restoring the wild

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 ## 2026-05-13
 
+### @{restoring-the-wild}
+
+My general impression of this book is that reintroducing species is about
+negotiating with the relevant interests, working hard on the ground, and
+developing a mix of personal, community, and institutional relationships. He
+hardly seems to mention grand ideals much at all, utopic or dystopic or
+anything. Catastrophism is nowhere to be seen.
+
+When I read @{regeneration}, I thought it wasn't relevant because it isn't
+apocalyptic. Seeing the same thing again, once again written by someone with
+lots of experience of successful conservation work, I think it is not a
+coincidence and highly relevant. These writers don't use the dominant
+catastrophic framing of green issues, because it doesn't work for them. And the
+key reason it doesn't work for them is because it de-emphasises the role of
+private interests and flattens people into an imaginary collective interest. But
+in order to get anything done, they have to put real private interests first.
+They have to abandon catastrophic rhetoric, because in their world, those
+narratives don't work for them. Catastrophic narratives, whatever they do, don't
+function to get things done. They perhaps serve better as a tribal identity
+marker for urban, middle-class people whose real need is to be seen to have
+rightthink. This could play a big role in my argument: the function of green
+catastrophism is NOT to motivate effective action, as we can see, the people who
+ARE taking effective action are avoiding catastrophic narratives because they
+obscure the role of interest, which is essential to getting things done.
+
 ### @{cornerstones}
 
 There was a cracking bit of narrative in the last chapter. Big takeaways: