Rewilding at Oostvaardersplassen

Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher, remarked that you never step into the same river twice i.e. history always moves on. 

This thought comes to my mind following the controversy over a Dutch rewilding scheme.  It the rewilding is seen as a genuine return to some pristine condition it is bound to fail.  That is because no such pristine state ever existed.  The decision not to cull large animals doesn't avoid that it just sets the scheme for a giant Malthusian crash in numbers. 

Of course, there was an alternative to human culling which would be to reintroduce a large predator to the area, but I imagine the proximity to human settlement made that politically impossible.

Incidentally, Heck cattle are reported to be a return to aurochsen in the piece.  They are much more bizarre than that.  The Heck brothers convinced the Nazis that they would try to recreate aurochsen from modern cattle strains, but the animals bred are nowhere the same size as the Aurochsen that you see in Ice Age pictures.  They are gone for good.  The Heck cattle are simply a similarly coloured breed of modern cattle that no one has ever seen before the Heck brothers created them.

I think we need to acknowledge that Anthropocene is inevitably going to be the era of managed landscapes.