This chapter examines Shelley’s images of the collapse of human civilizations and the colonization of their ruins by a darkly resurgent nature. In particular, it places Shelley’s fascination with civilizational collapse and natural overgrowth in the context of recent conceptions of “rewilding.” It argues that “rewilding” as currently conceived by its leading advocates remains an irreducibly human project, whereas Shelleyan overgrowth conceives of a resurgent nature that both occludes and darkly perpetuates the ruins of humanity. A number of key moments in Shelley’s work are central here: his description in his preface to Prometheus Unbound of the situation of the composition of that poem; a fragment of 1818, “Flourishing vine, whose kindling clusters glow”; and the description in Adonais of “Desolation’s bones.” Through close readings of these episodes, the chapter shows that Shelleyan overgrowth represents what we may call a “dark rewilding” – which is for us, as it was for Shelley, a future that human civilization increasingly appears to anticipate. Shelley anticipates many of the conceptual and ethical complexities of today’s rewilding, articulating instead a more ambivalent, less obviously hopeful conception of overgrowth as the eerie perpetuation of the ruins of a disappeared humanity.

Prior to colonization, humans always used African buffalo for meat and other products. The arrival of imperial powers marked the beginning of more extensive hunting, reducing buffalo populations in large areas of Africa. Buffalo production systems exist today along a gradient ranging from extensive (natural habitat) to semi-extensive (game ranches) to intensive (game farms) systems. These production systems rely on four sustainable uses: breeding, non-consumptive tourism, consumptive tourism and production of meat and other products. Private ownership and agro-sustainable biodiversity game ranching with buffalo has recently expanded in southern Africa, especially in South Africa, where it represents an extensive and productive land use.

Every textbook of biology will supply a number of ‘modes of speciation’, the ways in which new species evolve. But the issues in dispute among the biologists themselves are rather odd. The adoption of evolutionary theory by biologists has had a great impact on how species are understood. From the idea that kinds of living beings were created and at best had devolved to localised varieties, now species were the target of a ‘mechanical’ or ‘physiological’ explanation: they came into being. And under Darwin’s version of the evolutionary account (initially known as the ‘development theory’, since the Latin word evolutio means ‘development’), species were made from other, allied (which means ‘closely related’), species. The processes and causes of new species set up the ‘species question’ that Darwin and other naturalists were seeking to answer.

What are species worth? Do they have inherent value or are they just of value to human beings? Do they have rights? Does their integrity as species have moral worth, and do we have a duty to preserve them, or to modify them? Are species of utilitarian or instrumental value? These are the questions that the third great topic of philosophy seeks to answer: axiology – the values of things, and the duties they impose upon us as ethical, economic and aesthetic beings.

For a long time, species have been thought to be the index marker for healthy ecosystems, for undisturbed nature and for conservation, but the reasons why have varied considerably. National Parks developed from a desire to maintain potential sources of timber, game and hunting opportunities in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and the turn of the twentieth century, as demonstrated in Teddy Roosevelt’s book The Wilderness Hunter; An Account of the Big Game of the United States and Its Chase with Horse, Hound, and Rifle.

It’s not enough to just list the clusters in the living world. One also needs to group clusters together within larger clusters. This process is sometimes referred to as ‘ordering the world’, and is called taxonomy, from the Greek word for ‘order’, taxis. In traditional taxonomy, begun in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and formalised in the eighteenth century by Carl Linnaeus, this meant that species were grouped together in groups called in Latin genera (that’s the plural; the singular is genus). As a result, Linnaeus gave each species a two-part name (a binomial): its genus name (which always has a capital initial) and its species ‘epithet’ (which is always in lowercase). So, our species binomial is Homo sapiens; we are the species sapiens in the genus Homo. It’s kind of like a street address – you have the ‘general’ name (the ‘street’) and the ‘specific’ name (the ‘house number’) (see Box 2.1)

There are several ‘enigmatic canid’ species in North America. One of them is the red wolf (Canis rufus, Figure 1.1), and another is the Great Lakes Wolf. Red wolves are seriously endangered, with a re-released population in North Carolina and breeding programmes being the last populations. Red wolves weren’t even studied closely until the 1960s, after having been hunted nearly to extinction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The title of this book is Understanding Species, and I have spoken at length about what we understand species to be and to mean. Now, though, I would like to ruminate for a bit on the ‘understanding’ part.

To understand something is not necessarily to have the One True Answer. Human knowledge, and especially its concepts, is in a state of flux at all times. Sometimes, this is because we are learning new things about what the concept refers to, as is the so-called rule in science (it sometimes isn’t). At other times it is because the concept no longer means anything (like ‘phlogiston’ in chemistry or ‘vital force’ in biology). But sometimes it is because the concept has been included into the ‘what everybody knows’ segment of culture. John Maynard Smith, a famous and influential British evolutionary biologist, called this the Bellman’s Theorem (from Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark): ‘what I tell you three times is true’.

As I have noted, terms for species are at best polysemic (that is, they are a single word in a language with multiple and often incompatible meanings), and at worst species is a term with no meaning of any real scientific importance. Now we will consider several replacement concepts, and the evolutionary and genetic considerations that make them seemingly viable.

In Chapter 2 we considered the extent of the different definitions as applied to a simplified version of human evolution and genetics. One of those definitions included a historical aspect – monophyly.

If there is an issue in a science, philosophers will attend to it. This is not new, either. Since the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century, many if not most of the problems that philosophers have addressed or formulated have arisen out of science one way or another. Books on ‘the philosophy of botany’ or ‘the philosophy of natural history’ were published from the late eighteenth century onwards, although ‘philosophy’ meant knowledge in those days, and included scientific thinking. Nevertheless, science has always been a productive source of new problems for philosophy to chew on.

One of the things that is often said about the frankly catastrophic loss of biodiversity in the world today is that extinction is a natural process of the living world, and this is quite true. Extinction does not naturally occur at a constant rate, however. It ranges from near instantaneous (as when a 12-km-wide rock hits the planet, causing a Very Bad Day for most living things) to a slow background rate of extinction of species that have been reduced to a relic of past distributions and population numbers. So, when those who do not think we are in a catastrophic situation say, ‘Extinction is natural’, point out to them that the present scale of extinction is in global terms worse than a 12-km bolide, at least in geological terms, for the geological record doesn’t distinguish easily between a one-day catastrophe and a four-century one. Both are ‘sudden’ events in Deep Time. As E. O. Wilson wrote, in his book The Diversity of Life (1992)

There are, says Professor Julia Sigwart, an American mollusc specialist (malacologist), species makers and species users. The former are the taxonomists, and they identify, name and record species in technical journals and store the type specimens (the original specimen that ‘bears’ the name) in museums and other collections. There are way too few of these. The latter – well, that includes everybody, according to Sigwart. She notes in her 2019 book What Species Mean (chapter 3) that looking out of her window she sees species of tree, animal, bird and other living things, and that this knowledge involves two main steps: knowing that something is different from other similar (or related) things; and giving it a unique name to communicate and identify it to other users, for the taxonomists are also users of species. Knowing and naming species are related activities, but not the same.

Textbook histories are how most scientists learn about the past of the ideas and disciplines they employ, and any textbook will tell you that the idea of species goes back to the classical era if not earlier. In a way this is true, but textbook histories are written by scientists, not historians, and they often repeat untested or false ideas for reasons other than knowing the past. Often, history is something to be used as a way of establishing the in-groups and out-groups of science; in other words, history can be used as a weapon in the sciences. So, some critical revision is required.

Plato’s theory of Forms uses a closely related term ‘idea’ as well as eidos to denote ‘forms’, which are eternal and beyond the physical. Plato, as with philosophers since who are interested in kinds of things, used biological illustrations, such as ‘horse’, ‘human’ and ‘dog’, but he did not think actual horses, humans and dogs were species (or members of a class of things) because none of them, not even Socrates himself, were perfect examples of their forms.

The use of conservation translocations as a transdisciplinary conservation tool to prevent extinction, recover populations, and restore ecological function is on the rise. The growing impact of reintroductions, reinforcements, assisted colonisations, and ecological replacements can be attributed to a number of factors including an escalation of benefits for species, ecosystems, and human communities driven by bold innovations and courageous ambitions of the global conservation translocation community. The inclusion of diverse philosophical perspectives combined with increased need, interest, scope, and policy alignment has driven a broadening of novel approaches, innovations, and tools, but associated aspects can be contentious. To advance conservation impact of conservation translocations, we group eleven of these contentious issues into three broad categories – genes, species, and ecosystems – and then reframe them as growth opportunities. Contentious issues can create conflict, but we suggest that identifying common ground on agreed conservation values, negotiating with respectful kindness, and advancing progress through collaboration will enable powerful advancements for effective conservation translocations in the future.

The Eurasian beaver has returned to Britain, presenting fundamental challenges and opportunities for all involved. Beavers will inevitably expand throughout British freshwater systems and provide significant benefits. Unofficial releases have presented challenges in terms of sourcing and genetics, health status and disease risks, the risk of introducing the non-native North American beaver species, and the lack of engagement with communities and resulting conflict. Agreed approaches require development using multi-stakeholder approaches to recognise and promote benefits whilst sensitively managing beavers’ impacts on people’s livelihoods.

The May 2019 IPBES emphasised the scale of the current biodiversity crisis and the need for transformative change, but highlighted that the tools exist to enable this change. Conservation translocation is an increasingly used tool that involves people deliberately moving and releasing organisms where the primary goal is conservation – it includes species reintroductions, reinforcements, assisted colonisations and ecological replacements. It can be complex, expensive, time consuming, and sometimes controversial, but when best practice guidelines are followed it can be a very effective conservation method and a way of exciting and engaging people in environmental issues. Conservation translocations have an important role to play not only in improving the conservation status of individual species but also in ecological restoration and rewilding by moving keystone and other influential species. As the climate continues to change, species with poor dispersal abilities or opportunities will be at particular risk. Assisted colonisation, which involves moving species outside their indigenous range, is likely to become an increasingly used method. It is also a tool that may become increasingly used to avoid threats from the transmission of pathogens. Other more radical forms of conservation translocation, such as ecological replacements, multi-species conservation translocations, and the use of de-extinction and genetic interventions, are also likely to be given stronger consideration within the wider framework of ecological restoration. There have been significant advances in the science of reintroduction biology over the last three decades. However new ways of transferring and sharing such information are needed to enable a wider spectrum of practitioners to have easier access to knowledge and guidance. In the past the biological considerations of conservation translocations have often heavily outweighed the people considerations. However it is increasingly important that socio-economic factors are also built into projects and relevant experts involved to reduce conflict and improve the chances of success. Some level of biological and socio-economic risk will be present for most conservation translocations, but these can often be managed through the use of sensitivity, professionalism, and the application of tried and tested best practice. The role of species reintroduction and other forms of conservation translocations will be an increasingly important tool if we are to restore, and make more resilient, our damaged ecosystems.

The rewilding concept was born only about 20 years ago as large-scale conservation based on core protected areas linked by corridors, within which top-order predators have been restored. The original vision of rewilding has become somewhat blurred amongst a plethora of projects branding themselves as rewilding. Broadly two types of rewilding can be recognised: trophic rewilding, entailing the active restoration of key species, and passive rewilding, the spontaneous and undirected return of vegetation and ecological processes. Conservation translocations, in the form of reintroduction and ecological replacement, are a key component of trophic rewilding, with the prevalence of reintroductions in rewilding projects increasing in recent years. Trophic rewilding is therefore the intersection between rewilding, conservation translocations, and ecological restoration, where reintroduction or ecological replacement of key species is used to restore lost ecological functions.

The goal of the Quagga project is to breed animals “indistinguishable” from quaggas, but this is impossible as selection has been solely for coat coloration. Genetic and morphological differences exist between quaggas and other plains zebras so that in the absence of selection for these characteristics it is untenable to refer to the rebred animals as "quaggas." Even so, these animals introduced into habitats once occupied by quaggas will aid in their rewilding. The relationship between the Quagga Project and conservation is discussed from the perspective of whether funds used for rebreeding could have been more fruitfully expended to conserve endangered organisms and threatened habitats in South Africa. Nonetheless, the Quagga project has been successful in inspiring support from a variety of people and organizations; as such, it could serve as a model for conservation ventures. The challenges facing wild equines are discussed with reference to Grévy's zebras and Selous’s zebras, especially climate change, habitat loss, and hunting.

Drawing upon the arguments made throughout the book, in this concluding chapter I argue that as well as negating humanism through a focus on the non-human, animal historians have an imperative to find subjects and actors who can be ‘necessary fictions’ for radical politics. The animal remains important in this but not as a destabilizing spectre haunting humanistic assumptions. The animal can be a radical subject through our recognition that it represents more than just the organism itself. The animal is a synecdoche for the environments that they emerge from and are reproduced within. To include animals in our histories is to value the ecologies that make possible their continued existence in the world. But lest this claim become an empty gesture towards a liberal, inclusive environmental politics, it is a radical position that needs to be attenuated by a critique of the commoditization of life and marginalization of human populations.

This chapter looks ahead to the prospects for conserving Africa’s large mammal diversity in an increasingly crowded world. These animals played an integral role in our evolution and our continuing fascination with them drives eco-tourism industries. Attempts to rewild the continents that lost most of their large mammas are misdirected. Those retained in Africa should be conserved to benefit us both spiritually and materially.