[mapt]

At this stage rewilding is a matter of establishing lifeboats for what little remains before it completely disappears, not wiping the landscape clean.

You can't put the full measure of ecological complexity into a small cage in a zoo.

[nephihaha]

There are actually vast swathes of territory with very little human population. There is an entire continent which is almost completely inhabited apart from a few bases. Same with most of the Sahara and other such deserts. Or much of the larger mountain ranges. The world's population is not evenly distributed, and is mostly coastal even today. Even Asia, the most heavily populated continent has thousands of square miles with barely anyone in it.

We've already had some "rewilding" in Scotland and it was called the Highland Clearances. It resulted in the almost wholesale destruction of Gaelic culture, and most of the region's people losing their homes. Now we have billionaires and aristocrats who want to finish that process.

[mapt]

As far as I can tell, that's such an insane take I can't even recognize it as propaganda. The Highland Clearances had nothing to do with rewilding and everything to do with committing to better economies of scale in agriculture based on new technology... on top of (reading between the lines) a probable political imperative to deliberately wipe out the clans as organizing bodies, no different than dekulakization or killing all the bison.

AFAICT the Highlands (like much of the rest of the unpopulated parts of the UK) aren't wild now, they're a sort of overgrazed brownfield site with damaged drainage patterns that have been reduced to a handful of species.

[nephihaha]

Many of my ancestors were "cleansed" from the Highlands. They were forced out of their homes with threat of violence from the landlords, and their culture and language now almost completely extinct.

That isn't propaganda, it's something barely discussed. You've probably never even studied it before and you won't get a rounded view of it off Wikipedia. In fact some of the incidents (which included burning down homes sometimes of elderly people) would have barely gone recorded if it weren't for the Napier Commission which nearly didn't happen. Most of the incidents never did get recorded, because the victims were already in the big cities and other continents.

Now the billionaire Tetrapak heir wants to remove the few remaining people from the Highlands to finish the process. The super rich were always misanthropic and this is just one more example. They can hide their hatred of the common people behind environmentalism all they like. I doubt they care much for nature either. How much pollution has Tetrapak etc produced from its factories? A tonne more than any crofter ever did. But guess who pays? The peasants like they always did.

The Highlands were not just like "the rest of the unpopulated parts of the UK". They were completely different to many of them in multiple ways, even in language. They had been inhabited by people for thousands of years before abusive landlords evicted most of the population. They retained aspects of cultural and social organisation which had disappeared from much of Europe by that time.

This pattern repeats again and again. Most of the Irish were chased off their land by abusive landlords who ground them into poverty and famine. Stalin and other dictators forcibly removed millions of people from their ancestral lands by force and pressure.