DAVID KORTEN | May 6, 2026
We are rapidly dismantling the living systems on which our future depends—forests that regulate climate, wetlands that filter water, grasslands that sustain biodiversity, and migration corridors that keep ecosystems whole. These losses are undermining water security, food systems, and climate stability.
The Growing Rewilding Movement
A counter to this story of degradation is the growing worldwide rewilding movement. Its purpose is to restore large living landscapes and the ecological processes that sustain them. The time has come to ask how we can learn from—and build on—the experience of these emerging efforts.
Much of this work is made possible by a small number of extraordinarily wealthy individuals who are directing significant portions of their fortunes toward large-scale ecological restoration. They carry a deep sense of responsibility for how their privilege can be used in service to the living Earth and all its people.
One such couple is Douglas and Kristine Tompkins. I first met Doug and Kris some 20 years ago. I knew Doug, co-founder of Esprit clothing, as a funder of the International Forum on Globalization, of which I was for many years an active member. In 2004, I had the privilege of spending a week at the Tompkins’ Patagonian ranch. Doug took me on flights over their vast and magnificent lands. Together Doug and Kris directed their personal fortune to buying and restoring lands, which they then turned over to the Chilian and Argentine governments to become vast public parklands. They thus transformed their private wealth into enduring public ecological assets.
Another such philanthropist is Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss citizen and long-time U.S. resident who built his fortune through the medical device company Synthes. He has committed billions of dollars through philanthropic organizations to protect lands worldwide. His support includes major contributions to conserve Romania’s Carpathians, and to the global 30×30 initiative—an international effort to protect at least 30 percent of Earth’s land and oceans by 2030. Wyss is also a major contributor to African Parks, which now manages protected areas in partnership with governments and local communities in 12 countries across Africa. Some large-scale conservation efforts, including those led by organizations such as African Parks, have faced criticism for excluding or mistreating local communities—an important reminder that rewilding must be grounded in respect for human rights, Indigenous knowledge, and shared governance if it is to succeed over the long term.
In the United States, where land is divided among public agencies, private owners, and Indigenous nations, rewilding is emerging as part of a complex mosaic of multi-owner landscapes that link wild cores, working lands, and community stewardship across entire regions. Examples are the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative and Montana’s American Prairie project. These examples demonstrate that rewilding is not confined to sparsely inhabited places like Patagonia. It can take root where people live, work, and share responsibility for the land.
A Spectrum of Human Habitation
We can envision rewilded landscapes on a spectrum of human habitation. At one end are core wild areas—places where human intrusion is minimized and ecological processes are allowed to unfold on their own terms. These areas are essential to restoring the integrity, resilience, and evolutionary potential of Earth’s living systems. But they cannot stand alone.
Surrounding these self-organizing natural spaces are zones of active stewardship, where rangers, scientists, and local communities protect wildlife, restore habitat, reintroduce species, and guide ecological recovery. Next are human-integrated landscapes, where people earn livelihoods through guiding, hospitality, regenerative agriculture, and other enterprises tied directly to ecosystem health. Finally, there are areas of dense human populations with diverse, thriving economic activity.
These zones are not static. A landscape undergoing restoration may need substantial human assistance in reestablishing plant and animal species. Later it may advance toward greater ecological autonomy. Rewilding, in this sense, is not a fixed state but an unfolding process.
Sustaining Rewilded Areas
Can rewilded areas be sustained over time? The evidence suggests that they can, but only if we abandon the fantasy that such areas can be supported though the earnings from ecotourism alone. Analyses by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and others show that tourism revenues are often volatile and insufficient. This also highlights a deeper tension: economic systems driven by transnational corporations seeking to maximize short-term financial returns are fundamentally at odds with the long-term stewardship that rewilding requires.
What is promising is a blended model: initial philanthropic financing to secure and restore landscapes, followed by diversified income streams from tourism, local enterprises, and ecosystem services, combined with long-term endowment-style support to sustain essential stewardship functions.
This is why initiatives like the Legacy Landscapes Fund are so important. The Fund provides long-term, dependable funding for exceptional landscapes, acknowledging a simple truth: even the best-designed systems require a permanent stewardship layer that markets alone will not provide.
That distinction matters. A forest, wetland, savanna, or coastal ecosystem produces forms of real wealth rarely recognized by conventional economists. These include carbon storage, water regulation, soil renewal, habitat for diverse species, and the conditions essential to life itself—along with beauty and wonder.
An Ecological Civilization requires that we recognize and value these forms of real wealth. A rewilded landscape should not be expected to behave as a profit center like a shopping mall. The relevant question is whether it can generate sufficient aligned economic activity to support the human stewardship required to maintain ecological integrity.
The Carpathian initiative in Romania reflects the blended model of support. Foundation Conservation Carpathia is restoring one of Europe’s last great forested mountain systems while building a non-destructive regional economy. Through local enterprise support and Travel Carpathia, it is creating livelihoods that depend on a flourishing landscape.
Europe’s broader rewilding movement has made explicit this integration of local communities into rewilded areas. Rewilding Europe promotes enterprises that generate income while supporting ecological restoration and community wellbeing. These efforts are seeding what might be called an “economic ecology” of locally rooted businesses whose success depends on a healthy ecosystem.
For now, rewilding exists largely at the margins of an inequitable global economy that continues to fragment and deplete the living Earth. In a profound paradox, many rewilding initiatives are funded by wealth generated within that very system. Yet what they demonstrate is not merely an act of repair, but a different possibility: an economy organized around regeneration, stewardship, and long-term care.
In Patagonia, the Tompkins-led initiatives demonstrate how private wealth can be transformed into public goods on a national scale—transferring millions of acres into national park systems while supporting surrounding communities through nature-based tourism and related enterprises.
The deeper opportunity is moral as well as practical. Rewilding at scale allows concentrated private wealth—often accumulated through global markets and industrial systems—to be redirected into a shared, living inheritance: forests, watersheds, wildlife, and livelihoods that endure across generations.
A Model for Ecological Civilization
We are learning how to design human economies as embedded parts of living systems—where some places are left to the wild, some are carefully tended, and others sustain large human communities living in balance with nature.
A living landscape mosaic is what an Ecological Civilization will look like in practice.
Please go here for David's website: https://davidkorten.org/
No comments:
Post a Comment