This website is about Wildernis.
Not the wildernis of the steppes of Africa, the rainforests of South America, the icecaps of the poles, or the large deserts or mountains of the world.
On this site it concerns the old cultural landscape of Europe, with a history of thousands of years of human use, that has been reshaped completely by human hands.
What has been left of wildernis in this old land ? Is there still space left for wildernis in modern urbanised Europe ?
Everywhere in Western Europe people have plans and projects that express a longing to restore in the Old World spontaneous natural processes that are not steered by human hands.
Rivers are repopulated with beavers. In the Pyrenees mountains, bears reappear. On many places, in many projects, from Estonia to southern France, people are experimenting with natural grazing by wild living cattle and horses.
The few remaining natural rivers, as the Loire and Allier in France, or parts of the Danube in Hungary, are becoming places of pelgrimage for people who want to see how a natural river in their own continent looks like. It inspires them to rewild the canalised rivers in their own neighborhood.
At the same time as in the big urban areas the distance to nature seems to grow larger then ever, there is a need to experience natural processes that are not directed by human influence.
Revitalising european nature has more than a spiritual meaning . Tourism and recreation profit strongly from these developments, and my form a substantial way of earning an income. Extensive forms of agriculture will become a source of exclusive natural products.
Revitalising nature means as well restoring the sources of sustainable use of plants and animals that live wild in the restored ecosystems. If gathered out of the abundance of nature as a way of regulating their numbers the meat of animals like wild cattle, european buffalo, elks, deer, roedeer, wild horses, boar, rabbits, geese and ducks my become the very best of Europe. In healthy rivers, lots of fish are to be caught. On the land there is wood, and reed, nuts and fruits, herbs and honey.
Ecological and morphological processes that are hampered for hundreds of years, prove to be vital enough to revive within a few years.
On wildernis.com demonstration areas will be presented, and plans and projects, books, reports and films. A growing number of links will bring you to projects of nature developement all over Europe.

Listen to the SOUND OF THE WILDERNIS:
forgotten in Western Europe
still present in the Eastern part,
and spontanuously returning in our modern landscape.