Redefining Human Rewilding: Expanding Ecological Thought Beyond the Oikos

This commentary investigates the concept of human rewilding as a transformative movement and bottom-up philosophy that aims to reconnect people with their less domesticated, more spontaneous selves while challenging human supremacist beliefs and power structures. It critiques the traditional view of nature as an oikos, or house, as a repressive biopolitical metaphor of control through management and organization, and the creation of false divisions between humans and the more-than-human world. It proposes a shift toward ecological messy entanglements and multispecies co-stewardship. Integrating ecological and decolonial viewpoints, it explores how human rewilding intersects with cultural resistance and environmental activism, drawing inspiration from the work of Sarah Pike, and stresses the importance of rethinking our role within the biosphere through non-anthropocentric lenses. Through an examination of cultural and philosophical underpinnings, the essay underscores human rewilding’s potential to nurture endurable ways of living, increase biocultural diversity, and support ecological autonomies that transcend normative ideas of nature and their ontological violence toward humans and non-humans alike.