Rewilding as Re-Enchantment

Abstract

Rewilding is regularly connected to re-enchantment. In some rewilding projects, ecological restoration merges with narratives of wonder, enchantment and spirituality. While rewilding’s association with re-enchantment appears as part of its appeal, it is also criticised as anthropocentric, escapist or naive. This article aims to formulate a thorough conceptual understanding of rewilding as re-enchantment by situating it within the critical framework of (dis)enchantment developed in the early 20th century by Weber and Horkheimer and Adorno. Connecting this framework to contemporary, phenomenologically inspired accounts of enchantment and critiques on the mechanisation of nature, this article aims towards a new perspective on rewilding as a critical discursive practice of re-enchantment. Rewilding, like re-enchantment, can be seen as a valuable attempt to formulate alternatives to the modern paradigm and programme of disenchantment. Situating rewilding within a broader cultural context and historical perspective, this approach allows for assessing rewilding as part of modern (counter-)culture at large. Moreover, through a detailed account of (re-)enchantment in rewilding on a phenomenological, theoretical and relational level, this article gradually develops a conceptual understanding of re-enchantment as a valuable concept for ecological restoration and cultural transformation.

1. Introduction

“Beautiful world, where are you? Come back, / Nature’s graceful blossoming time! / Ah! merely in the fairyland of song / does your golden trail lives on!”

—Friedrich von Schiller (1788), Die Götter Griechenlands (The Gods of Greece)

“Haven’t we shed enough tears over the disenchantment of the world?”

—Bruno Latour (1993), We Have Never Been Modern

In 2023, the Scottish charity Trees for Life opened the “world’s first rewilding centre” in their flagship estate in Dundreggan near Loch Ness, celebrating this new approach to ecological restoration based on the restoration of natural processes and “self-sustaining” ecosystems (Carver et al. 2021; Trees for Life 2024b). As a pioneering organisation in the Highlands, Trees for Life has worked in reforestation and rewilding in the area since the late 1980s. The newly opened Rewilding Centre is meant to tell the story of the organisation, of rewilding and the change it has brought to the landscape (Trees for Life 2024a). But the visitor will stumble remarkably often upon other stories in Dundreggan: stories of the sìthichean, the fairies or of the Fianna, a band of warrior–hunters from Gaelic Highland mythology. Depicted on a map of Dundreggan, the stories are presented as part of the landscape, and the story map draws a picture of the Dundreggan estate as an enchanted place. The new Rewilding Centre not only appears to promote rewilding, but also a re-enchanted view of the landscape.

The connection between rewilding and re-enchantment runs back a long time, to the origins of rewilding in environmental activist counter-culture in the 1980s and arguably longer, to romantic thinkers and poets who drew parallels between enchantment and the wild (Pike 2019). Many contemporary rewilding projects and philosophies reveal re-enchanting aspirations through emphasising experiences of wonder and awe or referencing an active will-force in nature. Similarly, rewilding has been conceptualised—and criticised—by contemporary scholars as a project of romantically inspired re-enchantment seeking to escape the disenchantment with modern life (Bone 2018; Wrigley 2020). Whether encouraged or scrutinised, however, rewilding’s conceptual connections to re-enchantment are rarely spelled out. Consequentially, while rewilding may be branded as “re-enchantment”, it is not assessed as part of the broader critical framework of disenchantment to which re-enchantment formulates an answer (Meijer and De Vriese 2020). As such, criticisms may miss the crucial point of the joint ventures of re-enchantment and rewilding.

Enchantment and re-enchantment are elusive terms. Most people seem to possess some sort of intuitive understanding of what enchantment is, but the concept is much harder to define without doing injustice to its multi-faceted nature (Bennett 2001). Consequentially, re-enchantment, the project of recovering enchantment in modernity, seemingly dissolves into a vague and heterogeneous venture. While the aim of this paper is not to develop a singular definition of enchantment, I will argue that re-enchantment in its many forms can best be understood as a reaction against the disenchantment of the world. A conceptualisation should therefore start with an assessment of disenchantment. As what Charles Taylor calls a “context of understanding”, disenchantment provides the background for modern concepts of nature, human experiences in the wild and human–nature relationships (Taylor 2007, p. 3). This context, profoundly familiar to contemporary life, can be approached historically, theoretically and phenomenologically. Subsequently, (re-)enchantment arises as a concept which challenges this modern context of understanding in different ways: as an experience or “mood”, as a model of nature and as a relational concept.

Thus, the goal of this article is threefold, corresponding to the three subsequent sections of the paper. First, Section 2 assesses rewilding in relation to re-enchantment. It clarifies the historical and contemporary conceptual connections between wildness, rewilding and (re-)enchantment before reviewing some of the critiques on rewilding’s re-enchanting aspirations, pointing towards the need to answer these criticisms in a more nuanced way. Responding to this need, Section 3 exposits the philosophical framework of disenchantment and its implications for the modern theoretical model of nature and humans’ everyday experience of the natural world. Connecting the critical (dis)enchantment theory of Max Weber and Horkheimer and Adorno to contemporary, phenomenologically inspired accounts of enchantment (Taylor 1989, 2007; Bennett 2001) and to critiques on the mechanisation of nature (Merchant 2020), this section builds up towards a conceptualisation of re-enchantment and rewilding as critical, discursive answers to the modern paradigm of disenchantment in Section 4. Starting from a phenomenological account, re-enchantment is first conceptualised as a “mood” with ethical implications for the human domination of nature. In cultivating this mood, rewilding fosters positive attachments, humility and human restraint. Second, on a theoretical level, re-enchantment can be seen as the demechanisation of nature. By emphasising nature’s agency, rewilding provides a new paradigm of nature as active and dynamic. Lastly, the paper returns to the opening example of the Dundreggan Rewilding Centre, showing how re-enchantment and rewilding support each other, on a discursive level, as relational practices. Integrating moods and worldviews into a transformational story, re-enchantment thus fosters people’s relationships to place and the natural world.

Assessing rewilding as a part of the framework of (dis)enchantment situates it within a broader cultural context and historical perspective. Rather than seeing rewilding as an isolated phenomenon within conservation biology, such a perspective allows us to assess rewilding as a part of modern culture and counter-culture at large. In turn, this assessment of rewilding allows for a conceptual understanding of the scope and stakes of re-enchantment and its implications for the human relation with the natural world. Ultimately, I aim to provide a positive account of rewilding’s potential to (re-)enchant nature by stressing its value as a critical practice in a disenchanting world.

2. Rewilding and Re-Enchantment: Connections and Critiques

2.1. Defining Rewilding

Over the last decades, rewilding became established as a new approach to ecological restoration focused on the recovery of self-sustaining natural processes. Originating in North American environmental activist circles, the word was allegedly coined by Dave Foreman in 1992 in a column in Wild Earth (Foreman 2004; Jørgensen 2015; Fisher 2020). A few years later, conservation biologists Michael Soulé and Reed Noss introduced the term to a scientific audience, defining rewilding as “the scientific argument to restore large wilderness based on the regulatory roles of large predators” (Soulé and Noss 1998, p. 22). In the new millennium, rewilding came to indicate distinctive approaches to conservation, from “Pleistocene rewilding” through megafauna restoration to “passive rewilding” through the elimination of human intervention (Nogués-Bravo et al. 2016). Meanwhile, in the cultural sphere, “human rewilding” indicates practices such as bushcraft, foraging, basket-weaving and traditional hunting, but also forest bathing, mindfulness or performing rituals (Pike 2018). Thus, rewilding—like re-enchantment—is a multi-faceted concept, indicating a myriad of practices united under the common ethos to foster wildness and self-sustaining nature, with a clear appeal in modern life and culture (Gammon 2018).

In 2021, a working group of 33 rewilding practitioners and scientists from around the world, commissioned by the IUCN, responded to the need to formulate a working definition and 10 guiding principles for (ecological) rewilding. They defined rewilding as follows:

“the process of rebuilding, following major human disturbance, a natural ecosystem by restoring natural processes and the complete or near complete food web at all trophic levels as a self-sustaining and resilient ecosystem with biota that would have been present had the disturbance not occurred. This will involve a paradigm shift in the relationship between humans and nature. The ultimate goal of rewilding is the restoration of functioning native ecosystems containing the full range of species at all trophic levels while reducing human control and pressures. Rewilded ecosystems should—where possible—be self-sustaining. That is, they require no or minimal management (i.e., natura naturans [nature doing what nature does]), and it is recognized that ecosystems are dynamic.”

(Carver et al. 2021, p. 1888)

Three important aspects in this definition are worth noticing. First, rewilding’s main goal is to restore nature as a “self-sustaining” ecosystem. It is based on the idea of natura naturans, nature at work, as an active principle capable of dynamically shaping itself. Second, as a consequence, rewilding aims to reduce human management, pressures and control. These, after all, are types of human intervention which impede nature from taking its own course. Third, these restraints for human control can only be realised through a broader paradigm shift in the relationship between humans and nature. This need is further elaborated in the tenth principle, where the authors state that “rewilding means transformative change” (ibid., p. 1890). Thus, rewilding, while primarily an ecological undertaking, is equally dependent on, and aimed at, cultural transformation. As a cultural and discursive practice, rewilding should transform experiences and views of nature (from passive to self-sustaining), the rules for intervention in nature (from domination to letting-be) and the cultural paradigms which precede and shape humans’ relationships to the natural world. This paper starts from the centrality of these cultural aspects of rewilding in assessing its connections to re-enchantment in the next sections.

2.2. Conceptual Connections

In 2013, the British journalist and activist George Monbiot published Feral, a book that delivered a passionate plea for rewilding and would invigorate the new movement in Britain and beyond. Feral became a best-seller, opening up the debate about nature management and the reintroduction of large predators in the UK, and inspiring the establishment of Rewilding Britain in 2015. Feral was first published under the telling subtitle Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding—which was later changed to Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life in the American and pocket editions (Monbiot 2013, 2014). Though both titles are fit for capturing Monbiot’s aspirations, the first title may have been more honest about his true motivations for supporting this new practice of nature restoration. Motivations which Monbiot, in a famous quote, describes as follows:

“I will not try to disguise my reasons for wanting to see missing animals reintroduced. (…) My reasons arise from my delight in the marvels of nature, its richness and its limitless capacity to surprise; from the sense of freedom, of the thrill that comes from roaming in a landscape or seascape without knowing what I might see next (…). It is the sense that without these animals the ecosystem is lopsided, abridged, dysfunctional. I can produce reasons scientific, economic, historic and hygienic, but none of those describe my motivation.”

(Monbiot 2014, pp. 106–7)

“Delight”, “marvels”, “richness”, “sense of freedom” and “thrill”: these words refer to a search for a certain experience in nature, a unique state of being which “lopsided” and “dysfunctional” ecosystems cannot provide. Monbiot thus presents a rewilding programme aimed equally at satisfying a certain human desire as at restoring the natural world. A similar motivation surfaces through other parts of the book, for example, in the description of paleoecology—the study of past ecosystems—as “a portal through which we may pass into an enchanted kingdom” (Monbiot 2014, p. 93). John Bone therefore considers Monbiot’s aspirations highly reminiscent of a search “for romantic re-enchantment amongst a sector of society disenchanted with modern urban living and the manufactured diversions of consumerism as much as the more laudable aims of restoring biodiversity” (Bone 2018, p. 12).

Monbiot echoes an idea which shaped rewilding from its very origins, both in North American wilderness preservation and in pioneering projects in Europe. Monbiot’s sense that an ecosystem lacking in large predators is “lopsided, abridged, dysfunctional” mimics part of the ethical and aesthetic justifications that Soulé and Noss provided for rewilding. Foreshadowing Monbiot, the authors stress that “(w)ilderness is hardly “wild” where top carnivores (…) have been extirpated”, and “(w)ithout these components, nature seems somehow incomplete, truncated, overly tame” (Soulé and Noss 1998, p. 24). Soulé and Noss further refer to the wild as an “emotional essence”, suggesting an experience which they justify through ethical explanations, for without wildness, “(h)uman opportunities to attain humility are reduced” (ibid.). This last thought is sharply aligned with the North American tradition of wild(erness) ethics shaped by Thoreau and Leopold, which inspired early rewilding (Obst 2023). Further on, I will show how humility is not just a crucial component of a wild ethic, but is also constitutive for a credible account of (re-)enchantment.

Similarly, Sarah Pike has shown how re-enchantment animated activist actions and early rewilding discourse among radical environmental activists in the 1980s and 1990s. Invoking examples of blockades framed as “Middle Earth”, occupations dubbed “Pixie Villages”, environmental activists referring to themselves as “elves” and eco-warriors who claim their actions were inspired by talking trees, Pike demonstrates the crucial role enchantment has played as a discursive tool in environmental activism in the later 20th century. Activists engaged in discursive practices such as storytelling, the performance of ritual and personal engagement with trees, nature spirits and fairies. Notably, activists commonly used the word “rewilding”, indicating both self-rewilding (becoming “elves”) and the rewilding of nature. Activists emphasised nature’s intrinsic value and agency, symbolised by communicative encounters with nature spirits (fairies) or non-human others (trees). Thus, in its early days, “rewilding” was frequently used interchangeably with “re-enchantment” in activist discourse (Pike 2019).

Dave Foreman, who famously “coined” the word rewilding, must have been familiar with this activist discourse through his leading role in the radical group Earth First! in the 1980s. Earth First! activists saw the earth as a Sacred Mother, and Foreman framed their activism as a “sacred crusade to save the Earth”, thus “linking a Pagan view of the earth as mother with radical direct action” (Pike 2019, p. 139). After leaving Earth First! in the early 1990s, Foreman re-defined rewilding as shorthand for “wilderness recovery”. His conception of wilderness was a “self-willed land”—an idea he borrowed from the native American scholar Jay Hansford Vest—untrammelled by human domination and control (Vest 1985; Foreman 2004). By conceiving wilderness as “self-willed land” and wild nature as pervaded by a “will force”, Vest and Foreman invited the romantic idea of a Will in nature back into the very principles of contemporary wilderness philosophy and conservation.

Unravelling these conceptual connections in early rewilding is valuable for understanding some of the underlying motivations and aspirations of the rewilding movement. Not only did these connections inspire authors like George Monbiot, they can also be retraced in contemporary rewilding practices. The invocation of spirituality, ritual, fairy-stories and more subtle forms of re-enchantment is not uncommon in ecological rewilding projects. Embercombe rewilding in Devon, which organised the UK’s first year-long Rewilding Training in 2023, was founded in the 1990s as a spiritual community and offers bushcraft experiences, foraging workshops and spiritual self-development programmes. Embercombe promotes their Rewilding Estate as “a sacred place to connect to the earth and each other” (Embercombe 2024). Trees for Life—which will be further discussed in the last section—originated in the Findhorn Foundation, an eco-community near the Scottish Northeast Coast founded on spiritual principles (Findhorn Foundation 2024). In 1983, the Findhorn Foundation hosted the Third World Wilderness Congress, organised in collaboration with the current Wild Foundation, which included Jay Hansford Vest and Dave Foreman amongst the participants. In the conference proceedings, Sir Laurens van der Post, a leading South African conservationist and member of the Wild Foundation, stressed the value of wilderness restoration for human “transcendence” and remarked that “(w)ilderness is an instrument for enabling us to recover our lost capacity for religious experience” (Van der Post 1983, p. 14).

Van der Post, like Monbiot, Foreman and Soulé and Noss, inscribes himself in a tradition firmly entangled with a romantically inspired search for wonder in wild nature—a search which can indirectly be traced back, through thinkers such as Emerson, Kant and Burke, to romantic notions of the Sublime, but also to a general desire for re-enchantment which was at the heart of the romantic cultural project (Löwy and Sayre 2002). Romantic culture re-invented wild nature as an enchanting source of wonder, inspiration and touristic entertainment (Nash 2014). Philosophers such as Rousseau, Schiller, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Thoreau and Nietzsche rediscovered in wild(er) nature a freedom, vital power or will-force truncated by modern civilisation, inviting re-enchantment by reference to an active concept of nature (Oelschlaeger 1991). John Bone therefore considers Monbiot’s aspirations as highly reminiscent of a search “for romantic re-enchantment amongst a sector of society disenchanted with modern urban living” (Bone 2018, p. 12). Considering rewilding’s general connections to re-enchantment, he raises the question “as how far the [rewilding] phenomenon [in general] might be regarded as being reflective of a contemporary form of romantically inspired re-enchantment, driven by a constituency disenchanted with the humdrum and artifice of contemporary metropolitan life” (ibid., p. 4). Rewilding, according to Bone, is a continuation of a romantic tradition of re-enchantment. The following section will explain why this is considered a reason for concern.

2.3. Critiques

The main critiques on rewilding as re-enchantment can be summed up as follows: first, the concern of anthropocentrism; second, caution against a nature–culture dualism; third, concern about binary oppositions in general. The first category of critiques cautions against rewilding becoming a project mainly in the interest of humans, thereby overlooking nature’s true interests. Such criticism claims that anthropocentric rewilding chases an imagined ideal of wilderness that humans want to restore for their own pleasure and enchantment. Feral, for example, represents a programme in which Monbiot frames rewilding “as an enhanced opportunity for people to engage with and delight in the natural world” (Monbiot 2014, p. 12). Further on, he expresses the “desire to rewild his own life, to escape from ecological boredom” (ibid., p. 11). Thus, according to Charlotte Wrigley, Monbiot is illustrative for a sort of “anthropocentric rewilding” which promises “authentic encounters of enchantment” and “encompasses (…) an embodiment of entrenched romantic ideals of what wilderness constitutes” (Wrigley 2020, p. 350). Anthropocentric rewilding, says Wrigley, is not only problematic because it subordinates nature’s interests to human interests, but also because it paradoxically results in a separation of humans and nature. While Monbiot’s project claims to benefit humans, Wrigley points out that it “ends up reinforcing the notion that this sort of pure wilderness can only exist on the periphery of the human sphere” (ibid., p. 351).

This is the second category of criticism on rewilding as re-enchantment: it upholds dualist ideals of wilderness and excludes people from nature. Originating in 19th century North American wilderness philosophy and the history of the National Parks, the idea of wilderness as a “pristine” area allegedly ignores and erases the history of human involvement with the land (Cronon 1996). Thus, the romantic idea of wilderness, dubbed “the wilderness construct” by William Cronon, is held responsible for the displacement of indigenous people, and for the general separation between people and nature. Rewilding, in its aim to recreate wilderness, allegedly reproduces this dualist idea and “attempts to erase human history and involvement with the land and flora and fauna” (Jørgensen 2015, p. 487). The “wilderness construct” is connected to the project of re-enchantment through its implicit promise of enchanting encounters in these remote, pristine wildernesses (Nash 2014). More generally, Luque-Lora warns that re-enchanting nature, in this way, may present the danger of reinstating dualist, “romanticised views of nature”, which “may mislead us into admiring it from afar rather than appreciating our interrelatedness with it” (Luque-Lora 2020, p. 9).

These two criticisms, however, represent a strange paradox. On the one hand, rewilding is accused of being “anthropocentric” when it is overly concerned with human motivations; on the other, it is termed “dualistic” when it distances humans and their interests from nature. If rewilding, even for the benefit of humans, can only result in the reinforcement of a dualist idea of “pure wilderness”, there is simply no way out between anthropocentrism and dualism. However, while it is certainly worth exercising caution against encouraging a typically modern distance from nature in contemporary conservation, many of these critiques are based on an insufficient or at least incomplete understanding of the “romantic” idea of wilderness. While a certain degree of dualism may have played a part in the National Park movement as a political movement, neither the general romantic artistic and philosophical representation of nature, nor North American wilderness philosophy, included a sharp dualism between people and wilderness (Woods 2017). Instead, the reconciliation between humans and nature constituted the core of the romantic poetry of Coleridge and Shelly, and of the philosophical projects of Rousseau, Schiller, Nietzsche, Thoreau and Leopold (Oelschlaeger 1991). The Romantics equally did not only turn to “pristine” wilderness in search of enchantment, but also to places which reflected long-standing human culture and history—ruins and sanctuaries, country-side villages and rituals or the Dionysian nightlife of the city’s underbelly (Löwy and Sayre 2002). Thus, re-enchantment is by no means connected to just one vision of wilderness as pristine, pure and hostile to human intervention.

However, re-enchantment may subtly invite other binaries even within the idea of reconciliation between humans and nature. A third type of critique points out how re-enchantment may be underpinned by a binary framework, in which (modern, urban) civilisation is framed in sharp contrast with the “enchanted” cultures of the past. Pike relates how rewilding activists perceived their own world as “an enchanted woodland realm of talking trees, animals, and fairies” in contrast to their targets, such as logging or fracking (Pike 2019, p. 145). Through the construction of contrasting worlds, activists made sense of their programme of re-enchantment as a subversive practice, but they also reproduced “binary oppositions between the destructive practices of civilisation and the liberating promise of “the wild” (ibid.). Thus, rewilding may invoke (re-)enchantment to reinstate the contrast between the disenchanted world of civilisation and the enchanted promise of the wild. Monbiot’s juxtapositions between the wonder and thrill of rewilding and the incomplete and “lopsided” ecosystems of the present reflect this discourse, which reframes rewilding as an escape from the humdrum, boredom and disenchantment of modern life (Bone 2018).

However, these “binary oppositions” must be understood as part of rewilding’s critical stance. Rather than pointing towards hard ontological separations, they are part of a discursive practice formulating normative guidelines for human action. The distinction can thus be seen as a shifting, qualitative distinction rather than a fixed binary. Re-enchantment and rewilding stand in sharp contrast to modern civilisation only insofar as the latter seeks to invalidate these practices. This point is important, for by criticising re-enchantment and rewilding narratives as the sole instigators of such an “opposition”, the contrasting hegemonic paradigm remains unquestioned. This by no means negates the necessity to caution against dualistic and essentialist tendencies in re-enchantment and rewilding (for example, the myth of “the noble savage”), but it is equally necessary to caution against the claim that every contrast is a dichotomy, for this may easily become an unabashed exaggeration aimed at undermining re-enchantment as a whole.

Qualitative contrasts are part of re-enchantment’s critical stance in modern society. Originating in romantic responses to the mechanisation, devaluation and exploitation of nature, re-enchantment can be seen as a part of a romantically inspired critical reaction against modern capitalist bourgeois society and Enlightened rationalism (Oelschlaeger 1991; Löwy and Sayre 2002). While reappraising human experience, the romantic project of re-enchantment was, however, not just aimed at humans, but constituted a more profound critique of mechanistic conceptions of nature and their destructive implications (Merchant 2020). This critical stance was integrated, in the 20th century, in the philosophical framework of disenchantment. Seen through this framework, re-enchantment emerged as a critical response to the modern paradigm and experience of living in a disenchanted world.

3. The Disenchantment of the World

3.1. Disenchantment as a Process

In 1788, the German philosopher and poet Friedrich von Schiller published a poem titled “Die Götter Griechenlands”, the Gods of Greece, in which he describes, with a fair amount of nostalgia, how the modern view of nature has changed due to the rise of modern science. Like others, Schiller finds inspiration in the literature and art of Ancient Greece to draw a lyrical picture of a “beautiful world”, which he relates to a fundamentally different conception of nature. This characterised the Ancient World, but in modernity has been banished to the “fairyland of song”. Writing a century after Isaac Newton published the Principia Mathematica, Schiller draws a sharp contrast between two different views of nature: on the one hand, the mechanistic view of nature promoted by modern science; on the other, the sacred view of nature of Antiquity. The contrast is a rhetorical tool through which Schiller criticises a typically modern conception of nature as dead matter, as shown in some of the poem’s most famous lines: “even unconscious of her own magic / like the dead drone of the pendulum / she slavishly serves the Law of Gravity / the godless Nature!” In German, the last line is “die entgötterte Natur”, a phrase that does not just point to a “godless Nature” but to a process of subtraction, of “dis-godly-ing” nature until only the empirical facts and mechanisms remain.

Significantly, Schiller’s phrase “die entgötterte Natur” was allegedly picked up by Max Weber, who coined the phrase “die Entzauberung der Welt” (“the disenchantment of the world”) in a 1917 lecture at the University of Munich (Weber 1998; Josephson-Storm 2017). The essay was published under the title “Science as a Vocation” in 1919, just after the First World War. Weber offers an understanding of modern society as a “disenchanted world”, characterised by rationalisation (the rational–scientific explanation of natural phenomena) and intellectualisation (increasing theorisation and abstraction). Thus, Weber proposes a framework to explain how rationalisation led to the modern belief that everything is, in principle, rationally intelligible, calculable and manageable:

“Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service.”

(Weber 1998, p. 139)

Modern rationality is employed for tasks which, in “savage” times, were performed by magicians, spirits or mysterious powers. But, in a disenchanted world, the belief that nature is rationally intelligible and manageable led to the elimination of the need to rely on these “incalculable forces”. This does not mean that one can always understand or control one’s reality at any given time (when my dishwasher breaks down, I do not know how to fix it), but it does provide the solid belief that one could learn to do so if one wished (I could take a course in mechanics, watch a YouTube video or rely on a mechanic). Living in a disenchanted world, then, means that one believes that one can, in principle (and sometimes, in the future), master one’s entire world through the instrumental use of rational thinking. Rationality is not an end in itself, but a means to mastering. Hence, the core premise and aspiration of the disenchanted world is not to be rational, but to use rationality in order “to master all things by calculation” (ibid., p. 139).

Though Weber’s “savage”, who employs the spirits, and the calculating modern scientist arguably pursue the same goal—influencing reality—in a disenchanted world, there is an increasing sense of control and domination. No aspect of the material world is, in principle, off limits for mastering it; thus, increasing control turns into total mastery. Simultaneously, the non-material world is made irrelevant. “Incalculable”—and therefore unmasterable—things, such as moral and aesthetic values, are pushed to the margins, as Weber points out in these famous, prophetic lines:

“The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world.” Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations”.

(Weber 1998, p. 140)

Charles Taylor (2007) interprets these “most sublime values” as the things in life that provide a sense of “fullness” or meaning to life. For Taylor, this sense of “fulness” characterises the enchanted world of pre-modern times. The retreat of values in the disenchanted world, however, does not point towards the total disappearance of meaning from life, but represents an inward retreat into “mystic life” or “personal human relations”. Taylor explains this as the retreat of meaning from reality into the subjective domain of the human mind. In the pre-modern, enchanted world, values and meanings are perceived as objective features of the (natural) world. These are represented by non-human forms of agency which can be encountered in nature and society (God, gods, angels, nature spirits, animals, trees, magical objects like relics and amulets, etc.). By contrast, in the disenchanted world, (human) minds are considered the only true sources of agency and meaning (Taylor 1989, 2007).

For Weber, disenchantment is a two-fold process, characterised by the increasing mastery of reality through reason and the retreat of values from the world. His framework shows how the disenchantment of the world is not just characterised by the decline of magic and mystery, nor by mere rationalisation. Instead, a certain use of rationality as an instrument to master reality, both by controlling and exploiting, is constitutive of the process of disenchantment. Instrumental rationality draws a picture of the world in terms of its immediate intelligibility and services. In this picture, the world itself is reduced to calculable matter and stripped of its intrinsic value and agency, open for the taking. Thus the “disenchantment of the world” is not just, as Weber puts it, the objective “fate of our times”, nor a neutral historical process, but an ideologically loaded narrative which turns into its own affirmation: the modern dream of total mastery.

3.2. Disenchantment as a Programme

This view was further elaborated by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in the Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment). Written during the Second World War, the Dialectic of Enlightenment was first published in limited edition in 1944, and re-published in 1947. The central goal of the project, according to the authors, was to find out “why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, p. xiv). Delivering a profound critique on Enlightenment, the authors propose the fatalistic thesis of a self-destructing, dialectical dynamic in Enlightened Reason, which serves as an explanation for the horrors of the Holocaust. The “dialectic” of Enlightenment points towards the self-destructive tendency in which Enlightened thought, operating according to its own fundamental criteria, cannot but end up destroying itself. The book is founded on the guiding thesis that “(m)yth is already Enlightenment, and Enlightenment reverts to myth”, indicating the author’s perception of Enlightenment not as a unique historical moment, but as a tendency within human Reason to liberate itself from nature by striving for the increasing mastery of nature. Founded on the will to dominate nature, however, Enlightenment cannot avoid turning into the domination of society, undoing its own project of liberation. Thus, Horkheimer and Adorno see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society.

The Dialectic of Enlightenment opens with the statement that “Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world” (ibid., p. 1). The authors immediately announce that disenchantment is at the heart of the modern project. Enlightenment’s first aim is always to master nature by bringing it under the power of instrumental rationality. Nature has to become fully intelligible in order to “establish man as the master of nature” (ibid.). The mastery of nature, however, cannot be obtained without distance and alienation from nature, for only “in thought, human beings distance themselves from nature in order to arrange it in such a way that it can be mastered” (ibid., p. 31). The necessary distance implicated in the mastery of nature comes at the cost of alienation, as “(h)uman beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted” (ibid.). Mastery and alienation imply each other, for it is impossible to master and manipulate without estranging the other. Thus, to enable the mastery of nature by reason, nature needs to be disenchanted: all mystery and meaning must be cleared out of the natural world, because “the mind, conquering superstition, is to rule over disenchanted nature” (ibid., p. 2; Stone 2006). Disenchantment is the programme of Enlightenment because it is a precondition and a legitimation for the domination of nature as much as it is a consequence of it.

The identification of disenchantment as not just the cause or effect, but the intentional programme of modern Enlightened culture is crucial for understanding how the modern relationship to nature is shaped by the story of mastery as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Enlightened Reason self-produces an ongoing narrative of “disenchantment” that perpetually promises mastery over nature through the triumph of Enlightened Reason (Vogel 1996). While Horkheimer and Adorno present a fatalistic account of Enlightenment as the necessary consequence of human Reason, other scholars stress the importance of the historical moment in which Enlightened culture originated (Walsham 2008; Merchant 2020). The programme of disenchantment could not have succeeded at any moment, but could only be successful through the transformation of the prevailing view of nature from an organic to a mechanistic model.

3.3. The Disenchantment of Nature

Alister McGrath points out that “the model of nature that has been implicated in this process of disenchantment is that of the universe as a mechanism—as a machine, devoid of purpose or goals” (McGrath 2002, p. 101). A changing conception of nature from an active, organic cosmos to a passive mechanism paved the way for disenchantment by enabling (the belief in) greater measurability and controllability while removing the limits to exploitation (Merchant 2020). This shift was accompanied by a theoretical and practical belief in the knowability, measurability and malleability of nature, and also, as Shiller’s poem illustrates, by an experienced nostalgia for the sacred nature of the past.

The pre-modern model of nature was organic. Nature was perceived as an active, living cosmos in which all parts had agency and were interconnected in the greater order of nature. The dominant analogy was that of a human body: nature was seen as a living body in which every part collaborated to support the whole. Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, the organic view “gave way to a mechanistic world view in which nature was reconstructed as dead and passive, to be dominated and controlled by humans” (ibid., p. xvi). Inspired by the technological developments in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, the machine became the dominant metaphor. Nature was seen as a clockwork, perfectly designed by an intelligent mind outside of nature: a purely transcendental God. According to R.G. Collingwood, both the organic and the mechanistic worldview see nature’s order as an expression of intelligence, but while in the organic world this is perceived as “nature’s own intelligence”, in the mechanistic model it is “something other than nature: the divine creator and ruler of nature” (Collingwood 1967, p. 5).

Two philosophical–scientific strands have been crucial in shaping this new conception of nature as a mechanism: Cartesian dualism and Baconian science (Merchant 2020). Cartesian dualism, with its distinction between res extensa and res cogitans, separated the passive world of nature from the active thinking substance. The natural world is reduced to the object of the mind. Thus, Descartes’ philosophy is exemplary for the inward retreat of values, representing a subjectification of meaning. Since agency and meaning are the exclusive domain of “minds”, they can no longer be objectively given as part of the res extensa. Similarly, non-human agencies (save God in Descartes’s philosophy) or spirits can no longer exist in nature. In a Copernican revolution of values, the living earth is rejected from the centre, and the human mind (through its direct connection to God) now takes the place formerly reserved for the cosmos as the central source of meaning. With God banished to a transcendental realm outside of nature, it is but one small step from Descartes to human supremacy as the unique source of value, agency and meaning (Taylor 1989, 2007).

While Cartesian rationalism represented the retreat of values from the world, Baconian science was constitutive in shaping the modern dream of mastery. Drawing from magical traditions, new metallurgic technologies and patriarchal structures, Francis Bacon, the “father of modern science”, developed not only the experimental scientific method but also a “new ethic sanctioning the exploitation of nature” (Merchant 2020, p. 164). This ethic is founded on the affirmation of “man’s right over nature”, a thorough “inquisition of nature” and the idea that nature must be “bound into service”, made a “slave” or put “in constraints” to instate man’s dominion over nature (ibid., p. 169). While the rapidly developing mechanical arts provided the technological conditions for the increasing knowledge and manipulation of nature, Baconian ethics provided the ideological legitimations for enslaving nature. This normative framework rested on a dualist and mechanical view of nature as dead, passive matter.

Merchant describes how Baconian science originated in the magical and hermetic traditions of the late Middle Ages and early modernity. Early modern science took from natural magic the “assumptions such as the manipulation of nature and the passivity of matter”, which were subsequently assimilated “into a mechanical framework founded on technological power over nature and the collective benefit of society” (ibid., p. 109). Thus, in the Baconian framework, society’s interests were pitched against the interests of nature, resulting in a dualistic and hostile view. This view changed the relationship between the scientist and nature. The natural magician, who experienced himself as operating within the organic order of nature, needed to respect this order—appeasing the “spirits” which moved within it—to achieve his goal. Thus, they were an assistant of nature, but nature was always the operator (ibid.). According to Bacon, however, this thought was a mistake. In a rupture from the magical tradition, the Baconian ethos elevates the scientist from nature’s assistant to nature’s ruler.

Thus, the mechanisation of nature lies at the heart of the modern programme of disenchantment. Mechanisation transformed nature “from something sacred into mere matter available for human manipulation” and “removed the controls over environmental exploitation that were an inherent part of the organic view that nature was alive, sensitive, and responsive to human action.” (ibid., p. 111). Merchant’s critical analysis of modern science explains how the mechanisation of nature constituted the precondition for disenchantment. The disenchantment of the world coincides with—and is driven by—a changing conception of nature from the active source of agency and meaning in an organic worldview to the passive and empty object of the mechanistic model.

3.4. Disenchantment as Everyday Experience

The central place of nature in understanding disenchantment may be underestimated by scholars who conceptualise disenchantment, following Weber, mainly as the secularisation of Western society. But the secularisation of society was preceded by the secularisation of nature even within the Christian faith, which gradually redirected religious attention from nature to a transcendental God. This had profound implications for people’s everyday experience of the natural world. “At the level of the common people this worked out in an interesting way”, writes environmental historian Lynn White. “In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence” (White 1967, p. 1205).

White’s account of Antiquity is reminiscent of Schiller’s poem, describing the natural world as infused with gods and spirits. These spirits included nature spirits and nature deities, sacred trees, wells, rivers, hills and other landscape features, representing the agency, vitality and personality of nature and emphasising the uniqueness of place. They infused natural phenomena with meaning, while enabling humans to communicate and negotiate with the natural world. Meanwhile, they provided practical and normative guidelines, determining the possibilities and limits for human action. “Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated” (ibid.).

According to White, however, belief in these spirits—and thus nature’s intrinsic agency, sacredness and meaning—dwindled with the spread of Christianity through Europe. “By destroying pagan animism”, writes Whyte, “Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects” (ibid., p. 1204). Christian faith diverted the object of reverence from nature to a transcendental God. Stories of Christian lords and missionaries defeating nature spirits or cutting down sacred trees are exemplary for the Christian attitude towards the natural world.

Though White’s thesis, first formulated in 1967, has generated much debate, many scholars subscribe to some version of it by pointing towards the importance of the religiously inspired secularisation of nature as a cause for the disenchantment of the (natural) world (Taylor 1989, 2007; Bennett 2001). Secularisation, in this sense, desacralised or “degodified” nature, while disenchantment as a programme of mastery brought desacralised nature under the control of instrumental reason. The true significance of desacralisation is revealed by its normative implications for human behaviour in the natural world: devoid of gods, spirits and (sacred) value, the norms and limits for the exploitation of nature collapsed. However, in ancient and medieval European folk belief (which persisted, in some areas, far into modernity), elements of the pre-Christian, indigenous traditions were still assimilated into the Christian worldview. Thus, it was not until the Reformation, with its emphasis on the inner life, its return to the original texts and faith and its abandonment of the material and more sensuous aspects of Catholicism, that the secularisation and disenchantment of nature were truly accomplished (Taylor 2007).

Returning to the implications of disenchantment for everyday experience, Taylor provides a phenomenologically inspired account of this process through an “intuitive” approach. Wondering how an ordinary Medieval person, living in an enchanted world, would have perceived reality, Taylor points out that

“they lived in a world of spirits, both good and bad. The bad ones include Satan, of course, but beside him, the world was full of a host of demons, threatening from all sides: demons and spirits of the forest, and wilderness, but also those which can threaten us in our everyday lives.”

(ibid., p. 32)

The omnipresence of spirits coincided with a sense of self as a porous entity, open and vulnerable to influence and manipulation by these spirits. The enchanted world, then, showed an absence of boundaries between the self and the world alien to modern society. In contemporary, disenchanted culture, individuals experience themselves as “buffered” entities (Taylor 1989). Under the influence of Cartesian dualism, the sense of omnipresence of (nature) spirits in the pre-modern, enchanted world was gradually replaced, in a process of subjectification, by a mind-centred worldview in which (human) minds were considered the sole sources of intelligence, agency and meaning. For Taylor, “the crucial difference between the mind-centred view and the enchanted world emerges when we look at meanings in this sense. On the former view meanings are “in the mind”, in the sense that things only have the meaning they do in that they awaken a certain response in us” (Taylor 2007, p. 31). In contrast, however, “in the enchanted world, the meaning is already there in the object / agent, it is there quite independently of us; it would be there even if we didn’t exist” (ibid., p. 33).

The enchanted worldview, in contrast with the mind-centred view, thus fills the world with values, agencies and meanings. It warns against human exceptionalism, reminding humans of the given value of the natural world. At the level of everyday experience, disenchantment can therefore be described as the great clearance of nature from intrinsic value and meaning. In this light, the resulting feeling of emptiness provoked by disenchantment is not just a nostalgic longing, but an instigation for a critical project of recovery.

4. Rewilding as Re-Enchantment: Critical Connections

4.1. Conceptualising (Re-)Enchantment

The following section will focus on this project of recovery at large, with the aim to develop a conceptual understanding of re-enchantment relevant to rewilding, ecological restoration and environmental activism. The following sub-sections identify and spell out the different aspects of enchantment and their critical implications on phenomenological, theoretical and discursive levels. Some precautions, however, deserve preliminary attention.

First, as mentioned in the introduction, it is not within this article’s scope to develop general definitions of enchantment and re-enchantment. Rather, the goal is to develop a useful framework for assessing re-enchantment in relation to rewilding as part of its transformative potential and critical stance in modern culture. Second, a note on the “re” in re-enchantment. As the reader may have noticed, I do not draw a firm distinction between “enchantment” and “re-enchantment”, and sometimes refer to both terms jointly as (re-)enchantment. The prefix “re” (from the Latin for back) refers to a certain retrospectivity, revealing the ambition to recover parts of the past (Jørgensen 2015; Corlett 2016). This retrospectivity provides an important source for critique on both rewilding and re-enchantment—in the former, generating growing support for the term “wilding” (Tree 2018). But changing the semantics hardly changes the fact that even “wilding” projects overwhelmingly look towards past ecosystems to define future goals. Retrospectivity, however, can be a strength when drawing attention to those aspects of the past we really have lost and which may be worth recovering. Provoked nostalgia has been identified as an important driving factor behind ecological restoration (Howell et al. 2019). In an assessment of nostalgia in rewilding, I have previously argued that nostalgia can be a powerful activist drive and a critical tool and that retrospectivity should be “recognized as a crucial part and even a strength of the rewilding movement” (De Vroey 2023, p. 359).

A similar argument can be made for re-enchantment insofar as it refers to a project of recovery. Whether spelled with or without the prefix, (re-)enchantment often presupposes the existence of an “enchanted world” in the past and the possibility to recover some aspects of this world (Meijer and De Vriese 2020). Recovery, however, does not necessarily imply return. Rather than forcefully restoring things to their former state, the project of re-enchantment is primarily aimed at shining a light on the enchantment still present in modern life (Bennett 2001). Thus, the re-enchantment of nature, rather than being a new invention and a rupture with modernity, can be seen as a continuation of a long-standing tradition which can be found everywhere outside but also inside of Western modernity (McGrath 2002). The difference between enchantment and re-enchantment, then, is that the first term may refer to either the pre-modern past or the modern present, while the second term presupposes and formulates an answer to a process of disenchantment which already took place. Thus, “enchantment” is better suited for indicating prevailing enchanting experiences and ideas in culture and nature, while “re-enchantment” refers to the related project of actively recovering these elements.

Third, the tale of disenchantment has often been criticised, simplified or misinterpreted as an attack on science, and re-enchantment has been framed as the simplistic return to a pre-scientific or even an irrational worldview (Meijer and De Vriese 2020). Popular understanding may interpret disenchantment too simplistically as the triumph of science and rational thinking over superstition and irrationality, raising suspicions towards (re-)enchantment as irrational. This view, however, is very limited. As discussed above, disenchantment does not equal rationality, but the desire for mastery, enabling the domination and alienation of nature through the devaluation of the natural world. Re-enchantment thus does not represent an attempt to evade reason, but to challenge domination and alienation. There is no fundamental conflict between (re-)enchantment and rational thinking. Re-enchantment is, however, profoundly add odds with the instrumental use of reason for the domination of nature.

Another critique concerns the narrative of disenchantment itself. Though the disenchantment of the world has been constitutive for the fate of nature and culture in modernity, not everyone agrees to its employment as a framework, and much less to re-enchantment as an answer. “Haven’t we shed enough tears over the disenchantment of the world?” asked Bruno Latour in his polemic work We Have Never Been Modern (Latour 1993, p. 115). For Latour, the romantically inspired story of living in a “disenchanted world” feeds a lingering, modern sentiment of nostalgia and regret, enabling modern Westerners toward “imagining ourselves as radically different” (ibid., p. 116). One problem with attempts at “re-enchantment”, therefore, is that they may accidentally re-affirm the programme of disenchantment, rooted in the self-fulfilling prophecy of the disenchanted world. In other words, as long as we subscribe to the hegemonic belief that the world is disenchanted (even in a lamenting or critical way), disenchantment persists. Latour therefore suggests moving past the narrative of the disenchanted world, which he sees as the self-pity of the modern West.

However, forgetting the disenchantment of the world will not reverse the programme of disenchantment. As a collective worldview, the disenchanted world lies at the heart of our modern assumptions about nature and ourselves. By presupposing that we live in a disenchanted world, modernity undermines the possibility and legitimacy of enchantment and an enchanted worldview. Abandoning the framework altogether means risking missing this crucial point. As Jane Bennett puts it, “the very characterization of the world as disenchanted ignores and then discourages affective attachment to that world” (Bennett 2001, p. 3). Disenchantment, then, is not just a story that modernity produces to affirm its own singularity, as Latour has it. It is also a profound human experience with dire consequences for the way modern humans experience themselves and their place in the natural world, and how they will treat this world in turn. Such experience cannot be reduced to a story, and can certainly not be abandoned at will. We may have shed enough tears, but recovering enchantment may still be our best solution to move beyond disenchantment.

4.2. Enchantment as a “Mood”

Re-enchantment can first be understood on the phenomenological level of direct (everyday) experience. Enchantment constitutes a certain state, an experience of wonder and awe, a “mood” grasping the wanderer in the wild, the lover catching a glimpse of his beloved or the spectator of a work of art (Bennett 2001). This aspect of enchantment is probably best known to modern life, corresponding to a not-uncommon experience of wonder and awe induced by certain objects, places or circumstances. Monbiot’s cited reasons for rewilding respond to the desire for the human to “be enchanted”, that is, to experience enchantment first-hand. Bennett calls this subjective experience of enchantment “a mood”, involving “a surprising encounter, a meeting with something that you did not expect and are not fully prepared to engage” (ibid., p. 5). According to Bennett, this state contains the following two necessary, if somewhat paradoxical, elements: “a pleasurable feeling of being charmed” and “a more unheimlich (uncanny) feeling of being disrupted or torn out of one’s default sensory-psychic-intellectual disposition” (ibid.). Thus, charm and uncanniness together contribute to a “mood of fullness, plenitude, or liveliness, a sense of having had one’s nerves or circulation or concentration powers tuned up or recharged” (ibid.).

While this mood can be sought out and cultivated, it is never fully under the individual’s control. Instead, one of the very characteristics of the mood of enchantment is that it constitutes a moment disrupting and challenging a sense of total control. Enchantment, then, is a mood provoked by something beyond the individual, descending upon a person from the outside (ibid.; Dreyfus and Kelly 2011). By breaching the boundaries of the self, the mood of enchantment momentarily pulls humans out of the “mind-centred” view and into the enchanted worldview, rendering them open and vulnerable to outer influences (Taylor 2007). While it may provoke fear or anxiety, this openness is also the condition for a sense of connection to the world. Thus, the mood of enchantment is, in Taylor’s words, the first condition for “a fullness, a richness”, a place where “life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worth while, more admirable, more what it should be” (Taylor 2007, p. 8). This sense of richness transcends the anthropocentric or individualistic undertaking of chasing the mood of enchantment for one’s own sake, for, in the enchanted worldview, the richness is part of the world, not of the subjective self. Through the experience of fullness, we realise the “world is not simply an ensemble of objects for our use, but makes a further claim on us” (Taylor 1989, p. 513).

Encounters with wild nature have long been perceived as powerful instigators for the mood of enchantment. Being enchanted in and by the wild is a recurrent theme from Antiquity to the Middle Ages to the romantic reverence for wild nature as a source of re-enchantment (Collingwood 2004). Wild nature indeed has the proper prerequisites for instilling a mood of enchantment. Equally charming and uncanny, the wild essentially represents these elements which lay fundamentally outside of human control. In that sense, rewilding’s emphasis on “reducing human control and pressures” not only constitutes an attempt to allow space for nature’s autonomy, but also provides space for enchantment to resurface in the landscape. In wild areas, humans are confronted with a myriad of others, living their lives mostly separately and indifferently from human lives, but nonetheless able to affect us emotionally or physically upon encounter. This paradoxical realisation resolves the idea of human control and domination, resulting in a sense of humility.

Enchantment and wildness therefore can be seen as twin concepts, pointing towards the limits of human control. As such, these concepts challenge the many versions of the prevailing modern narrative of human control over nature. In an era which has dubbed itself “the Anthropocene”, the idea that humans “are already running the whole earth”, as Emma Marris argues, has taken a firm hold on the Western environmental imagination (Marris 2011, p. 2). From Baconian domination and exploitation to the call for the global “responsible management” of nature made by contemporary environmentalists, these narratives promote increasing mastery, even when it is for the benefit of nature (Obst 2023). On the level of everyday experience, these stories limit the ability to perceive true wildness and enchantment in nature. By framing the whole earth as a controlled garden, wild(er)ness as a human invention and all natural areas as merely designed, this story indeed implicitly depreciates opportunities for enchantment in nature as artificial and anthropocentric. Thus, the narrative of total human management impedes the mood of enchantment and discourages attachments, obscuring the possibility that nature itself can be enchanted and enchanting.

On the contrary, wild(er)ness can be defended as a place where nature’s enchanting potential can be uncovered and recovered, replacing disenchanting narratives with enchanting experience. As Max Oelschlaeger argues, this potential to shift experiences and attitudes constitutes the true meaning of wild nature, for it is a crucial step in shifting worldviews. “Wilderness experience, in all its many guises, challenges the modern identity of Man as manager of the planet and as consumer of wilderness resources” (Oelschlaeger 1995). The mood of enchantment operates in the same way. Cultivating the mood of enchantment thus appears no longer as a romantic folly, but as a moral demand for transforming the human relationship to the natural world. Thus, it becomes a prerequisite to realise rewilding’s ambitions to “reduce human control and pressures” and initiate “transformative change” (Carver et al. 2021).

4.3. Enchantment as a View of Nature

On a theoretical level, re-enchantment challenges the mechanistic view of nature, which characterises nature as a passive and meaningless object, calling for human domination and mastery over nature. Rather than returning to the Medieval or ancient organic view of nature, rewilding generally subscribes to a new, contemporary model of nature shaped by the joint ventures of ecological science and the environmental philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries, integrating both modern scientific theory and some elements of the organic worldview, which stress nature’s agency and autonomy (Oelschlaeger 1991). These contribute to the rise of a new model of nature as an active and dynamic interplay of self-sustaining but interconnected processes (Collingwood 1967; Marris 2011; Merchant 2020). Rewilding, recognising the dynamism of ecosystems, the agency of nature and the foundational role of processes, is firmly rooted in this ecological view of nature.

It is worth pausing at the philosophical foundations behind rewilding’s central principle of supporting “self-sustaining” nature. Self-sustaining refers to nature’s ability to take care of itself, to restore and renew itself continuously, and to change as it pleases. This does not exclude the possibility for (initial or sustained) human intervention, which rewilding recognises as valuable and even necessary in many cases. Rather, rewilding stresses the limits to such interventions: they should be aimed at supporting, not manipulating, nature (Soulé and Noss 1998; Carver et al. 2021). In that sense, the rewilding ecologist should be more like the magician than the Baconian scientists, more the “assistant” of nature than its “master”. Rewilders can interfere with natural processes only when this ultimately supports the capacity of nature for self-sustenance.

In philosophy and literature, a similar principle is expressed more strongly as nature’s “agency”, “vitality” or even “will”-power. On its website, Rewilding Europe—Europe’s biggest umbrella organisation for rewilding—refers to “nature’s vitality” and “nature’s inherent healing powers”, stressing an active view of nature as an agent with powerful potential (Rewilding Europe 2024). For Monbiot, rewilding has no fixed end-point, but instead “lets nature decide” (Monbiot 2014, p. 10). Extrapolating nature’s capacity for self-sustenance into some sort of decisive power, he describes rewarded ecosystems as “self-willed: governed not by human management but by their own processes” (ibid.). Like Foreman a decade earlier, Monbiot was inspired by Vest’s idea of “self-willed” land as a valuable conceptualisation of rewilding’s aspired outcomes. Vest derives this definition from an etymological account of “wild” and “wilderness”, which he sees as deviating from the Anglo Saxon word “will”, referring to someone’s or something’s intricate will-power. “A wild animal is a “self-willed animal”—an undomesticated animal—similarly, wildland is “self-willed land” (Vest 1985, p. 324). Grounding his account in the presupposed worldview of “Celtic” and “primal” European cultures, Vest points towards the close connections between the enchanted worldview and the idea of wilderness:

“Nature worship among primal Indo-Europeans evidences a traditional theme of sacred natural places, free from desecration by humans and their technology. Such sacred natural places were wilderness in the deepest sense; they were imbued with will-force,—willed, willful, uncontrollable—and with spirit. Thus, they held about them a sacred mystery—a numinous presence. It is from this tradition that the “will-of-the-land”—wilderness—concept emerges.”

(ibid., p. 325)

Vest’s account sharply contrasts with the story of wilderness as a modern construct and invention. Instead, he situates the very idea of wilderness within a profoundly enchanted tradition: not in a mind-centred view but in a world infused with “spirits “and “will-force” (see Taylor 2007). In Vest’s view, modern culture inherits the true meaning of the wilderness concept directly from its pre-modern predecessors, constituting a contemporary continuation of a tradition of sacred natural places. Though Vest’s account appears somewhat historically unsubstantiated, its philosophical value is strong in pointing out the close connections between the essence of wilderness and the enchanted worldview. As Vest’s paper inspired both Foreman and Monbiot, his view of self-willed land is equally crucial in understanding the original stakes of rewilding.

The essence of wilderness and rewilding, then, acquires a new dimension when understood in relation to—and perhaps from within—an enchanted worldview. The prevailing enchantment of nature revealed through the notion of the “self-willed” is crucial for rewilding’s foundational principles. This notion reframes nature as wild, alive and enchanting, and provides the ethical motivations to safeguard wild nature from human control. Thus, the (re-)enchantment which is revealed through the acknowledgment of nature’s will and agency appears as a constitutive part of rewilding’s very ethical foundations. Preserving this enchantment, then, arises as a crucial part of rewilding’s task.

4.4. Enchantment as Relational

Moving from theory to practice, this last section explores how rewilding encourages enchantment with the natural world in a concrete project and place by recovering—or uncovering—forgotten stories in the landscape which were constitutive for the relationship between humans and the natural world. The historian Simon Schama points towards the prevalence of myth and stories in the landscapes of Europe which reveal the intense historical bonds between culture and nature. “Notwithstanding the assumption (…) that Western culture has evolved by sloughing off its nature myths, they have, in fact, never gone away” (Schama 1996, p. 17). Though these myths may lay hidden under the surface of the landscape, they are alive and potentially powerful, waiting to be awakened or uncovered. Thus, “the cults which we are told to seek in other native cultures—of the primitive forest, of the river of life, of the sacred mountain—are in fact alive and well and all about us if only we know where to look for them” (ibid.). Searching for these myths is important, for they point towards cultural history and identity while revealing the role of nature in shaping culture. Ancient myths bridge the modern nature–culture divide and have enchanting potential, enriching the mood of enchantment, transforming the view of nature and infusing place with meaning.

Returning to the opening example, Trees for Life shows how this idea is brought into practice. The Dundreggan Rewilding Centre opened in 2023 on Trees for Life’s flagship estate in Dundreggan, near Loch Ness. Following public consultation and the principle of involving people in rewilding, the organisation developed a biocultural approach to rewilding in the landscape (Trees for Life 2024b). This strategy resulted in the recovery of the landscape as an enchanting place through reference to local history, poetry, folklore, song and stories. Information provided in the Rewilding Centre touches on the ecology of the area and rewilding’s ecological premises, but the main focus is directed towards the historical and cultural aspects of the landscape. Information panels and applications inform visitors about the history of Dundreggan and the surrounding glen, places that used to be inhabited by the Gaelic population of the Highlands up until the 19th century. Attention is directed towards the immediate and symbolic interactions that took place between Gaelic people and the landscape, the latter being expressed in ancient place-names, stories and beliefs about the landscape. Plaques titled “Lore of the land”, “Stories of the sìthichean” (the Gaelic for “fairies”) and “Secrets in the scenery” refer to these stories.

Most stories feature interaction with the Gaelic Otherworld: the enchanting realm of the fairies and other figures of Gaelic folklore. The Otherworld was the realm of the fairies, “spirits” or “will-forces”. The Otherworld was not a separated, esoteric or supernatural realm, but a parallel world that made its presence known in and through the landscape (Langhorne 2019). The Otherworld gave meaning to places and to human interactions with the natural world, warning, limiting or enabling certain practices. Thus, the Otherworld constituted the very heart of nature itself, disclosing nature’s essence and meaning (McIntosh 2001). Its true significance is not just revealed by its story-value, but by its normative implications for human behaviour in the natural world.

Uncovering the Otherworld is crucial for uncovering these past relationships and their ethical implications. Retelling enchanting tales, like the stories of the Fianna or the sìthichean, recognises the importance of these stories for the Gaelic worldview and relationship to the landscape. Today, Dundreggan is largely uninhabited, but through the presentation of stories, songs and beliefs, Trees for Life acknowledges that the “natural” landscape is in fact shaped by a past in which nature and culture were deeply connected. Drawing attention to ancient tales and beliefs is important, for they provide an understanding of “other ways of understanding and using the land, and of a people deeply connected to their environment” (A Living Landscape/Tìr bheò 2023). Uncovering the Otherworld in this way offers the visitor a different view on the natural world, transforming the landscape from a passive place that is acted upon to an active environment that exposes its own enchanting power (Langhorne 2019).

Trees for Life’s venture corresponds to what Schama identifies as a main task in reshaping the relationship between humans and the landscape: performing “an excavation below our conventional sight-level to recover the veins of myth and memory that lie beneath the surface” (Schama 1996). While Schama undertakes this excavation as a theoretical exercise, his framework is useful to understand Trees for Life’s approach in Dundreggan. Rewilding of this sort undertakes an excavation in search of the nature myths which underpin the culture and place it operates in, and thus ultimately its own undertaking. Rewilding’s “excavation” of the landscape uncovers a relational view of place through which the landscape is recognised as an active force generating (cultural) meanings, stories and values (Ogden 2011).

Such a relational view is crucial for an enchanting worldview. Enchantment, after all, is first and foremost a relational practice, encouraging connections between the individual and the world. After all, enchantment is a product of, and a precondition for, an openness to the world, which allows for meaningful existence, fullness and a sense of belonging (Taylor 2007; Dreyfus and Kelly 2011). Such openness to the world starts, not in abstractions, but as a situated experience, as an openness to place. Biocultural rewilding can foster such an openness to place by emphasising its persistent wild and enchanted character in the past and present, adding important meanings to the landscape through reference to an enchanted worldview. Avoiding anthropocentrism and dualism, this view acknowledges the non-human agency of the natural world, as well as the profound connection between humans and place. Thus, rewilding becomes a powerful re-enchanting practice, not just by uncovering the nature myths of the enchanted world, but also by discursively disclosing a wilder, fuller and more enchanting landscape, which can provide a better place for people to live.

5. Conclusions

Through an account of rewilding as re-enchantment, rewilding and enchantment arise, not just as two different answers to the disenchantment of the world, but as interconnected practices aimed at the transformation of modern culture. This account suggests that re-enchantment may even be crucial for rewilding’s foundational principles and core ethos. Thus, rewilding relies on (re-)enchantment to formulate alternatives to modern paradigms of nature and to bring about a necessary “paradigm shift” in the relationship between humans and nature.

But assessing re-enchantment in relation to rewilding also draws attention to the value of re-enchantment as a profoundly relational concept that is useful in understanding, transforming and rekindling the contemporary human relationship to the natural world. We may indeed have shed enough tears about the disenchantment of the world, but disenchantment is more than just a story of loss that keeps us focused on the past. It provides the very foundations and legitimations for the accelerated modern destruction of the natural world. Therefore, re-enchanting stories show important critical and normative potential in the face of the ecological crisis.

As a discursive practice, the value of re-enchantment is proven by its ability to recover—or rather uncover—enchanting aspects of the natural world, and an enchanted worldview which prevails in the margins of modern culture, challenging and criticising modernity’s self-affirming story of disenchantment. On a phenomenological level, the cultivation of a “mood” of enchantment in nature formulates an answer to the disenchanted experience of loss and emptiness. This mood has normative implications, calling for humility and restraints to human domination and control. On a theoretical level, recovering enchantment means shifting the mechanistic view of nature as passive to an understanding of nature as active and intrinsically meaningful. This understanding of nature as self-willed constitutes the ethical legitimations for rewilding’s principle of diminishing human control. On a discursive level, the re-enchantment of place through stories fosters human attachments and connections to the landscape. Here, rewilding and re-enchantment emerge as relational practices, challenging the nature-culture dualism while bridging between ecological restoration and cultural recovery.

The true value of re-enchantment is revealed as its potential to challenge the modern narrative of disenchantment and the view that our modern, scientific world is necessarily disenchanted. A disenchanting world clears stories of agency and value out of the landscape in order to appropriate the “empty” landscape. An enchanting tale, like rewilding, on the contrary, stresses a character of “fullness”, not only in the human experience, but in the natural world itself. Enchanting stories from the past infuse the world and the landscape with such “fullness”, as do enchanting stories produced by contemporary rewilding science, practice or imagination.

In rewilding, humans obtain the opportunity to employ science and rational thinking in favour of natural autonomy, agency and abundance; using rationality, not against, but in support of nature. Thus, rewilding shows, in a very practical and concrete way, that enchantment still prevails in modernity; that, even within modern life, the possibility is retained to formulate alternatives for the disenchantment of the world without sacrificing science or reason. Rewilding, then, might point humanity, not only towards a more enchanting, but also towards a much more reasonable relationship with the natural world.