As Lawn morphs into Meadow (probably much to my neighbors’ chagrin), Wild Ones move into this suburban Asheville Land. Rewilding seems to be working from an ecological standpoint, and the fecundity of late spring ushers in a flurry of Animal activities amongst the Wildflowers, Grasses, Clover, and more than a few invasive species. As I wander, admiring the diverse varieties of pollinating Bees and Butterflies, I disturb a nest of tiny Eastern Cottontail Bunnies Sylvilagus floridanus. I quickly back away, fearing that Goober, my Canine friend (who is an unfortunately avid hunter of little furry beings), might notice my discovery. Later, I observe their mother enjoying the Lettuces, Cabbages, and Kale in the raised garden beds. I have more leafy greens than I can eat right now, and have been sharing them with humans wherever I can, so I don’t mind also sharing them with the charismatic, cute, and adorable Bunnies who also live here.

 Later in the day, I notice a Crabapple Tree (whose abundance of newly formed little Apples had me prematurely and joyously thinking of future cider and preserves) has been stripped of its leaves and immature fruit by a browsing family of White-tailed Deer Odocoileus virginianus. And a Groundhog Marmota monax, who has recently taken up residence under the shed, doesn’t share the polite manners of the Bunnies when it comes to food distribution. Rather than nibbling delicately at a few leaves and then wandering off to enjoy some Meadow grazing, he yanks entire Plants out by the roots, consuming them with impressive, albeit alarming, comprehensiveness.

My cultural programming immediately seeks to divide these discomforting relationships with more-than-human co-residents into binaries of “good” and “bad” and seeks a “solution” to control or solve perceived problems.  Should I build fences? Leave Goober to solve the Groundhog “problem,” while simultaneously hoping he leaves the Bunnies alone? Trends in “rewilding” tend to portray a return to wildness with exclusively positive narratives (Li, 2018; Mortali, 2019). We are told that getting out into nature is good for our health and overall well-being and that the reintroduction of keystone species, such as Wolves, boosts ecosystem health and restores biodiversity (Bekoff, 2014; Foreman, 2021; Monbiot, 2017).

These stories carry elements of truth, but in places, such as Europe (and my backyard), where rewilding is currently taking place, the complexities of inviting the Wild Folx back into historically domesticated, human-controlled spaces are revealing themselves (Tokarski, 2019).

My chosen methodological approach to rewilding, co-operative inquiry, demands that what matters to co-researchers/co-inhabitants is not only accounted for but awarded equal weight to my own concerns (Bastian, Jones, Moore, & Roe, 2017), further complicating issues of competing interests with Deer and Groundhogs. A well-ingrained sense of human exceptionalism thinks in possessive terms – my Land, my Crabapple Tree, my Crops – but in order to foster not only my own flourishing but also to work with Others to foster theirs, I need to challenge the impulses of binary thinking that would label these interactions as entirely problematic and “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016) of the complexities of wildness returning to this Land.

I wonder if the psychological bifurcation of the “bad” aspects of Wildlife might cause humans to overreact to uncomfortable engagements with more-than-humans, such as by killing Groundhogs (which is legal in North Carolina, while relocating them is not) and erecting eight-foot-tall fences (which is the most-recommended solution on the internet to deal with Deer in the garden). Furthermore, seeing the wild world through the exclusively positive, rose-colored lenses of new age psychobabble, “we turn them into objects of admiration, beautiful and majestic, but still passive objects; or into ecosystem engineers, almost robotic in their efficiency. What we lose is the sense of these [A]nimals as independent agents that do not necessarily conform to our ideas and desires” (Tokarski, 2019, p. 59).  Pigeonholed viewpoints based on ideas, as opposed to real world relationships, prevent us from seeing the natural world in a holistic way that could lead to “possibilities of partial recuperation and getting on together” (Haraway, 2016, p. 10).

 As I rewild with the Land and all its inhabitants, and I dig into and deconstruct my conditioned responses to “problems,” myriad complexities reveal themselves: 

“…what seems needed to better understand the potential consequences of rewilding are approaches that seriously reflect on the resistance of nature and its disconcerting agency, the possibilities of coexistence with such agency, and the significance it acquires in our lives and in shaping our relations with nature. It is particularly the problematic aspects of living with such agency that form a challenge that we find difficult to accommodate and so must pay attention to—perhaps much more than we have so far” (Tokarski, 2019, p. 13).

Mateusz Tokarski (2019) suggests a hermeneutical approach, focusing on meaning, to attend to rewilding discomforts. In contemplating and researching meanings, I discover that for some North American Indigenous people, Deer represent the power of gentleness and unconditional love as opposed to force to foster flourishing (Andrews, 2010). In the tales of King Arthur, a White Stag leads knights of the round table toward the mysteries of their own essential wildness. In Indigenous European lore, the Celtic goddess of the Wilds, Flidass, drives a chariot driven by Deer (Ozurrson, 2018). The aptness of these meanings does not escape me. As I seek to shed my own cloak of domesticated conditioning, I must also learn to get along with the needs and interests of Deer and Groundhog co-researchers with an unconditional love that seeks to know them holistically – good, bad, and otherwise.

 I cannot and would not want to speak for Deer or Groundhog, but in considering what matters to them, I think it’s safe to assume that they want what all living beings want – access to food and shelter, safety for themselves and their families, an occasional treat, and spaces that allow for their own self-realization, whatever that may entail.  Groundhog is a complex, agentic being, both adorable and somewhat annoying, with a taste preference for cruciferous crops. I can protect early sprouts of Broccoli, Cabbage, Collards, and Cauliflower from him, allowing them time to grow for us both. Neither one of us will starve because of this delayed gratification. His existence is more precarious than mine, particularly with the ever-looming threat of Goober. My humanness allows me to offer him protection and safety, and by allowing this Land to rewild, plenty of wild food to enjoy while the Vegetables mature. This Land is his home as much as it is mine.

Unlike the sedentary Groundhog who lives only on this Land, the Deer range across a wider habitat. In watching them, I note the Land functions as a corridor for them, connecting two forested areas where they spend most of their time. They almost always take the same route, browsing whatever they find along the way. My human gift for reasoning suggests that I should probably find a different location for Crabapple. I can also plant other floral species to strategically attract and discourage Deer, thus ensuring their continued well-being, while at the same time protecting my own interests and increasing overall carrying capacities for other Wildlife.

I will certainly miss those Crabapples this autumn. Living together with Wild Folx, like relationships with all people, are complicated and not always perfect. The World Wildlife Fund (2016) estimates Mammal, Reptile, Bird, and Amphibian populations have been reduced by 68% since 1970. In 50 years, more than half of these sentient beings have been sacrificed on the altar of human greed, obliviousness, and selfishness. The least I can do is stay with the trouble and do my best to be a good neighbor.   

The wheel of the year turned this past week. To the ancient Celts, May 1^st or Beltane (which translates as “bright fire”) was a celebration of the beginning of summer. The fires of Beltane symbolize and rejoice in the Northern Hemisphere’s shift toward the Sun and the promise of the abundance of Earth’s fecundity. Here in the mountains, the drizzly, unpredictable days of early spring have passed into the certainty of above-freezing temperatures. The Bees are abuzz, Blue-tailed Lizards bask in warm sunshine, and Butterflies frolic amongst fragrant Wildflowers without fear of freezing to death.  Seemingly overnight the buds of early spring have erupted into a wash of greens painting the mountainsides, and the hopeful songs of avian suitors fill the air. The ebullient leafing out of Trees finally offers me the opportunity to definitively know their names, so I carved out some time for the painstaking tasks of counting, measuring diameters at breast height, and identifying the arboreal beings of the forested Land areas.

 A few months ago, Duke Energy and their hired assassins came through and brutally cut a wide utility easement through the middle of the Forest, cutting down 50+ year old Trees and grinding every, single, living Plant into mulch. Of course, this type of assault invites invasion by alien floral species, so it is no surprise that Honeysuckle shrubs and vines Lonicera spp., Asian Bittersweet Celastrus orbiculatus, and Multiflora Rose Rosa multiflora have sprung forth in profusion in the abhorrent vacuum. But seedlings of Red Maple Acer rubrum, White Oak Quercus alba, Black Cherry Prunus pensylvanica, and other native Plants have also answered the call to fill the void. Despite the horror of the ecocide, Duke’s barbarity provides an interesting case study for rewilding, providing a blank slate for more-than-humans to fill in with their own intelligent designs.

 I wrestle with my Western human ego’s desire to impose control over the situation, noting the strong sentiments for each species streaming in and out of my mind – annoyance (Multiflora Rose), delight (Chinquapin Castanea pumila), and hatred (Asian Bittersweet). I fixate on what I perceive as brokenness in this drastically human-altered place. As an environmental impact assessment specialist, I have been academically and professionally reared on such narratives, and media headlines serve to reinforce them. The climate is changing in ways never seen in the history of the Homo sapiens species. Air, Water, and Land choke on the byproducts of human technologies. Old growth Forests are being rendered into McDonald’s hamburgers and toilet paper. Species are disappearing into deep time at a rate three orders of magnitude higher than historic background extinction levels. All these things are true and overwhelming.

As I sit in the shade of a Dogwood Cornus florida Tree, enjoying a cool drink of water and a reprieve from the heat of the day, however, my attention is drawn to the abundance and variety of Plants springing forth on the Forest floor. Not just invasive species, but Solomon’s Seal Polygonatum spp., Sarsaparilla Smilax spp., and others emerge from the rich remains of the fallen. Earth’s capacity to perpetually regenerate life from death awakens in me the reverence paid this time of year by my Celtic ancestors. I find myself filled with awe despite my usual depressive affect. The world is not broken. Fixating on anthropocentric destruction overlooks the everyday miracles materialized by the trillions of beings who are busy at work crafting and recrafting Earthly reality. Perhaps it is the height of Western human arrogance to name a geological era, the Anthropocene, after ourselves. In fact, all beings, including humans, shape this world.

In thousands of years when humans are nothing but a planetary memory, the story of our life, death, nurturance, and destruction as a species on this planet will live on, an immutable history etched forever in geological time. The Earth will never be restored to an idealized, pre-human ecology (Donlan et al., 2006; Haraway, 2016), but it will always emerge, year after year, in a state of beautiful becoming. During our remaining time here, the chaotic reality of an increasing human population of almost eight billion people prohibits any ambitions for ecological utopias (Bekoff, 2014; Haraway, 2016), but rewilding can engage all planetary realities as sites for healing and coexistence, including and amongst the tangle of alien species in my backyard (Bekoff, 2014; Haraway, 2016). The Land here will rewild, but this will not eliminate death and suffering. Duke Energy will inevitably show up again, invasive species will move in, and the climate will change, but the ancient wisdom of Beltane promises that Persephone will reliably and predictably claw her way out of the underworld, miraculously morphing morbidity into new beginnings. And that gives me hope.