Rewilding Time in the Vale do Côa

Abstract

Opening For much of the twentieth century, both history and ecology were understood to be entities with a certain structure and orientation – gradually progressing along more or less linear paths towards states of increasing stability, set within a shared interpretive framework of succession and serialisation. Now, the storyline has shifted. We live in an era in which concepts of stability have been superseded by an insistence on contingency; singular linear pathways have been replaced with multiple, interleaving possibilities; coherence has given way to complexity. This general shift is evident in both ecological thinking and in contemporary discourses around time and history, and has the effect of troubling foundational precepts and overturning previous assumptions about the way the world works. Some have diagnosed this temporal and ecological upheaval as a signature feature of the Anthropocene, in which the deep past and the deep future are subject to unpredictable processes of interpenetration and cross-contamination, which converge in a volatile present (Dibley 2012). In this chapter, I aim to think temporality and ecology in relation to each other, through the concept of rewilding. In rewilding, I argue, emerging, alternative frameworks of ecology and history are fused, as the desire for restoration (to an imagined ecological baseline) is replaced by an embrace of radical ecological uncertainty (which draws on latent pasts to animate possible futures). In explore these ideas through reference to a specific landscape – the Vale do Côa in north east Portugal.