewilding what’s already been
damaged.
        In terms of popular media reach, perhaps the largest call for global rewilding has been Sir
David Attenborough’s 2020 film A Life on Our Planet.28 Here Attenborough turned the cameras
on himself, recounting his extraordinary career “documenting Earth’s wild places” and tragically
“their rapidly increasing destruction.” The film tells a story in three acts, together forming an
urgent plea to “rewild the world.” It starts with Attenborough’s own witness to the planet’s loss
of wild places. Attenborough tells of his childhood, his first experiences becoming fascinated by
fossils and living creatures, and the start of his career as a filmmaker. Throughout this biography,
the years of Attenborough’s life are measured with a reoccurring screen documenting Earth’s
population, the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere, and Earth’s “remaining wilderness.”
As the first two numbers rise, that last dramatically falls. Although punctuated with alarming
numbers, the story remains a testament of love and mourning. In Attenborough’s recounting, the
ecological changes of the last century form a story of profoundly loss, a tale of grieving the
destruction of good things. The world is not simply losing it’s the ecological stability it has had
throughout the Holocene epoch, it’s losing what is most marvelous about it, most deserving of
love and wonder: its wildness. The second act does include a little of the traditional doomsaying.
It projects what’s to come over the next century if current trends continue. But the third act
comes swiftly, outlining the major steps for securing a better, specifically a “wilder” future. In
harmony with Sala, Attenborough envisions a future planet that can reserve half of the land and
oceans in a wild state, rewilding much of what was lost over his lifetime.
28
   (Hughes, 2020)
                                                   19


Many Types of Rewilding – Shared Goal of “Open-endedness”
          The kinds of interventions required to arrive at 30% wild land globally vary a great deal.
It is not all the 3C’s approach championed in the early days of rewilding. Here I want to
introduce a number of definitions and examples of rewilding to show the kinds of projects
involved in rewilding land. My focus is to show the diversity of work being done, but, as I’ll
show in the next chapter, I believe the actual ecological interventions are only half the story of
rewilding.
          Human Geographers Jonathon Prior and Kim J. Ward have provided a definition of
rewilding they believe captures the diversity of ecological interventions involved in rewilding
today. They write that rewilding is, “a process of (re)introducing or restoring wild organisms
and/or ecological processes to ecosystems where such organisms and processes are either
missing or are ‘dysfunctional.’”29 As they explain this definition in another article, they believe
“rewilding is distinct from other forms of ecological restoration in that it emphasizes
autonomous self-regulation within and amongst non-human species and ecological processes.”30
They’re argument is that while many restoration interventions may be used in different rewilding
projects, the goal of “autonomous self-regulation” makes rewilding interventions distinct. And
surely autonomous self-regulation is exactly what the early rewilding approaches emphasized as
I explained above. Carnivore reintroduction is emphasized in the 3Cs approach because of the
role top predators have in regulating ecosystem stability, the trophic cascade of top predator
behavior. The focus on ecological function rather than specific species in the Pleistocene project
also reveals the goal of autonomous self-regulation. Their goal was to return lost ecological
functions that are necessary for long-term ecosystem stability, then step away and let those
29
   (Prior & Ward, 2016)
30
   (Prior & Ward, 2017)
                                                   20


functions play out. Other rewilding activities shows a similar focus on achieving autonomous
self-regulation.
         In her 2015 review of rewilding literature, Dolly Jørgensen identified five major kinds of
intervention understood as rewilding land.31 The first two were the 3Cs and the Pleistocene
projects I have mentioned. Jørgensen’s next two examples still focus on larger species
introduction, but they differ by broadening the kinds of animals (herbivores, including mammals,
reptiles, and birds, instead of top carnivores) and the timeline used as an ecological reference
point. Instead of focusing specifically on pre-colonization or Pleistocene ecosystems, many
reintroductions simply focus on a lost ecological function from any time. These functions include
things like seed dispersal, or the grazing understory plants. In these projects, Carnivores are de-
centralized and included in the larger concept of a “keystone species.” These are species that
have a disproportionally large impact on the regulation of their ecosystem.32 Because of trophic
cascade effects, top predators are often keystone species. Many keystone species, however, are
less assuming than large carnivores. For instance, the small Clark’s Nutcracker is recognized as a
vital keystone species for the subalpine regions of the Rocky Mountains. This bird disperses the
seeds of the Whitebark Pine, a high elevation tree that forms a major part of the diet of at least 22
other species, including Grizzly Bears.33 Jørgensen’s point is not to say that these other projects
are fully at odds with 3Cs or Pleistocene projects, only that the focus of species reintroduction
spread away from just carnivores and away from a focus on Pleistocene conditions for many still
very significant rewilding projects. Rewilding has seen a loosening of the goal to mimic or re-
31
   (Jørgensen, Rethinking rewilding, 2015)
32
   Now found in any ecological textbook, the concept of a keystone species was coined by zoologist Robert T. Pain
in 1969 (Pain, 1969). An overview of the development and use of the concept can be found in (Mills, Soulé, &
Doak, 1993)
33
   The Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation publishes a great deal on the science and restoration efforts of this
ecosystem (www.whitebarkfound.org). An early study of this bird/pine relationships can be found in (Hutchins &
Lanner, 1982).
                                                        21


create a specific ecosystem reference point in the past. Instead, the focus of diversifying
ecological functions – in the hope achieving autonomous self-regulation – trumps the goal of
recreating a specific ecosystem from the past.
         It is not my topic here, but it must be mentioned that the role of ecological history in
restoration has been a central and divisive question in the field. Marcus Hall’s 2010 anthology
Restoration and History: The Search for a Usable Environmental Past covers this debate in
detail.34 Each chapter details the hopes and pitfalls of determining a reliable model of past
ecologies to guide restoration. Although ecological history offers some parameters – and as it
remains important for connecting people to the story of places they restore – past ecologies have
proved either too vague to offer a guide or ecological conditions have changed in such a way that
recreating past conditions is no longer viable. More recently, Hall has argued that rewilding
developed as a distinct enterprise from restoration precisely by giving up on the goal of
recreating past ecologies. In his words, “Rewilders can be distinguished from restorers by the
fact that their ultimate goal is favoring wild conditions rather than past conditions.”35 Things are
not always so cut and dry. It’s not the case that all restorations were set on creating exact replicas
of the past, much less that they believed ecosystems were static. The past provides important
information and sense of connection to the history and development of a pace, but only a naïve
understanding of restoration takes the past as a clear and absolute guide.36 Nevertheless, the trend
34
   (Hall M. , Restoration and History The Search for a Usable Environmental Past, 2015)
35
   (Hall M. , The High Art of Rewilding, 2019, p. 210)
36
   Eric Higgs defends the role of ecological history along these lines in his Nature by Design: People, Natural
Processes, and Ecological Restoration (Higgs, 2003). Higgs is often cited as the restorationist, indeed the former
Chair of the Society for Ecological Restoration, most insistent on historical fidelity in restoration. But although his
account emphasizes studying ecological history, it also makes it clear that historical conditions are rarely fully
achievable, and sometimes undesirable. Cf. (Hobbs, Higgs, & Harris, 2009) and (Higgs, 2017). Aside from
informing strictly ecological decisions, the study of history is meant to create connection with place, to temper
hubris, and to predict future trends. It is anything but a slavish and hopeless attempt to recreate the past.
                                                             22


of rewilding rising to the mainstream, however, has been marked by de-centralizing the goal of
restoring historical conditions.37
         There are a few reasons for this. First, there is the ignorance of the past. Restorationists
often have little knowledge of real ecological conditions of the past. Second, ecology changes.
Not only are ecosystems dynamic and changing even in the most stable conditions, but also
climate change makes it clear that a great many past ecosystems can no longer persist in their
past locations. Rapid change predicted in the near future has led restorationists to plan for future
conditions rather than past. Third, some changes are irreversible. Ecosystem change, whether
through human wrought destruction or even through the introduction of invasive species, can
trigger a “tipping point” where the overall character and regulation of the system has shifted.38
For these reasons, the focus on large predators of the 3Cs approach, and the late Pleistocene
reference point for the Pleistocene projects, have been expanded. But centralizing the ecological
functions that have regulated ecosystems through evolutionary time and focusing on those
species (carnivores, herbivores, and specific plants) that have outsized impacts on ecosystem
character and regulation has remained the focus of rewilding.
         So far, rewilding seems a matter of (re)introducing species. Jørgensen’s fifth form of
rewilding, however, is by far the most practiced: productive land abandonment. This process is
exactly what it sounds like: “a process in which a formally cultivated landscape develops without
human control,”39 or in another definition, “the passive management of ecological succession
with the goal of restoring natural ecosystem processes and reducing human control of
landscapes.”40 This might seem like the most obvious meaning of re-wilding. In terms of
37
   On this point see (Miller & Hobbs, 2019)
38
   (Hobbs, Higgs, & Harris, 2009)
39
   (Höchtl, Lehringer, & Werner, 2005)
40
   (Navarro & Henrique, 2012, p. 904)
                                                    23


intervention, it often means simply no longer farming, no longer logging, no longer fishing. The
30x30 goal with surely include lots of intentional plant and animal (re)introductions where
ecologists determine that those species’ ecological functions are important and unlikely to come
back on their own in the short term. But for the most part, land and sea abandonment, in the
sense of ceasing extraction or agriculture, is the primary form of rewilding land. In this sense,
almost all Wilderness Areas in the eastern United States are projects of land abandonment, done
before the word “rewilding” named such interventions. These areas are “abandoned” in the sense
of ceasing the logging and farming that took place there. But they are also opened up to human
use for recreation and scientific study far more than before. The focus now will be to
strategically choose land where one can readily expect old and new species to quickly reclaim
and autonomously build new systems. Although the direct intervention in these cases is
“passive,” the point is that simply ceasing heavy use creates the conditions for the revival and
free operation of ecological processes and the self-reintroduction of plant and animal species
from surrounding areas.
         As mentioned above, and more noteworthy than the diversification of which practices
count as rewilding land, is Jepsen’s and Blythe’s prediction that the word “rewilding” is
functioning as a replacement term for “conservation” and “environmentalism.”41 I argue in the
rest of this chapter that this change is best understood as a change in the overall ethos of
environmentalism. That is, rewilding isn’t becoming a dominant term only because
conservationists are adopting new restoration methods specific to rewilding. Instead, rewilding is
a dominant term by bringing many familiar, long-established methods of conservation and
ecological initiatives under one umbrella. When “rewilding” is used as an umbrella concept that
41
   (Jepson & Blythe, 2020, p. 150)
                                                  24


includes activities that only a decade ago would never have been called “rewilding,” the term is
then naming a unified conservation goal, rather than a specific ecological intervention.
Rewilding in this broad sense is that big goal of 30-50% of the planet left wild. Or, rewilding is
the big goal of appreciating and allowing for non-human life to live less controlled by human
action. This big goal includes large reserves, but it also makes sense of letting one’s yard or
garden or city park accommodate more species and ecological processes.
          Cambridge University Press’ interdisciplinary anthology Rewilding (2019) can rightly be
called rewilding’s first textbook, the first “comprehensive overview of the roots, meaning,
applications, and challenges of the rewilding concept.”42 While the roots of Trophic Cascade and
megafauna reintroduction are discussed at length, overall the book employs this far broader,
umbrella use of “rewilding.” The editors say that the common differentia separating rewilding
from other ecological restorations is its future-focused open-endedness. They distinguish
rewilding along the same lines as Marcus Hall above: “Rewilding is about choosing new
trajectories of change towards wildness in future undefined states; restoration is generally about
reversing a trajectory of change to return to a defined previous state.”43
          In Wildlife in the Anthropocene, Jamie Lorimer also identifies open-ended
experimentation as the defining characteristic of rewilding.44 The ongoing experiment at the
Oostvaardersplassen, for instance, isn’t a test of whether or not a predetermined Pleistocene-like
ecosystem can be created by short-term interventions; rather, it is an “open-ended experiment” to
see what good things can happen when space is provided for the freer operation of ecological
processes. The experiment “is valued for its ability to surprise.”45
42
   (Pettorelli, Durant, & du Toit, 2019)
43
   ibid. p. 8
44
   (Lorimer J. , 2015)
45
   ibid p. 116
                                                  25


          Open-endedness is far more broadly applicable than a focus on trophic cascade and
megafaunal reintroduction. It is more of an ethos. This is even clearer in the chapter on Urban
Rewilding in the Cambridge anthology mentioned above. The term “urban rewilding” might
have once sounded oxymoronic, but it fits perfectly with the new broad use of the term. The
authors define urban rewilding as, “any initiative or programme that seeks to encourage
biodiversity, ecosystem function, and the persistence of native species in a range of urban
settings.”46 They have no trouble linking basic “green” initiatives like urban gardens, tree-lined
streets, and dog parks alongside more traditional restoration projects like stream bank restoration
and reforestation along city boundaries. All of these are kinds of urban rewilding. This is because
what connects all these interventions is a shared effort to encourage the freer operation of
ecosystem functions, to encourage autonomous self-regulating systems – even in urban space.
          My overall point in mentioning rewilding’s move to the mainstream is that the word has
come to name a kind of hope, more than it names any particular intervention. Rewilding names
the goal and reason for environmental action. Rather than merely ecological necessity or moral
obligation, the reason to rewild is, as George Monbiot puts it, “an enhanced opportunity for
people to engage with and delight in the natural world,”47 or as Enric Sala ends his book, “our
reward will be the sense of awe and wonder we enjoy by living in this diverse and beautiful
world.”48 If rewilding names a hope, then it makes sense that any activity working towards that
hope is included under the term. In the next chapter I will look more specifically at what the
hope of rewilding looks like for human lives, but I’ll close this chapter with a bit more of the
history and development of the hope for rewilded land.
46
   (Maller, Laura, & Benjamin, 2019, p. 167)
47
   (Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life, 2014, p. 1)
48
   (Sala, The Nature of Nature: Why We Need the Wild , 2020, p. 222)
                                                       26


Radical Hope – A Eudaimonistic Turn
         Years ago, an overview of rewilding might be expected to focus on a few centralizing
examples. The conversation centered around projects briefly mentioned above, the reintroduction
of wolves into Yellowstone National Park, the experimental grazing of Red Deer and Heck
Cattle in the Netherland’s Oostvaardersplassen, and more broadly the relevance of late
Pleistocene ecology on present ecosystems. The ambitious vision behind these experiments was
a radical hope of seeing the complexity and freedom of ecological systems returned to the world
on a grand scale. Rewilding was about bears and bison, flood and fire. It was about returning big
animals, big process to ecosystems that had been dramatically simplified through human use. In
large part it still is. But so much now attaches to rewilding that a clear border between what is
central and what is peripheral, even what is ecological restoration or what is in a broad sense
social reform, isn’t as obvious. The central examples are now often background information to
still other rewilding projects.
         Yet rewilding, in all its current diversity, is still set apart by radical hope, by an optimism
about a better future. Nothing is new, not really. And yet I think the turn to positivity in
rewilding conversations speaks of a larger and promising shift in environmental thought.
Environmentalism has largely been defensive, a matter of guarding wild places against
destruction. The task has been to preserve the last remaining acres of tall-grass prairie, old
growth forest, mountain cats, caribou herds, desert fish, or rare salamander. Environmental
arguments are structured to praise some distant past – some time before the damage of industrial
civilization’s exploitation of the land – and warn about the future. In this defensive posture
environmentalism has understood itself as a losing struggle, but a noble one. “When they win,
                                                    27


it’s forever,” the Sierra Club’s David Brower used to say, “When we win, it’s merely a stay of
execution.”49
          George Monbiot has presented a different vision. He published Feral in large part to
“encourage a positive environmentalism.” 50 Echoing many others, Monbiot agrees that 20th
century environmentalism, and I would highlight academic environmental ethics in this charge,
has been primarily a project of prohibitions. Overall, the rise of modern environmentalism
provided very good reasons for not harming the planet, from simply avoiding environmental
disaster, to duties to future generations, and, most importantly, duties to the value of non-human
life itself. Monbiot writes, “We have argued that certain freedoms – to damage, to pollute, to
waste – should be limited. While there are good reasons for these injunctions, we have offered
little in return.”51 What Monbiot wants to offer, what he finds in rewilding as a positive turn, is a
vision of a better way to live, a more rewarding and choiceworthy life for humans. He says this
plainly: “Rewilding should take place for the benefit of people, to enhance the world in which
we live, and not for the sake of an abstraction we call Nature.”52
          This kind of statement seems at once both paradoxical and anathema. Paradoxical
because rewilding is largely concerned with promoting the value and freedom of unmanaged
ecosystems. Rewilders are attempting to shift large swaths of land away from human habitation
and exploitation, encouraging a return of the complex ecosystem functions that human
intervention disrupted. It seems anathema because environmental ethics as a discipline was
founded as a project of justifying an ethical treatment of the non-human world for what it is in
49
   This aphorism is attributed to David Bower in many articles and almost never cited. Brower used it many times. It
can be found on www.davidbrowercenter.org
50
   (Monbiot, 2014, p. 12)
51
   ibid.
52
   ibid. p. 12-13
                                                        28


itself and not for what it provides to humans. An unrestricted concern for human benefit – for
expansion, for profit, for technological progress – lies behind all environmental crises in the first
place. Right? At least, this is a common enough diagnosis that comes in various versions.
         It is my task to defend the kind of turn Monbiot and many other rewilders are making. In
the following chapters I don’t provide a straightforward defense of any particular rewilding
project. My topic is still more general. I am asking What does it mean for environmental
philosophy to take a positive turn? How can it do so without being both paradoxical and
anathema? I argue that the positive turn evidenced in rewilding literature is best understood as a
Eudaimonistic Turn. That is, the project of environmentalism is changing away from justifying
prohibitions, however they are defended, and towards the question of what is the best kind of
life, the most choiceworthy way to live, in relation to one’s environment. The latter question is a
richer question. It doesn’t abandon the former; it incorporates the constraints of sustainability
and duty and adds to them tangible, motivating practices for a better life. Rewilders have set the
goal of a planet with at least 30% of its land left wild. They argue that it is ecologically
necessary. But more than this, they argue that a life with more wildness around is a better life.
And it’s the appeal of a better life that explains the rise and diversification of rewilding projects.
I think this eudaimonistic turn is the most promising movement in environmentalism today. In
the next chapter I will offer a clearer picture of how rewilders talk about the hope for a better
life.
A Note on Origins
         All origins have origins, but stories must start somewhere. Surely, the eudaimonistic
motivation in rewilding has an unbroken connection to the project of Wilderness designation in
North America, and this movement, it has been argued many times, is a tangible echo of a
                                                   29


Romantic response to the Enlightenment and later industrialization.53 What I’m calling the
Eudaimonistic Turn evidenced in Monbiot is simply de rigueur in the most influential works of
Aldo Leopold or Wilderness Society founder Bob Marshall. In The People’s Forests (1933),
Marshall presents the central goal of preserving forests in primitive states as providing a refuge
from the troubles of urban life. He writes, “As society becomes more and more mechanized, it
will become more and more difficult for many people to stand the nervous strain, the high
pressure, and the drabness of their lives. To escape these abominations, constantly growing
numbers will seek the primitive for the finest features of life.”54 The choice of “finest” harkens
back to Aristotle’s to kalon, a beautiful good, something truly choiceworthy. While Marshall is
no academic Aristotelianism, this kind of good so often motivates Marshall’s work.
          Other founders of the Wilderness Society are on the same page. Take Benton MacKaye’s
proposal for the Appalachian Trail (1921); if it were proposed today, it would absolutely be
marketed as a plan to rewild, not simply land, but rural life and economy. In fact, MacKaye’s
original Appalachian Trail proposal was published, not in any environmental or forestry journal,
but in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects. He wasn’t trying to shape nature; he
was trying to shape human life. As he put it, wilderness preservation is about offering a better
solution to the “problem of living,”55 understood as the impoverishing and often unjust living
conditions brought on by industrial society. His original trail concept had pedestrian access
connecting Washing, DC, Philadelphia, and New York City to the trail. Moreover, MacKaye is
clear that his goal is not to simply provide occasional retreats (which is what the Appalachian
53
   The connection between wilderness designation and the romantic movement has been described in (Cladis,
Radical Romanticism: Democracy, Religion, and the Environmental Imagination, 2014) and (Cladis, 2018)
54
   (Marshall, 2002, pp. 64-65)
55
   (MacKaye, 1921) – MacKaye’s original published the Appalachian Trail proposal in the Journal of the American
Institute of Architects.
                                                       30


Trail provides these days), but to set up an economic system that makes a far more rural life
possible for more people who would live and work in the areas protected for the trail. He writes,
          The ability to sleep and cook in the open is a good step forward. But "scouting" should
          not stop there. This is but a feint step from our canary bird existence. It should strike far
          deeper than this. We should seek the ability not only to cook food but to raise food with
          less aid – and less hindrance – from the complexities of commerce. And this is becoming
          daily of increasing practical importance. Scouting, then, has its vital connection with the
          problem of living. The problem of living is at bottom an economic one.56
          So, maybe Monbiot’s turn isn’t new. Origins have origins. Far earlier than the Wilderness
Society, we have Transcendentalism and Romanticism, along with various Agrarianisms that are
very much kindred spirits (perhaps elder brothers). These responses against enlightenment,
against features of industrialization, were regularly cast as returns to some kind of wildness. And
the force of these was also, I think, eudaimonistic. The push was to question progress and ask,
are the changes coming really changes for the better? Is the modernization of life really the more
choiceworthy life? What goods are lost in the transition?
          Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes (1810) is a good example. The Guide is a praise of
wildness, written as an attempt to capture a fading thing. One of Wordsworth’s most eye-
catching uses of the term “wildness” is used to describe – not the lakes and fells, not the badger
or the red deer – but the Lake District’s vernacular architecture. Wordsworth praises the houses
as wild: “These humble dwellings remind the contemplative spectator of a production of nature
… to have risen by an instinct of their own out of the native rock; so little is there in them of
formality; such is their wildness and beauty.”57 While other portions of Wordsworth’s poetry
may characterize wildness in terms of a solitary figure enthralled by a sublime universe, the
nature of wildness in the Guide is a way of life – a threatened quality of relationship with
56
   ibid. p. 325
57
   From the 1810 edition, electronic edition archived at www.romantic-circles.org (Wordsworth, 2022)
                                                          31


community and with the land. And the threat is not just human habitation or use, not these old
houses; the threat is in the new houses being built, the changing economic conditions and new
patterns of life initiated by an influx of wealthy folks buying up the area. The loss of wildness is
the loss of a way of life.
          Mark Cladis has recently charted the use of wildness in romantic traditions, noting that
the appeal to wildness most often serves as radical social critique.58 He closely reviews the work
of Wordsworth, Thoreau, and W. E. B. Du Bois, showing how all three employ notions of
wildness that are not quite ecological ideas, but something more like social-ecological ideals,
ways of living in relation to land as a critique of the impoverishments and injustices of dominant
modes of life in their time and place.59 It’s not much of a stretch to call any of this a positive
environmentalism.
          So, in the next chapter I want to focus on these broader, social-ecological hopes in
rewilding. One misunderstands the growth and popularity of rewilding if it is reduced to the
ecological defense of trophic cascade and diversifying ecological functions. A whole side of the
literature concerns, not rewilding land, but rewilding our lives. Here the eudaimonistic turn is far
more apparent. If environmentalism is going to become truly positive, to take what I’m calling a
eudaimonistic turn, it must widen its focus from the good of the land to the good of a life lived
on that land. And that’s the conversation many rewilders are starting.
58
   (Cladis, 2014 & 2018)
59
   See also, Robert Chapman’s “Ecological Restoration Restored” (Chapman, 2006). Chapman focuses on Leopold
and Thoreau’s notion of wildness, pointing out how what each prize has more to do with modes of living than
particular ecological states.
                                                       32


                                       CHAPTER 2: REWILDING LIFE
      “Just as Shakespeare’s Macbeth laments about life, rewilding becomes a word ‘full of sound
      and fury, signifying nothing’ – or perhaps, signifying everything.”
          - Dolly Jørgensen60
      “I have to say that by now, after spending years philosophizing about the word rewilding, I
      fucking hate it.”
          - Peter Michael Bauer 61
          In the last chapter I covered a bit of what rewilding optimism looks like in ecological
terms. I reviewed some of the ecological concepts used to argue that ecosystem health requires
wilder landscapes, large places where the large animals and big ecological processes that evolved
together are free to continue their relationships. But this is only part of the story. In this chapter I
talk about the social side of rewilding.
          Many attempts to define rewilding have focused most on providing one definition that
distinguishes all cases of rewilding restoration projects from previous forms of ecological
restoration.62 These definitions can be useful, if broad. Specifically, they focus on the ecological
science and the concepts outlined in the last chapter – trophic cascade, ecological function,
longer time scales, open-ended management.
          Andrea Gammon has taken a different approach to defining rewilding. In “The Many
Meanings of Rewilding”63 she argued for a cluster definition, a set of themes that run through
rewilding practices and discourse. This method builds on the Wittgensteinian notion of “family
resemblances.”64 The idea is that if one simply documents many different instances and uses of a
word, it is less likely that they are all connected by one core meaning, and more likely they are
60
   (Jørgensen, Rethinking rewilding, 2015, p. 487)
61
   (Scout, 2016, p. 243)
62
   This is what (Prior & Ward, 2016) and (Jørgensen, Rethinking rewilding, 2015) did, quoted in the previous
chapter. Even if not a strict definition, Marcus Hall (Hall M. , 2019) and Jamie Lorimer (Lorimer J. , 2015) also
attempt to separate all rewilding from restoration by appealing to the future-oriented, open-endedness of rewilding.
63
    (Gammon, 2018)
64
   See Philosophical Investigations I.67 (Wittgenstein, 1973)
                                                           33


connected by a series of partially overlapping similarities. For Gammon, then, no one criterion
captures the meaning of rewilding, but a number of themes, no one theme always present, braid
together in the diverse ways the word is used.
          What interests me most in Gammon’s approach is the inclusion of what she calls
“secondary” uses of Rewilding. Gammon divides these secondary uses between “reflexive” and
“primitivist” uses of rewilding.65 The former includes the many projects of people changing
lifestyles and worldviews in order to better appreciate wildness. Gammon’s central example is
George Monbiot, who I mentioned in the last chapter. Gammon describes his project this way:
“For Monbiot, rewilding as the restoration of defunct ecologies is the condition of possibility for
his human-centric meaning of rewilding: humans need encounters with a wilder world in order to
experience the personal rewilding that Monbiot sees as important for our well-being.”66 The
rewilding projects Monbiot describes are restorations of landscapes, but more than this they are
transitions of lifestyle in and with these landscapes that prove themselves better for human well-
being. Monbiot’s story is a lifestyle change from what he calls “ecological boredom”67 to a life
that more deeply appreciates the diversity and dynamism of the world around it. Just what such a
“wilder” life looks like is something of an open question. But the focus on human lifestyle
change is what Gammon means by “reflexive” rewilding.
          Gammon’s other secondary use, “primitivist rewilding,” is a more specific tradition
within the broader idea of reflexive rewilding. Primitivists also have a focus on lifestyle change
as the focus of rewilding. Gammon cites the groups Wild Abundance and the Firefly Gathering
as primitivists rewilders. I will introduce both groups, along with some background to the
65
   Gammon, 2018 p. 336-338
66
   ibid. p. 336
67
   (Monbiot, 2014, p. 12)
                                                  34


primitivist traditions, more below. In brief, primitivists value small self-sustainable agrarian life
and many hunter-gatherer traditions. For some, this involves creating fully off-grid communities.
For others, it is a way to include meaningful ancient skills into their modern life. Here it only
needs to be noted that the primitivists argue, a bit like Monbiot, that human well-being is found
in reconnecting in some way with the wild world. They go much further, however, in more
deeply critiquing industrial civilization and advocating for alternate forms of social and
economic organization, forms that prioritize the self-sufficiency of small groups living more
directly off the land. Gammon writes, “On this version of rewilding, in order to be whole and
fully actualized, humans have to learn to overcome the artificial and toxic ways in which we
have separated ourselves from nature. [Fixing this] requires that we re-acquaint ourselves with
the natural world by learning skills that enable self- and community-sufficiency without relying
on the standard means of employment and economy.”68
        Reflexive rewilding and a primitivist impulse aren’t covered in most attempts at a
singular definition of Rewilding. And yet, both color the history and current practice of
rewilding. It certainly is not the case that all rewilders are sympathetic to primitivists. I discuss
this more below. And yet, the reflexive focus of rewilding is a mainstay of rewilding literature
and the landmark nature literature that has inspired it, including Thoreau and Muir, Leopold and
Carson. It is the notion that, more than ecological damage, something good has been lost in
development of modern forms of life. It’s the hope that a better life is possible. Gammon agrees
that these reflexive and primitivist uses of rewilding may be secondary, even “fringe.” She
argues, however, that they are nevertheless influential uses of the word that must be kept in mind
for a more complete understanding of rewilding as a movement. She writes:
68
   Gammon, 2018, p. 337
                                                    35


          I want to suggest, however, that re-envisioning and its associated discontent are as much
          a theme of rewilding as are other criteria more commonly associated with rewilding as
          ecological restoration. … Ignoring [these secondary themes] misses a shade of meaning
          to which even the more conventional uses of rewilding sometimes make allusions. …
          Specifically, these fringe or secondary uses make explicit a discontent with which the
          more mainstream instances of rewilding and environmental thinking resonate. It is for
          this reason that maintaining rewilding as a single term that encompasses this breadth of
          usages is important.69
          My introduction of rewilding has already left room for these “secondary” meanings. I
think they are even more central to rewilding as a movement than Gammon argues. This is why I
divide my descriptions loosely between Rewilding Land and Rewilding Life. And I agree that
the themes on the “life” side can be understood as “secondary” in many contexts. But as a broad
movement, and certainly in popular appropriation, I think these secondary meanings are even
more important. The “re-envisioning” involved in the hope for better relationships with one’s
environment is foundational to the movement, both predating and inspiring much of the
ecological science and fueling the radical hope present in rewilding proposals.
          In this chapter I introduce several examples of “rewilding life.” Here I’m still answering
the question: What are rewilders so optimistic about? It is never simply more diverse
ecosystems. My point is not to defend any particular version of rewilding, or any particular hope.
Some rewilding hopes may be quite unappealing to most people. Nevertheless, I hope to show
that there is a benefit in the trend to centralize the kind of hope prominent in rewilding literature.
That is, there is a benefit in realizing that the question of the environment is really a
eudaimonistic question, a decision about what kind of life is more choiceworthy. This is the
discussion many rewilders are already having. Making it explicit sharpens reasoning and reveals
more of what it is at stake in the decision.
69
   ibid. p. 338
                                                    36


A Reflexive Example
         Of the number of recent books simply titled Rewilding, Micah Mortali’s 2019 volume
might seem out of place. There is a bit of ecology, a few mentions of popular environmental
authors, but it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t a text about ecological restoration at all. It’s a
yoga book.
         Micah Mortali begins the work with rueful descriptions of life in industrial society. “We
live in a time when technology dominates our lives. The internet and portable touch-screen
devices have radically altered our interactions and our societies. Fewer and fewer people are
connected to the source of their food or the land on which they live. This break in our
relationship with nature alienates us from the generative forces of our living earth.”70
         Mortali’s lamentation is about the architecture of industrial society, its material structure.
Life in industrial society is shaped by an increasingly homogenous infrastructure: the foundation
of highways connecting concrete city centers with endless sub-divided, centerless suburbs; the
organization of offices, living rooms, and restaurants to direct attention towards screens rather
than other people; the daily distance between home and work, and the greater, less tangible
distance between the goods we consume and their opaque origins. Even where individual
freedoms of belief and lifestyle are respected, the material structure of industrial culture sets
limits to the possible patterns of daily life, patterns dictated by the cellphone, the car, and the
television. One can work to cultivate other patterns – you might walk or bike commute, buy
local, avoid social media, garden, go knock to say hello to the neighbors – but even these simple
things become increasingly difficult when they work against the grain of one’s environment. The
infrastructure of our lives supports a certain kind of living, discouraging anything else. Mortali
70
   (Mortali, 2019, p. 1)
                                                    37


continues, “I often feel trapped in my modern lifestyle. … I feel compelled to stay on the
hamster wheel, even though I know I am contributing to the degradation of the earth.”71
           As a Yoga and Mindfulness educator, Mortali became increasingly dissatisfied with
teaching Yoga indoors on rubber mats and practicing Mindfulness primarily as an exploration on
one’s inner life. He developed practices of mindful rewilding as “a tool to train yourself to be
here now, with the earth as it is… This is a natural form of mindfulness, in which I surrender to
the presence of the living earth and allow her dance to carry me fully into the present moment.”72
The objective is to gain a wider perspective on life, on one’s place in relation to the larger living
world. Mortali laments that the patterns of industrial daily life make this wider perspective
increasingly hard to appreciate and sustain. Mindful rewilding, though, offers a perspective on
how one’s life is related to the larger world that allows one to “see through the manufactured
stories and become more discerning in our actions.”73 Through these practices Mortali believes,
“Our species can reclaim our once wild selves and appreciate once again our natural habitats.”74
           The story here is one of exile and return. Contemporary life is a separation from
something older, more permanent, more important. Rewilding is a name for coming home. In
Mortali’s case, a particular kind of yoga and meditation is one path guiding us there.
           This example is one of many. What I want to bring out in the examples below is this: the
hope of rewilders are competing visions, not merely about a healthy environment, but about a
Good Life. The most pertinent environmental discussions today are often more a matter of
answering Who do we want to be? rather than How ought we to treat our environment? I argue
71
   ibid., p. 16
72
   ibid., p. 21-22
73
   ibid., p. 22
74
   ibid., p. 23
                                                    38


that the former question, which at its heart is a eudaimonistic concern, is the better question to
centralize in environmental ethics.
More Origins – Loss, Wonder, and the Word itself
         The Pleistocene proposal mentioned in the last chapter, as novel as it was, grew from
older and deeper soils. It was never only arguments about what ecosystems required for
sustainability. Rewilding was giving voice to a sense of wonder that has long accompanied
ecological research and long inspired amateur naturalism. It is a wonder awakened by history.
         More often than not, learning how an ecosystem works feels like learning about how it
used to work. As Aldo Leopold lamented, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that
one lives alone in a world of wounds.”75 It may be maudlin, but the writer of Ecclesiastes is often
proven right: He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.76 The ecological eye notices what
is missing.
         But a reason to mourn things lost is also a recognition of something good, something
worth mourning. A little history enlivens the imagination. Simple facts about the past seem
revolutionary, perception-altering. I remember learning that the banks of the Monongahela River,
flowing just outside my window, were once blanketed with freshwater mussels. More than
random fecundity, this abundance came from centuries of skillful management by the indigenous
residents. Their river provided their diet. Just one century ago new European residents of my
town ice-skated across this river, on water I’ve never seen freeze. A warming climate partly
explains the change, but huge dams had regulated this river’s seasonal patterns of flood and
freezing long before this. When my town was founded the Sycamores along the banks of the
75
   (Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on conservation from Round River, 1986, p. 197)
76
   Eccles. 1:18 KJV
                                                    39


Monongahela River where wide and hollow enough to offer ready-made shelter for travelers,
with room for bed rolls and a cookfire.77
         A few facts change perception. Presence comes to reveal absence; bare mud speaks of
mussel beds; greenbrier thorns speak of lost timber. A walk by the river prompts mournful
reveries, a wish for shellfish and sycamore hollows, a vague longing, and a timid hope. These
facts are not simply about a river, but the kind of life that river afforded – a life now lost.
         This sort of wonder and longing differs from place to place, from person to person. I
mention my own because wonder and longing are matters for personal testimony, not general
arguments about what is ecologically necessary. Moreover, I mention my own because pining for
old Sycamores is much different than other mourning, much different than many indigenous
Americans remembering bison herds roaming the unfenced prairie, for instance, and the kind of
life that afforded.
         A student of Eastern North American forests studies after the Chestnut blight, after Dutch
Elm disease, after the Red Spruce were scraped clean from Appalachian ridge tops. Here in
central Appalachia, I drive home each day on a road I know is a paved-over Bison trail. What
was this place like then? What might it be like to live a life of Chestnuts in autumn, Elm shade in
summer, a land of clean water and clean soil, and forests that still supported Elk, Bison, and
Wolves. Imagining what was is a hairs breath from dreaming what could be; emotionally,
however, it’s a world away, a change from grief to hope. Rewilding gave a word to the
captivating sense of potential fostered in the study of ecological history.
         This buoyant hope and the hard science are separate things, but never far apart. The best
nature writers are those who most elegantly weave the two together. Aldo Leopold committed
77
   One of the more complete and approachable ecological histories of central/southern Appalachia is Donald Davis’
Where There Are Mountains (Davis, 2000)
                                                      40


the second chapter of A Sand County Almanac to this woven history. The chapter “February” is a
decade-by-decade lamentation of what Wisconsin, and Leopold’s own eroded Sand County farm,
had lost over the last century. Such accounting is necessary to begin the work of ecological
recovery. One must take accurate stock of the damage. But Leopold’s accounting here isn’t
science; it’s poetry. What to make of it? Why such articulate mourning? It gives hope direction.
Leopold’s Almanac mourns loss, but as a preamble to its deeper affirmation that a ruined farm
can be a wonderous place to live, still worth time and attention, still ready to come alive again.
With the right changes the former richness of the land might not simply return as we retreat, but
might become part of our lives. Still more, the Almanac testifies that the life of restoration is a
life worth living, not as a joyless duty, nor as a sacrifice for the future, but as a Good Life. And
this life can happen here, on an eroded Wisconsin farm or the banks of the Monongahela River.
This affirmation is the point of the poetry.
         This is a different kind of optimism than the hope of expanding wild ecosystems. This is
a hope for connection, for community, for a life of skillful and joyful participation in the ecology
of one’s world. As I will show, rewilding is often voicing this kind of hope, a hope for more
fulfilling relationships with one’s environment.
         I say all this to argue that this broad hope is an important context for understanding
rewilding. As reviewed in the last chapter, Dolly Jørgensen argued that rewilding began as a
term in ecological science with a few discrete meanings, each a specific form of ecological
restoration.78 She then interprets the rapid and diverse spread of rewilding as a case of what
linguist Uwe Pörksen call a “ ‘plastic word,’ words developed in scientific language for discrete
78
   Jørgensen 2014
                                                    41


ideas that then move into daily use and take on different meanings.”79 Other examples include
development, modernization, and sustainability. Words are always changing, but the worry of
this particular escape from science to popular discourse is that the various broad and fuzzy
meanings in social discourse can unwarrantedly garner something of the scientific authority of
the far more discrete and qualified uses in the original science.
           Jørgensen’s is a good warning, but it is too narrow a view of the history. The word
“rewilding” has its roots in the Earth First! community of the late 1980s. Dave Foreman, then a
leader of Earth First!, is often credited as the originator.80 The general story is that these radical
environmental advocates saw the dramatic expansion of Wilderness designation, or something
like it, as necessary for curbing environmental destruction. This meant expanding wilderness-
style protection to lands that do not qualify under the Wilderness Act. As part of a wave of
environmental “re” words (restoration, reclamation, rehabilitation, revitalization), establishing
wilderness management on land that didn’t qualify as wilderness is easily enough named re-
wilding. Tracking down the exact origins of the specific neologism, however, quickly becomes
trivial.
           One of the first recorded example in print is from a 1990 Newsweek article describing the
work of Earth First!.81 The article referenced “rewilding” as a word environmental activists were
already using. When Foreman split with Earth First! and established the Wild Earth journal in
1991, he used the phrase “Wilderness Recovery Zones” for the vision of making new, larger, and
interconnected wilderness areas. The topic of Wilderness Recovery Zones persisted in Wild
79
   ibid., p. 485 – For Poerksen’s full presentation see Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language
(Poerksen, 1995)
80
   See “History of Rewilding: Ideas and Practice” (Johns, 2019) as well as the inaugural edition of Wild Earth
journal (1991), the latter archived at www.environmentandsociety.org.
81
   (Foote, 1990)
                                                           42


Earth through the 90s, coalescing into Michael Soulé and Reed Noss’s seminal article
“Rewilding and Biodiversity” (1998) – the 3C’s essay mentioned in the last chapter. This essay
is often cited as an origin of the term, but it is better understood as a foundational document for a
particular model of scientific conservation, one that formed within a larger milieu of rewilding
dreams. That is, Soule and Noss’s plan – a push to protect wilderness Cores, establish migration
Corridors, and reintroduce Carnivores (dubbed the 3Cs approach) – is better understood not as
What, but a specific Why and How of rewilding. It offered a summary of the ecological
justification and practical direction for achieving a rewilded world.
         It is misleading to understand rewilding as a concept of ecological science that escaped
into wider popular use, as Jørgensen presented it in her first attempt above. The science itself
developed within the much wider conversation. Wild Earth journal wasn’t a science publication;
it was a collection of dreams, of poems, of travel narratives, amateur naturalism, diatribes, and
philosophical musings. Together it formed a testimony to the goodness of the living world and
the promotion of various ways of appreciating it. The 3Cs conservation plan solidified within
that diversity, not the other way around.
         An even clearer example of rewilding ethos and practice pre-dating rewilding science
comes from Jørgensen herself, writing a few years later. In Recovering Lost Species in the
Modern Age Jørgensen has a chapter dedicated to rewilding.82 Curiously, she doesn’t choose 21st
century examples of Pleistocene Parks or recent wolf or bison reintroductions. She goes back
100 years to describe the work of reintroducing Musk Oxen to Scandinavia. She sees in this
reintroduction the prototypical rewilding project, an effort began in 1932. As evidenced in her
narrative, the desire to reintroduce large species, to witness them roaming freely where they once
82
   (Jørgensen, 2019)
                                                    43


did, to live a life with them, predates the ecological justifications for doing so. It’s fair to say that
various discontents and longings are what inspired the ecology in the first place, or at least they
are the context in which it formed, not the other way around.
         Next, I look a bit more closely at two very different rewilding hopes, two very different
versions of a positive environmentalism. The juxtaposition helps reveal that what is most at stake
in the positive turn in environmentalism is, not quite ecology, but rival eudaimonistic visions.
A Little Primitivism
         A hope for restored ecosystems is big, a hope for the quality of life and relationships
those complex ecosystems afford is bigger still, but rewilding has been a rallying cry for yet
more expansive dreams. For many, rewilding is a call for sweeping social transformation. It is a
lifestyle, an ethic, and a politics. This was the secondary, political arena of rewilding discourse I
encountered over a decade ago. The following few examples are admittedly fringe, but their
threads weave through even quite mainstream rewilding conversations today. I first came across
the word “rewilding” in the early 2000s, separate from ecology, in a number of leftist and
anarchist zines – mostly publications of hand-stapled copier paper circulated at rock shows and
protests. In these pages rewilding was a project of explaining what’s gone wrong – what’s gone
wrong with everything – and how to fix it, or maybe just how to cope, how to carve out a
different kind of life from a civilization that increasing dictates, as they saw it, a homogenous
and oppressive existence.
         For some this took the form of grand political theory, like anarcho-primitivists John
Zerzan and Kevin Tucker. Their publications, notably the periodicals Green Anarchy and Wild
Resistance (far more polished than my early hand-stapled samples), argue that the roots of both
social oppression and environmental destruction lie – not merely in industrialization, not merely
                                                   44


in colonialism, not merely in capitalism, but – in the very foundations of centralized, agricultural
civilization. Patriarchy, racism, economic exploitation, as well as recklessly unsustainable uses
of natural resources, have their roots in the material organization of agricultural society, so they
argue. Social injustice and environmental destruction are intertwined in the invention of non-
migratory city life. Zerzan writes, “Mounting evidence demonstrates that before the Neolithic
shift from a foraging or gatherer-hunter mode of existence to an agricultural lifeway, most
people had ample free time, considerable gender autonomy or equality, an ethos of
egalitarianism and sharing, and no organized violence.”83 The move to centralized, agricultural
life was not an upgrade in quality of life for most people. Instead, city life was built and
maintained by reigning in the freedom, diversity, and independence of the many to serve the
interests of the few. The basic intuition here is a rejection of anything like a Hobbesian social
contract theory. Politically centralized agricultural life was not established through enlightened
self-interest; it was not an exchange of freedom for security; it was not an acceptance of the rule
of law as a salvation from perpetual want and indiscriminate violence. Instead, Zerzan claims
that the rise of agricultural civilization was forced and marked a distinct decline in quality of life
for most people.84
          And it was not only people who suffered, Zerzan claims, but their environment as well.
Primitivist Rewilders argue that centralized agricultural life necessitates unsustainable
environmental destruction. A permanent city inevitably leads to the exhaustion of local
resources, requiring continued expansion, usually conquest, to sustain it. Thus, social injustice
and ecological destruction are both bound to the material structure of society as centralized,
83
   From Zerzan’s essay “Why Primitivism?” (Zerzan, johnzerzan.net, 2002)
84
   Zerzan has consolidated many of his thoughts on these topics in his A People’s History of Civilization (Zerzan,
2018). For a comparison of Zerzan’s primitivism with the ‘state of nature’ concept in Locke and Rousseau, as well
as a fuller account of its relationship with current environmental ethics, see (Smith M. , 2002).
                                                            45


densely populated, agricultural communities. The answer, then, is to change that material
structure of society. It is a dream of changing how humans inhabit a landscape, how they meet
their needs. Rewilding in this context is the work of fostering “the innate egalitarianism and
ecological-inclusion that is rooted within all of us through millions of years of evolution as
nomadic societies.”85 The organization of less centralized, hunter-gather societies inspire a vision
of a happier, more just future.
          I mention Zerzan and Tucker briefly as an example of the wider ideas behind some forms
of primitivism. It’s not my intention here to evaluate his theories of ancient human societies. In
my estimation, they seem overly romantic and simplistic. My point, however, is only to draw
attention to some of the wider theories that lead primitivists (1) to assume something closer to
hunter-gatherer lifestyles will produce a better life and (2) to stress again the eudaimonistic
motivation present in this kind of thinking. The call to primitivism is not understood as a
personal sacrifice to protect wild nature. It is not a moral demand or an attempt to make amends
for past destruction. It’s pitched as a movement forward to a happier life. Whether such a life is
happier is another question.
          But primitivist rewilding is not all grand political theories. Others in these circles simply
discuss the joys found in traditional skills, in more rural, less industrial forms of life. The Firefly
Gathering and Wild Abundance, for instance, are groups that promote rewilding through the
practice of traditional life skills, some skills that might resemble some hunter-gatherer practices,
some skills that are rather modern, small-scale agrarian. The Firefly Gathering puts on an annual
event offering “over 300 classes ranging from bow-making and hide-tanning, to herbal medicine
and food preservation, to nonviolent communication, healing arts, and environmental
85
   This is in the mission statement of Kevin Tucker’s journal Wild Resistance (www.wildresistance.org)
                                                         46


remediation.”86 A large part of this kind of rewilding is about skillful engagement with one’s
environment to meet one’s needs. More simply, it’s about learning to do things. It’s about the
quality of life, the quality of social and ecological relationships, achieved in small communities
sustaining themselves. There is more goodness to a meal skillfully cooked than in a meal easily
purchased; more goodness still in a meal skillfully grown and gathered. Rewilding is about
identifying goodness lost in contemporary life, and finding ways of living that reclaim it.
         This kind of expansive rewilding – from political theory to basket weaving – is what
inspires Peter Michael Bauer, founder of Rewilding Portland. As he defines it, rewilding is about
un-doing the domestication of the last several thousand years. This means, “to foster and
maintain a sustainable way of life through hunter-gatherer-gardener social and economic
systems, including but not limited to the encouragement of social, physical, spiritual, mental, and
environmental biodiversity and the prevention and undoing of social, physical, spiritual, mental,
and environmental domestication and enslavement.”87 Rewilding then, is indeed about
everything, because it is a project of transforming society.
         Bauer began writing about rewilding in terms of changing lifestyles in the early 2000s,
separate from the introduction of Pleistocene rewilding into the public eye. As his work has
developed, it has had to define itself in distinction from things like the Pleistocene project. He
distinguishes between conservation rewilding and human rewilding. The latter focuses on
changing lifestyles, changing how we sustain ourselves and organize society inspired by hunter-
gatherer ways of life. This is the real goal. It is not at all understood as any kind of sacrificial
86
   Information on the organization and all their events and workshops can be found at www.fireflygathering.org
87
   (Scout, 2016, p. 20) Cf. www.petermichaelbauer.com for Bauer’s regular writings and Rewilding Portland’s
events and workshops.
                                                          47


return to primitiveness for the benefit of the environment; rather, it is championed as a more
worthwhile kind of life in itself, superior to current conditions.
          In a recent talk Bauer explained, “The main problem with conservation rewilding is that
it perceives wildness as this space that is non-human – and so we abandon spaces and let them
rewild. But the reality is that humans, as hunter-gathers and horticulturalists, can be an
inspiration to the landscape and actually bring back biodiversity intentionally through our
practices of disturbance. There can be regenerative disturbance.”88 Bauer is well aware of
dramatic changes and arguments over the meaning of rewilding. The word shifts and expands
over time. When Bauer says that he “fucking hates it” – in the epigram of this chapter – it’s a
humorous exasperation at the inability of one word to consistently convey his position. His
project of “human rewilding” is regularly confused and criticized in terms of “conservation
rewilding.” This is what happens with words, and Bauer is happy to leave behind the word
“rewilding” as its meaning changes. His project, however, remains the same: “A non-
appropriative, authentic, regenerative, indigenous life.”89 90
Ecomodernism
          It should be clear from the first chapter that not all rewilding has these kinds of
primitivist leanings. The projects mentioned by Sala and Attenborough differ a great deal from
the primitivists. Sure, they all hope to reserve a large percent of Earth’s land and oceans against
heavy human use and resource extraction. They hope to inspire fascination and love of wildlands
88
   This is from Bauer’s speech titled “Rewilding 101” for the 2020 Beltane Festival, hosted online for COVID. A
recording of the talk is hosted on Pete Michael Bauer’s YouTube channel, dated May 2, 2020. Link:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEvVprwiYsw (Bauer, 2020)
89
   (Scout, 2016, p. 245)
90
   The primitivists visions for a rewilded society above are, to use the most general spectrum, on the fringes of the
politically left. But the word has a history on the fringes of the far right as well, in masculinist philosophies, Norse
neopaganism, and some circles of white nationalism. For a review of how rewilding visions have become part of
some versions of far right Norse neopaganism and white nationalism, see Verena Höfig’s essay “‘Re-Wild
Yourself’: Old Norse Myth and Radical White Nationalist Groups in Trump’s America” (Höfig, 2020)
                                                            48


in their audience. And they all appeal to a better future where ecological richness is a prized part
of civilization. But the similarities fade there. While Sala and Attenborough, like nearly all
mainstream environmentalist, make laudatory gestures to indigenous cultures around the world
that have been able to inhabit land without destroying diversity, and while occasionally they will
use the metaphor of finding ways for industrial society to harmonize with its environment, there
is no serious call to emulate hunter-gatherer practices or social organization. There is no rueful
lament of the everyday lifestyle available in industrial society, still less a wholesale
condemnation of civilization.
         There are rewilding projects, however, far more starkly opposed to the primitive impulse.
In 2015 a number of influential environmental leaders collectively drafted and signed their
names to An Ecomodernist Manifesto.91 This too was a document of radical hope, an optimistic
proposal for a better environmental future. As the sub-title has it, “A manifesto to use humanity’s
extraordinary powers in service of creating a good Anthropocene.” Instead of any narrative of
exile and return to some older form of life, however, the ecomodernist position leans into
technology and industrialization.
         They distinguish themselves very clearly at the start: “We affirm one long-standing
environmental ideal, that humanity must shrink its impact on the environment to make more
room for nature, while we reject another, that human societies must harmonize with nature to
avoid economic and ecological collapse.”92 That is, ecomodernists oppose the idea that older, re-
appropriated forms of social organization and resource use have any chance of solving
91
   This document, as well as its history, the background of its 19 authors and other co-signers, is available to read
and download on www.ecomodernism.org. (Asafu-Adjaye, et al., 2015)
92
   An Ecomodernist Manifesto, p. 6
                                                          49


contemporary environmental woes. The solution will require leaning into technology,
intensification, and urban living.
        There are two parts to the ecomodernist vision. The first is a hypothesis, peak resource
use, and the second is a prescription, decoupling. First, ecomodernists predict that industrial
societies are approaching peak resource use. This has two parts. Population itself is approaching
a peak that will likely lead to some decline and the average amount of resource consumption in
affluent industrial societies is also approaching a peak. Using western economies as their model,
ecomodernists predict that raising living standards globally to current industrial standards will
not result in the same exponential growth of population and resource use of the past two
centuries, but instead will level out sometime soon.
        With this hypothesis in place, the ecomodernists have a straightforward prescriptive plan.
A global peak amount of resource consumption can be sustained by intensifying production and
increasing efficiencies. They call the general plan decoupling. The goal of decoupling is to
reduce the footprint of human consumption. That is, they hope to provide whatever humans need
for current industrial forms of life from far smaller amounts of land. So, by intensifying farming
the same amount of food can be produced in a much smaller space. Nuclear power can provide
the same amount of energy with far smaller extractive footprint of fossil fuels. Urban living can
sustain the current population on far less land.
        Ecomodernists are very clear that the intensification is the only way to effectively
decouple, to effectively free up more wild land, space set aside for nothing else besides the free
operation of ecosystems. Past forms of life simply will not do this: “The processes of decoupling
described above challenge the idea that early human societies lived more lightly on the land than
do modern societies. Insofar as past societies had less impact upon the environment, it was
                                                  50


because those societies supported vastly smaller populations.”93 The goal is still rewilded land.
The process to achieve this, however, is industrial urban lifestyles. They write in sum, “Taken
together, these trends mean that the total human impact on the environment, including land-use
change, overexploitation, and pollution, can peak and decline this century. By understanding and
promoting these emergent processes, humans have the opportunity to re-wild and re-green the
Earth — even as developing countries achieve modern living standards, and material poverty
ends.”94
          Thus, Ecomodern rewilding is not about incorporating something called wildness into
modern life, but more strictly dividing modern life from it. In another proposal for rewilding the
San Francisco Bay area, this division is quite literally a fence. What would it look like to return
large predators to their former Bay area ecosystems? Lewis Martin, writing for the Ecomodern
thinktank Breakthrough Institute, take the model of African preserves:
          To accommodate the California grizzly, something equivalent to the Kruger fence [an
          electrified fence around Kruger National Park, South Africa] would therefore be
          necessary, a barrier impassable to large, dangerous, and potentially destructive animals.
          Such an enclosure would separate an anthropocentric zone, where nature is valued but
          people are given priority, from a biocentric realm, where people can visit, observe, and
          when necessary, manage, but where biological abundance and diversity trump other
          considerations. …I see no reason why such a fence, some decades down the road, could
          not encircle most of the Diablo Range and eventually more than that, excluding some
          peripheral parks devoted to more risk-averse hikers and picnickers.95
The vision of decoupling here even applies to values. There are “anthropocentric zones” and
“ecocentric zones.” The goal of Ecomodern rewilding is thus straightforward, to greatly reduce
93
   ibid. p. 16
94
   ibid. p. 15
95
   (Lewis, 2015)
                                                   51


the footprint of anthropocentric zones through centralizing human populations and creating
efficiencies in resource use.96
          What I want to note here is that the Ecomodern plan is also a plan of hope and optimism.
It isn’t a story of doom telling us that we must be vegans living in cities in order to avoid
disaster. The hope is a plan to use resources wisely enough that we can have our cake and eat it
to, as it were. We can raise global quality of life, solve global poverty, and preserve even more
ecosystems with minimal disturbance and management. We can do this by decoupling what is
required for modern industrial lives from reliance on so large a footprint of earth’s space and
resources. The ingenious and efficient technologies to do this are not seen as last resorts to avoid
disaster, but as innovations to take pride in. The lifestyle of the Ecomodern urbanite is
understood as desirable, and adherents argue it increases the possibility of recreational
enjoyment of wildlands and creates more space for rural hobby and artisan agriculture, not as the
primary means of providing for society, but as worthwhile goods for those who want them.
Why Centralize the Question of the Good Life?
          My primary aim in this chapter has been to introduce examples of eudaimonistic
motivations for rewilding, not simply ecosystems, but lifestyles. The chapter so far is something
of a sampler, simply showing that very different kinds of rewilding share a similar eudaimonistic
motivation and justification. Simply pointing this out may have been pointless in the past. As
96
   Paul Robbins has argued that such attempts to divide land into “natural” and “human” purposes tends to thwart its
own purposes (Robbins, 2001). Using conservation in India as his case study, Robbins argues, “The study
demonstrates that through these efforts, state planners have attempted to physically partition those land uses seen as
“social” from those seen as “natural” and thereby enforce a modernist purification of land covers. Despite these
efforts—indeed, because of them—hybrid and “impure” land covers, which mix social and natural characteristics
and combine exogenous and indigenous species, have proliferated across the landscape. Moreover, these
quasiforests have proven impossible to control or quarantine. The results of analysis, therefore, suggest that these
sorts of unexpected landcover changes necessarily grow out of the very attempts to halt them through
modernization.”
                                                          52


I’ve mentioned, the founders of the Wilderness Society, even Leopold and Muir before him,
seem to have no hesitation in justifying wilderness preservation for its benefits to human life. A
life with access to relatively untouched forest is defended by Bob Marshall specifically as an
antidote to “the nervous strain, the high pressure, and the drabness of [our] lives.”97 What’s
more, this concern for human happiness was rarely understood at odds with a deep appreciation
of the value of non-human life and ecosystems themselves.
         But these easy assumptions changed with the rise of more systematic environmental
ethics. As I’ll review in the next chapter, environmental ethics, even as a very diverse discipline,
was in many ways united by a search for completely non-anthropocentric justifications for the
ethical consideration of non-human life and ecosystems. With that goal, the eudaimonistic
concerns of present rewilding read like a moral lapse, a tragic compromise in environmentalism.
In the next chapter I will argue that this is not the case.
         Before that, however, I want to close by noting two benefits to this rise in eudaimonistic
concern. First, the eudaimonistic hopes of rewilders appropriately recognize that environmental
decisions are always also decisions about human lifestyles. The environments we shape will
shape us in turn. They facilitate certain modes of life and hinder others. Environmental ethics is
never simply a matter of how to treat what is over there, an idea of a nature that’s almost
completely separate from the human sphere. Environmental questions are also questions about
what kind of people we – whoever’s environment hinges on these questions – hope to become
and what kind of life we hope to lead. What is important about accounts like Mortali’s mindful
rewilding is the recognition that the infrastructure of daily life, the environment of industrial
human society, is a network of forces that push its inhabitants to live in certain ways and not
97
   (Marshall, 2002, pp. 64-65)
                                                    53


others. And by and large, the way they are pushed is to Monbiot’s “ecological boredom” at best
or Marshall’s “nervous strain, and high pressure.” One can push against these – and Mortali’s
book is a list of techniques to do this – but it takes determination when it shouldn’t need to. A lot
of rewilding is the hope for an environment that facilitates a better life, rather than making living
a good life a struggle against one’s environment.
        Importantly, this is not to say that environmental ethics can now be solely a matter of
what produces a better human life. In the next chapter I will look at this balance specifically. It’s
simply the case that theories that make ecological science or ethical duty to non-humans the
central concern of environmental ethics have often neglected the reciprocal effect of
environmental action. Environmental ethics is not only evaluating actions toward the non-human
world, it’s also building the world people inhabit, the environment that shapes the character of
human life.
        The second benefit of the rise of eudaimonistic concern is that it reshapes environmental
questions into far more nuanced choices between goods. Environmental questions are rarely
binary; they aren’t about whether or not to protect the environment, whether or not to consider
non-human life. The question is almost always how to do these things. Common rhetoric likes to
pose rivalries into us vs them, for and against, or even the environmental decision against the
careless/expedient/greedy/etc. choice. But this clean enmity is rarely a clear picture of reality.
        In this chapter I introduced Primitivist and Ecomodern rewilding specifically because
they are so different from each other. I haven’t offered a critique of either. At first glance, it
seems some very basic requirements of what can be called a good life might recommend against
Primitivism. One might expect increases in infant mortality, malnutrition, and premature death
from simple injuries and treatable illness to outweigh some of the goods obtained through
                                                    54


subsistence farming and small communities. Sometimes, however, this is a fairly strawman
critique. Sure, the movement has its radical revolutionaries. But many people have more modest
goals, simply trying to build niches for what they’ve found to be more meaningful lifestyles,
niches within the modern industrial world.
          So too, at first glance the Ecomodernist Manifesto is founded on two fairly unrealistic
hopes: (1) that consumption levels will plateau, rather than dramatically increase with unforeseen
technologies and (2) that a population largely decoupled from wild lands will sustain concern for
preserving these lands. Perhaps folks with more primitivist leanings are on to something when
they stress that meaningful engagement and daily practice are a more solid foundation for
concern and better relationships with non-human life and systems. Others argue that new
technological solutions have a way of causing new problems.98 But more than this, perhaps many
will disagree that the highly centralized, decoupled life – even acknowledging its benefits – is
actually desirable. If it’s not, they’ll have to explain in detail why it’s not. And this is a benefit to
centralizing a eudaimonistic concern in environmental dialogue.
          What goods are gained and what goods are lost in any decision, what kind of life is
facilitated and what kind of life is hindered, these topics become the focus of environmental
dialogue that introduces a eudaimonistic concern. If nothing else, this framing provides a more
honest connection between rival parties, and pushes conversation to focus on these specifics. The
argument isn’t “Why you should become environmental” or “Why you are immoral if you
don’t.” Instead, arguments must share why specific kinds of environments, why specific forms of
life, are worth pursuing and preserving. Or at least, the conversation promotes an
acknowledgement of what good things are lost in the decisions made. Then it becomes necessary
98
   See, for instance, Paul Kingsnorth’s “Dark Ecology” (Kingsnorth, 2017).
                                                        55


to defend when and why a loss is worth it. This kind of environmental discussion is more
specific, more participatory, and more reflective.
         It is not my purpose here to make recommendations between primitive-ish and
Ecomodern goals. There is a good amount to critique on both sides. My point is that a decent part
of what ultimately recommends either plan – not solely ecological necessity and not solely
ethical demands to non-human life – is the choiceworthiness of the kind of life each affords.
Rewilding literature makes it evident that the hope of improving environments also involves the
reimagining of what kind of life is worth hoping for.
         My point so far is modest enough, only that rewilding is a complex collection of hopes.
More than a hope to heal ecological damage, it’s a hope of finding a better life in that work. And
this is a good trend for environmental ethics. It highlights what has always been the case, that our
choices in shaping the environment are choices that determine the kinds of people we become,
the quality and character of the lives we live.
         Ecology can only guide so much. Ecosystem stability may require the freer operation of
ecological functions, larger animals roaming larger distances, fire and flood determining cycles
of disturbance. Even so, it doesn’t quite determine whether this should happen behind an electric
fence on the outskirts of the city or here in the backyard. More than that, ecology doesn’t
determine how communities engage with it, adapt to it, celebrate or bemoan it. At the same time,
broad ethical mandates to preserve wild land equally underdetermine projects. As Monbiot
argued, broad ethical mandates are good at defending prohibitions, but not recommending new
lifestyles, not offering a specific hope.
         To argue that the freer operation of ecological forces is important for ecosystem health is
one thing; but the worthwhileness of a life lived in relationship with these forces is what
                                                   56


ultimately recommends a rewilded world. If the latter cannot be defended, then the former is
destined to the same pessimistic future of most forms of preservation – ecological doom or moral
duty undermined by incompatible cultural values and appetites. The future of rewilding as a truly
optimistic environmentalism, then, lies in environmental ethics prioritizing the question of the
good life.
        In the remaining two chapters I will propose and reply to two kinds of objections to a
focus on eudaimonistic concerns. The first is that a focus on human benefit undermines ethical
concern for the value of non-human life. The second is that a focus on good ends undermines the
ethical necessity of democratic – that is, fair, public, and rational – decision-making.
                                                   57


                          CHAPTER 3: REWILDING ANTHROPOCENTRISM
“Barring love and war, few enterprises are undertaken with such abandon, or by such diverse
individuals, or with so paradoxical a mixture of appetite and altruism, as that group of avocations
known as outdoor recreation.”
         – Aldo Leopold 99
         While still on the topic of rewilding, this chapter touches on questions about ethical
reasoning and motivation. It asks what it means to have the right reasons for doing the right
thing. In the last chapters I’ve argued that rewilding is at its best when it keeps the question of
the good life central to its project. Why rewild? – Ultimately, to live a better life. This answer
may immediately invite critique, a critique foundational to the whole enterprise of academic
environmental ethics. It a word, it’s anthropocentric. Centralizing the good life seems the very
definition of anthropocentrism, and it was anthropocentric ethics that necessitated specifically
environmental ethics (if not caused all modern environmental harms) in the first place.100 The
goal of a specifically environmental ethic was to put a check on thinking of the non-human world
as valuable only in terms of its service to human interests. The project of environmental ethics
was to look outward, away from human interests, to identify features of the world – of non-
human life, of ecosystems as a whole – that demanded moral consideration, that commanded
respect in their own right.
         In that story, it seems that centering the good life for humans is quite a step backwards. It
works to remove ethical checks on environmental destruction. It that story, we’re back to where
we started, valuing environments – however denuded and controlled, however much steel and
concrete – only in terms of how they serve human interests.
99
   From “Conservation Esthetic” in A Sand County Almanac (Leopold, 2013, p. 143)
100
    On this point, later in the chapter I will discuss Richard Sylvan’s arguments in (Sylvan (Routley), 1973)
                                                             58


         It is hyperbolic, of course, to imagine that rewilders who centralize the hope of living a
better, wilder human life (like Monbiot and many others sometimes express) are in danger of
supporting mass environmental destruction. If the question is between building a parking lot or
preserving a forest, everyone knows which side the rewilders are on. Diverse as they are,
rewilders are grouped together among the most adamant voices for the protection of ecosystems,
often calling for the most massive ceding of space and resources for primarily non-human use.
This ceding is a central part of how rewilders envision the good life. On a practical level, then, it
misses the mark to fear that rewilding is a path toward unchecked destruction of ecosystems for
the benefit of humanity. That’s not the real criticism. It’s more a question of doing the right thing
for the wrong reason. And for many, acting for the sake living a better life, is not the right reason
for environmental actions.
         And yet, the most recent and most influential rewilding texts find it very easy to talk
about their projects in terms of benefits to human. In one breath they discuss both wilding land
and wilding human life. Rewilding Europe, the largest rewilding organization in Europe, defines
their work with exactly this dual purpose: “Rewilding helps landscapes become wilder, whilst
also providing opportunities for modern society to reconnect with such wilder places for the
benefit of all life.”101 Rewilding Europe is working both to “…step back and let nature manage
itself” and “…reconnect a modern society – both rural and urban – with a wilder nature.”102 The
themes of both stepping back and reconnecting are not understood in tension with each other;
rather, the kinds of reconnection they seek are one and the same with the kind of stepping back
they advise.
101
    From Rewilding Europe’s “2015 Annual Review” - (Allen, et al., 2016, p. 10)
102
    From www.rewildingeurope.com article “What is Rewilding?” (Rewilding Europe, n.d.)
                                                    59


           George Monbiot’s Feral, which may be the most popular work describing much of the
rewilding in Europe, explicitly provides two definitions of rewilding. First, rewilding is “not an
attempt to restore [ecosystems] to any prior state, but to permit ecological processes to
resume.”103 This process may require an ecological kick-start – e.g., reintroducing lost species or
removing pernicious species – but largely rewilding is about stepping back and letting
ecosystems develop without significant management. Monbiot’s second definition concerns the
rewilding of human life. He writes, “I see rewilding as an enhanced opportunity for people to
engage with and delight in the natural world.”104 The static, monotonous shape of highly
managed landscapes is chided not only for how it constrains diverse and dynamic natural
processes, but also for how it produces ecological boredom. Monbiot describes a state of ennui
and alienation, where his relationships with his environment are both stiflingly predictable and
impossibly distant, a life spent, “watching the seasons cycling past without ever quite belonging
to them.”105
           But more than simply extolling the joys of interacting with wild landscapes, many
rewilders suggest that a focus on the beauty and significance to be found in wilder relationships
with one’s ecosystem, rather than a peripheral bonus, should actually become the centrally
motivating reasons behind environmental action. Monbiot, again, has called for a new “positive
environmentalism,” citing that, “[Environmentalists] have urged only that people consume less,
travel less, live not blithely but mindfully, don’t tread on the grass. Without offering new
freedoms for which to exchange the old ones, we are often seen as ascetics, killjoys and
prigs.”106
103
    (Monbiot, 2014, p. 8)
104
    ibid. p. 10
105
    ibid. p. 7
106
    ibid. p. 12
                                                  60


           Eric Sala, long time National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and director of the
international conservation effort Pristine Seas, has put the positive approach into practice in
global conservation. He explains his beauty-first approach to winning support for conservation:
“When [Pristine Seas] meets with country leaders, we make sure we never get into the brainy
weeds. … We never start with the head. We go straight for the heart, and taking a leader to the
field is the best recipe for doing so. … Once they fall in love with nature, these leaders
intuitively feel the responsibility to protect these places.”107
           Paul Jepsen and Cain Blythe, in there 2020 introductory text Rewilding, have described
the positivity of rewilding in terms of a widespread shift in environmental narratives. The story
of environmentalism is changing with the rise of rewilding. They point out, “…that stories of
rewilding lack the blame and the appeal to higher authority of the 20th-century environmental
narrative, instead focusing on new ways of thinking and grounded action, intertwined with ideas
of nature as a creative force and visions of a better future for all life.”108 They liken rewilding
narratives to stories of mental health recovery. The stories are not centrally about blame, or
impending disaster, or about justifying any imperatives to action. Instead, “Rewilding stories,
like accounts of recovery from mental health, commonly talk of ‘awakenings’ that prompt a
desire to do something, which leads to a reassessment and more action through which recovery
emerges.”109 The recovery described is not simply ecological restoration, but the establishment
of new ways of living and relating to the land, the repair of relationships. And that sort of task,
well, it involves talking about human goods, about the best way to live, about the most
worthwhile kind of life.
107
    (Sala, 2020, pp. 187-188)
108
    (Jepson & Blythe, 2020, p. 109)
109
    ibid., p. 210
                                                   61


           Conservationists have long used the beautiful, the cute, and the awe-inspiring to garner
public support for environmental causes. Charismatic megafauna and imposing mountains are
conservation mascots for this reason. This may be nothing more than tactic to attract attention
and garner support. But the recovery narrative above is something more than a tactic to inspire
action. This is a recasting of what the work of conservation is. It is personal work, it’s work
about humans as much as it is about our environments. The reasons for rewilding, then, openly
include a human focus. One might imagine that the most radical efforts to cede massive amounts
of space back to predominately non-human use would have the most non-anthropocentric
justifications. It may seem ironic, but this simply isn’t the case. Look to Jepsen and Blythe’s
closing words on rewilding: “Rewilding offers the prospect of a new and fulfilling way to
connect with nature. In a world where many people are increasingly finding the pursuit of
material desires to be superficial and wanting, we predict a surprising level of enthusiasm for the
‘new wild’ of rewilding and the sense of connection and well-being it generates.”110 The vision is
one of recovery, of escaping lives of unfulfilling and unnecessarily destructive consumption.
           These are very human-focused reasons. And I have suggested that this lifestyle-focused
side of rewilding, the side that asks “What kind of life is most worth living?” is actually the most
promising part of rewilding. Others might clarify that the focus on living happier, more
meaningful lives is important, but surely ethically secondary to respecting the value of the non-
human world. If leaving room for wilder ecosystems didn’t make one happier, they might clarify,
it would still be the right thing to do. So, without committing anyone else to this view, I want to
lean in to rewilding’s eudaimonistic impulse. I want to say that it is good if the goal of living a
110
    ibid. p. 143
                                                  62


better, more fulfilling and meaningful life really is the motivating reason behind rewilding. I
think it is. For me, then, it seems the charge of anthropocentrism might just stick.
         I answer this charge in a roundabout way. Ultimately, I want to suggest that the general
framework of thinking of environmental problems as cleanly divisible between human goods and
environmental goods, while not useless, is a very blunt tool. What’s more, I see in rewilding
practice the most promising attempts of rethinking this barren dichotomy of human versus
environmental interests in subtler, more fruitful ways. The dichotomy can be useful for justifying
prohibitions, but it is a dry well when it comes to recommendations, approbations, celebrations
of just what kind of life is worth living in relation with one’s environment. An environmental
ethic must offer more than a justification of what not to do, it must offer a compelling vision of
what’s worth doing.
         Many rewilders are doing their best to provide exactly these kinds of reasons. They are
publishing testimonies, formulating projects, and living daily lives in the effort of detailing a life
worth living with the land. And in the kinds of life they are describing, the blunt language of
tradeoffs between human and environmental interests softens into far more detailed language
about the particularities of place and the quality of specific relationships. It’s on this level, where
a simple divide between self-interest and moral duty is rarely so enlightening, that rewilding
recommends itself.
Holmes Rolston’s Critique and its History
         On my last two university campuses the forestry departments each implemented public
information campaigns about the ecosystem services provided by trees. They hung signs on the
campus trees informing passers-by of the tree species, its age, and in bolder letters its monetary
value, calculated not in terms of its lumber, but in terms of the ecosystem services that such a
                                                   63


tree provides. Quantifying ecosystem services in dollar amounts can serve many good purposes,
but these campaigns are not without their detractors.
         Some say it focuses on the wrong thing, that is, on human benefit rather than the health,
value, or even rights of non-human life. Detractors may contend, “It’s not about what the tree
does for us, it’s about the tree.” A public awareness of ecosystem services may influence policy
for the better and it may even deepen public understanding of the dependency of modern
industrial communities on their wider environments; however, awareness of economic value of
trees, or even an awareness of dependency on trees, is something different than an ethical
concern for trees. Concern of this kind is thought to be a more selfless consideration. I am not
properly concerned for the tree, many reckon, if the root of my concern is about what the tree
does for me. This is an objection about the quality of one’s concern for the environment. But
there is a more practical objection still. The moment technology or circumstance obviates the
tree’s services is the same moment the tree loses its economically quantified value. Concern for a
useless tree is now rootless.
         This debate around ecosystem services illustrates a perennial discussion in environmental
philosophy. The question is broadly about anthropocentrism, about the ethical and ecological
issues of placing human interests at the center of environmental thought and practice.
Environmental ethics developed as a field of professional philosophy in answer to the challenge
of developing a non-anthropocentric ethic. In 1973 Richard Sylvan asked, if destroying the earth
would not harm another human in any way – let’s say, if I was the last living human – would it
still be wrong? Sylvan was betting that his audience would have an ethical intuition that such
wanton destruction would be wrong, even if it didn’t harm human. Sylvan then argued that
traditional deontological and utilitarian ethics could not adequately support that intuition. If one
                                                  64


wanted to keep that intuition, a new, a specifically environmental ethic is required. 111 This kind
of ethic must find a way of valuing plants, animals, and ecosystems directly, and not indirectly
for their relation to humans.
          At the same time Holmes Rolston III was working to develop a theory of natural value
that was intrinsic and objective, a natural value distinct from human interest or even perception.
In 1975, his first work on the subject framed the problem in terms of “primary” and “secondary”
ecological ethics.112 The latter was common enough; it included any reason to preserve
ecosystems for prudential reasons, for how ecosystems support humans. In contemporary terms,
Rolston’s “secondary” ethics were considerations of Ecosystem Services. A “primary”
ecological ethic, however, sought moral reasons based solely on the value of living world, on
what plants, animals, and ecosystems are in themselves. This kind of ethic, Rolston argued, was
as yet undeveloped and urgently overdue. The development of a primary ecological ethic shaped
Rolston’s career and a good deal of environmental philosophy besides. Explicating intrinsic
natural value and determining duties toward it was Rolston’s new ethical “frontier.”113 It was
understood as a bold new project, a necessary step in the expansion of ethics.114 For a community
of philosophers over the next decades, environmental ethics had something close to a unified
purpose: determining how best to defend or reject ethical obligations to non-human nature in
111
    (Sylvan (Routley), 1973)
112
    (Rolston III, Is There an Ecological Ethic?, 1975)
113
    The “frontier” metaphor is central in Rolston’s idea of the position of environmental ethics. The idea is that
previous philosophical ethics had not provided a sufficient framework for evaluating environmental issues, thus
ethics must forge into a new frontier to do so. In his first major book on the subject (Rolston III, 1988) he opens and
closes with the metaphor: “Environmental ethics is novel, at least in the classical and modern West; it lies on a
frontier” (p. 2) and “Environmental ethics lies not on a fringe but on a frontier” (p. 333).
114
    Rolston was not at all alone in understanding environmental ethics as a novel expansion. This expansion idea is
also central in Roderick Nash’s The Rights of Nature (Nash, 1989)
                                                             65


itself. Their question, then, was about the tree itself – its intrinsic value, its teleological nature,115
its legal standing,116 etc.
           It is unsurprising then that 30 years later Rolston was quick to critique the rise of
environmental virtue ethics.117 As he saw it, a virtue ethic, much like “secondary” environmental
ethics (including ecosystem service arguments), centers human benefit as the justifying reason
and motivation for ethical consideration of the environment. Instead of protecting forests for the
human benefit of clean water and sustainable materials, environmental virtue ethics was
protecting the environment as a means of growing in virtue, of living a better life. Even if virtues
are a lot different than economic and material benefits, the focus is still on human benefit rather
than the value of the non-human world.
           Rolston provides a running example of working to protect a threatened species of desert
fish. Why should I protect the fish? Surely because the fish itself is worth it, is owed my concern;
not because caring for the fish makes me a better person. He writes,
           Excellence of human character does indeed result from a concern for these fish, but if this
           excellence of character comes from appreciating otherness, then why not value that
           otherness in wild nature first? Let the human virtue come tributary to that. It is hard to
           gain much excellence of character from appreciating an otherwise worthless thing. …
           The excellence of human character depends on a sensitivity to excellence in these
           marvelous fish flourishing in the desert.118
It’s a matter of priority. Rolston’s critique is not a rejection of seeking environmental virtue, or
even desiring to live a virtuous life in relationship with one’s environment; rather, Rolston offers
a correction about how environmental virtue is achieved. If one hopes to get environmental
virtue right, then one must make environmental value foundational. It is only when I act in
115
    See especially (Taylor, 1986)
116
    See especially (Stone, 1974)
117
    “Environmental Virtue Ethics: Half the Truth but Dangerous as a Whole” (Rolston III, 2005)
118
    ibid. p. 68
                                                        66


recognition of the intrinsic value of the tree, and not for how the tree or my actions toward it
might benefit me, that I begin to act virtuously toward the tree. Rolston’s deepest charge, then, is
that those who say that building virtuous character matters most, have misunderstood how
building virtuous character works. The value of the living environment is what matters most, and
only a character that appreciates this value, responds to this value, acts on behalf of this value, is
a virtuous character. As Rolston puts it, “It seems unexcellent – cheap and philistine – to say that
excellence of human character is what we are after [in conservation].”119 The sting of Rolston’s
critique is that precisely by making human virtue the center of an environmental ethic, virtue
ethicists forbid themselves from achieving a truly virtuous, i.e. selfless or altruistic, disposition
towards their environments.
           To translate this into a broader discussion of rewilding, I might say that the goods people
seek in a rewilded life – the more meaningful, centering, fulfilling relationships with wildness
around them – are obtained by giving priority to the value of their environment first and
foremost. Any more rewarding or worthwhile life is a result of that selfless, altruistic respect of
value. Wildness shouldn’t be respected because it makes our lives more meaningful; rather,
wildness is capable of making our lives more meaningful because it is such a valuable thing in
the first place.
Conflation, Ulteriority, and Purity
           I have three responses to Rolston’s charge. The first is a standard reply in the literature
that claims critiques like Rolston’s arise from a conflation, a type of misunderstanding, of key
points of virtue ethics. My second response looks a bit deeper at what it means to have
blameworthy motivations. The presence of non-altruistic, or not clearly altruistic motives isn’t
119
    ibid. p. 70
                                                     67


enough to make an action blameworthy. The framework of categorizing motivations as either
altruistic or egoistic is itself too blunt a tool for adequately understanding large swaths of moral
life, especially relationships with the environment. I’ll introduce a rough conceptual tool to better
separate blameworthy motives from non-blameworthy motives. Lastly, I question the practicality
of an ethic that hinges on the purity of one’s motivations. Of course, there must be room to
condemn, critique, and improve bad motivations. The quality of one’s motivations does matter.
But my overall argument is that simply dividing motivations into altruistic or egoistic, moral and
non-moral, is no good at all.
         The further goal is to support the trend in rewilding literature that focuses on the personal
and social benefits of rewilding. Rewilders are providing testimony of a better life found in
centralizing relationship with the wildness of their environments. They’ve found something
good, something better than the status quo of industrial consumer culture, and they encourage
people to join. I misunderstand this invitation if I reduce it to self-centered or even
anthropocentric motivations.
         Conflation
         Rolston’s charge is a version of what is called the self-centeredness objection to virtue
ethics. As Rolston says, environmental virtue ethics get things backwards by prioritizing
personal virtue over the value of the living world. More broadly, it’s the older misunderstanding
that virtue ethics is concerned with being happy more than doing what’s right (regardless if it
makes me happy). This self-centeredness objection, so virtue ethicists respond, arises from a
theoretical conflation. The conflation occurs by taking two separate questions – namely, (1)
What sort of disposition characterizes a particular virtue? and (2) Why is that disposition a
virtue? – and conflating them into one.
                                                      68


           David Solomon employs this distinction in his initial response to the self-centeredness
objection.120 There is a difference, he argues, between the theoretical account of what makes a
disposition a virtue and what characterizes the practice of that virtue. And, “…within an [ethics
of virtue] it is not the theory of the virtues which is supposed to be primarily action-guiding, but
rather the virtues themselves.”121 Take Charity for instance. The question What characterizes a
charitable disposition? differs markedly from the question Why is charity a virtue? The former
will include a rich description of the charitable person’s use of their possessions, their
recognition of the needs of others, their willingness to respond to these needs, and the quality of
their reasons for helping others. A properly charitable disposition will certainly be other-
regarding. It will involve a sensitivity to the needs of others and a desire to benefit the other for
their own sake. There are vice terms that describe when such features are absent; vainglorious
philanthropy or giving in order to put others in your debt are blameworthy because the
motivations are not charitable. But, if the description of the charitable person is so clearly not
self-centered, how does the self-centeredness charge arise?
           It arises by conflation, by answering the question What characterizes virtue X? with the
answer to the question Why is X a virtue? A theoretical account of what makes a given
disposition a virtue will involve many considerations, but most virtue theories share that the
virtues constitute human flourishing. Put simply, charity is a virtue because a charitable life is
better than a miserly one. Even the possible rewards of miserliness, however enjoyable they may
be, are simply not as good as the goods obtained through a life of charity, of the caring
relationships charity builds, of a loose attachment to possessions, of a greater understanding of
the needs of others.
120
    (Solomon, 1988, p. 430ff)
121
    ibid. p. 435
                                                    69


         Now watch what happens when I conflate these questions by answering the first question
with the answer to the second: What characterizes charity? Well, caring about living a better life.
But, no. That isn’t how anyone characterizes charity. What’s gone wrong is the conflation.
         Environmental Virtue Ethicist Ronald Sandler uses Solomon’s point to directly address
the charge of anthropocentrism, that an environmental virtue ethic will be primarily concerned
with securing human flourishing and only indirectly concerned with the environment.
         This objection confuses doing virtue theory with living virtuously, and conflates what
         makes a trait a virtue with a virtuous person’s reasons for actions. Actions, behaviors, and
         practices are evaluated in terms of the virtues, and a virtuous person is responsive to the
         morally relevant features of a situation, not to what makes a character trait a virtue. Even
         if what makes a trait a virtue is anthropocentric, the considerations that a person who
         possesses the virtue takes as reasons for acting right might be nonanthropocentric.122
They are generally not using the language of virtue ethics, but I think a similar dynamic occurs
when rewilders extol the benefits of rewilding. Rewilders often pitch rewilding as a better way of
living, a more choiceworthy life. Call that anthropocentric if you wish. But what that better life
consists in, what actually characterizes the kind of person able to enjoy that better life, are a
number of centralizing, regular engagements with the wildness of one’s environment that are
anything but anthropocentric. They involve become attentive, fascinated with the world around
me, adjusting my life to allow space and time for ecosystemic processes to continue unhindered,
doing restoration so ecosystem functions can resume more quickly, etc. Why do all these non-
anthropocentric things? Well, rewilders are fairly comfortable saying, at least in part, “because
it’s a better, more worthwhile way to live.” So, does this make the whole enterprise
anthropocentric? I don’t think so, but I’d guess that many will still worry.
122
    (Sandler, 2007, p. 42)
                                                   70


         Ulteriority
         So, it may deflect the charge of anthropocentrism to point out that the actual activities
prescribed by rewilders are anything but anthropocentric. But I have said that rewilding is at its
best when it centralizes the question of the good life. I went further than most rewilding literature
goes. Why rewild? Ultimately, because it’s a better life.
         But why is it a better life? Well, here I’m very happy to agree with Rolston’s insistence
on prioritizing natural value; it is a better life because it centralizes the appreciation of and
meaningful engagement with things of real value, that is, with living things and the systems that
foster and develop them. Roughly, a day in the woods is better than a day looking at a screen, not
because I just happen to enjoy the woods, but because those living woods are far more valuable,
far more worth enjoying. More fully, and regardless of whether one hikes in the woods or not, a
life shaped by understanding myself in terms of my place in the story of the development of life,
and consciously shaping my relationships with my environment to better appreciate life and its
systems, is better than a life of mostly unreflective relationships with my environment. And this
is the case because the living world is of immense value. The better life that rewilders extol is a
life of appreciating value, an appreciation found in more centralizing, more regular, more
tangible relationships with the wildness of life around them.
         Maybe now the question seems like splitting hairs. Desiring a better life is desiring a
better relationship with things of immense value. So, yes, value is primary; value has to be there
first, in a metaphysical sense at least. But is this the same as my primary motivation being to
respect that value? My answer to this question is that the question is unhelpful. It results in more
confusion than clarity about my ethical situation. This becomes clear with a comparison of
different kinds of cases. Sometimes it certainly is helpful to identify what makes an action wrong
                                                     71


by citing non-altruistic motives. Other times, the presence of non-altruistic motives is not so
clear, or better yet, not so clearly blameworthy. In these later cases I misunderstand and distort
my ethical situation by demanding that it be cleanly sorted into altruistic and egoistic
motivations. To show this, I look at Rolston’s self-centeredness charge in light of the more
everyday concept of ulterior motives.
         There are certainly cases, as many as grains of sand on the beach, where an action is
wrong because it is done for ulterior motives. I was nice to my uncle, let’s say, only because I
wanted to be written into his will. Classic. But a problem occurs when we use the same
dichotomous framework – that motivations are either altruistic or egoistic – to evaluate all
motivations.
         The charitable person, for instance, is certainly moved by the plight of another.
Additionally, and this is an important addition, the charitable person desires to grow in virtue,
that is, desires to become better at being charitable. This person also desires to live in a world
where charity is more common, where the needy are fewer. Are these latter motivations ulterior?
Are they blameworthy? My intuition says “no” to both questions. And yet, if I use a blunt ethical
framework that says all motivations can be sorted as altruistic or egoistic, and that egoistic
motivations are blameworthy, well, then I end up in the tricky situation of condemning myself
for wanting to be better and for wanting a better world. This is a common deduction and a
terrible one.
         So, when is a non-altruistic motive not ulterior and not blameworthy? For a very quick
answer, I want to borrow a conceptual tool from a related, but different conversation. In his first
attempt to develop a modern understanding of virtue, Alistair MacIntyre introduced the
                                                   72


distinction between internal and external goods of practices.123 An internal good is a good
obtained only by excelling at some kind of practice. The joys of performing music well – for
instance, the exhilaration of the performance, the sense of ease and control that comes through
mastery, the recognition and praise from qualified experts, etc. – are only obtainable by actually
performing music well. These goods cannot be obtained without gaining the skill to perform
music well, and are thus goods “internal” to the practice of music. An external good, the classic
example being money, is a good that can be obtained through many alternative means. The $50
payment for a gig, which is also a joy connected to performance, could have been made many
ways, maybe by working at the mall, or even by stealing from the mall. MacIntyre uses the
notion of practices and internal goods to develop his early concept of virtue. A virtue is a skill or
disposition “which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices.”124
           Virtues are the dispositions and skills which enable us to enjoy internal goods. The
important point here, is that virtues may be more or less indifferent to external goods, but they
are inseparable from internal goods for which they are virtues. As MacIntyre puts it, “Virtues
then stand in a different relationship to external and to internal goods. The possession of the
virtues – and not only their semblance and simulacra – is necessary to achieve the latter; yet the
possession of the virtues may perfectly well hinder us in achieving external goods.”125
           Consider the musician again. One might condemn a musician for “selling out” (not that I
would). Selling out involves sacrificing the quality of the music for the sake of the external good
of money. But no one condemns a musician for working to achieve goods internal to musical
practice. And of those internal goods, the line between self-focused and others-focused is rather
123
    (MacIntyre, 1984, p. 188ff)
124
    ibid. p. 191
125
    (MacIntyre, 1984, p. 196)
                                                    73


blurry. Even the concept of altruism seems simply unrelated. A musician desires to become more
skilled. A musician desires to please an audience. In different circumstances there may be all
sorts of subtle and complex ways to critique and improve motivations, but what I wouldn’t
critique, simply because I can’t even make sense of it, is to demand that a musician should be
motivated to make great music without the desire of becoming a better musician, a musician
capable of making great music. And yet, this is the kind of question Rolston’s critique of virtue
ethics leads him to ask.
           Rolston brings things to a head near the end of his essay with the question: “Would we
choose conservation without our resulting virtue?”126 Within a certain reigning moral framework,
the question can make sense. But on the face of it, it’s the same question about music above.
Would I choose to steward my farm well without being able to steward my farm well? Would I
choose to restore forests to healthier conditions if it meant that I wouldn’t gain the ecological
knowledge and skill required to do so? I’d need a very sci-fi thought experiment to even consider
those options. Borrowing MacIntyre’s concepts, Rolston is asking, Would I choose the internal
goods of a practice without gaining the skills necessary for the achievement of those goods? The
answer is question: how could I?
           Rolston’s question does make sense if I translate it like this: “Would we choose to follow
conservation rules even if they did not provide us with external goods?” That question does
make sense, but it is not a question about virtue. Rolston’s worry is about doing what’s right
even when it is costly. But costly how? He writes, “Humans can and sometimes should be short-
term losers. Sometimes we ought to make sacrifices, at least in terms of what we presently value,
to preserve species.”127 Rolston means the loss of various external goods, things like cheap
126
    (Rolston III, 2005, p. 76)
127
    ibid. p. 72
                                                    74


electricity, the space and autonomy of suburban housing, the promise that the children of the
affluent might obtain even higher levels of affluence, etc. Yes, it is certainly the case that
conservation will require the loss of those kinds of goods, more for those who have more of
them! But this kind of sacrifice isn’t simply consistent with a virtue ethic, it is best addressed by
a virtue ethic.
         A virtue ethic identifies which goods really are worthwhile, which kind of life is actually
most choiceworthy, and then it identifies what virtues aid us in living such a life. The virtues are
what prepare people to identify when sacrifice is called for and to courageously or even
gracefully achieve it. The virtue of diligence is what enables the young musician to continue
practicing when it means missing a party, or a TV show, or even some sleep. Prioritizing virtue
doesn’t keep us from making sacrifices; virtue is what best enables us to do so.
         In the epigraph to this chapter Aldo Leopold notes that outdoor recreation involves “so
paradoxical a mixture of appetite and altruism.”128 I am arguing that there is no paradox. I’m
arguing that the reigning rough moral framework – part Kantian, part Augustinian, part whatever
else – that insists on separating motivations into egoism and altruism, blaming the former and
praising the latter, is simply an inadequate framework. I am arguing that when Rewilders provide
compelling testimonies of the goods to be enjoyed, of the better life to be lived, by changing our
relationships with our environment that it is a bit tragic to hear the response: “We shouldn’t be
motivated to do the right thing because of personal benefits. We shouldn’t be so
anthropocentric.” The reigning non-anthropocentric ethic frames up the world as a question
between doing the right thing and living the best life. The trend in rewilding is to reject that
128
    From “Conservation Esthetic” in A Sand County Almanac (Leopold, 2013, p. 143)
                                                      75


frame and testify that the best life just is the life with better relationships with our environment. I
wouldn’t settle for less.
         Purity
         My last point on this score may seem less practical philosophy and more practical advice.
It is less about what is correct or incorrect, but what is realistic. It is true that reasons and
motivations matter; it is true that bad reasons and vicious motivations mar ostensibly good deeds.
And yet, unhappy is the person who insists on knowing their own reasons and motivations with
certainty. Unhappier still is the person who insists that reasons and motivations be singularly
pure.
         Whether or not people can quote it, my culture is still imbued with the absurdity that: “It
is not sufficient to do that which should be morally good that it conform to the law; it must be
done for the sake of the law.”129 The absurdity here comes out in attempting it. Go try it. Go do
something purely for the sake of the law. Perhaps merely search your memory of laudable
actions. Now ask, did you actually act for the sake of the law? Really? Was it only because it was
the right thing to do? Was there no admixture of personal gain, of unreflective natural habit? If
there was a mixture of reward or habit, which one was primary? Which one did you act for the
sake of?
         Maybe you are convinced your action is still laudable. Of course. It is easy to pat oneself
on the back after the fact. It is easy, perhaps necessary, to ignore one’s own muddle of reasons
and motivations, especially when it is quite rewarding to ignore them, to simplify them, to paint
them into a prettier picture. Are you sure you aren’t ignoring anything?
129
    Groundwork 390
                                                     76


          Was there no fear, no concern at all for the repercussions of acting otherwise? Okay,
sure, you are above such fears. But what about vanity? Was there no smug satisfaction? Was
there satisfaction at all? Even though your action resulted in personal loss, in public ridicule, in
exile from the city, were you not satisfied at having done the right thing? And here is the
ineradicable doubt: Could that satisfaction have been the reason why you did it?
         Well, it turns out it wasn’t for the sake of the law, after all.
         Sure, this is a slippery slope – but a slope thousands of saints have run down, flagellating
themselves into oblivion. The problem isn’t with the saints, it’s with the framework. Best to
abandon it.
Conclusion
         I opened this chapter with a trend in rewilding literature to extol the personal and social
benefits of rewilding. Rather than emphasizing doom or moral duty, rewilders are happy to talk
about happiness. They talk about being converted to new ways of living, of falling in love with
landscapes and ecosystems, of recovering from destructive and unhealthy lifestyles. I think
environmental ethics benefits a great deal from these kinds of testimonies. This is because
environmental ethics is in no great need of general principles to guide action; what is needed is
tangible, practical ways of living on the earth capable of preserving it.
         But in making this argument I wanted to address the broader idea that seeking the good
life, the most choiceworthy life, is an egoistic pursuit. This critique comes from an inadequate
moral framework that categorizes motivations sharply as either altruistic or egoistic. More than
any one philosophical account, there is a broad cultural understanding of morality as primarily a
project of doing the right thing even when I don’t want to. The good person is the one who
                                                    77


resists temptation, the best person is the one who sacrifices all for doing the right thing. So much
of moral life just doesn’t fit the framework.
         Many rewilders understand their project in terms of finding better ways to live. And the
kinds of life they are recommending are not adequately understood in terms of duty for duty’s
sake or altruistic motivation. They are not cleanly divisible into human goods and non-human
goods. They are trying to build better relationships with their environments, relationships they
can be proud of.
                                                 78


                                 CHAPTER 4: REWILDING GOODS
“We need to acknowledge, above all, that our marching orders come not from without but from
within – which is to say that they’re not marching orders at all, but instead self-legislated
expressions of our freedom and rationality.”
         - Benjamin Hale130
         In the last chapter I considered the objection that a eudaimonistic concern in
environmental ethics gets things backwards. That is, it makes human benefit the foundation of
environmental concern, rather than the value of non-human life and the systems that sustain it.
This kind of objection comes from the environmental movement’s insistence on non-
anthropocentrism, which in most cases has served as a bulwark against unchecked destruction, a
counterbalance to prevailing trends. One cares for the environment best when they care primarily
for the environment, not human interests.
         I argued that, first, a eudaimonistic ethic is not self-interested in any of the damning ways
that worry environmentalists, and second, that the sharp divide between anthropocentrism and
non-anthropocentrism is largely unhelpful, too blunt a tool to understand and guide ethical
action. Although I focused on Holmes Rolston’s objection to environmental virtue ethics, my
response was directed to the broad insistence that environmental ethics must be fundamentally
concerned with natural value and not human benefit.
         I have suggested that the rising popularity of Rewilding as a diverse movement has
evidenced a broadly eudaimonistic turn in environmental thinking. That is, instead of asking
what duties one has to the environment, or even what must be done to prevent disaster, rewilding
literature centralizes the question What kind of life is most worth living? Rather than advocating
for a particular rewilding project, and much less defending everything that gets called rewilding,
I’ve said there is a benefit to environmental ethics in centralizing this question.
130
    (Hale, 2016, p. 268)
                                                    79


         In this chapter I want to look at another, very different objection. In general, it is argued
that environmental ethics should decentralize good ends and focus on fair process. That is, the
goal of environmentalism shouldn’t be to produce a particular kind of environment, but rather to
ensure all environmental decisions are made in ethically justifiable ways.
         This critique cuts against both a eudaimonistic approach as well as an intrinsic value
approach. The idea is that environmental ethics goes awry when any idea of environmental good
– whether it be a vision of the good life, a claim of intrinsic value, a standard of ecological
health, etc. – is allowed to sidestep a discursive and democratic decision-making process.
Environmental ethics should turn away from promoting specific visions of the way the world
should be, and instead focus on making environmental decisions in the most fair, inclusive, and
publicly justifiable ways. In this view, fair processes matter more than end products. Put in
slightly different terms, right reasons are more important than good ends.
         Consider a pressing question: Should North American wolves be reintroduced into their
former habitats? One might answer: Yes, because the ecological science shows that predators are
integral to ecosystem stability. Or, yes, because wolves have a right to their habitat. Or even, yes,
because God intended wolves to be here. These are all very different kinds of answers (quick
caricatures here), but they are alike in justifying the way things should be with an appeal to a
good outside of an open, discursive decision-making process. The only right answer, as this
critique would have it, is the one with reasons that pass a fair process of rational, public
justification including all relevant parties. Passing this process is what makes the answer
ethically justifiable. No person – not the scientist, not the ethicist, not the priest – has the
authority to say how the environment should be.
                                                   80


          In a broader ethical discourse, what is at stake here are rival views on (1) the final
authority of moral judgements and, relatedly, (2) the nature of what it means to be morally
wrong. This position above is a loose version of a Contractualist position.131 On this view (1) the
final authority on moral judgements is a public justificatory process. Authority comes from the
mutual recognition of all relevant parties that a reason for action is justifiable. Stemming from
this, (2) what it means to be morally wrong is to act on unjustifiable reasons, reasons that have
not or could not withstand open public scrutiny.
          In general, I think there is a lot to like in this approach, especially for questions of
environmental governance. In environmental discourse, views that emphasize justificatory
processes over good ends are almost always coupled with a diagnosis that environmental
problems result from collective human action, which is often unreflective, unorganized, and
unfair.132 If the processes by which we make daily decisions and environmental policy become
reflective, organized, and fair, it makes sense to think many environmental problems will be
ameliorated. What’s more, the position includes a noble political hope. It encourages a polity that
prioritizes rational debate, rather than whatever propaganda, force, or legal technicality can
produce a desired outcome. It hopes for communities capable of taking collective responsibility
for the condition of their environment. But more than these good results, the process of
131
    For a much more specific and widely discussed version of Contractualism put forward by T. M. Scanlon,
especially in his What We Owe to Each Other (Scanlon, 1998). The authors discussed below may have wide
differences from Scanlonian Contractualism, but it would be less exact still to call them simply deontologists. What
relevantly unites the different critiques in environmental literature I’m discussing is a large focus on (1) public
justificatory processes and (2) the evaluation of reasons for actions being the most important moral consideration.
132
    Luc Ferry’s and Benjamin Hale’s comments on this will be discussed below, but in the next chapter I will address
a very similar objection from Steven Vogel’s Thinking Like a Mall (Vogel, 2015) for a sustained argument that the
primary ecological problem is really poor collective planning, which Vogel describes as a kind of large-scale
alienation. Just as the worker is alienated from their products in a Marxist framework, people at large are alienated
from their environment, which in Vogel’s work is a product collectively shaped by people.
                                                           81


submitting our reasons to ongoing public critique might just be the right thing to do. And perhaps
it is.
        In this last chapter I will review Benjamin Hale’s defense of prioritizing right reasons in
environmental ethics. I will mention other defenders of democratic environmental discourse
along the way, but I appreciate Hale’s commitment to writing for a wide public audience about a
very public and timely topic. I review Hale’s arguments against environmentalism that prioritizes
good ends. In response, I argue that the kind of right reasoning that Hale promotes is only part of
an answer; it’s too indeterminant for the decisions that must be made. Detailed testimonies of the
kind of good relationships with the environment that are worth promoting – the kind found in
recent rewilding literature with this eudaimonistic focus – are important to get on with the public
discussions most needed.
A Different Battle
        As I’ve introduced a broad idea of Contractualism, it may seem I’ve set up the finale of
this work as a battle between grand ethical theories: Eudaimonistic Virtue against Contractualist
Deontology. In this case I would be compelled to argue for the insufficiency of (1) and (2), that
(1) moral authority requires something more or other than a public justificatory process and that
(2) the meaning of being morally wrong is something different, or simply broader, than acting on
unjustified reasons. This is how theory would battle theory.
        This kind of work is usually done through counterexamples. If one wanted to challenge
Contractualism, it is tempting to reach for a certain kind of counter example. Imagine a world,
the reply might go, where right reasons produced monstrous results. If one wants to morally
condemn those monstrous results, then one must admit there is an ethical standard more
important than having publicly justified reasons. It can be tempting, then, to imagine some sort
                                                 82


of techno-democracy where an inclusive polity has used fair, rational, collective processes to
create policies that have nevertheless allowed extinctions to continue rise, greenhouse gasses to
compound, habitat destruction to increase, etc. One might go further and imagine the planet-
sized cities that, often serving this same thought experiment role, have been a regular part of
science fiction. The trope of the planet-sized city, dubbed an Ecumenopolis, appears in Asimov
(Trantor) and Star Wars (Coruscant) and many others. Now imagine that this planet’s population
chose to build their planet into one endless city, but did so fairly, rationally, collectively, etc. To
boot, imagine folks like it and life is pretty good there. If one wants to morally condemn what
was done to the planet, then it looks like some ethical standard matters besides right reasons and
fair processes. Perhaps it was the intrinsic value of all the extinct species, perhaps it was the
suffering of non-human animals. Or perhaps, you’ll have to argue that despite seemingly fair and
rational processes, the reasons were still irrational (and how so?).
        My topic throughout, however, has not been strictly about the theoretical superiority of
eudaimonistic ethics. Rather, it’s the claim that the eudaimonistic focus in current rewilding
efforts has proved fruitful. Better yet, I think a eudaimonistic concern does greater justice to the
nature of my society’s (in as inclusive and global a sense as I can give this) environmental
predicament. That is, our current task is not a failure to prove the ethical rightness or wrongness
of environmental actions. Our current task is to envision and foster a different kind of life worth
living in the midst of unsustainable environmental destruction. It’s a work of creativity and
cooperation. It’s the attempt to shape something new and better on a large scale.
        With this in mind, I want to review and mostly affirm the practical goals and important
critiques of a few environmental philosophers with broadly Contractualist approaches. Yes, we
need more reflective, organized, and fair decision-making processes. Right reasons do matter,
                                                   83


and much current public discourse is full of insufficient and irrational reasons, whether
supporting desirable or horrible ends.
        So, I don’t think the eudaimonist in this setting has to prove the absolute priority of good
ends over right reasons in some broad theoretical sense. My argument is similar to my comment
on anthropocentric/non-anthropocentric divide in the last chapter. There I said the concept of
anthropocentrism was a blunt tool, often unhelpful in real world decisions. Similarly, in real
world conversations the divide between right reasons and good ends is no kind of team sport, as
if we support one way or the other. It’s both. We need to submit our reasons to ongoing public
critique. But what this conversation is about, that is, what a public environmental project must
accomplish, is deciding together what kind of world we want, what kind of life is the best to live.
We do need reasons for picking one kind of life over another. And the kind of detailed
testimonies found among rewilders – and, notably, agrarians (a once familiar division between
the two is sometimes blurry) – are great models of how one can give reasons for these kinds of
decisions. Current environmental discourse does not require a way of morally justifying one
action at a time out of various sets of fixed possibilities, as if there is a right way forward if only
we heeded the most justified reasons. Instead, the conversation requires creatively and
collectively imagining something new - more deeply diagnosing what is unsatisfactory with our
current condition and trajectory, naming what kind of relationships with our environments really
are the most choiceworthy, and fostering a new kind of living. The broadest environmental
discourse in the Anthropocene is ultimately a conversation about what kind of life is most
choiceworthy. So, if we’re going to get good at public environmental discourse, at sharing and
listening to reasons, the detailed testimonies of the sort rewilders are prioritizing are a great
model.
                                                  84


          All this to say, in what follows I will highlight some of the most practical critiques
against environmental ethics that prioritize good ends. And my aim is to show how
eudaimonistic environmental thinking, of the sort I’ve highlighted in previous chapters, not only
avoids these problems, but also supports many of the interests of Contractualist detractors.
Benjamin Hale – A Viridian Commonwealth
          I’ve said that rewilding is marked by an optimism for better relationships with one’s
environment, for a better life centered by those relationships. In the last chapter I cited a few
folks specifically commenting on the kinds of positive appeals common in rewilding movements.
Enric Sala says that he has shifted his conservation appeals from “the head” to “the heart.” He
doesn’t bombard world leaders with facts or warnings. He takes them to the field, to the ocean, to
the reef, to see just what’s worth saving. “Once they fall in love with nature, these leaders
intuitively feel the responsibility to protect these places.”133 Paul Jepsen and Cain Blythe said
that rewilding narratives share a similar positive arc; they are stories of awakening, realizations
that a better way of living is possible. That is, they are stories of being taken to a field – or ocean,
etc. – and becoming convinced that a better kind of life is desirable and possible.134 George
Monbiot contrasts a life of suburban ecological boredom with a thrilling and energetic life made
possible by living in less tame landscapes.
          My point has not been that the particular visions of the good life in the rewilding
movement are actually the best versions of the good life. The point is that it is monumental that
the question of what kind of life is most choiceworthy is being centered in the environmental
movement. As it happens, Monbiot’s vision of an escape from ecological boredom can seem – at
times – a bit juvenile, a bit beatnik, a bit more harry-chested fantasy than many might like. Of
133
    (Sala, 2020, pp. 187-188)
134
    (Jepson & Blythe, 2020, p. 109)
                                                     85


course, this isn’t to disagree with any of the ecological arguments that make up much more of
Monbiot’s work. The point is that as a whole he’s testifying to a better kind of life, rather than
only the value of non-human life or the authority of ecological science merely. At the end of the
day, this sort of environmental appeal offers a far richer frame for evaluating our environmental
ills and working to develop creative alternatives.
         But there is another kind of objection waiting here. What if all appeals to goodness –
whether it’s the beauty of nature, the intrinsic value of non-human life, or even the more fulfilled
and authentic lives testified to by rewilders – what if any appeal to goodness is ultimately
misguided?
         This is the argument Benjamin Hale makes in his book The Wild and the Wicked. He
courts the idea that, just maybe, the whole living world we call “nature” might not be that great
after all. What’s more, maybe the lifestyle of “the greens” is far less than appealing. In his
introduction he explains,
         [Many people] think that in order to argue that environmentalism is right, they must also
         show that nature is good, that being green is good. Their thought, then, is that to be green,
         one should embrace all things natural. One should buy granola and drive a hybrid and
         drink tea and cook tofu. In effect, one should start hugging trees. Unfortunately, this view
         belies a deep-seated intuition that nature is not as precious as some claim, which begets a
         big problem.135
Hale wants a kind of environmentalism that works even if one decides that the woods full of
wolves aren’t obviously valuable, or that veganism and odd deodorant doesn’t obviously mark a
better kind of life.
         Enric Sala’s attempt to appeal to the heart, rather than the head, is off the table for Hale.
In fact, Hale suggests that this appealing to the heart, albeit in very different ways, is more or
less what all environmentalism has been doing for half a century. The environmental movement
135
    (Hale, 2016, p. 2)
                                                   86


has been trying to convince people that nature is good, beautiful, valuable in a number of ways,
deserving of one or another kind of ethical consideration, or even just fun. These are very
different kinds of appeals – e.g., showing the cuteness of charismatic megafauna and arguing that
animal life, however charismatic or horrifying, has value deserving of consideration – but they
are similar for Hale in that they both hinge on appealing to the value of the wider non-human
world. For the same half-century as environmentalists have been making these appeals,
environmental destruction has sharply increased. Perhaps this is enough evidence to show that
the arguments and propaganda haven’t worked. Or rather, Hale says, it only works for folks
already leaning that way: “‘Love thy mother’ has been the reverse-battle cry, and it has hit home
only with those who are soft at heart.”136
           But whether it works or not, that is, whether environmental ends can be achieved by such
appeals, is very much beside the point for Hale. Hale argues on principle, not utility. Focusing on
good ends, to the detriment of caring about right reasons, misses something important about the
nature of morality itself, even what it is for humans to be moral beings.
           In what follows I will focus on Hale’s two biggest arguments against prioritizing good
ends in environmentalism: Hale calls these Narrowness and Tactical Thinking, reviewed below.
But first I’ll lay out his central case for prioritizing the justification of reasons over the
promotion of good ends. Hale sums up his position, “What really ought to be driving our
environmentalism is our humanity, not nature’s value.”137 What Hale means by “our humanity”
becomes plain in four main points in his positive argument for prioritizing the public justification
of reasons as the central activity of environmental ethics. These are:
136
    ibid., p. 284
137
    ibid., p. 4
                                                     87


           (1) Humanity is marked by the ability to act based upon reasons.
           (2) The quality of one’s reasons are the most important factor in morally evaluating
                human action.
           (3) Thus, if we care to morally evaluate environmental action, we must evaluate the
                quality of our reasons, not only the goodness of our ends.
           (4) Lastly, the best way to evaluate our reasons is through discursive, public justificatory
                processes.
           These first two points are well-trodden, if not uncontested, philosophic ground that Hale
surveys very well. As Hale explains, the precondition for morality is the particular quality of
human nature; it is because humans make free decisions based upon reasons that morality has
any sense at all. This is the central way people can make a distinction between an accident and a
crime, between a faux-pa and a pointed insult, or between ingratiating flattery and real
friendliness. The moral distinction between these is a distinction about the reasons the person
acted upon, not upon the resultant ends, good or bad. In the case the flatterer, the motivating
reasons are what we condemn, not the nice compliment. In Hale’s words,
           [The human will] is vital to understanding ethical problems. [The will] is, essentially, the
           bearer of reasons, standing apart from the simple goal-oriented drives characteristic of
           animals and instead functioning to provide rational support for the things we do.
           According to many ways of thinking, it is only people, and only collectives of people,
           who maintain the capacity to express their wills in the formation of law.138
He continues, explaining how an ethics that focuses on reasons above ends does justice to the
nature of humanity:
           If we turn our attention more directly to focus on reasons, and specifically acknowledge
           that we are humans who can share reasons, justifying our actions in the process, I think
           we can maintain our grip on our humanity while also acknowledging that it is out of our
           humanity that our commitment to a clean and healthy environment must emerge. … In
           fact, our own capacity to endorse some principles and reject others, thus shaping an
138
    ibid., p. 147
                                                      88


           identity around our commitments … may very well be what keeps us human, what
           defines us as free.139
           The third move stems from these. If the heart of ethics is about having justified reasons
for action, then Environmental Ethics is no different. Or another way of putting it, what is
ethically wrong (and not simply unfortunate) about climate change or animal extinction is not
that these events are happening; what’s wrong is the unjustified reasons people have for the
actions that have caused these events. A meteor that caused the same result would not be an
ethical matter. It’s certainly an undesirable state, but it does not involve a morally deficient
reason. “In short, merely assessing states of the world does not open the door to reasons, and it
seems to me that it’s these reasons that we’re after when we talk about morality and ethics.”140
           The heart of Hale’s work, however, comes in the final point. The book’s ultimate goal is
to explain what is involved in justifying one’s reasons and to inspire readers to dedicate
themselves to the continuous work of justifying their reasons for acting. I’ll provide more detail
on Hale’s idea of justification below in the review of his negative arguments against focusing on
good ends. But two main points are stressed throughout.
           First, justification is a continuing prosses. One cannot justify something once and for all.
Changing conditions, changing contexts, changing stakeholders, and the limitations of one’s
knowledge demand an openness to reconsidering and re-justifying reasons in the face of
changing circumstances. “Whenever possible, we should keep our options open. As we devise
our business plans, we need to ask what our reasons are and whether we can justify our business
to a community of not so like-minded others, to those who stand neither to gain nor to suffer
under our eventual action.”141 More importantly, Hale warns against viewing justification as
139
    ibid., p. 148
140
    ibid., p. 120
141
    ibid., p. 174
                                                      89


simply determining that some end or goal is worth promoting, and then considering most any
means to that end as justified. Instead, Hale warns against “epistemic closure.”142 As he explains
it, epistemic closure results from any kind of pseudo-justificatory process that comes to a final
answer in such a way that dissenting opinion can be preemptively rejected, and progress thus
becomes a tactical matter of how best to promote that (inadequately) justified goal. “Closure is a
function of the orientation toward success, toward winning. Once we’ve allegedly done the hard
work of justification, we’re free to close our justificatory loop and aim at our goal.”143 Rather
than picking a goal and running with in (even a goal as good as stopping species extinction,
preserving habitat, etc.), environmental ethics must be about continually justifying one’s reasons
for action, especially the means used to reach any end. “The way in which we know that we have
identified the right reasons is by ensuring that our reasons are regularly subjected to the scrutiny
of a wide community of diverse evaluators.”144
           Second, and included in the last quote, justification is a public process. There is an
energetic joy in Hale’s promotion of public justification. It’s uncomplicated and beautiful. He
urges: “Round up your reasons and take them on the road. Take them to your friends, who will
likely agree…. Take them to your neighbors, who may or may not agree…. Take them to the
person on the other side of the state, on the other side of the world. Take them farther, looking
backward, as if from a time machine far in the future, to see whether what you’re doing is
something that future people could accept. If so, why?”145 Hale’s work doesn’t get into the
details of exactly what kind of governance mechanism, or ideal discourse situations should be
sought to ensure the best justification. But he makes it clear again and again that as an individual,
142
    ibid., p. 220ff
143
    ibid., p. 223
144
    ibid., p. 232
145
    ibid., p. 278
                                                    90


one has too limited a view to adequately justify one’s reasons. The purpose of justification is to
ask if everyone else involved, especially those with dissenting opinions, different goals, different
values, can agree that one’s reasons for action are warranted.
           Rather than diving into what kind of process might yield better justification, which is a
field of its own, I want to move to Hale’s negative arguments about how centralizing good ends
– perhaps the eudaimonistic ends of rewilders – undermine or abandon the requirement of public
justification. I believe they do no such thing. In fact, I think an environmental movement that
focuses on rich, detailed testimony about the joys and impoverishments of one’s daily
relationships with their environment provides a beautiful model of how best to enter real, public
discourse about environmental action.
           Now that the context for Hale’s arguments against a focus on good ends can be made
clear. In sum, focusing on good ends leads to poor justification processes, or even leads to
undermining or sidestepping justification altogether. He claims it does this is two ways:
Narrowness and Tactical Thinking. I turn to these now.
           Narrowness
           Throughout the book, Hale warns against “collapsing” or “flattening” ethical reasoning
into a conception of the good. Whether that good is a world that has mitigated the damage of
climate change or species extinction, or whether it is a world that fosters particular qualities of
relationship with one’s living environment, Hale warns that a focus on the good state
environmentalists are working to bring about causes a sort of tunnel vision for ethical reasoning.
           When we transform our reasons into a monolithic idea – like the value of nature, the
           worth of life, the price of a product, the pursuit of happiness – we winnow our reasons
           down into that single, univocal measure. We reduce the complex relationship that we
           have to the world and that the world has to us.146
146
    ibid., p. 269
                                                      91


Hale likens this kind of ethical thinking to a game of “would you rather?” We all make fun
conversation of arguing about what’s better, e.g., to die by fire or drowning? To be able to fly or
to be invisible? We can go back and forth all evening, for and against.
           If we think we can pass judgement on an action simply by appealing to the end state of
           the world (or even the expected end state of the world), we become little more than moral
           mathematicians, assigning values of good and bad, better and worse, to possible
           outcomes – like kids waiting for the bus. The human project of ethics is reduced, then, to
           a simple actuarial project of crunching the numbers.147
           Hale’s target isn’t simply fully fledged, radical utilitarianism. He’s against an often-
unreflective consequentialism that underlies a great deal of environmental thinking. The rewilder
or the agrarian apologist might argue that a life of small community, of skillful work with the
land, and of joy in wild places is a better life than suburban loneliness and consumerism. That
very well might be true. But does simply arguing that one kind of life, one state of the world, is
better than the other constitute responsible ethical reasoning?
           Hale’s answer is a strong “no.” The question we should ask is (not, which state of the
world is better?, but…) are my reasons for promoting one kind of world rationally and publicly
justifiable to all concerned? Environmentalism, then, shouldn’t be a campaign to promote any
particular vision of a better world; it should be a corporate effort – “on a scale that Tocqueville
could never have anticipated”148 – to justify our reasons for acting the way we do to all involved
and to our strongest rivals. The right reasons for doing something are the reasons that can pass a
process of public, rational justification. This process will bring out the complexity of our actions
and reasons, with far more rich considerations than weighing which state of the world is better
than another.
147
    ibid., p. 120
148
    ibid., p. 273
                                                     92


           Presumably, focusing on the public justifiability of reasons (1) enriches the reasoning
process with the views of a wider and more diverse people involved and (2) quickly shows the
insufficiency of many common reasons. Primarily, the reason “because it will make us happier”
becomes a pretty dubious reason. First, it forces us to listen to those who are fairly certain it will
not make them happier. But more than this it’s clear that many actions are not properly justified
simply on the grounds that it makes one happy. I couldn’t justify murder this way, for instance,
so why is it often taken as a good enough reason for environmental policy? Prioritizing the
search for reasons that can be justified, then, is a better way.
           Perhaps this seems elementary enough, but the charm and value of Hale’s argument is
how it provides an approachable and inspiring defense for more earnest public evaluation of our
reasons for environmental action. This is something I’ll always support.
           Tactical Thinking
           Aside from narrowness, there is another danger lurking in a focus on good ends without
prioritizing right reasons. In sum, the danger is assuming that ends are enough to justify the
means. Hale’s running example here is ecologically motivated terrorism.149 In 1998, members of
the Earth Liberation Front set fire to buildings at Two Elk ski lodge near Vail, Colorado. The fire
was an effort to stop the expansion of development into high Rocky Mountain environments.
Any number of similar acts could be cited. But here Hale can quote the arsonists’ own stated
motivations. Kevin Tubbs, a member of the group that set the blaze, explains that:
           I was only motivated by a passion to save animals and a desire to help the environment so
           that we could pass on a healthier and a more vibrant Earth to our children and to future
           generations. In these actions, I always acted out of love… I helped out with these actions
           only with altruistic intentions.150
149
    ibid., p. 205ff, 215-216
150
    ibid., p. 215-216
                                                    93


Without passing judgement on Tubbs, his explanation is the cliché of a gritty comic book villain.
Some villains are nihilistic, but most are trying to be heroes. One wishes that this kind of
thinking was reserved for Marvel villains like Thanos, the galactic warrior who eliminates half
the Milky Way’s population for the sake of a sustainable future. But alas, “I hurt you because I
love you” is a far too common excuse in real life.
          Hale is not the first to warn that an environmentalism which focuses on good ends more
than rational and democratic processes, is in danger of excusing atrocity. French Philosopher Luc
Ferry’s 1992 work The New Ecological Order makes this case at length. In the wake of Francis
Fukuyama’s declaration that the “end of history” had arrived with the fall of the Soviet Union,
that Western liberal democracy had established itself as the final form of human government,
Ferry set out to show that an even deeper, but all too familiar danger to liberal values was
ascending. In what he loosely refers to as “postmodern deep ecology” – a diversity of thinkers
ranging from Arne Naess’ Deep Ecology, Val Plumwood’s Ecofeminism, and Earth First!’s
direct action campaigns – Ferry saw a philosophy poised to undermine liberal democratic values.
          Ferry doesn’t shy from comparing the new environmentalism directly to the worst of both
the authoritarian Right and Left, to both Hitler and Stalin. He writes, “Deep ecology can combine
in one movement both the traditional themes of the extreme Right and the futurist ideas of the
extreme Left. The essential element which gives coherence to the whole is the heart of the
diagnosis: anthropocentrist modernity is a total disaster.”151 This sort of environmentalism was
revolutionary – in the same universal sense as Soviet ideology. The means and methods of
democratic reform can’t save us from environmental destruction if the values of liberal
151
    (Ferry, 1992, p. XXVII)
                                                    94


democracy – particularly its humanism – are the cause of environmental destruction in the first
place.
          Ferry saw the new environmentalism raising various interpretations of ecology to the
level of moral and political authority. That new ecological authority then dictates decisions,
rather than democratic processes.152 And while the environmentalists themselves might be the
kindest folks around, any philosophy that insisted upon a moral and political authority outside of
liberal, humanist democratic processes was, at the end of the day, the foundation for
authoritarianism. Thus, Ferry’s closes: “As a political movement, ecology will not be
democratic; as a democratic movement, it must renounce the mirage of grand political
visions.”153
          In his book Hale is never so severe, but the insistence on democratic processes is the
same. Hale takes pains to stress that tactical thinking isn’t wrong simply because it’s a slippery
slope to authoritarianism, or manipulation, or terrorism (although the slope is real and we have
all fallen off it often enough). Tactical thinking in ethics is wrong because it fails to treat other
people as the rational and free beings that they are. That is, it fails to respect our opponents’
humanity. People who disagree are seen as obstacles to be overcome, rather than people to be
listened to and reasoned with.
          Being ethical and acting rightly is not, and cannot be, about winning some sort of
          geopolitical game. It is not about bringing about an environmental paradise in which
          everyone drives hybrids and children’s cribs are festooned with ivy. Rather,
152
    As footnoted above, philosopher Steven Vogel has proffered similar, and similarly sharp arguments against anti-
democratic trends in environmental philosophy. I review these in the next chapter. His arguments in Thinking Like a
Mall (2015) defend two main points. The first is metaphysical: the non-human world simply isn’t the kind of thing
that can provide normative prescription. People who come to a democratic discourse claiming to represent
normative authority derived from “nature” are as manipulative and oppressive as those who claim some god’s
authority to justify their positions. He likens those who claim to “speak for nature” to “shamans” and
“ventriloquists”; the behavior isn’t simply undemocratic, it’s oppressive. His second point is political: only a more
deeply democratic process can empower human communities to take responsibility for the quality and condition of
their environments.
153
    (Ferry, 1992, p. 14)
                                                           95


           Environmentalism must be about having the right reasons. The way in which we know
           that we have identified the right reasons is by ensuring that our reasons are regularly
           subjected to the scrutiny of a wide community of diverse evaluators.154
           It is the process of rational, public justification that Hale is defending. Whatever good
end we might want, a concern to behave rightly will show us that we must submit our reasons for
promoting these ends to ongoing public scrutiny. This justificatory process is what ultimately
justifies our ends. Or as he plainly states it, “If the decision leading up to the action has gone
through this justificatory process, then the state of the world that results from the process of
justification can also be called justified.”155 The good end alone doesn’t justify itself, and it
surely doesn’t justify the means. Environmental policy, then, isn’t something we can derive from
outside this sort of process – not even from ecological science. “We need to acknowledge, above
all, that our marching orders come not from without but from within – which is to say that
they’re not marching orders at all, but instead self-legislated expressions of our freedom and
rationality.”156
           If this is the case, then what environmentalism needs most is a polity that fosters rational
justificatory processes – both in our individual decisions and public policy – and a citizenry
prepared to participate. Thus, environmental ethics requires, “fair and equal citizenship among
like parties.”157 Or perhaps more aspirational, “We need not just a project about what will make
my life, or your life, or some other stakeholder’s life, better or worse. We need everyone to study
ethics and philosophy and science.”158 Hale calls such a society a viridian commonwealth.
154
    (Hale, 2016, p. 232)
155
    ibid., p. 276
156
    ibid., p. 268
157
    ibid., p. 289
158
    ibid., p. 273
                                                       96


Yes, And…
          Narrowness and Tactical Thinking are surely undesirable in ethics. And fair public
decision making that prioritizes justificatory reasons should be the goal. The fact that one can
point to eudaemonists and other ethicists that are neither narrow nor tactical, that also have done
a great deal to advocate for democratic processes and rational discourse is important; it shows
that we’re dealing with a slippery slope, however present and dangerous of a slope. Exemplary
exceptions notwithstanding, it is still true that narrowness and tactical thinking abound in the
environmental movement, and we should all be working together to make rational discourse
more common and powerful. Hale’s book is a great piece of approachable public philosophy for
this purpose.
          My reply, then, is not simply that the eudaimonist turn in rewilding literature can be ‘not
guilty’ of these errors. I want to argue that a eudaimonist concern, centralizing the question of
what actually is the most choiceworthy life in relation to one’s environment, helps perfect Hale’s
own purpose.
          The Right is not Sufficient for the Good
          There is an old critique of prioritizing the right over the good.159 It’s a thought
experiment that appeals to an intuition that caring about certain goods, about certain qualities and
motivations of action, matters more than concern for justifiable reasons merely.
          Imagine a friend is in the hospital. The prognosis is not good. You decide it is your duty
to visit your friend, to bring comfort and companionship in their time of need. As an ethical
159
    This example was most famously used in Michael Stocker’s 1976 paper “The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical
Theories” (Stocker, 1976). Stocker focused on the “motivational structure” of ethical life, arguing that both
deontological and utilitarian theories fail to do justice to evaluating motivations in action. Since that time, the
thought experiment has become a mainstay of ethics courses and, as I first encountered it and am employing a
version of it now, it has been broadened a bit to simply suggest there is a lot more – more even than motivation –
than rightness or adherence to a principle in evaluating the action.
                                                             97


person you want to confirm that it is the right thing to do to visit your friend. You may even
weigh out your reasons against rival reasons, you seek out opinions that disagree. You might ask
the preference of the friend’s family. You might ask the medical staff supervising. You want to
ensure that your acting for the benefit of your friend and not your own selfish reasons. You want
to ensure that your action is something you could recommend universally. You want to ensure
that you won’t do harm.
         Now, imagine two types of visitor. Person A does not really want to visit, isn’t
particularly moved by the value of their friend, isn’t compelled to offer comfort out of love for
the friend. But, evaluating all the reasons, Person A decides it is still the right thing to do to visit
and to comfort. At the very least, Person A sees that they would want companionship in their
time of need. So, Person A visits.
         Person B also recognizes that they would want comfort and companionship in their time
of need. Person B also weighs out their reasons against rival opinions. Person B is also
concerned that their reasons are universalizable. Granting that these conditions are met, however,
Person B really wants to be there for their friend.
         Now, if you were the one in the hospital, which visitor would you want? The person
committed to doing the right thing, or the person who can’t help but care about you (who, as it
happens, also cares about doing the right thing)? Most folks pick Person B. Of course, that could
just be a selfish impulse. I certainly want people to care about me. But what about this question:
Which person is the better friend?
         Person A has the qualities we might want in our health care workers. Person B has the
qualities we’d hope for our friends. Many folks think Person A is not simply less desirable, but is
at least a little blameworthy. Even in going to visit, they’ve failed to live up to what it means to
                                                  98


be a good friend. Even though both have met the standards for right action, being a good friend
demands something more.
          Like everyone else, I often don’t want to do the right thing. Hopefully I work up the
fortitude to do it anyway. But I also chastise myself, not simply for wrong actions, but for the
presence or absence of desire, of wanting better or worse things. I worry about not having the
best desires, the better impulses, the better first instincts. Everyone does, I think. If such
chastisement has any ethical weight, then ethics is about more than the justifiability of action. I’ll
leave this point here for a moment and bring it back after the next point.
          The Right Underdetermines the Good
          Hale promotes public justificatory processes. Indeed, passing a public process (the details
of which are not really discussed) is what it means for a reason to be justified. “If the decision
leading up to the action has gone through this justificatory process, then the state of the world
that results from the process of justification can also be called justified.”160 As I mentioned at the
start of the chapter, it can be tempting to bring up a monstrous counterexample for this kind of
process-based moral theory.161 That is, if the process can produce monstrous results, well, this is
a reductio ad absurdum against the sufficiency of the process. Although I don’t put much stock
in this kind of counterexample, it’s fair to expect an environmental ethic to not be so open-ended
that it easily justifies environmentally monstrous results.
          At the same time, an environmental ethic, especially one that prioritizes public decision-
making processes, can’t determine every aspect of how a community lives with their land. Surely
a great diversity of environmental relationships – various ways of organizing society, cultural
160
    Hale, 2016, p. 276
161
    These are commonly called “moral catastrophe” examples. For more, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
entry on “Deontology” dedicates space to these examples in Section 4 (Alaxander & Moore, 2020).
                                                       99


practices and meanings, whole vastly different kinds of lifestyles – can count as environmentally
ethical. Granting that diversity is necessary, I wonder if there is more work for environmental
ethics than insisting on fair processes.
        I’ll use a thought experiment, much like Hale’s own throughout his book. So, imagine a
world where people do care about justifying their reasons. They recognize that a great deal of
environmental harm has been caused by thoughtless actions and they resolve to publicly justify
their reasons and change their actions in the face of better reasons. They all crowd into a room to
better discuss an ethically justifiable environmental policy moving forward. This world is some
beautiful ideal of a city council meeting. The meeting has come to order. The first question on
the agenda is What environmental policy should we have? Now, what do they talk about?
        Of course, it isn’t really an answer to say, “We should build the policy that we have the
best justified reasons for building.” That open-ended principle has already been adopted. The
meeting will have to discuss tangible proposals.
        Now, imagine two such worlds. They both go through an ideally fair process. At the end,
however, the societies that result are vastly different. One is largely agrarian, distributed. The
other largely urban, centralized. Let’s say they’ve both solved the same ecological problems, but
in vastly different ways. Great.
        Let me stop. One of the problems with this thought experiment so far is that, personally, I
might be completely satisfied with either world. I can only dream of either. But the imagined
worlds introduce a question: Could there be anything ethically distinguishable between the
worlds? It seems to me that these two worlds will allow very different lifestyles. This seems
good. I want an environmental ethic that allows for diversity. But I worry that Hale’s account
would have me conclude that any difference between these worlds can only be a matter of taste,
                                                  100


of mere preference, that is, not ethically relevant. It’s true that the difference between worlds will
be a difference between goods - between different possibilities, between lifestyles, identities, and
relationships that the infrastructure of each world either fosters or discourages. It’s also true,
however, that the difference between these goods matters a great deal, and not as something as
easily dismissible as personal preference. In the case of the hospital visitors above, the difference
between the two may have been a good, a quality of desire, but it’s what makes all the
difference.
        This thought experiment looks a lot like the end of Chapter 2. Ecomodernists and
Primitive-ish groups are advocating for very different worlds, worlds with different
infrastructures, worlds that foster and discourage very different kinds of life. The situation of
discussing the environmental future is a discussion of what kind of life is most choiceworthy. It’s
about building the infrastructure that determines what lifestyle and relationships are fostered or
discouraged. Put better, it’s a discussion about what sort of people to be and to become.
        My argument is that the rewilding visions that centralize a concern for what kinds of life
and relationships with our environments are ultimately choiceworthy are the best examples of
actually getting on with the conversation that needs to be had. Lord knows we need interlocutors
that care about justifying reasons. Lord knows we need to listen to each other more. But the topic
of the conversation is this: What kind of life do we want to live? Identifying and justifying
reasons for this necessitates centralizing the question of the good life in relationship with the
environment. The details will matter. The choice between competing goods will matter. The
eudaimonistic concern in rewilding literature is a step in the right direction, for attending to these
choices, for getting on with this discussion, and for doing it well.
                                                 101


                             CHAPTER 5: REWILDING DISCOURSE
“The champions of good procedure post guards at the doors of city hall to prevent undemocratic
types from entering. Inside, the tables and chairs have been arranged to achieve an order of
equality and openness. But no one, in fact, enters, sits down, and begins to converse.”
         – Albert Borgmann162
         In the last chapter I introduced Benjamin Hale’s objections that an environmentalism
which centralizes a hope for goods leads to pernicious forms of narrowness and tactical thinking.
Both are problems in environmentalism, and yet I argued that the need for detailed testimony and
discussion of exactly what kind of environment and environmental relationships are most
choiceworthy, and why, remains the most important focus for public environmental decision
making in the Anthropocene. In this chapter I want to look in more detail at another, related
criticism concerning environmental discourse, this one put forward by Steven Vogel.
         Like Luc Ferry’s charge described above, Vogel is concerned that democratic decision
making is undermined by an environmentalism that employs normative, authoritative
understandings of nature. In brief, a democratic process about how to shape the environment
must be a discussion among equals who are equally responsible to explain their own preferences
and defend their reasons. Environmentalists that employ fixed, normative understandings of
nature are appealing to an extradiscursive authority – a standard outside and presumably above
the preferences and reasons of the decision-making body. In essence, normative understandings
of nature function like appeals to divine authority. If my community is debating, say, divorce or
abortion, and my contribution to the discourse is simply “God forbids these things,” then I am
refusing to participate as an equal who is equally responsible to defend my own reasons for my
own preferences. What I’ve really said is that everyone else comes to this discussion as equal
individuals, but I am representing a higher authority. Ignoring whether such outside authorities
162
    (Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, 1992, p. 4)
                                                     102


exist, and whether they can be represented this way, it is a performative contradiction to enter a
democratic discourse with reasons that deny the legitimacy and authority of the discourse itself.
If all that matters is what God or Nature demands, then why make a democratic appeal? As I
explain in detail below, Vogel calls this kind of speech ventriloquism, a speech supposedly on
behalf of and appealing to the unquestionable (quite literally unquestionable, in that it is not there
to answer questions) authority of something outside the discourse.
         Like Hale’s critique in the last chapter, this critique is much larger than the issue of
rewilding, but it bears upon my call to centralize the question of the good life in environmental
discussions. Are rewilders committing this kind of performative contradiction in their
testimonies to the good of a rewilded world?
         It can certainly seem so, in at least three ways. First, a good deal of rewilding advocacy
takes the shape of a basic fallacious appeal to nature. Something like, [X] is how
ecosystems/humans evolved, thus it is good to preserve/practice/restore [X]. The evolutionary
history of the ecosystem is being appealed to as a normative authority. Second, rewilding appeals
are often presented, or at least understood by an audience as, normative brute facts. That is, it
can seem like rewilders promote their personal lifestyle preferences as if they brute facts. For
instance, that rural life is better than urban life, that the woods are better than suburbs, that
amateur naturalism is simply an inherently superior hobby than whatever you’re doing with your
free time (watching television, working on cars, travelling to cities, etc.). Whether these are deep
philosophical mistakes or merely very poor rhetoric has to be decided on a case-by-case basis,
but no matter, these two kinds of argumentative error are easy to dismiss (their persistence in
popular discourse notwithstanding).
                                                    103


           I’m interested in a third kind, however, one that I’ve tangentially mentioned in the
preceding chapters. Consider Enric Sala’s words on his organization’s rhetorical strategy,
mentioned in Chapter 3: “When [Pristine Seas] meets with country leaders, we make sure we
never get into the brainy weeds. … We never start with the head. We go straight for the heart,
and taking a leader to the field is the best recipe for doing so. … Once they fall in love with
nature, these leaders intuitively feel the responsibility to protect these places.” Sala’s strategy is
to engage his audience with the very thing, the real material ecosystem, for which he is
advocating. The strategy is less of an argument, and more of an invitation to experience. Or
again, remember Jepsen and Blythe’s review of rewilding narratives, also mentioned in Chapter
3. They point out, “…that stories of rewilding lack the blame and the appeal to higher authority
of the 20th-century environmental narrative, instead focusing on new ways of thinking and
grounded action, intertwined with ideas of nature as a creative force and visions of a better future
for all life.”163 They continue, “Rewilding stories, like accounts of recovery from mental health,
commonly talk of ‘awakenings’ that prompt a desire to do something, which leads to a
reassessment and more action through which recovery emerges.”164 I highlight the word “action”
because it ties in with Sala’s taking world leaders on field trips. The connection is an appeal to
go do something, to engage with the world in a particular way, to then evaluate the good of
preserving and promoting this good.
           This third kind of appeal is the topic of this chapter. As I explain below, this kind of
appeal is what the philosopher Albert Borgmann has called Deictic Discourse. As Borgmann
presents it, deictic discourse should be an important part of a democratic polity. When I have
said in the previous chapters that there is a popular kind of rewilding narrative that has
163
    (Jepson & Blythe, 2020, p. 109) emphasis mine
164
    ibid., p. 110 emphasis mine
                                                     104


centralized the question of the good life, and that this eudaimonistic turn is good for
environmentalism in the Anthropocene, I could have said that rewilding discourse has become
deictic.
          This last chapter moves in three steps. First, I present Steven Vogel’s account of
ventriloquism, explaining why this kind of speech presents a problem for democratic discourse,
simply presenting a performative contradiction and best and at worst wielding unwarranted
authority over others. Next, I describe Albert Borgmann’s account of deictic discourse, how it
differs from ventriloquism, and how it can play an important role in democratic discourse. I then
close with a conclusion to the whole work, suggesting that environmental ethics does well to
understand the breadth and diversity of rewilding as a result of its eudaimonistic aims and the
deictic speech that most adequately fit those aims.
The Problem of Ventriloquism165
          According to Vogel, the root cause of the environmental crisis is our alienation from
“nature.” That is, we fail to understand that nature is – in a real, material sense – a product of
humanity’s collective social practices. Our practices create, re-create, alter, and destroy our
environments. We socially construct our environments through a series of actions that none of us
chooses individually, and which none of us collectively deliberated about and decided upon.
These are the claims most central to Vogel’s important contribution to environmental
philosophy. In this chapter, I sadly must breeze over Vogel’s materialism, his refreshing focus on
the real material conditions of our collective relationships to our environments. Instead, I focus
on the upshot of this philosophy, that human can solve this alienated state by increased open
165
    This section was originally co-authored with philosopher and friend Dr. Joey Aloi for a paper submitted to
Environmental Ethics (forthcoming 2024). In its present form this chapter has been altered to fit the topic of this
dissertation, but I must acknowledge Aloi’s important contribution in both conversation and writing for this section
summarizing Vogel’s position.
                                                        105


democratic discourse that takes responsibility for the shape of the environment. This kind of
discourse will refuse to accept that things must remain the way they are, and will recognize its
collective power to change things for the better.
         None of us intended to create the sixth great mass extinction event; none of us want
global climate change and the devastation it wreaks. But as individuals, we are powerless to do
anything about the environmental crisis because it is caused by our social actions, not our
individual actions. There is no better name for this distance between our individual hopes and
goals and our societal actions than the concept of Marxist alienation, and this is the concept
Vogel uses to describe our collective relationship to our environments: “we cannot choose to
change them, nor would we even know how to do so, although it is our own acts that produce
them.”166 Our everyday environments are largely produced by actions, and filled with artifacts,
that none of us have chosen, that do not act as their creators intended, and that none of us feel we
have control over.
         For this reason, Vogel’s solution to our environmental crisis relies upon a more
transparent communal deliberation about our social construction of nature, one which is
democratic and genuinely dialogical. If the problem is that we are both individually alienated
from the environments we have socially constructed and communally alienated from each other
and the roles we play in this process of material social construction, then the solution is a
genuine, open, and honest dialogue about what sorts of environments we do want to live in and
how we might best construct them socially. Vogel writes, “dialogue actually transforms the
social and political situation and thereby makes certain solutions possible whose value
individuals are capable of monologically recognizing but which they cannot by themselves put
166
    (Vogel, 2015, p. 81)
                                                 106


into practice.”167 The practice of a genuine dialogue is open and honest. We attempt to learn
about each other’s opinions and lived experiences in order to honestly and transparently choose a
course of action based on something approaching consensus. We genuinely listen in the hope of
learning, we are open to the possibility of being persuaded, we are not merely interested in
rhetorical conquest and hoodwinking our interlocutors. This process of genuine dialogue is
crucial for engaging in the types of social practices which construct an environment that most
closely meets our hopes and dreams and goals.
           Of course, this sort of genuine dialogue is only possible when speech flows back and
forth, when we listen and speak with each other as equal partners in this task of social
construction. All sorts of political, social, and economic power dynamics can distort this sort of
dialogue, as can deliberate attempts at propaganda and illicit coercion. For this reason, we need
to be able to speak from our hearts and our experiences, and trust that our interlocutors are doing
the same. If we are to have an honest conversation about practices of social construction, we
need to be able to take the first-person speeches, arguments, and opinions of our interlocutors at
face value. It is no solution to alienation when social practices change only through duplicity,
manipulation, or the operation of brute force.
           For this reason, Vogel is concerned with ventriloquism. Ventriloquism occurs when one
or more of the participants in a dialogue claim that they are not speaking on behalf of their own
opinions, not expressing their own values, not speaking from their own lived experiences, but,
rather, speaking with some special authority on behalf of non-human entities. By introducing a
voice into the communal deliberations which cannot be questioned, cannot respond to correction
or dissent, the ventriloquist wields an authority that none of the other interlocutors have. The
167
    ibid., p. 221
                                                   107


ventriloquist does not have a responsibility to explain or justify the arguments they make on
behalf of bike lanes, elk, or the microbiome. Indeed, to attempt to explain or justify these
arguments would be to admit the ventriloquism is a ruse. The ventriloquist will present these
value judgments as if they were fact, in need of no explication or justification, as transparently
obvious as the height of Mount Rainier or the painfulness of fire: “such claims, just because they
can’t be questioned, will be treated as unquestionable in the sense of being unquestionably
true.”168
           The problem, for Vogel, is that the muteness of all nonhuman entities on our planet
ensures that the ventriloquist cannot be honestly interpreting on behalf of mountains, salmon, or
the climate. Rather, the ventriloquist is merely inserting their own opinions about mountains,
salmon, or the climate into the debate in such a way that they are shielded from criticism or
inquiry. No other participants in the dialogue have the privilege of baldly asserting their opinions
about these entities without some sort of argumentative or empirical justification. This gives the
ventriloquist an unjustified, and unjustifiable, argumentative privilege that the rest of the
participants in this communal dialogue just don’t have. “This is the deepest danger in the idea
that nonhuman entities can speak – and it is a political danger. Because they speak no human
language, in order to understand what such entities say we need people to translate for us: and
yet what claims to be a translator might turn out to be nothing but a ventriloquist, and we have no
good way to distinguish one from the other.”169 (189).
           Precisely because Vogel explains the environmental crisis as a result of our individual
and communal alienation from the ways in which we socially construct our environments,
honest, transparent, and deliberate conversations about what we do and don’t like about the ways
168
    ibid. p. 187 italics in original
169
    ibid., p. 189
                                                  108


we currently construct our environments, and about how we ought to do so in the future, are
crucial for solving and dealing with our environmental crises, including, of course,
environmental injustice. Because ventriloquism puts a mask of fact over the values of the
ventriloquist, it is supremely disruptive to the honesty and transparency required by genuine
dialogue. The danger of ventriloquism lies in the fact that it might deepen alienation, and thereby
worsen the environmental crisis and environmental injustice. It deepens alienation by presenting
“nature” as a fixed outside authority, rather than a flexible product of the people having the
conversation. No one of us has privileged access to normative knowledge about the non-human
world. Or, more precisely, to the extent that we have a type of privileged access, it is because we
have engaged in the sort of practical study or first-hand interaction with this world that we ought
to be able to make transparent through argumentative and expository discourse.
         The present question, then, is if rewilders become ventriloquists when they appeal to the
goodness of certain kinds of ecosystems and lifestyles. Before deciding this, I will introduce
another kind of speech that can easily be mistaken for bald ventriloquism.
The Power and Weakness of Deictic Discourse
         Deictic discourse is a form of first-person speech that does accept responsibility for itself
as Vogel demands. And yet, this speech testifies to goods beyond itself – more specifically, it
testifies to material things and the goods of human practices and relationships with these
material things. This appeal beyond the speaker, this pointing to the world, however, does not
have the force of an appeal to outside authority. Rather, it functions as an invitation for an
audience to appreciate a good for themselves. The important difference I want to draw out is that
between an appeal to extradiscursive authority and an invitation to experience or interpret the
world in a particular way. My purpose is to show not only that deictic discourse is not guilty of
                                                  109


ventriloquism, but also that it is vitally important for the kind of discourse necessary for taking
unalienated, collective responsibility for the environment.
         To this end, I show the origin and purpose of deictic speaking in Borgmann’s philosophy
of technology. Next, I outline three features of deictic discourse that clearly separate it from
ventriloquism. Finally, I close this section with Borgmann’s appeal for the necessity of deictic
discourse; namely, without it our discussions and our decisions are bound to simply perpetuate
the reigning values of a technological age, the same values – too often hidden and unanalyzed in
our political discourse – that have shaped our society’s relationships with its environments in the
first place.
         Overlapping Interests
         There is a fruitful overlap between Vogel’s and Borgmann’s description of environmental
problems. Both agree about its major symptom, that we have collectively constructed an
environment that we do not like. From ugly and abandoned downtowns, the loneliness and waste
of suburban sprawl, to the sixth extinction and beyond, these problems are almost universally
disfavored, while still being collectively created. Further, Borgmann agrees that there is some
amount of alienation from the recognition of and participation in the collective processes that
actually do the shaping of our environments. And lastly, both call for a new sense of collective
responsibility for our environment as the most promising way forward.
         This overlapping agreement is evident throughout Borgmann’s work, but perhaps most
clear in the introduction to his latest book, Real American Ethics. This work opens with a call to
“take our mutual and inclusive responsibility more seriously and understand it more deeply.”170
Responsibility for what? In this case, for the shape of one’s country, for our environments – of
170
    (Borgmann, 2007, p. 4)
                                                  110


all kinds, domestic, public, urban, rural, and even wild – and the kind and quality of life those
environments afford. Borgmann’s book is a detailed extrapolation of one of Winston Churchill’s
aphoristic lines: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” But, as
Borgmann immediately points out, “The individual does not shape buildings. We do it together,
after disagreements, discussions, compromises, and decisions.”171 It is not too much of a stretch
to hear a bit of Vogel’s understanding of the social construction of nature in the following
passage:
           The ways we are shaped by what we have built are neither neutral nor forcible, and since
           we have always assumed that public and common structures have to be one or the other,
           the intermediate force of our building has remained invisible to us, and that has allowed us
           to ignore a crucial point: We are always and already engaged in drawing the outlines of a
           common way of life, and we have to take responsibility for this fact and ask whether it is a
           good life, a decent life, or a lamentable life that we have outlined for ourselves.172
We have built this; we must take responsibility for it. This is the heart of what Borgmann has
called “real ethics,” which is “taking responsibility for the tangible setting of life.”173
           And yet, anyone familiar with Borgmann’s work knows that a central part of “taking
responsibility” and of working to improve how we shape and inhabit our environments, is
through a concerned attention and public testimony to the normative character of reality. This is
the context in which Borgmann calls for deictic discourse. Although there is overlap in
describing the symptom, Borgmann differs from Vogel in diagnosing the cause. It is not that we
fail to have organized discourse, it's that our discourse, like everything else in our age, is shaped
by the characteristic way of understanding and relating to the world in a technological age. Just
like our environments have been shaped by various values and practices to reinforce some kinds
of life over others, so too our discourse itself – its practical, material forms in our public
171
    Ibid., p. 5
172
    Ibid., p. 6
173
    Ibid., p. 11
                                                         111


decision-making processes – has been shaped by the same self-reinforcing values. Deictic
discourse is a way of breaking out of the status quo to more clearly evaluate the shape of things
and offer alternatives. Below I offer a basic example, and then I will summarize three features of
deictic discourse, revealing its difference from ventriloquism and translation.
        Consider this. The city of Wheeling, WV (my current home) is renovating its downtown
streets and sidewalks for the first time in three generations. This streetscape project is the subject
of ongoing public meetings, filled with residents advocating for various interests and values they
hope to see shape the final physical shape of their downtown. It includes all the usual suspects:
downtown businesses worried about disruptions in customer traffic, downtown residents worried
about parking, families wanting safe parks, cyclists wanting trails, and, of course, architectural,
engineering, and construction companies wanting any excuse for prolonged business. Let’s say
you want to advocate for a downtown friendlier to pedestrians. How do you do this at the town
hall meeting?
        One method is a kind of pandering; that is, I might argue that whatever my opponent
values – e.g., increased customer traffic downtown – is best achieved by creating an environment
more friendly to pedestrians. This may be true. So, I can win over my opponents, not by
changing what they value, but by showing that their values overlap with my proposal. For
instance, pedestrian access increases foot traffic, which in turn promotes the increased business
that downtown business owners desire.
        Another method might be an appeal to justice; that is, I might argue that pedestrians
deserve similar access to the downtown and increased safety and ease while doing so. It is unfair,
I might say, that the infrastructure of our city rewards car traffic and punishes pedestrians. In this
                                                  112


case, I also am not interested in changing what my opponent values, but I am arguing that there
must be a limitation on pursuing their interests to avoid infringing on the rights of others.
        But what if I hope to change what my opponent values? What if I want them not simply
to concede or compromise, but to really appreciate the good of a largely pedestrian downtown?
The most effective method, if it were feasible, would be to take my opponent to some of the most
beautiful and enjoyable pedestrian cities and let them experience the difference. It certainly does
happen, again and again, that when people experience the joy of strolling through medieval
European villages, or the ease and calm of a Scandinavian bike commute, that they start wanting
these goods in their own cities. They return home and see it with new eyes. The offense of
noxious exhaust, the prevalence of road rage, the constant anxiety of every street crossing, all
these everyday experiences are newly seen as such unnecessary burdens. Our city, they easily
see, could be different. We can shape it differently. Both the impoverishments and the potential
of their own home are revealed through the experience of a different good.
        If I can’t take everyone to Siena or Copenhagen (I can’t take myself there), I might try to
give convincing testimony to the good of a pedestrian downtown. I might appeal to my city’s
history, to the way there used to be city squares full of people, to how businesses opened to
seating on the river, to how all the downtown apartments used to be full because it was not only
convenient, but pleasurable to walk to work. I might use a vivid architectural drawing, a short
film, some poetic or artistic means of conveying the value of living in a pedestrian city along the
Ohio River. All of these are kinds of deictic discourse.
                                                113


           Three Features of Deictic Discourse
           Borgmann’s discussions on deictic discourse are most fully elaborated in his Technology
and the Character of Contemporary Life.174 Although the stress of that work, and much of
Borgmann’s work thereafter, has been an explication of the nature of technology and how our
current age is best understood as a specifically technological age, there is much to be gained
about the nature of discourse about our environments while leaving the discussion of technology
to one side. Below we summarize Borgmann’s view on deictic discourse in three propositions.
           1. Our real environment is already a collective decision about what is good, what
                ultimately matters in life.
           As said above, Borgmann explains the context for deictic discourse by first showing that
we have already shaped our environments in ways that privilege certain kinds of life and prevent
and marginalize other ways of life. Our environments are not simply a statement about what is
important in life, but a material structure that reinforces it. And yet our common discourse does
little to attend to this reality. Again, “We are always and already engaged in drawing the outlines
of a common way of life, and we have to take responsibility for this fact and ask whether it is a
good life, a decent life, or a lamentable life that we have outlined for ourselves.”175
           Borgmann made this point plain in his early work on technology. “Beneath the
appearances and parlances of radical openness [in liberal democracies] there is a definite pattern
of institutions and procedures and of life.”176 And again, “We have taken a collective position in
our actions, though not in our discourse, regarding the good life.”177 This context is what gives
sense to deictic discourse. The reason deictic discourse is needed is precisely because we require
174
    (Borgmann, 1987)
175
    Borgmann, 2007, p. 6
176
    Borgmann, 1987, p. 169
177
    Ibid., p. 171 emphasis mine
                                                   114


a way of collectively evaluating the ways in which our environments are always already
reinforcing certain kinds of life and we need a type of argumentation capable of communicating
real alternatives.
         Thus, although deictic discourse will always involve pointing to a particular real, material
aspect of the world, its purpose is to attempt to communicate about what ultimately matters in
life. Deictic discourse is for expressing what kind of life is most worth living. And more often
than not, it is an attempt to show that the life most worth living is different than the kind of life
privileged and materially reinforced by our environments – environments that our collective
actions have shaped, and in turn our shaping us.
         2. Deictic discourse shows but does not force.
         So, if I want to show others the problems and impoverishment of the life privileged by
our shared environment, and I want to testify to better alternatives, what kind of argument do I
use? As in the “pedestrian” example above, it is often most appropriate to show rather than tell.
But we want to make clear that this appropriateness is not a matter of what is most effective; it is
not a utilitarian or sophistic argument about what will work best in a democratic setting. Instead,
the nature of deictic discourse is dictated by its subject matter. The discussion is about
experiencing the goodness, the value of a certain kind of relationship to the world. This kind of
subject matter is one that cannot be packaged into a deductive argument and forced upon an
audience, not because it won’t “work” – won’t convince the audience – but because the subject
matter itself doesn’t fit that form. Deictic discourse is always an invitation for another to see the
world in a certain way – and we cannot force them to see, we can only do our best to shape the
conditions, to set the scene, and to ask them to look. As Borgmann describes it, “At its most
important it is always a plea, and especially in a democracy it must be a plea; it cannot be
                                                  115


trickery or imposition. More particularly it is a plea on behalf of a certain kind of life. The
challenge for the philosopher is to be an effective advocate. But at the end of the day, when all
the presenting and persuading has been done, that way of life has to recommend itself in its own
right.”178
           The very important upshot of this is that deictic discourse is weak in one sense. That is, it
does not force its conclusions directly upon its audience. It openly admits that it is powerless to
do so. Rather, it points to reality, and believes that, should the viewer be so disposed, the
experience of goodness will convince them itself. The cogency and rigor of deductive argument
or of scientific explanation are neither denied nor diminished in Borgmann’s analysis. Neither
are they in conflict with deictic discourse. They are simply unsuited to the goals of deictic
discourse. As he puts it,
           Discourse of ultimate concern can draw continued strength from something that is present
           visibly, forcefully, and in its own right, and it can address others by inviting them to see
           for themselves. Thus deictic discourse need not cajole, threaten, or overwhelm. …
           Speakers of deictic discourse never fully warrant the validity of what they tell but point
           away from themselves to what finally matters; they speak essentially as witnesses.179
And again, “[Deictic discourse] does not strive after cogency since it cannot, nor does it wish to,
control its subject matter. But neither is it arbitrary since it is guided by an eminent, publicly
accessible, and tangible concern which can be pointed up and explained.”180
           But this weakness in directly forcing a conclusion upon an audience is part of different
kind of strength. When deictic discourse does “work” – when full communication is made and
another “sees” the value the speaker testifies to – it commands more than intellectual assent. It
compels the other to action, to seek that good for themselves. The other forms their own
178
    Borgmann, Real American Ethics, p. 163
179
    Borgmann, TCCL, p. 178
180
    ibid., p. 169
                                                        116


connection to the real, material thing testified to and seeks to enjoy it. They want the life made
possible by the good they have found. This is not the case with more forceful argumentation:
“The assent that is exacted by scientific cogency is as narrow as the explanation. Normally it ties
me into the world by so thin or shallow a bond that I am not moved to act.”181 And again,
“Deictic explanation discloses something to us and elicits active assent; it moves us to act. …
But it remains contestable because it cannot, nor does it want to, control its subject matter or the
conditions of its reception. Though deictic discourse is contestable, it is principled as well. It has
a publicly accessible subject matter that can be considered and examined. It rests its case not by
subjective standards but by pointing away from the subject to the thing in question.”182
           Deictic discourse is thus a kind of pointing. “Look,” it suggests, “Isn’t this better?” The
audience is always free to say, “No, it’s not better.” Or perhaps, “Yes, but it is also more and
different than you see.” And yet, if they do agree, the assent becomes a commitment to a good,
not merely an intellectual assent.
           3. Deictic discourse requires a discourse ethics of participation, a willingness to try.
           Here I may test your patience with a much longer quote of one of Borgmann’s
descriptions of how deictic discourse works, and when it is unlikely to work or even be
appropriate. The quickest examples involve talking about taste, in food or in art. If I want to
convince someone that chocolate tastes good or, for something more specific, that Neutral Milk
Hotel captures the ambivalent energy of suburban millennial adolescence, well, does it make
sense to form a deductive argument for these things? Surely, I am misunderstanding what I’m
trying to communicate if I did go about forming such an argument. The better method, of course,
is to ask others to try it. Take a bite. Listen. Sure, I can set the scene. I can prepare the other to
181
    ibid., p. 179
182
    ibid., p. 181
                                                    117


hopefully experience what I have experienced. I can ask them to cleanse their palate first. I can
suggest that they get in an old Honda Civic and listen to the album on a drive across the fly-over
states. But I can’t argue them into the conclusion of experiencing my experience. This would be
to misunderstand what I’m attempting to communicate.
         Here Borgmann explains the setting required for deictic discourse:
         Say I have been touched by the majesty of the wilderness or the force of Bach’s orchestral
         suites. In a calm and thoughtful setting I will speak freely and perhaps effectively of what
         has moved me. I will trace and highlight the crucial features of these phenomena and
         recount their eloquence. This can be done when my listeners and I are within hailing
         distance of nature and within earshot of music in the quiet repose of friendship and inquiry.
         In each situation I may be able to draw the listeners into the very presence of these forces
         and have them see, listen, and agree for themselves. But there are contentious situations
         where I would not begin to try and make a case for the wilderness or for Bach. …
                  There may be a situation of lighthearted sarcasm where someone dares me to
         protest my devotion to the wilderness. Irreconcilable convictions may clash in a setting of
         anger and frustration. And philosophers are at times issued the challenge to defend their
         ultimate concern the same way they are expected to defend the mind-body identity thesis.
                  Such settings are immune to the kind of discourse that is appropriate to nature and
         music. … Youthful defenders of nature often come to philosophy with a request for a
         cogent mode of discourse to make their cause prevail regardless of opposition. … When
         environmentalists are told that such irresistible argumentation is impossible, they are
         distressed.183
         We cannot argumentatively force an audience to see the value of the wild. But we can
more adequately point away from ourselves and to the wild, the real material thing, and set the
scene for them to experience it for themselves. If one wants to argue that a life dedicated to the
mountains is more choiceworthy than a life dedicated to the mall, perhaps the best argument is
not a lecture, but a walk. Experience the differences of the real, material things.
         This point says something about what it means to be a listener. In these matters there
must be a willingness to try in order for deictic communication to occur. If someone has
elegantly expressed why chocolate taste good, and I have listened attentively, evaluated their
183
    (Borgmann, Power Failure, 2003, pp. 90-91)
                                                     118


reason, and yet refused to take a bite, then I haven’t really listened – I have not done what I must
to evaluate their claims.184
          The upshot is that Borgmann’s description of deictic discourse is not only a suggestion
for how one speaks about things that ultimately matter, but also a guide for how one must listen
and how we must shape our communal discourse to allow for this kind of communication. In
addition to shaping the environment at large, communities must curate their forums, their
discourse space, to allow for this participatory, active discourse ethic.
Fostering Deictic Discourse in Deliberation
          Where might deictic discourse belong in those communal deliberations that, on Vogel’s
account, work to remove alienation? On the one hand, deictic discourse is first-person speech,
and so it is unobjectionable and would be of no concern to Vogel. It might even be encouraged if
it increases democratic participation. But on the other hand, it often takes the form of speech on
behalf of a silent thing, place, practice, or event; indeed, sometimes the human speaker claims
they heard the silent thing speak eloquently, its value was communicated, shine forth, in such a
way that people tend to describe it as seeing and hearing the value. In this sense, deictic
discourse is inadmissible, or at least self-contradictory in ways that rightly give pause to other
participants in the democratic dialogue. Looking at it in this way, deictic discourse both does and
does not follow Vogel’s rules of discourse ethics, which means it might be rehabilitated or
allowed as some impoverished version of an argument – halfway there, but in need of rigorous
interpretation and elaboration by one human speaker on behalf of another.
184
    There are, of course, plenty of occasions where we might not be convinced to try out a practice and yet not be
guilty of violating the norms of democratic conversation – trying a food to which one is allergic. But by the same
token, one is not required by the norms of genuine conversation to listen attentively to the Senator filibustering by
reading from the phone book.
                                                        119


         But understanding deictic discourse in this manner misses what is most fundamental
about it. It is not first-person discourse in the sense that the speaker is telling us something about
their personal preferences, as in, “I like strawberry ice cream.” Rather, it is a testimony about the
thing first and foremost, and how engaging in a practice with that thing has formed the individual
as the person they are. It is a discourse about how a certain practice has shaped the first-person
perspective of the individual speaking. To use a grammatical analogy, the human speaker is the
object of the sentence, not the subject. The subject is the thing (and associated practice) on behalf
of which the human speaker is speaking. The speaker claims that the thing’s voice can be heard
in practice, that the thing is publicly accessible, and the speaker invites their interlocutors to
engage in this practice in order to “hear” the voice, for the thing to become “eloquent” in its own
right. The weakness of deictic discourse lies in the fact that speakers can neither force their
interlocutors to engage in the practice, nor can the speaker arrogate to themself the authority of
the voice heard through the practice.
         My worry, then, is not that Vogel’s descriptions of democratic deliberation and of
nature’s silence would disallow deictic discourse. Rather, my worry is that an interpretation of
the conceptual categories “first-person speech” and “ventriloquism” as mutually exclusive and
mutually exhaustive – and the accompanying and supporting analysis, which relies on a
hermeneutics of reconstruction, neglecting the hermeneutic task of integration – encourages a
misunderstanding of deictic discourse. It is a misunderstanding that obscures and distorts the
power of deictic discourse by seeing it as an impoverished form of genuine democratic dialogue
– perhaps confused in its appeal to the voices of nonhuman things, perhaps unconfident enough
to feel the need to girder itself with ventriloquism. Furthermore, it excludes or dismisses a
normal and customary manner which ordinary people speak about things of great importance.
                                                   120


And, finally, it obscures the aspect of deictic discourse which should be of most interest to
rewilding environmentalists: the invitation to engage in a new type of collective practice, a new
way of materially socially constructing the world. This is the kind of invitation that rewilders are
giving.
         In fact, it is often in keeping with the democratic intentions of Vogel’s work to recognize
deictic discourse, and not ventriloquism, at work when speakers invoke voices that their
interlocutors cannot hear. Imagine a common protest, citizens argue against building a new ski
lodge on supposed “sacred ground.” How should one respond when these dissenting citizens join
democratic discourse, speaking of voices, testifying to practices, and relating an experience of
“sacredness” that are silent and absent to many of their interlocutors? Perhaps there is no easy
answer to this question, but it is a very bad answer to rule that those participants are simply
irrational and corruptors of democracy. It is a bad answer to only understand such an appeal as a
power grab based on extradiscursive authority.
         And yet, this is what Vogel does. In the very last footnote of his book writes Vogel give
his suggestion of how to regard such appeals in a democratic setting: “To say [extradiscursive
appeals] are ‘ruled out,’ of course, is not to say they are prohibited, since freedom to express any
view is itself one of those necessary procedural presuppositions. It is simply to say that they do
in fact possess this self-contradictory character.”185 So, the appeal to the sacredness of the land,
in this case, is “ruled out,” but not prohibited. It takes a keen and sympathetic eye to appreciate
the difference. I don’t see it.
         Vogel’s commitment to procedural inclusiveness here is commendable. But to hear the
speech of such testimony as nothing but performative contradiction at best, and mendacious
185
    Vogel, Thinking Like a Mall, p. 263 n. 41
                                                   121


ventriloquism at worst, seems dismissively paternalistic, and not in keeping with the spirit of
open and honest deliberation Vogel so rightly prizes.
         What’s more, if the listener understands the speech as deictic, and not ventriloquistic,
they will see that proper listening demands an ethics of openness, a willingness to try, in order to
participate in this kind of discourse. The audience, giving it an honest try, my end up finding the
experience silent and empty, valueless. But to not feel the responsibility to try in order to
participate in this kind of dialogue is simply to misunderstand the kind of appeal being made.
         The call to action at the heart of this closing argument is not to ask philosophers to
engage more often in deictic discourse. In fact, for all the reasons Vogel gives, environmental
philosophers ought to be wary of the ventriloquist and ought refrain from echoing their cadence.
Rather, I am claiming that philosophers – and any other participants in democratic dialogue –
ought to be more open to deictic discourse and skilled at recognizing deictic discourse for what it
is. Environmental philosophers especially ought to keep a keen ear out for the invitation to
practice, avoiding hasty accusations of ventriloquism. Deictic discourse is a third thing, neither
ventriloquism nor straight-forward first-person attestation. Deictic appeals are not a corruption of
democratic dialogue, but some of the most common and most important forms of communication
for a community to better understand each other’s experience of their environment and take
responsibility for shaping its future together. Deictic discourse is this: We’ve found something
good here, things worth preserving, practices worth fostering in our communal life and identity;
try it and see.
                                                    122


                                           CONCLUSION
        Our environmental situation in the Anthropocene is not a search for any one clear and
correct answer about how we must treat our environment. Ecological science can provide
important bulwarks, borders that show some minimal requirements for ecological sustainability.
But the decisions we must make are not about what is minimally required for some amount of
sustainability; instead, our decisions are about what kind of communal life we want. The choice
of environment is a choice about who we want to be and how we want to live. In my estimation,
popular rewilding discourse is leading the way on recognizing this. They are centralizing the
question of the good life, and using largely deictic appeals to invite others to try new practices, to
join different practices, and, hopefully, to discover the value of these things and practices for
themselves.
        The Ecomodern and Primitive visions I reviewed in chapter two illustrate the kind of
choices environmentalism currently faces. The question between each is not what the ecosystem
requires, but what kind of relationship do we – whatever community is coming together to make
these decisions – want to have with our environments.
        My point has been modest, only that rewilding is a complex collection of hopes. More
than a hope to heal ecological damage, it’s a hope of finding a better life in that work. And this is
a good trend for environmental ethics. It highlights what has always been the case, that our
choices in shaping the environment are choices that determine the kinds of people we become,
the quality and character of the lives we live.
        Ecology can only guide so much. Ecosystem stability may require the freer operation of
ecological functions, larger animals roaming larger distances, fire and flood determining cycles
of disturbance. Even so, it doesn’t quite determine whether this should happen behind an electric
                                                  123


fence on the outskirts of the city or here in the backyard. More than that, ecological science
underdetermines how communities engage with environments, adapt to them, celebrate or
bemoan them. At the same time, broad ethical mandates to preserve wild land equally
underdetermine projects. Ethical prohibitions may function as the same kind of broad bulwarks
that limit some actions, but they do not narrow down options enough to persuasively recommend
real, tangible modes of living a good life and environment that fosters it. A more specific hope is
required.
         To argue that the freer operation of ecological forces is important for ecosystem health is
one thing; but the worthwhileness of a life lived in relationship with these forces is what
ultimately recommends a rewilded world. If the latter cannot be defended, then the former is
destined to the same pessimistic future of most forms of preservation – ecological doom or moral
duty undermined by incompatible cultural values and appetites. The future of rewilding as a truly
optimistic environmentalism, then, lies in environmental ethics prioritizing the question of the
good life.
                                                  124


                                        BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alaxander, L., & Moore, M. (2020). "Deontological Ethics". The Stanford Encyclopedia of
        Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), URL =
        <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/ethics-deontological/>.
Allen, D., Bosman, I., Collier, S., Elderadzi, M., Helmer, W., & Schepers, F. (2016). 2015
        Annual Review. Rewilding Europe.
Asafu-Adjaye, J., Blomquist, L., Brand, S., Brook, B., Defries, R., Ellis, E., . . . Teague, P.
        (2015). An Ecomodernist Manifesto.
Bauer, P. M. (2020, May 2). Rewilding 101 at 2020 Wild Beltane Festival. Retrieved from
        YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEvVprwiYsw
Borgmann, A. (1987). Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical
        Inquiry. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Borgmann, A. (1992). Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Borgmann, A. (2003). Power Failure. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group.
Borgmann, A. (2007). Real American Ethics: Taking Responsibility for Our Country. Chicago:
        University of Chicago Press.
Carmody, R. (2021). Gut microbiota through an evolutionary lens. Science, 372(6541), 462-463.
Chapman, R. (2006). Ecological Restoration Restored. Environmental Values, 15(4), 463-478.
Cladis, M. (2014). Radical Romanticism: Democracy, Religion, and the Environmental
        Imagination. Soundings, 97(1), 21-49.
Cladis, M. (2018). Radical Romanticism and its Alternative Account of the Wild and
        Wilderness. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 25, Issue 4,
        Autumn 2018, Pages 835–85(4), 835-857.
Davis, D. E. (2000). Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern
        Appalachians. University of Georgia Press.
Dinerstein, E. e. (2019). A Global Deal For Nature: Guiding principles, milestones, and targets.
        Science Advances, 5(4).
Donlan, J. (2005). Re-wilding North America. Nature(436), 913–914.
Donlan, J. (2005). Re-Wilding North America. Nature(436), 913–914.
Donlan, J. e. (2006). Pleistocene Rewilding: An Optimistic Agenda for Twenty‐First Century
        Conservation. The American Naturalist, 168(5).
                                                125


du Toit, J. D. (2019). Pleistocene rewilding: an enlightening thought experiment. In N. Pettorelli,
        S. Durant, & J. du Toit, Rewilding (pp. 55-72). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Executive Office of the President Joseph Biden. (2021, January 27). E.O. 14008: Tackling the
        Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad. Federal Register, 82, pp. 7619-7633.
Ferry, L. (1992). The New Ecological Order. (T. C. Volk, Ed.) Chicago: University of Chicago
        Press.
Foote, J. (1990). Radical environmentalists are honing their militant tactics and gaining
        followers. Newsweek, 115(24).
Foreman, D. e. (1991). Wild Earth, 1(1).
Gammon, A. (2018). The Many Meanings of Rewilding: An Introduction and the Case for a
        Broad Conceptualisation. Environmental Values, 27(4), 331-350.
Gordon, J. (2012). Honor Thy Gut Symbionts Redux. Science, 336(6086), 1251-1253.
Greene, H. (2015). Pleistocene Rewilding and the Future of Biodiversity. In B. Minteer, & S.
        Pyne, After Preservation Saving American Nature in the Age of Humans. University of
        Chicago Press.
Höchtl, F., Lehringer, S., & Werner, K. (2005). “Wilderness”: what it means when it becomes a
        reality—a case study from the southwestern Alps. Landscape and Urban Planning, 70(1-
        2), 85-95.
Höfig, V. (2020). 'Re-Wild Yourself': Old Norse Myth and Radical White Nationalist Groups in
        Trump's America. In N. Meylan, & L. Rösli, Old Norse Myths as Political Ideologies:
        Critical Studies in the Appropriation of Medieval Narratives (pp. 209-231). Turnhout:
        Brepols Publishers.
Hairston, N. G., Smith, F., & Slobodkin, L. B. (1960). Community structure, population control,
        and competition. The American Naturalist(94), 421-425.
Hale, B. (2016). The Wild and the Wicked: On Nautre and Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: The
        MIT Press.
Hall, M. (2015). In H. Marcus, Restoration and History The Search for a Usable Environmental
        Past. Routledge.
Hall, M. (2019). The High Art of Rewilding. In N. Pettorelli, S. Durant, & J. du Toit, Rewilding.
        Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hall, S., & Bunce, R. (2019). The use of cattle Bos taurus for restoring and maintaining holarctic
        landscapes: Conclusions from a long-term study (1946–2017) in northern England.
        Ecology and Evolution, 9(10), 5523-5869.
                                                126


Hayward, M. e. (2019). Top-down control of ecosystems and the case for rewilding: does it all
        add up? In N. Pettorelli, Durant, S., & J. du Toit, Rewilding (pp. 325-354). Cambridge:
        Cambridge University Press.
Higgs, E. (2003). Nature by Design: People, Natural Process, and Ecological Restoration. The
        MIT Press.
Higgs, E. (2017). Novel and designed ecosystems. Restoration Ecology, 25(1), 8-13.
Hobbs, R. J., Higgs, E., & Harris, J. A. (2009). Novel ecosystems: implications for conservation
        and restoration. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 24(11), 599-605.
Hughes, J. (Director). (2020). David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet [Motion Picture].
        Netflix.
Hutchins, H. E., & Lanner, R. M. (1982). The central role of Clark's nutcracker in the dispersal
        and establishment of whitebark pine. Oecologia, 55, 192-201.
Jørgensen, D. (2015). Rethinking rewilding. Geoforum, 65, 482-488.
Jørgensen, D. (2019). Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and
        Belonging. The MIT Press.
Janzen, D., & Martin, P. (1982). Neotropical Anachronisms: The Fruits the Gomphotheres Ate.
        Science, 215(4528), 19-27.
Jepson, P., & Blythe, C. (2020). Rewilding The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery:
        The Illustrated Edition. Icon Books.
Johns, D. (2019). History of rewilding: ideas and practice. In N. Pettorelli, S. Durant, & J. du
        Toit, Rewilding (pp. 12-33). Cambridge University Press.
Ka'Chava. (2022, December 23). Kachava. Retrieved from "Rewilding" Your Gut Could Be Key
        To Optimal Health: https://www.kachava.com/blogs/health-wellness/rewilding-gut-for-
        optimal-health
Kant, I. (1981). Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. (t. J. Ellington, Ed.) Indianapolis:
        Hackett.
Kingsnorth, P. (2017). Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and other essays.
        Minneapolis: Greywolf Press.
Kolbert, E. (2014). The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New york: Henry Holt and Co.
Leopold, A. (1986). A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on conservation from Round River.
        Ballantine Books.
Leopold, A. (2013). Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac & Other Writing of Ecology and
        Conservation. New York: The Library of America.
                                                 127


Lewis, M. (2015, June 3). The Breakthrough Institute. Retrieved December 2022, from
        Rewilding Pragmatism Or, What an African Safari Can Teach America:
        https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/issue-5/rewilding-pragmatism
Lorimer, J. (2015). Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature. University of
        Minnesotta Press.
Lorimer, J., & Driessen, C. (2016). Back Breeding the Aurochs: The Heck Brothers, National
        Socialism, and Imagined Geographies for Non-Human Lebensraum. In P. &. Giaccaria,
        Hitler's Geographies: The Spatialities of the Third Reich (pp. 138-158). Chicago:
        University of Chicago Press.
Lorimer, J., & Driessen, C. (2016). From “Nazi Cows” to Cosmopolitan “Ecological Engineers”:
        Specifying Rewilding Through a History of Heck Cattle. Annals of the American
        Association of Geographers, 106(3), 631-652.
MacIntyre, A. (1984). After Virtue. Notre Dame, IN: University of Nortre Dame Press.
MacKaye, B. (1921). An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning. Journal of the
        American Institute of Architects 1921-10: Vol 9 Iss 10, 9(10), 325-330.
Maller, C., Laura, M., & Benjamin, C. (2019). Health and social benefits of living with ‘wild’
        nature. In N. Pettorelli, S. Durant, & J. du Toit, Rewilding (pp. 165 - 181). Cambridge
        University Press.
Mao, J. e. (2005). Habitat Selection by Elk before and after Wolf Reintroduction in Yellowstone
        National Park. The Journal of Wildlife Management, 69(4), 1691-1707.
Marshall, B. (2002). The People's Forests (American Land & Life). University of Iowa Press.
Martin, P. (2007). Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America.
        University of California Press.
McIntyre, R. (2022). The Alpha Female Wolf: The Fierce Legacy of Yellowstone's 06. Greystone
        Books.
McLeish, T. (2018). Return of the Sea Otter: The Story of the Animal That Evaded Extinction on
        the Pacific Coast. Sasquatch Books.
Miller, J., & Hobbs, R. (2019). Rewilding and restoration. In N. Pettorelli, S. Durant, & J. du
        Toit, Rewilding. Cambridge University Press.
Mills, L. S., Soulé, M., & Doak, D. F. (1993). The Keystone-Species Concept in Ecology and
        Conservation. BioScience, 43(4), 219-224.
Monbiot, G. (2014). Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life. University of Chicago
        Press.
                                                  128


Monbiot, G. (2014). How Wolves Changed Rivers. Retrieved December 2022, from Sustainable
        Human: https://sustainablehuman.org/stories/how-wolves-change-rivers/
Mortali, M. (2019). Rewilding: Meditations, Practices, and Skills for Awakening in Nature.
        Sounds True.
Mossotti, T. (2012). Yellowstone Wolf Project. Prairie Schooner, 86(3), 115-122.
Nash, R. f. (1989). The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics. Madison:
        Univeristy of Wisconsin Press.
Navarro, L., & Henrique, P. (2012). Rewilding Abandoned Landscapes in Europe. Ecosystem,
        15, 900–912.
Pain, R. T. (1969). A Note on Trophic Complexity and Community Stability. The American
        Naturalist, 103, 91–93.
Pettorelli, D., Durant, S., & du Toit, J. (2019). Rewilding. Cambridge University Press.
Poerksen, U. (1995). Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language. Penn State University
        Press.
Prior, J., & Ward, K. (2016). Reimagining rewilding: A response to Jørgensen. Geoforum, 69,
        132-135.
Prior, J., & Ward, K. (2017). Environmental Aesthetics and Rewilding. Environmental Values,
        26(1), 31-51.
Raymond, W. e. (2021). Sea otter effects on trophic structure of seagrass communities in
        southeast Alaska. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 674, 37-58.
Raymond, W. W. (2021). Testing the generality of sea otter‐mediated trophic cascades in
        seagrass meadows. Oikos, 130(5), 725-738.
Rewilding Europe. (n.d.). Rewilding Europe. Retrieved December 2022, from What is
        Rewilding: https://rewildingeurope.com/what-is-rewilding/
Riddle, T. (2022, December 23). Tony Riddle. Retrieved from
        https://www.tonyriddle.com/rewilding-tutorials
Ripple, W. e. (2016). What is Trophic Cascade? Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 31(11), 842-
        849.
Robbins, P. (2001). Tracking Invasive Land Covers in India, or Why Our Landscapes Have
        Never Been Modern. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 91, 637-659.
Rolston III, H. (1975). Is There an Ecological Ethic? Ethics: An International Journal of Social,
        Political, and Legal Philosophy, 18(2), 93-109.
                                                  129


Rolston III, H. (1988). Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World.
        Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Rolston III, H. (2005). Environmental Virtue Ethics: Half the Truth but Dangerous as a Whole.
        In R. Sandler, & P. Cafaro, Environmental Virtue Ethics (pp. 61-79). Lanham: Rowman
        & Littlefield.
Rolston III, H. (2012). A NEW ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS: The Next Millennium for Life on
        Earth. New York: Routledge .
Sala, E. (2020). The Nature of Nature: Why We Need the Wild . National Geographic.
Sala, E. (2021). TED. Retrieved December 2022, from A bold plan to protect 30 percent of the
        Earth's surface and ocean floor:
        https://www.ted.com/talks/enric_sala_a_bold_plan_to_protect_30_percent_of_the_earth_
        s_surface_and_ocean_floor?language=en
Sandler, R. L. (2007). Character and Environment: A Virtue-Oriented Approach to
        Environmental Ethics. New York: Columbia University Press.
Scanlon, T. M. (1998). What We Owe to Each Other. Harvard University Press.
Schmitz, O. J. (2000). Trophic Cascades in Terrestrial Systems: A Review of the Effects of
        Carnivore Removals on Plants. The American Naturalist, 155(2), 141-153.
Scout, U. (2016). Rewild or Die: Revolution and Renaissance at the End of Civilization. Myth
        Media.
Silberstein, M. (2022). The Trophic Cascade of Elkhorn Slough A surge in the sea otter
        population has positively impacted the ecosystem of this tidal embayment. Natural
        History, 130(2), 24-30.
Smith, D. W., Stahler, D. R., & McNulty, D. R. (2020). Yellowstone Wolves: Science and
        Discovery in the World's First National Park. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Smith, M. (2002). The State of Nature: The Political Philosophy of Primitivism and the Culture
        of Contamination. Environmental Values, 11(4), 407-425.
Solomon, D. (1988). Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 13(1),
        428-441.
Soulé, M., & Noss, R. (1998). Rewilding and Biodiversity: Complimentary Goals for
        Continental Conservation. Wild Earth(Fall), 19-28.
Stocker, M. (1976). The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories. The Journal of Philosophy,
        73(14), 453-466.
                                               130


Stone, C. D. (1974). SHOULD TREES HAVE STANDING? TOWARD LEGAL RIGHTS FOR
       NATURAL OBJECTS. Los Altos: William Kaufman, Inc.
Sylvan (Routley), R. (1973). Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental Ethic. Proceedings of
       the XVth World Congress of Philosophy, 205-210.
Taylor, P. (1986). Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics. Princeton University
       Press.
Vera, F. (2000). Grazing Ecology and Forest History. Wallingford: CAB International.
Vogel, S. (2015). Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature.
       Cambridge: the MIT Press.
Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation. (n.d.). Retrieved December 2022, from
       https://whitebarkfound.org
Wild Earth. (n.d.). Earth First! Movement Writings. Retrieved December 2022, from
       Environment and Society Portal:
       https://www.environmentandsociety.org/mml/collection/11571
Wittgenstein, L. (1973). Philosophical Investigations. (G. Anscombe, Ed.) Pearson.
Wordsworth, W. (2022). WILLIAM WORDSWORTH'S GUIDE TO THE LAKES. Retrieved
       December 2020, from Romantic Circles: https://romantic-circles.org/editions/guide_lakes
Zerzan, J. (2002). johnzerzan.net. Retrieved December 2022, from Why Primitivism? :
       http://www.johnzerzan.net/articles/why-primitivism.html
Zerzan, J. (2018). A People’s History of Civilization. Feral House.
                                                131