Description
Concerns are growing in the Highlands of Scotland that the involvement and investment of land-owning classes in rewilding projects marks the most recent manifestation of class and cultural domination of the region. Missing from these conversations is an exploration of how reforming land management without reforming land ownership may also act to preserve hegemonic masculine domination. This paper will contribute to ecofeminist and decolonial scholarship and present early findings on the significance of symbolic masculinities in the rewilding movement to the emerging politics of land in nature-based solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises.
The urgent demands these crises and the necessity to act quickly in line with international responsibilities has generated an impatience for an ecologically reformed rural land management. However the era of nature-based climate solutions has the potential to further deny fragile rural communities the land, and socio-ecological infrastructure, necessary to support socio-cultural life. The tensions embedded in the intersections of the rewilding and land reform movements in the Highlands offer a unique conjuncture to interrogate ecological masculinities and emotive and gendered claims to land in the era of nature-based climate and biodiversity solutions.
