School of Sustainability

Three bison, a calf, and a loom two hundred years old

Dana Rogoz spent five days this summer walking the Țarcu Mountains. Rogoz is a well-known Romanian actress, not a biologist, and she says so herself. She had come as one of the first ambassadors for the LIFE with Bison initiative, and she went out with specialist guide Cătălin Josan to find the animals she had agreed to speak for. After hours of searching, she and her daughter Lia finally stood in front of three female bison and a calf.

The herd she was looking at is the larger fact behind her visit. The Southern Carpathians rewilding landscape now holds more than 250 free-roaming European bison, the biggest land mammal on the continent, in a corner of southwest Romania to which the species has only lately returned. The initiative, co-funded by the European Union's LIFE Programme, pairs that recovery with support for local communities, nature tourism and nature-based business, and the ambassador scheme exists because a recovering herd still needs people to hear about it.

What Rogoz kept returning to afterwards, though, was not the animals but the houses. She met artisans, farmers and young entrepreneurs, watched a woman known as Mama Ana weaving on a loom two hundred years old, and was struck that none of it felt arranged for visitors. Her conclusion, arrived at over those five days, was that rewilding is only half about restoring ecosystems; the other half is giving people a reason to stay in the villages, through tourism built on what the valley actually has.

She left talking about her son Vlad's biology teacher, and whether a whole class might be brought out to walk the same ground - a ripple effect, she said, that she would love to see. Her line afterwards was that anyone who visits and falls for the place can become an ambassador too, which is a neat summary of how the scheme is supposed to work: the visit is the message.

Rewilding Europe · Read the source