The Rewilding Revolution: A Path to Climate Resilience and Planetary Prosperity

 We stand at a precipice, facing an ecological crisis of unprecedented scale. Climate change, rapid biodiversity loss, and the depletion of vital resources threaten not just our comfort but the very fabric of life on Earth. Yet, within this dire prognosis lies a powerful, transformative solution: rewilding, coupled with a radical shift in our economic paradigm through Geoism, specifically implementing land value, monopoly, and externality taxes. This combination, seemingly a pipe dream, offers a clear and achievable path to environmental restoration, economic prosperity, and the eradication of poverty.

The Fragile Web: Understanding Ecological Collapse

Our planet operates as an intricately interconnected system. Unfortunately, human activity has relentlessly severed these connections, pushing us towards a catastrophic ecological collapse. This destruction manifests in several critical ways:

• Spatial Fragmentation: We have carved up natural landscapes into isolated fragments. This prevents the movement of wildlife – from the smallest insect to the largest mammal – disrupting gene flow and making populations vulnerable. Imagine a tiny butterfly unable to reach a patch of wildflowers just a few miles away, or a badger sett cut off from its foraging grounds.

• Trophic Disintegration: The complex web of life, from the microscopic organisms in the soil to the apex predators, is being torn apart. Mycorrhizal fungi, crucial for nutrient exchange between soil and trees, are disappearing. The intricate dance of decomposers, insects, and larger animals, which drives nutrient cycling and soil formation, is faltering. This "trophic cascade" has devastating long-term effects on ecosystem health.

• Temporal Erosion: Over time, we are systematically reducing the resilience of ecosystems, making them more susceptible to collapse and leading to rapid species extinction.

The most immediate and alarming consequence is biodiversity loss, not just in terms of the number of species, but critically, in bioabundance – the sheer quantity of individual organisms. While we celebrate isolated success stories, such as the resurgence of grey seals, pine martens, red squirrels, and raptors due to reduced persecution, these are exceptions. The overall trend is a dramatic decline.

One of the most significant impacts of this decline is a collapse in carbon storage. Our soils, globally and particularly in the UK, are losing their vital carbon content. This diminishes our planet's natural ability to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, exacerbating climate change. Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall patterns, and increased flooding are direct consequences of this instability.

Beyond carbon, we face severe resource depletion. Fertile land and healthy soils are diminishing worldwide, leading to food insecurity. Water scarcity is an increasingly urgent issue, even in regions traditionally considered water-rich, such as the South East of England. Furthermore, energy shortages are set to intensify, especially with the surging demands of new technologies like AI, which require vast amounts of electricity. Our current consumption patterns are unsustainable; whilst some nations like the UK appear to reduce carbon emissions, this is often a sleight of hand, outsourcing production and its associated carbon footprint to other countries.

The decline of ecosystem services is another critical concern. These are the free, life-sustaining benefits nature provides:

• Carbon Storage: As mentioned, our ability to store carbon is diminishing.

• Pollutant Absorption: Natural systems absorb pollutants from water and air, a service that is now compromised.

• Pest and Disease Control: Healthy ecosystems regulate pests and diseases. The rise of zoonotic diseases, which jump from animals to humans, is often linked to the destruction of natural habitats.

• Flood Prevention: Perhaps one of the most visible and costly impacts. Healthy habitats act like giant sponges, absorbing excess water during heavy rains and releasing it slowly during dry periods. When these natural systems are destroyed, we experience both more severe floods and prolonged droughts.

Globally, our consumption of natural resources continues to climb unabated. Despite technological advancements like electric cars and wind turbines, the overall demand for resources is not slowing down. Scientific studies, such as the Living Planet Index, confirm a continued decline in global biodiversity, with species abundance still dropping across the UK, especially for insects and birds. Furthermore, current conservation policies often prove ineffective, with statistics sometimes "fudged" to create an illusion of recovery where none exists, for example, through categories like "unfavourable recovering" for Sites of Special Scientific Interest.

Rewilding: Releasing Nature's Power

Rewilding offers a paradigm shift from traditional conservation. Instead of merely conserving what little remains, rewilding actively restores ecosystems to the point where they can largely look after themselves. The ultimate goal is for nature to be so robust that dedicated conservationists are no longer needed, a testament to the self-sustaining power of resilient ecosystems.

Key principles of rewilding include:

• Core Areas: Establishing large, protected areas where natural processes can operate without human interference.

• Connectivity: Linking fragmented habitats to allow wildlife to move freely, restoring gene flow and supporting healthy populations.

• Keystone Species: Reintroducing species that play a disproportionately large role in shaping their environment. Beavers, for example, are "ecosystem engineers" that create wetlands, benefiting countless other species and enhancing flood resilience. The successful reintroduction of beavers, starting in Kent in 1999, and the reintroduction of wild herbivores like Konik ponies and European bison, are powerful examples of this.

• Natural Processes: Embracing natural disturbances and cycles, such as floods, fires, and animal behaviours, that historically shaped landscapes. The "Great Storm" of 1987, initially viewed as a disaster, actually led to increased biodiversity in affected woodlands.

• Engaging People: Rewilding is not about excluding humans. It's about creating wilder landscapes that people can still enjoy and benefit from, fostering a deeper connection with nature.

Imagine a woodland transformed: instead of a monoculture, you have a mosaic of thriving, dying, and dead wood, teeming with diverse species. This complexity provides habitat and nutrients, mimicking the dynamism seen in places like the Białowieża Forest in Poland and Belarus, or even the ecological rebound observed in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

A practical example of rewilding's impact is the work in the Marsham Valley near Fairlight in Sussex. Facing severe flooding, local landowners, through the newly formed Future Landscapes Trust, initiated a natural flood management project. By computer modelling rainfall events and implementing interventions like "leaky dams" (mimicking beaver activity), buffer strips, complex woodland understories, and wet woodlands, they aim to significantly reduce peak flood flows. These interventions create a giant sponge, slowing water movement and allowing it to infiltrate the ground, thereby protecting downstream communities.

Coastal rewilding offers similar benefits. The "20 tons of Hipex to save London" concept, whilst dramatic, illustrates the potential of coastal realignment. By strategically breaching sea defences in areas of low agricultural value, salt marshes can be restored. These natural habitats absorb storm surges, protect inland areas, and provide crucial wildlife habitat, offering a more sustainable and cost-effective solution than ever-higher concrete walls.

Another example is the transformation of the Blean Woods around Canterbury. Once a monoculture of commercially undesirable Corsican Pine and Western Hemlock, managed as a tax dodge and choked by rhododendron, it has been painstakingly restored. The introduction of Konik ponies and European bison has helped diversify the regrowth, creating complex habitats and driving ecological processes, demonstrating the long-term commitment and transformative power of rewilding.

Carbon: The Essence of Life, Restored

Carbon is the building block of life, born from the heart of stars. But its form dictates its impact. Complex carbon, stored in biomass, soils, and deep oceans, is vital. Simple carbon dioxide, released into the atmosphere, is problematic.

The Earth's soils hold the largest terrestrial carbon reservoir – roughly 2,300 gigatons. However, centuries of poor land management, including drainage and intensive agriculture, have drastically depleted soil carbon, transforming these vast stores into a significant source of atmospheric carbon. Current carbon accounting models often underestimate this, only considering the top 10 or 20 cm of soil when far more carbon lies beneath.

Rewilding offers a powerful solution for carbon sequestration:

• Arable Land: Contains only about 1.4 tonnes of carbon per hectare.

• Plantation Woodland: Around 85 tonnes per hectare (most carbon is in the soil, not the trees).

• Ancient Woodland: 130 tonnes per hectare.

• Dwarf Scrub (Rewilded Habitat): 210-211 tonnes of carbon per hectare.

• Complex Grasslands/Savannah: Up to 430 tonnes per hectare in highly complex soils.

• Wetlands (Ponds/Lakes): Can store 500 tonnes per hectare in lake beds.

• Wet Woodlands: An astounding 625 tonnes per hectare.

• Peatlands: The undisputed champions, capable of holding up to 5,000 tonnes of carbon per hectare, even with trees.

The immense carbon storage capacity of rewilded habitats, particularly wet woodlands and peatlands, is often overlooked. Calculations suggest that reintroducing beavers to just 30% of the UK's waterways, allowing them to create these carbon-rich habitats, could sequester an amount of carbon equivalent to the UK's entire human emissions. It is truly a colossal amount.

The Barriers to Rewilding: Land, Policy, and Economics

Despite its profound benefits, rewilding faces significant hurdles:

• Land Access and Cost: The most fundamental barrier is the prohibitive cost of land. Land prices have skyrocketed, increasing 40-fold since I began my career. This makes it almost impossible for conservation initiatives or government agencies to acquire land of influence over land for rewilding. This escalation is driven by speculation, the economic rent derived from land ownership and the many tax breaks associated with land ownership. The cost does not derive from its productive use.

• Bureaucracy and Ill-Conceived Policies: Many projects become bogged down in bureaucracy, failing to translate into tangible changes on the ground. Existing policies often do not effectively support or incentivise genuine rewilding.

• Economic Loss Aversion: Policymakers are fearful of job losses and reduced revenue if land use shifts from traditional agriculture to rewilding. This creates "perverse incentives" and "futile tradeoffs," where the perceived immediate economic cost of conservation outweighs the long-term, far greater costs of ecological degradation.

• Political Inertia: Politicians and civil servants often operate within incredibly narrow policy options, preventing the implementation of truly transformative solutions.

• Ineffective Subsidies and Grants: Agricultural subsidies and agri-environment schemes are frequently "captured" by landowners, driving up land rents and prices without significantly benefiting tenant farmers or achieving genuine environmental outcomes. Grants, whilst well-intentioned, are often inefficient, as nature itself is often better at managing ecosystems than human intervention.

• Failed Carbon Trading and Biodiversity Net Gain Schemes: Current carbon trading systems have largely failed to reduce emissions, instead enriching speculators. Biodiversity net gain schemes, whilst promising in theory, are susceptible to similar pitfalls. An alarming example is the surge in prices for "poor quality" Scottish land, bought by international finance, not for ecological restoration, but for speculative gain based on future carbon credit payments. Furthermore, the common practice of tree planting, often touted as a carbon solution, can be counterproductive in the short term, releasing soil carbon during the initial growth phases and often being unnecessary, as trees naturally regenerate given the right conditions.

These policies fail to address the root causes of environmental degradation and merely shift the problem or create opportunities for financial speculation rather than genuine ecological restoration.

Geoism: The Economic Solution to Our Ecological Crisis

The solution lies in a fundamental re-engineering of our economic system, aligning incentives with ecological health and social justice. We need to implement policies that truly work, learning from successful interventions:

• Plastic Bag Tax: A 98% reduction in single-use plastic bags virtually overnight.

• Landfill Tax: A 90% reduction in mixed municipal waste, back in the 1990s.

• Sugar Tax: Substantially reduced childhood sugar intake.

• Water Abstraction Licenses: In places like Cape Town, a 50% drop in water consumption, supported by provisions for the poor, incentivised efficient water use.

These examples demonstrate the power of well-designed taxes to change behaviour. The entrepreneurial drive of people can be harnessed to use less of a taxed resource.

This brings us to Geoism, an economic philosophy advocating for the public collection of economic rent from natural monopolies, particularly land. The core principle is simple: tax land, not labour or production.

• Land Value Tax (LVT): Economists across the political spectrum, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, have recognised the unique nature of land. Unlike goods produced by labour, land is finite; its value is largely derived from community development and public services, not individual effort. A Land Value Tax would capture this "unearned increment" in land value, dramatically reducing land speculation and making land far more accessible. When land values plummet, as they would under an LVT, conservation organisations, communities, and individuals could acquire land for rewilding and other beneficial uses, unlocking vast ecological potential. This removes the "private tax on nature" that currently makes rewilding so expensive.

• Carbon Tax at Source: Instead of ineffective carbon trading schemes, a direct tax on carbon extraction at its source (e.g., oil wells, coal mines) would fundamentally alter economic behaviour. This tax, combined with a universal basic income or "citizen's dividend" for the poor, would ensure that the cost of carbon is internalised without disproportionately burdening vulnerable populations.

• Monopoly and Externality Taxes: Beyond land and carbon, taxing other natural monopolies and negative externalities (like pollution) would create a truly level playing field.

The transformative power of Geoism combined with rewilding is profound:

1. Reduced Poverty and Increased Prosperity: By taxing land instead of wages, income tax, or VAT, economic activity is stimulated. Labour is no longer penalised, leading to higher wages and more job opportunities. The poor, currently struggling with high housing costs and regressive taxes, would see their prosperity significantly increase.

2. Efficient and Green Economy: When carbon and resource use are taxed at source, every economic decision instantly incorporates environmental costs. Businesses and individuals are incentivised to innovate, use fewer resources, reduce waste, and embrace greener practices. This turns every capitalist into a "capitalist for saving the world."

3. Unleashed Rewilding: The dramatic reduction in land prices due to an LVT would unlock vast tracts of land for rewilding. This would enable the restoration of critical ecosystems, the sequestration of colossal amounts of carbon, enhanced flood protection, improved air and water quality, and a resurgence of biodiversity.

4. Rebalanced Incentives: The perverse incentives that currently drive environmental destruction would be reversed. It would become more economically rational to protect and restore nature than to degrade it. The futile trade-off between economy and environment would disappear, revealing that a healthy economy is entirely dependent on a healthy environment.

This vision, though ambitious, is neither utopian nor impractical. It is an economic and ecological blueprint for a thriving future. By embracing the power of rewilding to restore our natural systems and implementing Geoist principles to create a fair and efficient economy, we can overcome the challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss, ushering in an era of unprecedented prosperity and ecological abundance for all. The tools are available; the political will is the only missing piece.