By the mid-20th century, the wild parts of the world had been trimmed and tamed into neat submission. Wolves were gone from Yellowstone. The lynx, once ghosting through the Scottish Highlands, was a creature of folklore. Vast wetlands had been drained, rivers dammed, grasslands paved over. This was progress, or so we were told. But something curious has happened in recent decades, the old world has begun to push back.

Rewilding, a term once confined to the fringe of conservation biology, has entered the mainstream. It refers not merely to protecting nature, but to restoring it, in the hopes of bringing back what was lost. In Yellowstone, the reintroduction of gray wolves in 1995 did more than restore a species. It reshaped the ecosystem. Elk herds, once unchallenged, were kept in motion. Riverbanks grew lusher. Songbirds returned. Beavers, long absent, rebuilt their dams.

Critics rightly ask many questions. Is this nostalgia masquerading as science? Can we really recreate lost worlds, or are we building zoos without fences? And what of people, those who live in proximity to these returning species, or whose ancestral lands are eyed as candidates for rewilding? These questions resist easy answers. But in the best cases, rewilding is less about erasure than reconciliation. It’s about weaving humans back into the natural order, not banishing them from it.

The Anthropocene has taught us that we are profoundly entangled with the ecosystems we once thought separate from ourselves. Climate change, mass extinction, the fragmentation of habitats aren’t external crises. They’re symptoms of our disconnection. The impulse behind rewilding is radical but intuitive, let nature heal itself.

Even in cities, rewilding takes root. Peregrine falcons nest on skyscrapers. Urban beekeepers coax honey from rooftops. In pockets of green, native grasses replace turf, drawing pollinators back into the fold. The return of the wild is not always dramatic. Sometimes it’s quiet, tentative, almost imperceptible, until it’s not.

Hope, like nature, is resilient. The arc of environmental history has long bent toward depletion. But we are learning to bend it back, if only slightly for the moment. To rewild is to believe that what is broken might yet be repaired, not to what was, necessarily, but to something rich and alive nonetheless.