Wildland

Documentary exploring the concept of rewilding and the arguments surrounding its application in Scotland, including the potential impact on both humans and wildlife.

Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/rewildingscotland

What is rewilding?

Rewilding is a form of environmental conservation and ecological restoration that has significant potential to increase biodiversity, create self-sustainable environments and mitigate climate change. Rewilding aims to do this by reintroducing lost animal species to natural environments. It is an exciting and promising conservation strategy aimed at restoring natural processes and wilderness areas, providing connectivity between such areas (corridors), and reintroducing large herbivores, predators and/or keystone species.

While reintroduction is an approach that many conservationists take to restore and reinforce endangered species populations, rewilding’s focus on animals high up on the food chain like apex predators and large herbivores make it unique. The reason these particular species are targeted by rewilding is that by being high up on the food chain, they influence many species below them by restoring ecological functioning.

Since it was first academically defined in 1998 by American conservation biologists Michael Soulé and Reed Noss, as an approach focusing on “cores, corridors, and carnivores”, the idea of rewilding has evolved in several different directions. The main offshoots of the original idea including Pleistocene rewilding (Donlan et al, 2005), passive wilding (Gillson et al., 2011), and translocation rewilding (Seddon et al., 2014). These variations on rewilding each come with their own set of potential benefits and challenges.

Most rewilding approaches fit the concept of trophic rewilding, defined as: “an ecological restoration strategy that uses species introductions to restore top-down trophic interactions and associated trophic cascades to promote self-regulating biodiverse ecosystems”.

Source: https://truenaturefoundation.org/what-is-rewilding/

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Danes Anders Holch Povlsen , 48, and Anne Storm Pedersen, pictured together, met when Anne began working in sales for Bestseller and have bough 11 Scottish estates making them biggest landowner in the UK

Anders Holch Povlsen is the fabulously wealthy owner of the international fashion business Bestseller and the biggest shareholder in the British online fashion company ASOS, who bought Topshop in a cut-price £330million deal today.

The humble Danish retail mogul, 48, worth £6.1billion but known for liking a whisky down the pub and driving a bashed up VW Golf, is Scotland’s richest man with around 220,000 acres of the Highlands under his control after he started buying up some of the country’s grandest estates 14 years ago.

As a result, the reclusive Dane has become Britain’s biggest private landowner, making Prince Charles, who owns a paltry 130,000 acres in the UK, look like a veritable pauper.

Povlsen became enchanted with Scotland when one summer in the 1980s the young boy from Denmark went fly fishing in the Scottish Highlands with his parents and brother.

Some have called it the most expensive family holiday in history because three decades later he has spent £100million quietly turning himself into a real-life Monarch of the Glen.

With his wife Anne, 43, they have formed a ‘200-year vision’ for their estates, which involves rewilding the land. In the vision, Povlsen said he planned to pass the estate along to his four children and that they would continue his work.

But their dream was hit by tragedy when three of their four children were killed in the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka in 2018. Alfred, Alma and Agnes all died. Only their youngest daughter, Astrid, then ten, survived the attacks and the couple said that they remain ‘genuinely grateful’ that she is still alive.

In an open letter posted after their deaths, Mr Povlsen and wife Anne Storm Pedersen wrote that the project will take longer than a lifetime to complete and so would be carried on by their children after they died.

He wrote: ‘From our home at Glenfeshie, both Anne and myself – our children and our parents too – have long enjoyed a deep connection with this magnificent landscape.

‘As the holdings have grown and our common vision for the work becomes ever clearer, we have incorporated the entirety of the project into a venture we call Wildland.

Mr Povlsen has bought 11 Scottish estates and they are said to be worth £120million – more than double what he is believed to have paid for the properties. But he has spent huge sums rewilding land and refurbishing properties

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https://wildland.scot/conservation

RESTORATION

Wildland’s philosophy, its overriding mission, is very simple: we wish to restore our parts of the Scottish Highlands to their former natural splendour. And not just the land, the whole fabric of these great estates. It is our 200 year vision. Today, we have taken but the first few steps towards making this vision a reality.

Whilst nature answered only to the changing seasons, so too did man coexist in natural balance. However, we also have to accept the harsh reality that people who once worked the land have moved away. Now though, Wildland’s fervent desire is to see local communities thrive once more and to have those those that have left the Highlands come back; bringing with them all-new skills and all-new visions for the way that people can work and live here.