Description
This paper examines how landscapes are rewilded in ways that continue to serve colonial masculinities. Drawing on my ethnographic research in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, I offer a decolonial ecofeminist perspective ion the large private estate model, and introduce rewilderness as a conceptual tool for examining how control and domination are reproduced through rewilding. Rewilderness landscapes are sites where biodiversity may improve and ecosystems may show signs of recovery, but continue to be constructed in ways that serve colonial masculinities.
Situating carbon markets and “rewilderness escapes” within longer histories of enclosure and land commodification, I demonstrate how the large estate model perpetuates a mode of land use that continues to serve colonial masculinities. Employing Ferdinand’s (2022) theorisation of the colonial-environmental double fracture, which severs colonial pasts from present environmental conditions, I identify three discursive strategies that obscure this continuity: first, the mobilisation of wilderness imaginaries to conceal habitation and clearance; second, appeals to cultural inheritance that mask historical land grabs; and third, depoliticising discourses of urgency that sideline questions of justice. The reproduction of colonial dynamics produces landscapes in which the hope of rewilding coexists with a postcolonial melancholia that it represents “more of the same.” In tracing these tensions, the paper contributes to debates on gendered resistance in environmental politics, revealing how decolonial ecofeminism can expose and contest the masculinised logics shaping rewilding.
