Across the worlds of travel, art and fashion, the arc of rewilding continues to bend “from extinction to distinction.”
The United Nations has declared the 2020s the “Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.” Books like The Secret Lives of Fungi and An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us have helped bring ideas of self-regulating ecology with as limited intervention as possible to the fore not just of conservation, but culture.
Stella McCartney is now an ambassador for Rewilding America Now, a New York-based nonprofit focusing on rewilding initiatives that preserve North America’s wild horses.
In honor of the 50th Anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, Oregon's High Desert Museum is hosting a retrospective of Andy Warhol’s Endangered Species series in December. (Two North American animals depicted by Warhol, the bald eagle and bighorn ram, are native to Oregon.)
Jamb, the prestigious fireplaces-and-furniture shop on Pimlico Road, recently did the interiors of Aldourie, a 300-year-old orange Baronial castle on the banks of the Loch Ness. The property is part of Wildland, a portfolio of hotels and rentable holiday lodges from Anders Holch Povlsen, a majority shareholder in the fashion retailer Asos, and his wife, Anne Holch Povlsen. Together, they have more than 222,000 Scottish acres to their name.
The goal here isn’t “stewardship of the land.” Rather, it’s growing trees, restoring peatland and countryside conservation. “We want our children and grandchildren to say: ‘They did their best.’ It’s a 200-year mission,’ Anne recently told World of Interiors.
Rewilding certainly captures bookings. The reintroduction of jaguars to Argentina’s wetlands after more than seven decades of absence means the Iberá Wetlands are now home to as many ambitious wildlife initiatives as properties. Hotel Puerto Valle and Rincón del Socorro, a pair of properties founded by Kristine and Douglas Tompkins, who ran the outdoorsy empires Patagonia and the North Face before becoming conservationists, offer exclusive access to Iberá Provincial Park — and the caiman, maned wolf, anteater, otter, deer, capybara and some 350 birds who live there.
As part of their ongoing project to help restore the northern Great Plains — home to swift foxes, river otters, pronghorn, grizzly bears, wolves and numerous species of grassland birds — the Smithsonian and the non-profit American Prairie recently announced new technologies to monitor endangered prairie dogs, North America’s only native ferret species.
