Maybe its because I come from a campaigning background, but I am surprised by how many in the wildlife/conservation world of the UK view conflict itself as a failure. It's played into the rewilding debate. To my mind if you espouse a radical new paradigm, expect fights. 1/9

If you are proposing a new way of looking at and valuing land and developing a new set of values, it will naturally lead to disagreement. That in itself is not a huge problem to me as long as you are decent and fair and make progress. 2/9

I've worked on wildlife around the world and spent 10+ years fighting battles on renewables and climate and other things. Of course the oil companies and their followers were against renewables - it was a threat to them. So we had fights, and in the end we have largely won. 3/9

Similarly my wildlife experience was either campaigning or outside the UK, so I was not entangled in the business of having to persuade landowners to improve things softly softly. This goes for many of the other early adopters of rewilding I can think of. 4/9

The land/conservation business has a different set of battles, by necessity largely working with the vested interests rewilding seeks to go around. It often sees conflict as failure, as it threatens the gradual process of improvement and the land balancing act they seek. 5/9

This makes sense. But it in part why the arguments around parts of rewilding are often dull. They are among people looking at things from different ways. To a rewilder we start with nearly zero rewilding, so arguments or not progress is progress. 6/9

If agriculture dislikes rewilding, that's ok because were not addressing our arguments to them. They are in the business of farming, and that's fine, we need food, but rewilding is not farming, it is about taking some land out of farming, so why would we expect their support? 7/9

Similarly we would never expect the meat industry to support a campaign to reduce meat consumption. You should never need to be unpleasant, but if you propose that, expect a fight. It is not in itself a failure. 8/9

It's why I think too much effort has gone into worrying about whether the term rewilding is controversial. By and large I do not think it is the term that is controversial, but what it is. Which is a challenge to the status quo. 9/9