rewildv.
/ˌriːˈwʌɪld/, U.S. /riˈwaɪld/ transitive. To return (land) to a wilder and more natural state.Used esp. with reference to the reintroduction of (large) mammals of or similar to species that were exterminated locally at some earlier period.
ΚΠ
1990 Newsweek 5 Feb. 24/1 Militants vow not just to end pollution but to take back and ‘rewild’ one third of the United States.
1994 J. Davis in D. C. Burks Place of Wild 236 The many sociological and political questions ancillary to any discussion of rewilding the continent.
1998 Santa Fe New Mexican (Nexis) 9 Dec. b1 These are animals that originally were on the short-grass plains and they're missing from the plains right now. We think this is a great opportunity to re-wild the plains with bison.
2007 Guardian 9 May (Society section) 9/1 Hopes of rewilding parts of the Scottish Highlands came to grief after the Scottish executive refused to allow even a small-scale pilot scheme for introducing beavers.
Derivatives
ˌreˈwilding n.
ΚΠ
1993 Guardian 13 Nov. (Weekend Suppl.) 55/3 That means a re-wilding of the river, a restoration of its virginal habitat.
2006 Sci. News 11 Nov. 315/1 If proponents of Pleistocene rewilding choose areas where a good amount of plant diversity already exists, reintroducing megafauna could shift vegetation back towards its previous state.
This is a new entry (OED Third Edition, March 2010; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
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v.1990