Thoughts on Rewilding and Extraction

EXTRACTION IS A MYTH or is it?

Oxygen Rewilding is a private conservation company focussed on large-scale rewilding in the UK with properties in Wales, Scotland, and England, and it is led by founder and CEO Dr Rich Stockdale. I’ve been critical of their communications approach before, specifically of a video they produced purporting to be about the sale of a ‘private’ island off the coast of Bute. That video (below) is one of the worst bits of rewilding comms I’ve ever seen — a finely tuned blend of bullshit (there aren’t any private islands in Scotland, where there is a right to roam), entrepreneur-brain platitudes, and ignorance (they seem to initially be on the wrong island).

As a start-up bro styled company that’s rapidly grown to sitting on hundreds of millions in land assets, they seem to have caught some criticism, and they are taking it VERY WELL, and not at all personally, with Rich himself penning an article explaining why actually, all their critics are sort of lefty loony anti-capitalists who are somehow doing the bidding of the real destroyers of the countryside (whom I have started to refer to as ‘big farma’).

Here is the article in question, in all its furious glory.

Although I can’t help but dissect it, there’s actually quite a bit that I agree with in there — rewilding is not the same as mining, monocultures, or deep sea dredging. Landscape scale restoration needs to happen, urgently, and private capital is probably necessary to get it done. Rewilding has also been shown, in many instances, to increase employment levels on landscapes that are in dire need of people and jobs alike.

I think actually though, the most interesting thing about this article is its tone. Complete with ALL CAPS in the title, it somehow manages to be both aggressive and defensive, but also, just like the Bute video it is astoundingly tone deaf.

The context is that this is a company that manages more than 43,000 acres, with much of that funded by private investment and loans from backers such as Triodos, but also by Government funding. Their promo is relentless, with podcasts, a busy youtube channel — in short, if you are in their space, they’re pretty hard not to have in your face. Their funding streams will likely include public funding, or funding from projects that impact the public in a major way. They’re in your face, and the public interest in how they’re getting on and what they’re up to is obvious.

In Rich’s article, critics are dismissed out of hand as ‘lazy’ anti-capitalists, but to my mind, this dismissal is the lazy part. Real people, in and around the land that Oxygen wish to be trusted as benevolent profiteers of, have little reason to believe that this wave of capital come to line pockets anew will be different to the last few waves, be it mineral extraction, swapping subsistence farming for grouse shoots, deer stalking or sheep. Doesn’t the whole thing seem a little over-sensitive? What is a little light criticism to what’s a company growing this fast, and with so much financial clout?

The real critique of the Oxygen model isn’t some strawman about clinging to monocultures nor does it come from ‘big farma’; it’s that we want to know exactly how you make your money from our landscape, and what the implications are. People deserve this transparency and their questions shouldn’t be met with this kind of hysteria. Neither will vague notions of increasing the landscape value do; we know you have shareholders to reward, and tens of millions of pounds of loans to repay. What’s the asset realisation picture, long-term?

Rich touches on the (apparently non-existent) conflict between profit and positive impact, and that the two things absolutely do not compete. Well, don’t tell me that, I’m from Wales and our experience tells us a different story.

Where profit is prioritised above all else, and communities are granted no ownership or power, extraction has been the start, the middle, and the end of the story. Until this is acknowledged and understood, rewilding will face huge challenges everywhere it’s tried, and even the best projects will be tarred with the same brush. Try telling the people of Merthyr, of Bethesda, of Glyn Ebwy, and Aberdare that the profit motive had nothing to do with it. And they’ll tell you to fuck off!

The truth is that people are right to question whether their communities are truly partners in these endeavours. They are allowed to ask whether asset conversion is the only way to save nature. Some are already recognising this - Community Energy Wales are reckoning with same problems transposed onto the energy industry, and have come up with solutions grounded in shared ownership (read their excellent manifesto here).

At the end of the day, the onus is very much on companies like Oxygen to win the rest of us over, and based on the tone of this article, I think they need to gain a little self-awareness before they can do so.

I’ll leave it with this bit of Welsh wisdom:

“yr euog a ffu heb neb yn eu herlid”. 🏃‍♂️💨

[It’s the guilty who flee with nobody in pursuit]

Food for thought!💭