An Agri-wilding Scenario for a Regenerative Rural Heritage Landscape in Post-productivist Cambrian Mountains, Wales, UK

Abstract

The historical agriculture intensification has left notable environmental issues pressing to be resolved these days. In this context, rewilding was introduced into science as an eco-centric approach to introduce pristine wilderness back into artificial environment and allow open-ended and continuous natural processes to regain dominance in landscape. This passive management approach flourishes as a result of marginal farmland abandonment across Europe, has meanwhile sparked debate with farmers who live off the land that historically embraces active management. Paddock Rewilding investigates a middle ground to mediate and create synergies in two conceptually polarized value systems of heritage landscape and rewilding to combat the loss of vegetative cover and soil fertility that has resulted from nearly a century of continual harvesting and livestock pasturing. Inspired by the indigenous pathway of „shifting cultivation,” a pilot community in Cambrian Mountains, Wales, UK–Pontarfynach has been selected to demonstrate the idea of Paddock Rewilding and corresponding landscape intervention. The intervention employs timescale, traditional movement of livestock, and the historical rights of the Common land to treat the landscape as a temporal gradient to unlatch the potential land rhythm, and explores how larger territories can be elaborated into a „permanently impermanent” rotational scenario between „Rewilding” and „Dewilding,” to offer a possible alternative to envision a balanced and sustainable land management paradigm.

Keywords

Rewilding / Sustainability Management / Farmland Landscape / Shifting Cultivation / Neoliberal Conservation

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2021 Higher Education Press