How high techs change conservation strategies? A scoping review of the philosophical trace behind a rewilding 4.0

Rewilding is a novel approach aimed at recovering wildlife with minimal human intervention. Despite the philosophical roots of rewilding, the ongoing biodiversity decline motivates some advocates to incorporate emerging technologies, including de-extinction, into conservation efforts. This new artificial management of nature seems ethically counterintuitive according to the philosophy of rewilding. We conducted a scoping review to map how many academic publications addressed rewilding dependence on high tech, and selected a final amount of 37 studies out of 1279. While the search spanned 1999–2024, all included studies were published up to 2014. We found differences in purposes, expectations and ethical stances between each rewilding strategy (Pleistocene, trophic and passive) regarding technological applications. We consider that these disparities in how academic publications understand high-tech rewilding can lead to significant implications on conservation theory, practice and policy, raising up philosophical discussions. From the literature screened, we first categorized four recurrent views identified behind the high-tech rewilding approach (control and domination, ecomodernism, human-nature dualistic or hybrid ontology, and human interventionism) and we discussed them from philosophical analysis; and second, we reviewed five biases and limitations explicitly mentioned in the literature (methodological, economic, political, animal welfare, and anthropocentric). Given the boom of recent publications in academic literature and mass media taking for granted a rewilding based on high tech, there is a need for further research to discern what we mean by rewilding and what are the consequences of each understanding.