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Disenchanted Natures: A Critical Analysis of the

Contested Plan to Reintroduce the Eurasian Lynx
into the Lake District National Park

Alasdair Neilson

To cite this article: Alasdair Neilson (2019): Disenchanted Natures: A Critical Analysis of the
Contested Plan to Reintroduce the Eurasian Lynx into the Lake District National Park, Capitalism
Nature Socialism, DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2019.1680717

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2019.1680717

Published online: 31 Oct 2019.

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CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM
https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2019.1680717

Disenchanted Natures: A Critical Analysis of the

Contested Plan to Reintroduce the Eurasian Lynx into
the Lake District National Park
Alasdair Neilson
School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland

ABSTRACT
There is a need to analyse the environmental conflicts that arise out of species
reintroduction proposals and what these conflicts can tell us not just about
rewilding as a form of “conservation,” but also the broader societal conditions
in which the conflicts occur. This paper analyses the emblematic nature of the
contested proposal to reintroduce the Eurasian lynx into the Lake District,
where a complex history has resulted in both a distinctive landscape and
unique economy. It is within this context that the emblematic nature of the
reintroduction conflict must be analysed. The author argues that the
spirituality of the Lakes, conjured through the artistic expression of the Lake
Romantics, was within the context of the industrial revolution and the
processes of industrialisation, urbanisation, and rationalisation. On the other
hand, the proposal to reintroduce the lynx and the focus on personal
redemption and “wildness” are a product of the capitalism of late modernity,
defined by global capital and information flows, individualism, and the
extension of rationalisation and financialisation into the social and natural world.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 16 July 2017; Accepted 27 July 2019

KEYWORDS Disenchantment; rewilding; conservation; Eurasian Lynx; Lake District National Park

Overview
Introduction
The literature on rewilding has grown substantially in the last decade (Hintz
2009; Jørgensen 2015; Prior and Ward 2016; Deary and Warren 2017, etc.).
Yet there is a need for more studies of rewilding to account for the environ-
mental conflicts that can arise out of species reintroduction proposals. The
first part of this paper seeks to establish a theoretical framework in which
to understand the conflict that arose out of the proposed reintroduction of
the lynx into the Lake District National Park. Drawing on social theory,
this paper postulates that reintroduction projects can be underpinned by
the seemingly disparate but connected ideas of spirituality and capital

CONTACT Alasdair Neilson alasdairneilson@gmail.com

© 2019 The Center for Political Ecology
2 A. NEILSON

accumulation. It further argues that these notions can be understood through

the theoretical lens of “disenchantment,” which can shine a light on rewilding
and the conflicts that often arise out of reintroduction proposals. This is
especially true in the Lake District case, as it holds a unique place in Britain’s
cultural conscience, being the cradle of the English Romantic and environ-
mental movements. The area’s complex history has resulted in both a distinc-
tive landscape and unique economy. The fact that a campaign sought to
change this landscape by introducing a species that had not set foot there
for some 1300 years is symbolic. Through interviews and document analysis,
the second part of this paper presents an empirical investigation of this point.
It is hoped that the ideas set out here will provide a useful framework to
analyse rewilding projects, especially species reintroductions, in a new theor-
etical light.

Rewilding and Reintroduction Conflicts

Looking at the composite parts of the term “rewilding,” it is perhaps not sur-
prising that varying interpretations of the word exist (Deary and Warren
2017). From Robert Marshall’s (1930) article “The Problem of the Wilder-
ness” to William Cronon’s (1996) “The Trouble with Wilderness; or,
Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” few terms have garnered as much fever-
ish debate as that of wilderness and the wild. Coupled with the prefix “re,”
denoting a return to some previous state, it is no wonder that the aims of
the term’s application are often diffuse. This is especially true as notions of
“wilderness” are often constructed around false historical narratives of “pre-
civilisation” and the relationship between indigenous populations and their
environment (Cronon 1983). The fact that rewilding has transitioned from
a relatively obscure academic term to something of a mainstream environ-
mental discourse only confounds these issues further. However, as Jørgensen
(2015, 486) points out, this fact illustrates the power of the ideas distilled
within its conceptualisation, leading to an opaque word becoming an “envir-
onmentalist mantra” and “a focal point of large and complex debates.”
Species reintroductions are a sub-section of rewilding. It is normally these
projects that create the most contention as they are either introducing an
animal that has been extinct for millennia (proposals to reintroduce Pleisto-
cene megafauna into the US) or are introducing an apex predator into
environments that contain humans and farmed animals (e.g. wolves in
Yellowstone).
Despite growing calls for the reintroduction of apex predators into Europe,
relatively few projects have come to pass. The most famous example of a
species reintroduction conflict is the reintroduction of the grey wolf into Yel-
lowstone in the US. Farrell’s (2014) seminal work The Battle for Yellowstone:
Morality and the Sacred Roots of Environmental Conflict addresses the
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 3

broader symbolic nature of the proposal and subsequent conflict. Farrell

argues that the conflict over the reintroduction of the wolf was a result of
deeper moral and symbolic tensions. Rather than primarily being a legal or
scientific contestation, the conflict was actually symbolic of “cultural upheaval
and the construction of new moral and spiritual boundaries in the American
West” which encompasses themes of American cultural history, such as a mis-
trust of centralised government and the role of nature and religion in the
American psyche (Farrell 2014, 1).
Although not analysing the reintroduction of an apex predator, Schwartz’s
(2006) study of the reintroduction of horses into Latvia also deals with the
broader symbolic nature of a contested species reintroduction. For Schwartz,
the move against the planned reintroduction of wild horses in Latvia appeared
symbolic of struggles over national identity and fears of wholesale globalisa-
tion after the fall of the iron curtain.
This paper pursues a route similar to both Farrell’s and Schwartz’s. The fol-
lowing section seeks to unpack some of the themes that emerge from rewild-
ing and reintroduction conflicts to create a theoretical framework in which to
analyse the Lake District case.

The Wild, Redemption and Spirituality

The words “wild” and “wilderness” tend to be used interchangeably. However,
as Prior and Brady (2017) argue, conflating the two can be problematic. They
assert that although ideas of wild can be a component of wilderness, they are,
nevertheless, distinct concepts. Whereas wilderness can be defined as a “quan-
titative spatial dimension that can be reduced acre-by-acre” (Chapman 2006,
471), they draw on Chapman (2006) and Woods (2005) to argue that wild is
“the autonomy of the more-than-human world where events such as animals
moving about, plants growing, and rocks falling occur largely because of their
own internal self-expression” (Woods cited in Prior and Brady 2017, 35).
Such distinctions become especially complex when referring to species rein-
troduction where, if we follow this distinction, the animal could be considered
wild, but the place in which the animal is reintroduced not necessarily
wilderness.
Most proponents of species reintroduction stress the importance of the
animal (especially keystone predators) in restoring the environment to
some former, ecologically healthier state (Brown, Mcmorran, and Price
2011). The “self-willed” restoration of a landscape, the growing of fauna
and the return of biodiversity become intrinsically linked with the motif of
Edenesque wilderness. In essence, the animal and its wild nature can be
seen as the bringer of wilderness, juxtaposed against humans, who are often
seen as the destroyers of wilderness (Gottlieb 1996; Reece and Krupa 2013;
Farrell 2014).
4 A. NEILSON

Yet this role is as much symbolic as it is ecological, as the animal species in

question become situated within a particular socio-historical context. After
all, it is no coincidence that the proposed reintroduction of so-called charis-
matic predators, such as the lynx and wolf, garner the most widespread
support. Plans to reintroduce these creatures become infused with notions
of redemption and moral obligation. Bruce Babbitt, The US Secretary of the
Interior, pronounced on the day that grey wolves were released back into Yel-
lowstone National Park that “[t]his is a day of redemption and a day of hope
… we’re showing our children that restoration is possible, that we can restore
a community to its natural state” (cited in Farrell 2014, 37). Restoration, then,
becomes not just about restoring a landscape to its perceived natural equili-
brium, but also about humanity “getting back” to nature.
Reintroduction campaigns thus become entwined with notions of spiritual-
ity, even if they are fought in a secular context: “pro-wolf advocates … express a
spiritual connection to all that is ‘wild,’ to ‘soul-stirring’ untamed wilderness,
and, explicitly and implicitly to creation … the redemption of the wolf rep-
resents ecological as well as spiritual renewal” (Farrell 2014, 45). However,
this idea of spirituality is far from the codified rules of traditional religious insti-
tutions. Indeed, such notions are inherently individualistic in character, with
Ferguson and Tamburello (2015, 298) arguing that nature should be viewed
as a “resource,” “to connect to the sacred and to generate spiritual feelings”
on a personal level, rather than a routine form of collective religious practice.
Indeed, from Wordsworth to Thoreau, spirituality has long been linked to
environmental ideals. This fact is often taken for granted, as this spiritual
dimension is rarely contextualised with the socio-historic landscape in
which it is produced. For example, spirituality was central to the work of
the Lake Romantics, who eulogised the landscape of the Lake District
against the backdrop of the industrial revolution. On the other hand, in the
US John Muir’s religiously imbued writing lamented the passing of the wild-
erness frontier and the last bastion of rugged individualism (Cronon 1996;
Farrell 2014).

Neoliberal Natures
What is hard to square with these notions of spirituality is the economic jus-
tification for some reintroduction projects, which includes ecosystem services
(Cerqueira et al. 2015) and ecotourism (Hoogendoorn et al. 2018). Environ-
mental processes and ecological systems have increasingly become viewed as
“stocks of resources” and “flows of services,” all of which are “amenable for
management” (Eckersley 2004, 83). Such ideas build on one of the central
tenants of capitalism: that land is both a commodity and private property.
Extending this notion in “radical ways” has allowed for new nature values
to be realised, ones that can be “be traded, invested in and speculated on
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 5

via conversion into the commodity form” (Sullivan 2013, 210). This new form
of production and accumulation has, at its heart, the idea of a “social nature”
that renders natural processes a “marketplace” (Smith 2007, 33).
As Tsing (2005), Igoe and Brockington (2007), Sullivan (2013) and Kelly
(2011), amongst others, have pointed out, these ideas have risen to promi-
nence in conservation, being evident in policies such as individual fishing
quotas (IFQs), carbon trading, biodiversity offsets, and ecosystem services.
As Sullivan (2013, 211) states, this financialisation of conservation can be
seen as a “new frontier for speculative investment.” As such, the understand-
ing of “nonhuman natures in terms of banking and financial concepts” has
enabled the idea of conserving nature to be “entrained with new circuits of
monetized exchange and financial instruments” (Sullivan 2013, 211). This is
what Tsing (2005, 13) calls the advent of “spectacular accumulation.”
Another key aspect of this new accumulation frontier has been the rise in
ecotourism, where the idea that “nature can only be ‘saved’ through … capit-
alism” (Benjaminsen and Bryceson 2012, 337) is perhaps most evident. Eco-
tourism is based on the premise of promoting an environmental conscience,
while also maintaining the parameters of capitalist production and consump-
tion (Igoe and Brockington 2007, 433).
Reintroduction projects have shown a tendency to adopt these conserva-
tion practices. For example, those campaigning for the reintroduction of
the wolf into Yellowstone highlighted the benefits of the wolf for the ecotour-
ism industry (Honey 2008) and, more recently, the wolves have also been
framed as a provider of ecosystem services (Bennett, Peterson, and Gordon
2009). Furthermore, Schwartz’s (2006) and Hintz’s (2009) analyses have
shown that reintroductions can be problematic because of the tendency to
bypass those already living in the reintroduction site, thus “alienating and
excluding them from political discussion” (Schwartz 2006, 68).

Disenchantment
Although spiritual aesthetics and capitalism appear at odds with each other,
they can be understood through the theory of disenchantment. Max Weber
framed his conceptualisation of disenchantment as the slow extirpation of
magic from the world. He stated that modernity is defined by the absence
of “mysterious incalculable forces,” and that “one can, in principle, master
all things by calculation” (Weber 1946, 7). For Weber, the post-enlightenment
world was one ruled by rationalism, intellectualism and individualism, a
world that could no longer be characterised as the “great enchanted
garden” (Weber 1978, 630).
Thus, Pepper’s (1991, 34) argument that a “relationship with nature … is a
route to re-enchantment in the contemporary world” would be viewed with
scepticism by Weber, who believed the process of disenchantment was a
6 A. NEILSON

course that cannot be altered. For Weber then, the Romantics, who, as Yelle
(2013, 17) states, “merely inherited the notion of disenchantment, and pro-
vided it with a different value,” were engaged in a futile effort to find
meaning in a world ruled by intellectualism and rationality. In Science as a
Vocation Weber (1946) directly criticises “the romantic German youth” by
arguing: “Redemption from the rationalism and intellectualism of science is
the fundamental presupposition of living in union with the divine” (1946,
9). He called this attempt to find “redemption” from scientific thought the
“modern intellectualist form of romantic irrationalism” (1946, 9).
It is important to note that, for Weber, the process of disenchantment did
not start with capitalism or the Enlightenment, as the process had been present
in Occidental culture for millennia. For the Frankfurt School theorist Theodor
Adorno, on the other hand, disenchantment was squarely a product of modern
capitalist mass deception. Efforts to find re-enchantment were the “the total
administration of the mind by the bourgeois logic of domination and unrea-
son” (Greisman 1976, 499). Any notion of “naturalness” for Adorno was
nothing more than a false escape: “The force of hypostatized bourgeois
culture drives man to seek refuge in the phantasm of nature … a desire to
regress to the Stone Age” (Adorno cited in Greisman 1976, 500). As Greisman
(1976, 501) points out:
… nostalgia works against the implementation of societal improvement … By
seeing the archaic as preferable, and ascribing questionable animistic qualities
to the everyday life of the past, it short-circuits the mind’s ability to cast off
feudal ideals for contemporary ones.

These interpretations are not, however, mutually exclusive. Drawing on

both Weber and Adorno, it can be argued that attempts to find meaning
through ecotourism and the idea of “getting back to nature,” for example,
merely represent the buying of a spiritual phantasm, allowing for further capi-
talist production. Indeed, this idea is prominent in the sociology of religion
(Lyon 2013). Religions like Buddhism, which in their conception are funda-
mentally unmaterialistic, have been entrained into the stream of global con-
sumption, thereby offering an easily purchased way to “escape” the
oppressive qualities of late capitalism. Meaning, thus, is “sought as a redemp-
tive gospel in consumption” (Lyon 2013, 112). This process has become pro-
minent in new religious movements where ideas of communality, asceticism,
and codified rules have been replaced with individualism, consumerism, and
spiritual vagueness.

The Lake District

The Lake District is often considered the “jewel in the crown of the British
countryside” (Lake District National Park 2016). Its importance, in part,
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 7

arose out of smog of the industrial revolution. The Northern industrial cities of
Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle all lay reasonably close to the Lakes, and
it was these cities that bore the brunt of the industrial revolution. Although the
agriculture of the Lakes played a role in Britain’s industrial boom through the
production of wool, it was during this time when the Lakes became a place of
perceived serenity—juxtaposed against the squalor of the cities that lay less than
100 miles from its borders. Industrial Revolution did not so much pass the Lake
District by as “touch[ed] its periphery” (Brown 2012, 223).
This escape, however, was primarily the luxury of the upper classes, who
would take the Grand Victorian Circular Tour of the Lake District. As Daniels
(cited in Hammett 2012, 165) states, “rugged regions like the lake district,
hitherto avoided by polite society, were packaged as scenic attractions with
guide books marked paths and viewpoints.” The constitution of this landscape
was the result of a complex relationship between farmer, farmed animals, and
land. It was this landscape that became the “aesthetic ideal” for the British
Romantics, inspiring poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge. Indeed, the legacy
of the Romantics fundamentally shaped the identity of Lake District itself, inad-
vertently transforming its economy. The irony is that the ideals the Lake Roman-
tics bestowed, and the art they produced, turned out to be well suited to capitalist
production, as Berman (1994, 45) states, “although capitalists have few sympa-
thies with romantic daydreamers, they have no difficulty marketing them.”
The result is an economy built on the two interconnected pillars of agriculture
and tourism. Although in real terms tourism provides the most revenue, those
visiting the Lakes are embarking on a cultural pilgrimage of sorts, to visit a land-
scape immortalised by the likes of Wordsworth and Southey. As the Lake District
National Park Partnership states (2013, cited in Rebanks 2013, 14): “Farming is
the most critical economic … activity in the Lake District … it is the key human
activity that gives the Lake District its sense of place and its distinctive and iconic
landscape character … It plays a critical … role for tourism.”
Yet farming itself remains notoriously tough in the upland areas of the
Lake District, with most farming families reliant on stewardship subsidies
from the European Union (EU) and the British Government. With tourism
representing such a vital part of the Lakes’ economy, and economic output
of the agricultural industry waning, these rural areas are “places of consump-
tion rather than production” (Storey 2006, 36). The traditional methods of
upland farming (e.g. dry-stone walling and shepherding) have been turned
into a tourist product, their cultural value transformed into a commercial
one that, as Lanfant states, “stimulates the reinvention of the past” (1995, 37).

The Lynx
There is little evidence of the Lynx in Britain, even the date and the reason for
its extinction are debated. In 2006 the remains of a lynx were found in
8 A. NEILSON

Moughton Fell and Kinsey cave in the Yorkshire Dales. When radiocarbon-
dated, it was found that the two specimens had been alive from 80-320AD
and 25-600AD respectively. This meant that lynx had been present in
Britain after the Roman period and would have almost certainly come into
contact with humans for a sustained period of time. Hetherington, Lord,
and Jacobi (2005) suggest that a possible reason for the extinction of the
Lynx was the large deforestation of much of Britain. A reliance on woodland
for hunting would have likely put them in conflict with farmers. Wide-scale
deforestation occurred in Britain as early as the Bronze Age, and as more
hunting ground disappeared the lynx would have seen farmed animals as
an easier option.
Despite fact it has not been native to the UK for over 1300 years, Jørgensen
(2011, 708) argues, reintroduction is an appropriate label arguing that
“history does not start arbitrarily when written records come to areas that
the West recognizes as constituting ‘historic times.’”

The Conflict
It is far more likely that the restoration of a species that has been extinct for a
long period of time is more hotly contested (Jørgensen 2013). This appears to
be the case with Lakes. The Lake District, around Ennerdale, was one of four
sites across England and Scotland where a trial was proposed. However, the
choice of the Lakes caused the most controversy.
The campaign to reintroduce the lynx was led by a combination of public
figures (George Monbiot, Chris Packham, etc.) and non-governmental organ-
isations (NGOs) (Lynx UK Trust, Rewilding Europe, etc.) who were all fea-
tured in predominately national news publications (The Guardian, BBC,
etc.). Those opposed to the reintroduction were groups who primarily
relied on the current landscape of the Lake District: farmers, the national
bodies who represent them (National Farmers Union (NFU), National
Sheep Association (NSA) etc.), those involved in the tourist economy and
local news outlets (e.g. The Westmorland Gazette), who regularly featured
these actors and their views.
The main NGO pushing for the trial was the Lynx UK Trust who in 2015
produced detailed proposals in collaboration with the Rewilding Foun-
dation, University of Cumbria AECOM and Clifford Chance. The formal-
ised proposal caused acrimony amongst those opposed to the plan, with
the majority of new stories and formal reactionary stakeholder documents
being published in this period. In 2016 the Lake District was ruled out as
a potential site for reintroduction, with the more remote area of Keilder,
Northumberland considered as the more viable option. However, despite
this announcement, debates about the current state of the Lake Districts
landscape continue.
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 9

The Study
Through interviews and document analysis, the second part of this paper pre-
sents an empirical investigation of how the reintroduction project can be
understood through the seemingly disparate but connected ideas of spiritual-
ity and capital accumulation.

Methods
Overall, forty-one documents and four semi-structured interviews were ana-
lysed in this study. The rationale for conducting these interviews was that the
farmers’ voices represented an essential part of the story, yet was underrepre-
sented in the corpus. The farmers were asked their views on the reintroduc-
tion plan, as well as what role they believed they played in the landscape of the
Lake District. Documents were chosen based on their relevance to the case
study and included both national and local online news stories and stake-
holder documents. The primary stakeholder for the pro-reintroduction cam-
paign was the Lynx UK Trust, whereas the anti-reintroduction corpus did not
have a particular prominent actor spearheading their efforts. Rather, it was a
combination of local and national farming bodies and local newspapers.
Boolean searches using the keywords “Lynx,” “Reintroduction,” “Rewilding,”
“Lake District,” and “Cumbria” were used to conduct initial searches. The
results were then manually sorted to check for relevance. Semi-structured
interviews were carried out with upland farmers, who would most likely
have been affected by the planned reintroduction. The interviews took place
over two days in May 2016. A discourse analysis approach based on Hajer’s
(1995) conceptualisation of environmental storylines, where multiple story-
lines underpin a discourse, was used to interpret the results. The software
NVivo was utilised to manually code the data, which has become a popular
method in qualitative studies of this type (Mercer 2004; Rødner 2005).

New Property Rights

One striking theme in the reintroduction corpus is the effort to diminish the
farmer’s role in managing the land, as well as the value of the land itself. By
doing so, the pro-reintroduction campaign seeks to fundamentally change
the parameters of the Lakes’ current tourist-based economy. This change is
justified through the notion of ecological and economic rationalisation. The
reintroduction campaign positions itself around the logic of the market as
its organisers seek to rationalise the economy and ecology of the landscape,
which is portrayed as “hopelessly unprofitable” (Jones 2015).
The farmers, in response, frame themselves as the steward of the lakes. This
responsibility is often framed in legal terms, coming from either EU or UK
10 A. NEILSON

governmental legislation (NSA 2016). This notion of complying with certain

legal responsibilities is especially evident in relation to the Site of Special
Scientific Interest (SSSI):
The Tarn [a lake formed by a glacier] itself is an SSSI, so we are restricted [in]
how much fertiliser we can use, what grazing we can do … and it’s all for the
environment. Everything we work for, it’s all aimed at the environment …
There’re not many farmers left in the Lakes that sustain themselves without
subsidies … To introduce the lynx, I just can’t understand it. (Farmer 1)

Although there was no definitive answer on whether the reintroduction

itself would occur on private or public land, both can enable new forms of
accumulation through the linking of “publicly owned and protected lands
with privately controlled forms of property rights” (Kelly 2011, 32). These
private property rights, for example, the “right to operate ecotourism indus-
tries, the right to photographs and other images,” enable organisations and
private individuals “to benefit from public spaces” (Kelly 2011, 33). This idea
is very prominent in the reintroduction plan—the Lynx UK Trust refers to
branding and merchandising the lynx, specialist safari tours and rights to
photographs (2015b). It is noted that there will be a “£7 visitor entrance fee”
to see the lynx. Indeed, the Lynx UK Trust (2015a, 22) estimates an economic
benefit of £48.1 million for Cumbria alone. Such ideas are consistent with
Tsing’s (2004, 83) notion of “spectacular accumulation,” that non-traditional
forms of property rights are being used to accumulate capital in ever more
imaginative ways through conservation practices. Revolving around what
Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe (2012, 39) call the “spectacle of nature,” these
non-traditional forms of are “fast becoming one of the most important ways
in which capitalism and conservation are interacting and cooperating.”

Extracting Value from the Lynx

By helping to maintain the conditions for production, ecosystem services also
become central to the rationalisation of the Lakes’ economy. In the reintroduc-
tion plan the lynx does this by creating efficiency. For example, the Lynx UK
Trust states that the lynx will help reduce the cost associated with deer abun-
dance such as car accidents and diseases, as well as decrease fox numbers,
which they argue will benefit grouse and pheasant hunting industries:
The reintroduction of lynx … may lead to cost savings due to reductions in deer
populations and subsequent reductions in the negative impacts associated with
deer abundance. (The Lynx UK Trust 2015a, 23)

Here the nature of the lynx is subject to the process that Smith (2007)
describes. The reintroduction corpus constructs an inherently “social
nature,” production and accumulation becoming based on nature as a mar-
ketplace through the quantified and monetised behaviour of the lynx. A
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 11

paradox within the reintroduction corpus thus emerges as the lynx’s nature is
treated as secretive and unknowable, yet also universal and predictable:
Often the only way humans know lynx are around is by footprints in the snow
… [It] is a solitary animal; a secretive creature that prefers dense forests full of
hiding places and stalking opportunities. (Lynx UK Trust 2015b)

The rationalisation is evident in the use of algorithms to quantify the popu-

lation growth of the lynx in order to calculate its net economic benefit.
Cost savings are given monetary values. For example, the proposal states
that each deer killed by the lynx would represent a monetary benefit of
£78.98 per household by reducing deer-related car accidents. The argument
for the reintroduction, then, is fundamentally underpinned by “banking
and financial concepts” such as “net economic benefits” (Lynx UK Trust
2015a, 35), enabling an ecological vision to be “entrained with new circuits
of monetized exchange and financial instruments” (Sullivan 2013, 211).
Yet the lynx’s function in value extraction is not confined purely to its role
in ecosystem services. The ecotourism economy that the reintroduction plan
envisages is also fundamentally underpinned by the nature of the lynx, but in
this case, it is more “wild,” rather than quantifiable, behavioural qualities. For
example, Monbiot draws on the lynx’s place in Y Gododdin, a Welsh medieval
poem that eulogises the heroic deeds of the warriors of the Brythonic King-
doms. A section in the poem refers to the hunting of llewyn (thought to
refer to lynx):
To know that Dinogad’s father’s quarry, the llewyn in Aneirin’s saga, inhabits
the woods through which you walk feels like the shadow that fleets between
systole and diastole. (Monbiot 2015)

The lynx embodies a pre-human understanding of the past, a temporal desti-

nation that is not embedded in any concrete notion of history, but rather is
juxtaposed against England’s “green and pleasant land” epitaph and the pas-
toral images it exemplifies. The past that the reintroduction campaign envi-
sages is thus far from the bucolic Arcadia, “a quaint if brutal world” being
“crushed to atoms beneath the industrial steamroller” that the Romantics
yearned for (Greisman 1976, 496). Rather than a landscape shaped by
human habitation, what they lament is the excessive management of the
land, wishing its return to a “self-willed” landscape through the autonomy
of the lynx:
I see it as one of the most depressing landscapes in Europe. It competes with the
chemical deserts of East Anglia for the title of Britain’s worst-kept countryside
… this sparse economy reduces the natural world to something resembling the
aftermath of a nuclear winter across vast tracts of the uplands. (Monbiot 2013)

The veneer of spirituality that the lynx conjures, therefore, is a product of how
it is juxtaposed against the banality of an overly managed, rationalised
12 A. NEILSON

landscape, which in itself becomes representational of broader historical pro-

cesses that have come to restrict the scope for human life. Indicative of this
narrative is the sense of loss:
Britain once looked very different. In place of sheep-strewn fields and treeless
uplands, there were vast natural forests, glades, and wild spaces. Within them
… lynx roamed the land … No matter how much we may think England’s
green and pleasant countryside is “natural,” it is a pale shadow of what once
was—and what could be again. (Jones 2015)

Although the nature of the lynx is seen in quasi-spiritual terms by the

national media, Rewilding Britain and the Lynx UK Trust, such notions
become underpinned by a financialisation discourse and most notably the
use of existence value—a controversial measurement that seeks to quantify
value based purely on the fact that something exists. Edwards (1992, 124)
points out, the basis for existence value cannot be understood through the
“neoclassical paradigm of a utility-maximizer” as it seeks to quantify monet-
ary value based on the “benefit that humans obtain by knowing that a natural
place continues to exist.” The Lynx UK Trust believes that as the lynx can be
classified as a “charismatic animal” and therefore has a high existence value.
They calculate this value at a one-off payment of £18.50 per household or
£2.76 per household per year (Lynx UK Trust 2015a, 30).
By attempting to quantify the unquantifiable with the precise figures of
“£18.50” and “£2.76,” the Lynx UK Trust tries to monetise what Weber
calls Wertrational, or value/belief rationality, rendering any notion of spiri-
tuality hollow. As Smith (1996, 37) states, to give nature this monetary
worth “means, in a real sense, that nature loses its value,” as it is “the very pri-
celessness of nature that gives it value.”

Discussion
Existence value and ecosystem services can be seen as part of the same pro-
cesses that the Romantics fought against: “The quantification of life … the
cold calculation of price and profit, and … the laws of the market over the
whole social fabric” (Löwy 1987, 892). The discontentment with the bucolic
nature of England’s countryside also fundamentally puts the reintroduction
plan against the historic grain of English environmentalism. Indeed, the
focus on the wild rather than the bucolic is more aligned to US notions of
untouched wilderness and lamenting the passing of the Western frontier.
A central premise of the restoration discourse is that the lynx is a native
species. Any argument for restoration, both ecological and otherwise, is fun-
damentally undermined if the lynx is seen as no longer belonging to the
English landscape. For this reason, the pro-reintroduction corpus continually
stresses the importance of the lynx in England’s heritage. This also becomes
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 13

linked to the mythological aspect of the lynx. The Lynx UK Trust states the
reintroduction:
… could see the Lynx return to the nation after 1300 years of absence—a vital
part of England’s natural heritage … Above all else, [the lynx] will be a symbol
for the pride that the English public have in their nation’s wild places. (Smith
and Convery 2015, ii)

The current economy of the Lakes can be said to rest on the legacy of the
Romantics, as it is based on the idea of continuity and the belief that the area
has, despite the seismic socio-economic transformations that have occurred
outside its borders, remained remarkably unchanged. The current landscape
is seen as the result of hundreds of years of unchanging agricultural practices,
giving rise to the notion that “the Lakes have always been like this” (Farmer 2),
or that they are “a cultural landscape that has been moulded by its inhabitants
—especially its farmers” (Holdgate 2015):
Farmers have a vital role in shaping the landscape. They keep the Lakes the way
they are and how most people think they should be … If the sheep were
removed, the Lakes wouldn’t be the same. People are attracted to see this.
Farmers are vital in maintaining this aspect of the Lakes. (Farmer 3)

Holdgate (2015) further states that

[h]ad the landscape of 6,000 years ago come down to us we would have doubt-
less rejoiced in it. It would have been the British equivalent of Yellowstone, and
it would still have had what some describe as the “charismatic megafauna” …
With all respect to the enthusiastic “re-wilders” I do not think there is a remote
possibility of re-creating that wilder Lakeland.

The anti-reintroduction corpus frames this sense of permanence as underpin-

ning the tourist-based economy in the Lakes. Farmers become central to this
diorama, the sheep they herd and their work commodified into a cultural
product, their role as a producer more symbolic than functional. Although
the traditional agricultural techniques of the upland farmers are framed as
changing little (something highlighted by the local media, NFU and NSA),
their contextualisation within the wider economy has changed. This is
reflected in the discourses utilised by the farmers as they seek to justify
their continued presence in the uplands as stewards rather than producers.
They use terms such as sustainability, land management, and SSSI, position-
ing themselves around these prevailing environmental discourses, as their
economic futures become contingent on their legislated role of stewards.
This could be interpreted as an example of what Baunsgaard and Clegg
(2012) call “mode rationality,” a notion that the farmers, as well as the coher-
ent discourse coalition of local media and agricultural representatives, have
utilised these dominant environmental discourses because of the social
capital they currently have. Those who are pro-reintroduction are, therefore,
14 A. NEILSON

framed as “fanciful,” their ideas utopian against the more formal and ration-
alistic discourse used by the anti-reintroduction corpus:
These people have far too much time on their hands … They are creating a
utopia of their own imagination. (farmer quoted in Hodges 2015)

They are fanciful, none of them have a clue. (Farmer 3)

Although the ideas of permanence and stewardship are seen as significant

factors for attracting people to the Lakes, the notions of spirituality and auton-
omy that underpinned the eulogising of the Lakes and its farmers by the
Romantics appear diminished in the anti-reintroduction discourses. Instead,
the farmers and their way of life appear more as cultural artefacts—the
farmer’s worlds away from the self-regulated ideal society that Wordsworth
described, as their role becomes narrowly pre-defined by the tourist industry
and the legal parameters of the subsidies they receive.
Of course, the farming communities of 18th-century England were not, as
Wordsworth (1997, 526) stated, “ideal societies” whose “constitution had
been imposed and regulated by the mountains.” The role of the farmer has
always been contextualised within a broader economy; the wool that the
farmers harvested from sheep in Wordsworth’s time would have gone to the
great textile cities of Northern England. However, this broader economy under-
pinned their role as producers, giving them at least the illusion of self-autonomy
and the appearance of aesthetic separation from industrial cities like Manche-
ster, which Engels famously described as “Hell on Earth” (cited in Law 2002,
56). Yet Manchester is no longer hell on earth, and the conditions the Roman-
tics railed against are less starkly visible. Thanks to globalisation, oppressive
industries are now largely far from view and thus the Lake District is no
longer the antithesis to the excesses of industrial capitalism that once lay at
its borders. What is left is a commodified sense of permanence, more of an aes-
thetic illusion now than it was at the time of Wordsworth, as the farmers would
not endure on the uplands if not for the subsidies they receive.

Conclusion: Reintroduction and Disenchantment

The campaign to reintroduce the lynx is symbolic of a disenchantment with
the pastoral image of England’s managed countryside; the lynx being por-
trayed as the antithesis to the rural idyll. England’s “green and pleasant
land” no longer offers the “spiritual resource” that Ferguson and Tamburello
(2015, 13) talk of and, therefore, it lacks the ability to connect humanity to
“the sacred.” The Romantics’ spirituality and their search for Arcadia in the
Lakes occurred in the context of the industrial revolution and the processes
of industrialisation, urbanisation, secularisation, and rationalisation. Rewild-
ing, on the other hand, and its focus on personal redemption and “wildness,”
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 15

are, in part, a product of the capitalism of late modernity, what Bauman

(2000) termed “liquid modernity,” defined by global capital and information
flows, individualism, and the extension of rationalisation and financialisation
into every facet of the social and natural world. “Wild” nature appears as a
place of spiritual retreat from these conditions, yet leads to “a cynical dismis-
sal of all things human” (Taylor 1992, 194).
The reintroduction conflict, then, is a product of its historical context, as
beneath the veneer of the local, the wild, the redemptive and the spiritual
aspects of the reintroduction campaign there lie the dynamics of global capit-
alism. What is clear is that the conditions that Weber described through his
conceptualisation of disenchantment provide one of the main drivers for
people wanting to see the lynx, as the overly rationalised world comes to
underpin the economical vision set out by the reintroduction plan. It is for
this reason that the best way to understand the plan to reintroduce the lynx
into the Lakes lies not exclusively in conservation, but also in the internal con-
tradictions of modern capitalism. When Weber (1946, 9) directly criticised
the romantic German youth for “their romantic irrationalism,” he did so at
a time when Romanticism was the antithesis to capital production. As Bell
(1996, 19) states, “the bourgeois attitudes of calculation and methodological
restraint came into conflict with the impulsive searchings … that one found
in romanticism.” Still, the dialectics of history dictate that capitalism often
internalises its antithesis. Although consumption appears to offer an escape
route from the conditions of disenchantment and alienation, Adorno (2013,
7) maintained that such an escape is so fleeting that “it must be constantly
renewed.” Any sense of community and connection presented is thus one
without “inconvenient obligations that earlier forms of community
demanded” (Bauman, cited in Igoe 2010, 379). Absent are Thoreau- or
Muir-esque ideals of and commitments to living in or with nature—what
Thoreau (cited in Schneider 2000, 215) called “nature looking into nature.”
Instead, it is more about being temporarily “face to face with the wild”
(Jones 2015) and the nebulous qualities of the “wild” itself.
Reintroduction conflicts are often more than the sum of their parts. As
Farrell illustrated in the Yellowstone case, they can distil broader complex
socio-political processes. Rewilding is complex, and each project must be situ-
ated in a sociocultural landscape—both physical and otherwise. It is hoped
that this paper offers a useful theoretical framework in which to understand
species reintroduction beyond simplistic biological or political contexts.

Acknowledgements
I want to thank Dr Darmon and Professor Bomberg for their support throughout this
project, as well as the anonymous reviewers at CNS for their swift and detailed
feedback.
16 A. NEILSON

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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