Herding Katz: Rewilding, paradox and domination

Eric Katz has recently claimed not only that rewilding is inherently paradoxical, but also that its paradoxes reveal rewilding's implication in the very mindset of anthropocentric domination against which it is floated as a partial solution. In this paper, I argue that rewilding need not in principle be committed to a pernicious anthropocentrism. With the assistance of an important distinction between ‘synchronic’ and ‘diachronic’ wildness, I firstly argue that rewilding need not be viciously paradoxical in any unequivocal sense. I then suggest, with the aid of Henry David Thoreau's account of synchronic wildness, that rewilding might rather be geared to inculcate hypersensitivity to nonhuman otherness particularly conducive to an anti-domination mindset. Hence rewilding may remain a live tool in responding to the challenges that characterise our shared world.