Rewilding Restores Hope

Caroline Fraser

Having spent seven years circling the globe to investigate conservation successes and failures, I can say without a doubt that the best method of preserving and restoring biodiversity is rewilding. Based on scientific principles and organized around the “three C’s” — cores, corridors, and carnivores — rewilding expands existing core wilderness areas, reconnects these areas through corridors, and restores and protects top predators, which regulate the food chain in every ecosystem.

While many rewilding projects are in their infancy — the European Green Belt, for example, has just begun to restore the former Iron Curtain region as an “ecological backbone” — others have achieved astonishing early results.

Caroline Fraser is the author of Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution (Metropolitan, 2009). Information about the rewilding projects she describes can be found at:

www.rewildingtheworld.com

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