Millie Kerr, a former corporate attorney turned journalist, discusses her book Wilder and how rewilding projects are rebuilding ecosystems worldwide. The movement started in the 1990s with the idea of reintroducing carnivores, protecting core habitats, and connecting them. Wolves in Yellowstone and scimitar-horned oryx in Chad show how keystone species can reshape entire ecosystems.
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Welcome to today's Rethink What Matters podcast, the podcast dedicated to aligning the economy with the ecology with everyone for improved business performance, stronger families, and a greener, cooler planet. And today I'm joined by Millie Kerr, author and conservation storyteller. Millie is the author of Wilder: How Rewilding Is Transforming Conservation And Changing the World. Welcome, Millie.
Thanks, Paul. It's really great to be here today.
Brilliant. Um, and I see that your book has had high praise from The New Scientist and Jane Goodall herself, who is well known for her work with chimpanzees.
Yes, their endorsements and praise were really humbling to me, especially to have someone like Jane Goodall stand behind this book. And I think one of the things that seems to have resonated with people is the global nature of the book. So every chapter examines a rewilding project in a different part of the world, and that seems to have changed the rewilding dialogue a little bit, I think.
If you could tell us a little bit about your journey.
So my journey is a winding one. I started my career as a corporate attorney, and then I transitioned to journalist and conservation storyteller about a decade ago. In terms of this book, I'd been writing a lot about conservation, and I'd started to hear more about these really ambitious rewilding projects that were taking place all over the world. And even though some of them were not using the term rewilding, it was clear that they fit within the parameters. And I really wanted to write an optimistic book that shows that there are fantastic advances happening in conservation. And so that's how I landed on this topic.
That's great. So perhaps we can just explore a little bit more about rewilding and what actually is the scope of rewilding.
Rewilding today means a lot of different things to different people. Here in the UK, it tends to be focused on restoring former agricultural land by taking different measures that will make the land healthier and therefore attract wildlife. But in fact, when rewilding became a topic in the 1990s. The term was coined in the US, and it actually referred to what are called the 3 Cs, which is carnivores, cores, and connectivity. And so the original aim, which still guides a lot of projects today, is to create or maintain core areas like large national parks, then have corridors connecting a specific core area to another or to numerous other cores, and then as needed to reintroduce carnivores, because carnivores obviously sit at the top of the food chain, so they regulate ecosystems, and there's this trickle-down effect that can entirely revolutionize an ecosystem. And the example that a lot of people point to, uh, was the reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the U.S. in 1995, because after the wolves were brought back, there were changes in terms of predator-prey dynamics. The wolves were killing more prey, and the prey animals weren't overgrazing, and so on and so forth. But today, rewilding encompasses projects of many different scales, not all of which involve the reintroduction of carnivores. However, many do focus on bringing back what are called keystone species which is basically any species that exerts more influence over an ecosystem than others. It includes animals like elephants and sea otters and beavers, for instance.
So this is, this is really spot on, I think, for a water roo. You know, water is all about net gain. And I think rewilding is very similar to that, you know, net gain seems that net zero is not really enough to move us forward. And I think rewilding is the sort of the positive side of conservation. Conservation is about, you know, stopping decline, and rewilding is about building and regenerating for the future and restoring and repairing and building anew.
I agree. I think that's a really fantastic parallel, and I do feel that we have to aim as high as we can in the, you know, context of conservation and rewilding. We shouldn't just be focused on a particular ecosystem or one or two species, even though those projects are laudable. We should really be trying to revitalize and restore entire ecosystems and everything that comes with it and everything that regulates it.
Right, brilliant. So rewilding is, it's about species, it's about habitats, and it's about ecosystems.
That's right. And, you know, there are some projects that are more focused on species reintroductions, for instance, because once that happens, like with the gray wolves, there will be this trickle-down effect. And, you know, wolves were introduced to Yellowstone— reintroduced rather, Yellowstone National Park, which is already a very large wilderness area that's protected. Whereas there are other projects where creating or expanding a protected area is half the battle. And of course, these projects are at all different stages as well. That was something when writing the book, I had to think about, you know, at what point is this a rewilding project? And at what point is it successful? Is rewilding actually happening? Those are some of the really interesting questions, I think.
I'd like to come on to that. How, you know, what's the measure of success with rewilding?
So it does depend on what the goals and kind of the bounds of the project are. But there's one or two in my book that really do hinge on the population growth of a particular species. So in one chapter, I wrote about the reintroduction of scimitar-horned oryx to Chad. And the goal is to see 500, you know, breeding and viable adults, or in the sort of in the near term, just to have 500 adults living in the wild. But if you have something that involves more what's called trophic complexity, which is kind of like that interaction between predators, prey, vegetation, etc., you might then have different metrics. Or if your original goal is to protect X number of hectares of habitat, you might find that you have success when that's in place. And it is worth pointing out that in the UK, rewilding tends to fall under what's called passive rewilding. And so in a lot of these projects The goal is to take land, oftentimes former agricultural land, and let it run wild again. And so even though people might kick off the process by bringing down fences or removing invasive species or not allowing livestock to go in a particular area, the hope is that species that might have either gone missing locally or the numbers have plummeted, that they'll just kind of come back of their own accord.
Right.
But I think in general, one of the things that rewilding will still have to work out over time is how these measures of success work. And at what point is a project seen as being self-sustaining?
Right.
Because even though rewilding does require human intervention at the outset, even if it is in a more passive sense, there is this notion that at some point people need to step away. Yeah, the project needs to be successful and self-sustaining. Yeah, of course. Nature, let nature take its course. Exactly.
