Rewilding the Urban Soul: searching for the wild in the city

By Claire Dunn

We’re a famously nature-loving nation, yet 86 per cent of Australians call the city home. Amid the concrete and the busyness, how can we also answer the call of the wild?

Once upon a time, a burnt-out Claire Dunn spent a year living off the grid in a wilderness survival program. Yet love and the possibilities of human connection drew her back to the city, where she soon found herself as overscheduled, addicted to her phone, and lost in IKEA as the rest of us. Given all the city offers — comfort, convenience, community, and opportunity — she wants to stay. But to do so, she’ll have to learn how to rewild her own urban soul.

Join Claire as she sits by and swims in the brown waters of the Yarra River, forages for undomesticated food in the suburbs, and explores many other practices in a quest for connection. To make our human hearts whole, she realises, we’ve all got to pay attention and learn to belong to our cities — our land. This is where change begins. For ourselves and for the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781925938937

Claire Dunn

Claire Dunn is a writer and a passionate advocate for rewilding our inner and outer landscapes. She worked for many years as a campaigner for the Wilderness Society and now facilitates nature-based reconnection retreats and contemporary wilderness rites of passage. In 2010, Claire lived in the bush for a year as part of a wilderness survival program, an experience she wrote about in My Year Without Matches. She currently lives in Melbourne.

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Prologue

The Choice

‘You’re moving to the big smoke? Really, girl?’ Mark looks at me incredulously, covers his mouth with his hand, and turns away in a half-mock theatrical giggle. It turns into a gravelly cough, which gives weight to his hanging question. I can’t help but laugh too as he tries to regain his composure, prematurely looking back in my direction before being beset by coughs again. Finally, he turns towards me, his head cocked on one side with a look that is more of a listening, his dark eyes gently enquiring into mine.

Behind him, a small plume of smoke still issues from the welcoming-ceremony fire circle that Mark extinguished not long ago. Small groups of people stand sandalled or barefoot on the grass, chatting quietly. A few kids are chasing each other around the single pecan tree in the field. In the background, the forest is dark along the creek line, lightening to blues and greens as it meets the sandstone.

The ceremony was the most animated I’ve seen him — striding confidently through the space made by a hundred-odd people in a circle, gesticulating with his arms as he talked. His passion for the country here emanated through his every gesture and footfall. ‘You’ve got to claim your belonging,’ he said. ‘We’ve all got to belong to this land, everyone, everywhere. Then we are the caretakers of old.’ The crowd around him was captivated.

‘An elder in training,’ he used to joke in humble introduction. But it was a half joke. He’s apprenticing still to his old uncles and aunties of the Gumbaynggirr clan, who reside on the north coast of New South Wales. I can feel some threshold has been crossed in the three years since I’ve seen him. It’s in his gaze, like he’s seeing through me with X-ray vision.

I feel a lump grow in my throat as I meet his eyes, remembering the first time we met. It was the first week of a yearlong wilderness survival skills residency that I was embarking on with five others on a piece of land not twenty kilometres away as the crow flies. I can clearly picture myself, walking into the thick of the smoke, directing it over my head with both hands as if splashing water, my heart a cauldron of fierce intentions for the four seasons ahead. And Mark there, tamping down the gum leaves onto the coals with his bare hands. He would return throughout the year at intervals, walking us out on country, showing us the plants that would feed and heal us, cooking up some damper when we got too thin, tempering the intensity with his belly laughs.

‘Really, girl?’ he asks again, this time more seriously. ‘But I know you, you’re made of the bush,’ he says with a slight edge of concern. I’m amazed how well he remembers me after the passing of years.

Tears come to my eyes as I clock the truth of this in my body, the comforting smell of smoke in the air, the stirring cry of the channel-billed cuckoo, my hair still wet down my back from a dip in the creek and my bare feet spread like moulded clay on the earth. The majority of my years have been lived outside capital cities. The times I’ve lived urban, I perched rather than dwelt, a bird on a wire waiting for the wind to blow me back to a branch in the woods. And now Mark is witnessing me about to enter another kind of jungle, this time of the concrete kind.

‘I know, it’s kinda crazy,’ I say vaguely, ‘but I’ve gotta go.’

Mark looks on, waiting.

‘Oh, okay, and I’ve met someone,’ I say, smiling shyly. I don’t tell him I’ve only known the guy for a few months.

‘Ah, now we’re getting the full story,’ he says with a laugh, his eyes sparkling with mischief. It’s not really the full story, I think to myself. There are other reasons, but they might be harder for Mark to understand, or at least to joke about.

‘What’s he gonna hunt you in the city?’ Mark laughs and I join him, trying to picture my new man catching anything other than the mosquitoes he chases down with vehemence in the bedroom. Mark’s wide smile fades and his face turns suddenly serious.

‘You stay wild, eh? You’re a woman of the earth. Don’t forget what you’ve learnt out here.’

My full trolley is a reluctant cargo ship in the swell of a busy IKEA Sunday. Another laden trolley capsizes in my path. I stop to wait while the giggling bunch of uni kids attempt again to pile on a bedroom’s worth of cheap furniture and accessories in the most counterintuitive order. Their trolley bumps mine, and the large flat-packed box at the bottom of my cargo slides onto the shiny white floor. ‘Crap,’ I mutter, and I try to wedge it back on.

I look around and try to remember which direction I’ve come from. I identify five possibilities, all looking equally unfamiliar. I squint under the overhead lights. No sun to guide my way here. Another load, captained by three more students, makes pace towards me. I’ve got to steer my ship out of here.

My trolley makes a resistant squeak as I turn and find myself in domestic dollhouse avenue — kitchen after kitchen curated to particular eras and genres. I pass farmhouse chic, ode to stainless steel, 1950s kitsch, contemporary warm. I half expect to see Ken and Barbie tossing salads and waving at me. This is not just buying kitchen furniture, or even an aesthetic, it’s buying a dream, an off-the-shelf life.

Oh gawd, get me out of here. I’ve been wondering around for what seems like hours, but I wouldn’t know, as there are no clocks, nor any clear up or down, just endless spirals. I feel like I’m stuck in an Escher painting. I’m thirsty and my heart is beating faster than the physical exertion of trolley hauling requires.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into. A friend suggested that I come to IKEA to buy a cube shelf to fill an awkward space below a window that was proving hard to fit with any second-hand furniture I could find online. This is no shop, though, more of a modern cathedral for the religion of Home. But here I am, another worshipper amongst the thousands. I look down at my trolley. The one piece of furniture I came here for is down the bottom, under a pile of other stuff — a full-length mirror, a small chest of pine drawers, sheets, a soap holder, a toilet brush. Stuff.

I eye the four custom-made cane baskets that slot into the cube shelves. Whose fingers have woven these? Which plants have these been harvested from? Who loaded them onto trucks or trains or ships? And where? There is no explanation on the tag. They have appeared out of the magic Santa sack of IKEA.

How did I get here? This isn’t the life I envisioned when I moved to Melbourne two years ago. And what I’m shopping for is a very different nest to the one I was feathering seven years ago. My homemade shelter is so vivid in my memory I can almost reach out and touch it. The saplings bent over to form a neat dome, lashed together with the rough string I twined in the early morning when the acacia sap flowed supple and wet. I can hear the particular kind of rustle the blady grass roof made when its thatched braids were tussled by the wind. Sometimes I’d lie in bed during a winter storm and wonder if it was going to all blow away, leaving me exposed to the steely stars. The fire is bubbling and squeaking in cosy ambience, and I feed it slowly with sticks from where I sit on my grass mat, drinking tea. Seaweed hangs from the rafters, drying.

Looking around, I can see the home furnishings and trimmings that I designed and made with my own hands. Within them are the stories of the days at dawn harvesting vines to weave baskets that would become my wardrobe, pantry, and foraging bag; the quiet contentment of sitting around a fire blowing coals onto wood to burn out a bowl; the three days I sat unmoving on the ground and carved spoons and spatulas from a fallen branch; the sculpting of cooking pots and bowls from clay. I remember well the day I spent laying rocks in the centre of my shelter for the fireplace, cementing them with clay from the creek. I recall the imagination I employed to craft a wooden hook and pulley system for my billy to hang over the fire.

Out was symmetry, corners, and rulers. In was makeshift, inventive, and homespun. It amazed me how little I needed to live well, and to be comfortable. One of my fears was of not having soft furnishings. It was the last thing I missed, and the first thing I didn’t. A thickly woven grass mat and a backrest felt positively luxurious after an active day outside.

It was an in-joke amongst us on the residency to compare our ‘primitive IKEA ware’ — having never stepped foot in an IKEA store before but associating it with a kind of simple wooden aesthetic. But here on the shiny showroom floor, steering a trolley full of stuff that could have come from Siberia, I feel about as far from that world of my creation as I can imagine. If I’d had a crystal ball back then, I might have thrown it in the billabong.

I pass by a wall of cushions and pillows. They threaten to suffocate me in their downy wads of feathers and filling, a symbol of our collective somnolent addiction to comfort. My stomach grows queasy. I search for the nearest exit sign and head directly for it.

Back home, I read the label on the chest of drawers and realise that formaldehyde was used to stick the particle board together. That means I’m probably breathing it in right now. Still, the low cube shelf fits perfectly, which is not easy in this odd-shaped room.

My new flatmate Min bounds down the stairs to see how I’m going.

‘That was a nightmare,’ I say.

‘Oh yeah, IKEA is its own form of beast,’ Min laughs. ‘But that looks like a good fit. You’ve created a beautiful wild little cave down here. The basement has been transformed!’

‘Getting there,’ I say. Last weekend, I ripped up the grotty carpet, sanded and polished the floorboards, and painted the walls white. I converted the strange little alcove into a bed base that extends out into the room. Sitting up in bed is like resting on a ledge at the back of a cave and looking out the overhang into the forest.

‘This must be your book,’ Min says. I glance up to the see the all too familiar spine of My Year Without Matches being coaxed from the bookshelf.

‘That’s the one,’ I say, feeling a little shy.

Min flicks to the photo section in the middle.

‘Wow, your shelter is so beautiful. I would have loved to have known you in this time,’ she says, angling the book in my direction to show me the image of my head poking out of the top of the tiny remaining hole in the thatched roof. I’m wearing a big hat and an even bigger smile.

Min glances up and catches my eye for a second. ‘I can’t imagine what it’s been like to move back to the city. To be so grounded in a place, to be in connection so completely, and then … well, the city is a different type of wild.’

I nod, not quite knowing what to say.

‘Can I borrow it?’ she says, holding up the book.

‘Sure,’ I say. The book and Min disappear back up the stairs.

I pull some items out of a box and start arranging a loose mandala of bones, stones, feathers, and shells on top of the IKEA shelving. Inside the box, I make contact with something rough and cylindrical — the banksia cone I collected from my shelter site. The only physical item I brought back with me.

Something about this particular house move is stirring the whole pot of that chapter.

If I were to answer Min’s implicit question, I would probably start with the most explicable and tangible layer first — the story of the burnt-out environmental activist who took off to the bush to heal and reconnect with her original love. It’s partly true. After almost a decade of dedicated grassroots campaigning for forest and climate protection, I was becoming a ‘greenocrat’, spouting statistical certainty from my office swivel seat in the city of Newcastle rather than from the immediacy of a forest protest.

There’s only so long that kind of fire can burn. The flames cooled to embers. And from the coals a new burning question grew. What’s the real reason we’re losing this battle? I asked myself. What really creates change? The strategy thus far — shout the truth from the rafters until people hear it and join you — had proved limited in its efficacy. It seemed to me that change was less about a lack of information, and more a lack of love. Disconnection from the natural world makes it easier to treat it like a commodity. Trees are things we can rip out and use, without realising we’re taking from our larger body too. Facts don’t move people to act. Love does.

I wanted to fall in love again.

I travelled to the US for two summers to work and study with famous tracker and survival expert Tom Brown Jr, himself once an apprentice to a Native American elder and master tracker. I sat in traditional sweat lodges with songs sung in first languages. I sat my first Vision Quest, a four-day solo fast on a mountain. I spent seventeen days camped on the edge of a national park on my own. I tested my skills on multi-day survival trips. I travelled to Arnhem Land and sat with the women on land that had sustained an unbroken lineage of their ancestors for countless thousands of years.

Something in me was waking up. I grew more curious. What might happen if I stepped in fully? If I was able to really steep myself in nature? Immerse myself in this language older than words; enter into this largest conversation one might have with the world? One that’s far from to-do lists, strategies, or small talk, but powered by the immediacy of bird, lizard, rock, sky, dewdrop, imagination, snake, dream, rain, spider, song, mountain, and stream? What would happen if I uprooted myself from the city’s conveniences, comforts, and distractions and plugged myself back into the primary relationship of earth and self? There was some treasure, I knew, that could only be found when my imagination was fed not by the same social mirrors of my current life but by the untamed and unshod. I knew I had to enter into a deeper relationship with wild nature to find out. But how?

I was invited to take part in Australia’s first Independent Wilderness Studies Program, a loosely organised yearlong residency where a small group would apprentice themselves to the arts of earth-based living. There were to be few visitors in and few trips out. There would be some structured learning, but mostly the schooling would be in unschooling — running feral and free. It was as much about encountering nature as it was about encountering oneself in nature. Unlearning is what I needed: to unpick some of my civilised conditioning, step beyond the four walls of certainty, and experience life unmediated, unwrapped. To feel how fire feeds and warms me not by the flick of a switch but by the blisters on my palms from drilling wood onto wood to create a spark; to taste the earth in fruit, shoot, and berry; to track the seasonal changes; and to rest with the dream-rich depth of a nervous system not peaking on caffeine, sugar, stress, and overstimulation.

I was the first to sign up. Not many months later, I found myself clearing a space to live under the limbs of a giant grandmother banksia tree, the seed pod of which I now hold in my hand. I make another space, this time atop the new IKEA shelf, and carefully lower the cone.

I think of Min upstairs in her loft turning the first few pages. That the story of my journey that year can be found in a bookshop still amazes me. It was so hard to try and capture in words, so full of paradox and dichotomy — both extraordinary and yet very ordinary, practical and mystical, ecstatic and struggle-filled.

A white-browned scrub wren calls outside close by. I wonder if it’s raising the alarm over the neighbour’s cat; I pop my head above window height to see the tabby’s tail disappearing under the privet. Caught! It feels good to be able to know these things. I’ve already clocked the fox prints down at the river, and the perch the spinebill likes to sing from near the letterbox in the morning sun.

As I had hoped, my year without matches did indeed gift me entry into this larger conversation with nature. Sitting and watching attentively day after day, I became porous and receptive to the patterns and routines of the forest. My awareness busted out of its accustomed ruts, my default shifting to a full-bodied sensory engagement. To some extent, I’m still listening from this place. And can switch it on when I want. The abiding curiosity that turned on out there is as strong as ever, the book of nature a never-ending fascination.

But love’s promise is as much about descent as it is ecstatic union. This was the part of ‘change’ that I hadn’t bargained for. The forest cracked me open, a hard seed pod that fell to the ground and over the months and seasons was worked on by the slow action of wind and rain and soil microbes.

All my youthful certainties, all my conditioned habits of achievement and perfection — the entire house my ego had carefully constructed so as to experience the world with as little vulnerability as possible — dissolved. It wasn’t just unlearning, it was unravelling. I was stripped back to bone. The long wanders in the forest where I would lose myself were a mirror to the inner disorientation. I didn’t know who or what I was anymore. In that painful undoing, what emerged was a less cultivated, less managed self. My compass bearing shifted away from the directionality of expectations, judgements, and shoulds and towards intuition and instinct. My capacity to feel everything expanded.

The irony is that the trail I followed to the bush has led me back to the city. A few years after the residency, my curiosity turned towards my own species again — to know what mysteries lay behind those uniquely human eyes. I’d been a lone wolf long enough. I was ready again to swim in a sea of humanity, to let myself be enchanted by, and in turn enchant, another human heart. I was ready to feel my gaze returned with a similar understanding, to know and be known in the way particular to my species. I was ready to find edges and challenges of a different kind.

The next wild adventure beckoned, drawing me into the centre of human cultural flowering. I knew in this I would also be saying yes to concrete rather than dirt underfoot, streetlights rather than moonlight, freeway noise rather than cricket song, busyness rather than idle hours.

I said yes because I had made a promise at the end of my bush year. It had come to me during one of my last overnight wanders in late spring, when the ground had warmed enough for me to sleep without padding and the sun shone strong enough to warm my bones at dawn. Drunk on awe and gratitude as I watched the sunrise, I realised I needed to build a bridge, to bring what I had found out in the bush back to the city, to ignite the spark of the wild within the heart of a disconnected culture.

I just needed a carrot to get me there. It came in the form of a man.

Yet after a couple of years, I was still unsettled, both in place and person. I went bush a lot, running or attending workshops, a growing point of contention. The online demands of his startup business were at odds with my outdoor pursuits. I wanted to put roots down but felt like there was no real soil for them. Soon, the man and I parted ways.

Ostii and I had met in the backyard of his inner-city townhouse under a wisteria dripping with sweet bunches of purple flowers buzzing with bees. I was in Melbourne promoting My Year Without Matches. ‘That colour suits you,’ was the first thing he said when he saw me in a mustard jumper, my wet hair twisted up in a top knot. I took in his prayer beads, zip-heavy canvas vest, scruffy brown hair, and piercing blue eyes. The gaze that I returned was as unwavering as his. Three months later, he flew north to help pack my belongings into my car and then serenaded me the thousand kilometres to his tiny city castle.

As we left the flat plains of the interior, the city grew like a grey bubble on the horizon, the jagged skyline of the skyscrapers slowly taking form as we sped towards it with all my worldly possessions. We both grew quieter as the suburbs knitted together. It wasn’t until we pulled up outside his home, my new home, that we looked at each other and burst out laughing. The wild ride was just beginning.

We found a rhythm together that was threaded with reams of laughter. We planted loquats and mulberries on the nature strip, filled the backyard with tomatoes, rocket, and basil. We danced and wrestled in the living room and entertained around a tiny fire pit. In the mornings, I would take my cup of tea and squat in the stamp-sized patch of sunlight in the backyard, watching the white-naped honeyeaters suck nectar from the single gum tree. Yes, there was a lot of good in those years.

I contemplated leaving the city after we split but realised I wanted to remain. While the countryside is rich in natural beauty, I had struggled to find a place for myself in the towns and villages of regional Australia. I liked playing in a bigger pool, alongside the 86 per cent of other Australians who call the city home.

When Ostii and I had driven into the city that first time, and I looked out the window past the countless anonymous faces buzzing about on their business, I wondered what draws so many of us here. Surely not the waiting a year for a parking permit, waiting in lines at check-outs and cafes, waiting in peak-hour traffic. Noise. Pollution. Limited green space. The rushing and the busyness. Not even the good coffee or the availability of sushi at 3.00 am.

I imagined the city like a giant beehive. If the cooperative nature of the bee colony produces honey, so too a city-hive with its density of diversity — of people and cultures, organisations, resources, and needs — is an incubator for creative nectar. Cities drip with innovation and invention, the sheer weight of numbers offering endless possibilities for collaboration within more defined niches, micro-environments of specificity where synergistic possibilities expand exponentially. Beehives contain a kind of pressurised communality that happens to yield one of the sweetest products on the planet. So too cities provide a certain creative tension, a cooperative-competitive edge when so many people rub up against each other.

I suspected that there was an aspect of wildness I had yet to explore — the human creative kind. I was ready to play in the particular kind of playground that only cities provide, to dance in the anonymity, and experiment in the laboratories of cultural diversity and depth.

Now I am one of the bees in the city hive. Ostii is gone, but I have found a house to share with Min and two other creative busy bees. Seven years ago I didn’t own a single key; now my keyring jingles with a dozen. The $2,000 I survived on for the bush year wouldn’t get me much past a month. Gone is my phoneless freedom; my iPhone has more apps for instant communication than I have fingers. Whereas once my job description was the ‘sacred order of survival’, now it includes issuing invoices and paying taxes. My daily errands no longer include water collection, basket weaving, and eel trapping. They spill over the page and include engagements with dozens of colleagues, clients, collaborators, and contractors. And my nature time has shrunk from all the time to never enough.

Yet if I’m honest, there’s a part of me that clings to the identity of the bush me as the real me, that thinks this city life is some sort of phase or experiment. I’m a city dweller with a wild heart and I still haven’t found a way for these aspects to happily coexist. And I need to, try at least. Because if I can’t, then how can I be that bridge? How can I expect us to fall in love with the world in the way that’s so needed if it’s dependant on going bush for a year? No, it has to be possible, right where we are. How, I’m not exactly sure. But it starts with asking the question. And I’m not the only one with this thought on my mind.

I catch a National Geographic documentary titled The Call of the Wild. It follows nature writer David Gessner as he pokes his nose into the lives of those exploring the current state of the human–nature connection. After brainwave mapping the interference of phones during a walk in the park, and a spot of forest bathing, Gessner gets serious, joining a guy named Colbert Sturgeon in his handmade campout on the banks of a swamp in Georgia. Once an insurance middleman, Colbert left it all to live off the land, dropping virtually all contact with the monetary economy. Tucking into a meal of barbecued snake with Colbert on the deck of his riverside shelter, Gessner reflects on how we are at a historical tipping point. More than half the world’s population now lives in urban areas, a proportion expected to increase to 66 per cent by 2050.

‘We’re in a petri dish, undertaking a huge experiment,’ Gessner says. ‘What happens when we remove ourselves so profoundly from nature?’ The assumption here being that the evolutionary blink of an eye in which we have moved off the savannahs and into townhouses has not dampened either our biological or spiritual suitability to live intimately with our environment. Rather than disappearing, the capacities have atrophied, become lazy, been forgotten about.

One possibility within this petri dish, says Gessner, is that we exist increasingly within a bubble, our ancestral lifeways becoming more and more distant, until such time as the bubble bursts. The title of the documentary, however, points to the more optimistic direction Gessner is heading: the ‘call of the wild’ is hardwired in us, and the degree to which we have strayed from our evolutionary origins is triggering an equal and opposite reaction — in the direction of nature.

It’s a movement some are calling ‘rewilding’: a reclaiming of a more wild or original state, a movement away from domestication. The word itself speaks a thousand, its simple conjunction of ‘re’ and ‘wild’ pointing to the fact that we were all once wild and can be again.

The word has its origins in conservation biology, referring to the strategy of reintroducing keystone species such as apex predators. The most famous example is Yellowstone National Park, where the reintroduction of wolves caused a trophic cascade of beneficial ecological effects that extended down even to the river invertebrates. The absence of wolves had caused a boom in deer populations, who then ate out the valleys. The willows had been reduced, and subsequently so had the beavers. As deer numbers fell under predation by the wolves, beavers returned, and their activities shifted the stream hydrology. And that was just one chain of events. There were many. Life came back into balance not through isolating nature behind fences but through upping its wildness factor.

Just as this rewilding movement seeks to restore the agency of ecosystems, the human rewilding movement is seeking to restore balance and vitality to our inner ecosystems. For as we have systematically controlled and tamed nature, we have simultaneously controlled and dewilded ourselves. The result is a range of physical and psychological ailments that are hallmarks of modern life — rising levels of suicide, depression, obesity, and disease; childhood behavioural problems going by such labels as ADHD; the loneliness epidemic that underpins a collective spiritual crisis of meaninglessness. Our once wild, bushy tails are now threadbare and dragging behind us.

Rewilding writer and practitioner Arthur Haines draws a parallel between captive animals and modern humans. Though lions held in a zoo have greater life expectancies and longer life spans, he says, most people understand that such a lion does not live the life it was biologically intended to. While it is still a lion, some of its ‘lion-ness’ has been taken away. It’s precisely because of the hardships and uncertainties of life in the wild that the animal fully lives its wholeness. So too, Haines says, the chronic disease and emptiness of modern culture indicates we are not living as humans were biologically intended to — some of our ‘human-ness’ has been taken away. Caged by convenience, we modern humans have forgotten our wild roots, our acute capacities of perception, our kinship with the natural world. We’re asleep on the doormat while the world burns.

Rewilding asks us to consider afresh the link between wildness and health. Both Yellowstone and my own experience tell me that given some encouragement, the wild will return, that it even longs to return, waiting with poised claw and sharpened beak to step back into the great dance with us. Rather than chaotic or dangerous, wildness in this context is a healer, an agent of balance, a wisdom keeper in its own right.

What if wildness itself is the overarching keystone quality that could revivify our modern human ecosystems?

Perhaps the real endangered species is that of the wild human. Winning that campaign would negate the need for all others. For this species, if reintroduced, could return health, vitality, diversity, and abundance to our cultural and physical landscapes, to the centres of civilisation themselves.

Unlike the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, rewilding is as much urban as it is rural — is more about the cultivation of wildness as a quality and experience than about turning back the clock to some perceived hunter-gather idyll. Rewilding asks us to question our allegiance to