What is Rewilding?
Rewilding is an approach to ecological recovery that focuses on restoring the processes and relationships that allow ecosystems to function, adapt, and sustain themselves over time. Rather than restoring a site to one particular snapshot in history, it recognises that Nature is dynamic and ever changing. Healthy landscapes are shaped by complex interactions between species, climate, water, soils, and disturbance.
Over thousands of years, our planet’s ecosystems have become progressively controlled and simplified. Each generation has come to accept a more degraded version of nature as “normal” — a phenomenon known as the shifting baseline.
Rewilding is grounded in functionalism, the ecological understanding that certain species, interactions, and processes play outsized roles in shaping ecosystems. When these functional relationships are restored, ecosystems can begin to self-organise, recover complexity, and require less human intervention.
Across large landscapes, this has involved reintroducing apex predators, and locally extinct species, restoring beneficial disturbance, reconnecting fragmented habitats and allowing rivers and wetlands and to resume their natural dynamics.
Many of the same principles can be applied to fragmented, human-dominated landscapes like coastal and hinterland Northern NSW. Every landholder who chooses to restore habitat, improve ecological function, and prioritise native species contributes to a growing network of properties that will reconnect our broader landscape. In this way, small, thoughtful interventions — repeated across many properties — can collectively strengthen connectivity, rebuild biodiversity, and revive the living systems.
How does Rewilding Science differ from Restoration Ecology?
Rewilding and restoration ecology are closely related and complementary approaches to nature recovery.
Restoration ecology focuses on repairing degraded sites — for example, rebuilding vegetation communities, stabilising riparian zones, and re-establishing key species — often working toward a defined ecological target or reference condition.
Rewilding focuses on restoring the processes and relationships that allow ecosystems to adapt, recover, and organise themselves over time, with less ongoing human intervention.
In practice, ecological restoration is often an essential starting point and rewilding can provide a big-picture overview and a longer-term direction for allowing landscapes to function, adapt and evolve as a whole.
At Re-WildScape, we apply rewilding, ecological and climate adaptation thinking at the scale of project, property and landscape. We recognise that many smaller sites working together will build the resilience required by our native species to adapt and survive the accumulative pervasive threats they face.
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“Rewilding doesn’t only happen in vast wild areas. When many people make small, thoughtful changes to their own patches of land, it will begin to function as a living network — stitching habitat back into the landscape and giving nature space to return.”