Wildland Romania
Whilst Wildland’s holdings in Scotland create an opportunity for large parts of the Scottish Highlands to restore itself to its natural state and for traditional ways to endure alongside the very latest thinking, we are looking further afield too. We’re looking at how the same philosophy can deliver equally beneficial regeneration of land lifestyles in other places around the globe.
In Romania we see great parallel with the Scottish Highlands. We see opportunities to learn lessons from mistakes made in one country to ensure that they don’t become repeated in another and we see an example of what we seek to have once more flourishing where it has long been lost.
In Romania, Scotland can see an image of what its own glens and hillsides were like less than two centuries ago. Mile after mile of rich forestry and all of the wildlife that one might expect to thrive within it; including all of those magnificent apex predators that were also once a part of Scotland’s story. Bears, wolves and lynx for example were all indigenous in Scotland too, but man’s degradation of the landscape and focus towards commerce and profit soon meant that there was no longer a place for them and now they’re all long gone. For Romania, Scotland exists as a warning of what will happen if logging continues across countless miles of hillside and how something still wondrous could easily soon become a desert.
Alongside Wildland’s own holdings in Romania, we are also supporting the Foundation Conservation Carpathia project (FCC) which seeks to create a new National Park in Europe – from the Ukrainian border in the North, right down to the Danube – that can be a rival in scale, scope and beauty to the Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks in the United States.
Wildland Africa
It’s not just in Europe though. In Africa too – in Tanzania, in Botswana and Rwanda – Wildland has acquired significant estates where it believes the same philosophies can apply and where land, the wildlife that lives upon it and the communities that exist alongside can thrive in harmony. …a harmony which is absent when only modern pressures and money are allowed to drive the dynamics of a place.
Just as is happening in Scotland, in Africa too Wildland believes that land has to be given a chance to restore itself naturally. Communities given a chance to appreciate that the real value of the land they live on is in its rich heritage and the fabulous diversity of wildlife that Africa is renowned for. Where wildlife and communities are in conflict, we want to prove that there is another way.
We will take fences down and allow natural migration routes to re-establish themselves. We will restore our lodges and homesteads and explore the benefits of eco-tourism over subsistence farming; benefits not just for Wildland but for the whole of the communities that live and work on or alongside its land.