After Wilding
A speculative documentary about how rewilders envision the future of British nature
Rewilding is an approach to environmental restoration that seeks to repair ecosystem processes that have been disrupted by human activities. It differs from traditional environmental conservation through its future-oriented goals. Where conservation often aims to preserve historical landscapes by keeping them in stasis, rewilding has more open-ended ambitions that include reducing human management in the long term and building ecosystem resilience against the future impacts of climate change.
However, despite ‘the future’ playing a central role in the practice of rewilding, it remains difficult to imagine what a future Britain that has been significantly rewilded would look like. With the UK being one of the most nature depleted countries in the world and with narratives of the future being dominated by unavoidable environmental catastrophe, there are simply too few examples of wild nature to inspire our collective imagination.
Developed over the course of a nine-month design residency at Maple Farm, a rewilding project in Surrey, After Wilding is a speculative documentary that seeks to address the imagination gap facing rewilders in the UK. The film, which is based on a series of interviews with the Maple Farm community, explores how the imagined futures of rewilding practitioners motivate their present-day activities. Built using machine learning image and audio synthesis, the film attempts to reconstruct the community’s collective vision of what a rewilded Maple Farm would look like in twenty years’ time.
Part documentary, part fiction, After Wilding presents a vision for the future of British nature that is both grounded and radically hopeful. It aspires to reclaim environmental futures from those who preach narratives of inevitable doom and reaffirm the possibility of practical socio-ecological, cultural and political change.
Joe Revans
wildfutures.joerevans.com
hello@joerevans.com