In this talk I will argue that rewilding is giving form to a new environmental narrative that is different in structure and worldview from the dominant 20th century environmental narrative. An appreciation of underlying environmental narratives is important. This is because narratives are a guide to sense making in a complex and uncertain world and provide social movements, science and advocacy with legitimacy and purpose. Narratives create ‘architectures’ for the telling of normative stories about the state of the world and how we might act within it.
I will first outline the origins and core narrative elements of the traditional environmental narrative. I will analyse its wide-reaching influence but also argue that this has is based on promoting anxiety and constructing characters of good and evil. I will go onto suggest that rewilding stories lack the elements of the established environmental narrative and instead foreground new ways of thinking and grounded adaptive action, intertwined with ideas of nature as a creative force and the prospect of a better future for people and nature. I will show how the structure of this new narrative, which call ‘Recoverable Earth’, has similarities with narratives of mental health recovery and is fundamentally a future-looking narrative of empowerment, reassessment and change.