Today is Rewilding Day, and it offers a moment to reflect on the systems we have altered, and the responsibility we carry in deciding what comes next.
Rewilding is often misunderstood as an attempt to turn back time, as though we could somehow return landscapes to an earlier, untouched state. That is not what is being proposed, nor is it possible.
Rewilding is a deliberate and forward-looking act. It is about recognising the systems we have simplified, the relationships we have disrupted, and making a conscious decision to rebuild ecological function where it has been lost.
Across Australia, those losses are no longer abstract. They are visible in fragmented habitats, in species confined to shrinking ranges, and in landscapes that continue to function, but in diminished and often unstable ways. What we are managing in many places are not whole ecosystems, but the remnants of them.
Every species plays a role within a network that is more intricate than we often acknowledge. Predator and prey, plant and pollinator, soil and water, each connected through relationships that have evolved over millennia. When one element is removed, the system shifts, sometimes gradually, sometimes abruptly, and those shifts accumulate over time.
This is where rewilding becomes necessary, not as an idealised vision, but as a practical response to imbalance.
In Australia, the loss of native predators offers a clear example. Four species of quoll once ranged across much of the continent, each occupying its own ecological niche and contributing to the regulation and behaviour of other species. Today, their distributions are significantly reduced, and in some regions they have disappeared entirely, leaving gaps that are not immediately obvious but are nonetheless consequential.
The Western quoll illustrates this well. Its presence influences prey species, shapes behaviour, and contributes to the balance of the systems it inhabits. Its absence does the same, just in reverse. Returning the Western quoll to appropriate landscapes is not about nostalgia or symbolism. It is about restoring a function that has been missing.
Rewilding is not confined to large, visible species or expansive landscapes. It also applies at smaller, more fragile scales, where the margin for loss is even thinner.
Off Tasmania’s coast, the critically endangered red handfish persists in extremely low numbers. Its decline has been driven by habitat degradation and environmental change, and without intervention it would likely disappear. Through FAME-supported work, individuals are bred, protected and reintroduced, gradually rebuilding a population that would otherwise be lost.
This is rewilding in its most precise form. Careful, deliberate and grounded in science, but driven by the same principle: that every species contributes to the integrity of the system it belongs to, and that losing them carries consequences beyond the species itself.
For more than three decades, FAME has focused on preventing extinction. That remains our purpose. We are clear about our role, and equally clear about what we are not. We do not attempt to be everything to everyone, nor do we position ourselves outside our expertise.
Our work is, and has always been, centred on species conservation, habitat restoration and supporting the conditions that allow ecosystems to function. It is a space we understand, and one in which we are prepared to take considered, and at times bold, action.
Through initiatives such as Safer Havens, we are supporting projects that extend beyond holding species in isolated pockets. The focus is on rebuilding habitat, enabling reintroductions, and allowing species to re-establish within systems where they can interact and adapt over time. This is more complex work, and it carries risk, but it is also where meaningful recovery occurs.
There is no certainty in this work. Reintroductions do not always succeed. Ecosystems respond in ways we cannot fully predict. There are competing pressures on land use, funding and priorities that must be navigated with care. Yet, the alternative is not neutral. It is a continued erosion of complexity, a gradual narrowing of life, and a future in which conservation becomes an exercise in managing decline rather than enabling recovery.
That is not a future we are willing to accept.
There are moments, when returning to a site where this work is underway, that bring the significance of it into focus. They are not dramatic or staged. More often, they are quiet and easily missed by those not looking for them. A shift in movement. Evidence of breeding where there had been none. Changes in vegetation that signal pressure has eased. The sense, difficult to articulate but unmistakable when you experience it, that a system is beginning to reassemble. It is not a return to what was there before. It is something taking shape again, informed by the past but not confined to it.
A rewilded world will not be pristine or predictable. It will be dynamic, at times uneven, and shaped by ongoing change. What it offers is not perfection, but resilience. A richness of life, of interaction, and of possibility that we have been steadily losing. The future is not something we inherit intact. It is something we create through the choices we make, and the actions we are prepared to take.
Rewilding is one of the clearest choices we have about the kind of future we are prepared to create.
Tracy McNamara
Chief Executive Officer
Photo Credit:
Melissa Jensen
Tracy McNamara
Caroline Newman
Jemina Stewart-Smith
Michael J Barritt
