Description
Large scale rewilding is rapidly changing the rural landscapes of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, but with the highest concentration of land ownership in Europe, the power to change these landscape remains vastly unequal. An expanding carbon market driving up the price of land and plans for an under ambitious land reform (Scotland) bill, further cement the exclusion of place-based communities from the possibilities of land ownership and the power to rewild. Whether rewilding signals a hopeful opportunity to reorganise our socio-ecological worlds or ushers in new formations of multi-species exploitation and domination under the guise of ‘green solutions’ is highly contested. This paper will examine the question of land ownership shapes these ecological trajectories. Contested claims to land, new green land grabs and the regions histories as colonizer and colonized, make it a unique site to examine questions of power and land ownership in ambitions to restore and rewild ecosystems. I offer a decolonial ecofeminist perspective on the colonial and patriarchal power embedded in the rewilding of privately owned estates in the region.
