Rewilding and Olfactory Landscapes

Rewilding has recently emerged as a novel but provocative form of environmental conservation, posing many challenging questions regarding how humans relate to and experience the natural world through direct experience, culture, politics, and law. This chapter considers rewilding from an olfactory aesthetic perspective in a European context. I argue that rewilding presents us with a conservation practice that can propagate negative olfactory aesthetic qualities within landscapes. I firstly claim that such qualities challenge prevailing tendencies in policy, administrative, and academic circles to position sensory experiences of nature as innately positive, and secondly, that negative olfactory aesthetic qualities and experiences need to be taken seriously if rewilding is to receive popular and legislative support.