Passive rewilding

Passive rewilding refers to actively unmanaged environments that are allowed to regain natural dominance, typically after their abandonment. A type of rewilding, passive rewilding aims to restore natural ecosystem processes via minimal or the total withdrawal of direct human management of the landscape, Passive rewilding allows natural processes to restore themselves, and enables a particular level of chaos as woodlands reclaim land, species to return and ecological disturbances like wildfires, pests and floods contribute to the area.

Sometimes referred to as nature's reclamation, it differs from other forms of rewilding in that direct human management or intervention is completely absent, whereby the environment is subsequently overgrown and occupied by natural elements on its own. In 1998, science fiction author Bruce Sterling coined the term involuntary park to describe previously inhabited areas that for environmental, economic, or political reasons have lost their value for technological functionalism and been allowed to return to an overgrown, feral state.

Passive rewilding includes abandoned human settlements and developments, such as post-agricultural lands for instance, that are intentionally left undisturbed and later become spontaneously overtaken by foliage and wild animals. Such occurrences are known to exist in numerous locations around the world. Degraded or abandoned land is actually the forefront of a global reforestation.

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