This Master’s thesis is a conceptual analysis of ecological restoration, also looking at the ethical implications that should follow from the concept. Ecological restoration promises an answer to environmental degradation and consequently serves as a major form of environmental management in the future. Growing human populations and their growing appetites have caused severe environmental degradation. Above all, strict protection legislation should be strengthened rather than watered down as is the current trend. If compensation for biodiversity loss is unavoidable, as it may well be, these losses must be made transparent and adequate reparation must embrace socio-ecological uncertainty, for example through a Multi-Criteria Evaluation framework. Given the risks that biodiversity offsets pose in bypassing strict regulations, eroding our moral responsibility to protect nature, and embracing misplaced technological optimism relating to ecosystem restoration, we argue that offsets cannot fulfil their promise to resolve the trade-off between development and conservation. Considering this range of values, we summarize the multiple ecological, regulatory, and ethical losses that are often dismissed when evaluating offsets and the " nonet loss " objective. We discuss multiple ecological, instrumental, and non-instrumental values of ecosystems that should be considered in offsetting calculations. We examine the irreplaceability of ecosystems, the limits of restoration, and the environmental values that claim to be compensated through ecosystem restoration. The " nonet less " objective assumes that the multi-dimensional values of biodiversity in complex ecosystems can be isolated from their spatial, evolutionary, historical, social, and moral context. I suggest that rewilding carries on some of the main themes of the wilderness debate, but considering rewilding broadly allows tensions and novel questions to manifest that are important to how rewilding should be discussed and understood going forward.īiodiversity offsets aim to achieve a " nonet loss " of biodiversity, ecosystem functions and services due to development. In the paper’s second part, I turn to three key issues in environmental philosophy in order to connect rewilding with the historic themes of: (1) the exclusion of humans from wild or wilderness places, (2) the ontological purity of wilderness areas through their non-human origins and history, and (3) cultural landscapes and notions of place. I argue that this breadth helps in understanding the wider interest in rewilding as an emerging environmental phenomenon. I defend the continued use of rewilding as a single term, despite its seemingly disparate usages, and I advance a clustered concept of eight overlapping characteristics as a way to conceptualise these. To these, I add secondary notions of rewilding from out- side the scientific literature that are pertinent to the meanings and motivations of rewilding beyond its use in a scientific context. In the first part of the paper, I work from definitions and typologies of rewilding that have been put forth in the academic literature. In this paper, I (1) offer a general introduction of rewilding and (2) situate the concept in environmental philosophy.
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