The Welsh Way to Wild
We are proud to be members of the Welsh Rewilding Alliance.
The Welsh Rewilding Alliance is a growing movement uniting organisations, landowners, communities and decision-makers to restore thriving ecosystems, boost rural livelihoods and celebrate Welsh landscapes and our wild nature. cynghrairailwylltio.cymru & rewildingalliance.cymru
Jon Moses has written a report, the Welsh Way to Wild, which describes how the Welsh landscape and our relationship to it has changed, our problems and opportunities and a vision for what could be. The Welsh Rewilding Alliance needs your support, please sign up and add your voice.
Here’s an extract from the report,
“Scenes once familiar off our shores are now witnessed, if at all, through David Attenborough documentaries – something for faraway places, rather than sources of enchantment at our door. Pick out any antiquated natural history book in the National Library: you’ll soon find examples of the ordinary extraordinary of this now- vanished everyday. A million herring caught in a single night near Aberystwyth in the mid-18th century. Angelsharks, once “plenty” in Cardigan Bay, today inspire triumphant BBC reports when a single individual is sighted. Consider one account from 1919, just a century ago, which swore mackerel came so thick below Little Orme’s Head that the quarrymen “caught hundreds by merely wading in for a few yards and throwing them ashore with their hands.” Such richness feels implausible, even unimaginable today. We have become numb to a horizon defined by emptiness, deadened to the possibility it can be any other way.”
Wales, like the rest of the UK, holds the bleak accolade of being one of the ‘most nature-depleted countries in the world’… This illustrates a simple fact: the relationship between ourselves and nature has come badly unstuck. Something needs to change. In a recent YouGov poll, 75% of those polled in Wales expressed their support for rewilding, with 82% favouring the reintroduction of native species, of which 94% welcomed the reintroduction of beavers – the highest level of support in the UK.
The Welsh Rewilding Alliance has come together through a simple view: that we share our nation with many thousand forms of animate life, and our trajectory should not - cannot - be one of its incremental, ongoing eradication.
Rewilding works best at scale… in Wales, where the average landholding is around half the size (of its neighbouring countries) and public land constitutes less than 10% of total ownership, rewilding may explore a different approach… with a constellation of small to medium sized sites elsewhere. In time, these could be joined together through nature-rich corridors, supported via the collaborative layer within the Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS) to achieve the ecological benefits of connectivity and scale. Approached in this way, sites dedicated to ‘core’ rewilding could be achieved with little impact on food security while providing significant sites of nature recovery in every region.”
The Welsh Rewilding Alliance aims are:
● Flourishing ecosystems, where nature is given the space to recover and natural processes can thrive.
● Active public and community involvement, so people are part of shaping the future of land in Wales through rewilding.
● Strong, diverse rural economies, rooted in nature and creating meaningful, long-term opportunities for local communities.
● Supportive policies, laws, and funding that make rewilding possible and effective.
● A Wales rich in culture and language, where rewilding contributes to vibrant communities and a thriving Welsh language.
● Fairer access to land, recognising the need for land reform in Wales and the opportunities rewilding can offer communities within this.
