Rewilding in the Media #24

By: Rewilding

July 11, 2025

Editors’ note: In this periodic summary, we list some of the latest research and rewilding projects, ideas, and notable stories in the media about protecting and restoring wild Nature that the TRI board and staff discover and discuss. We urge sharing links to the ones you find most inspiring, and we invite you to send us links to important rewilding stories we may have missed.

1. The Rewilding Institute’s Northeast Carnivore Advocate Nadia Steinzor gave an interview on wolves and policy on the Wolf Connection’s podcast. Listen here.

2. New York Times, What Stalks Wolves Across Europe by Adam Weymouth [May 12, 2025]
“The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 brought many changes, but one of the more unexpected was that it enabled the wolves of Eastern Europe to begin expanding their range west, where they had been practically unknown for more than a century. […] Today there are more than 21,500 wolves on the continent, a species of least concern. Their revival, a beacon of hope in the biodiversity crisis, is testament to what can be achieved when conservation policies do not stop at borders. But the recent freedom under which wolves have thrived in Europe is once again in peril.”

3. Fast Company, These stunning photos show how nature came back after the world’s largest dam removal project [May 14, 2025]
“Four dams and three large reservoirs were removed from the Klamath River in a project that finished last year—and acres of native wildflowers are now in bloom along the river’s edge. It’s been less than a year since the world’s largest dam removal project was completed along 420 miles of the Klamath River, near the border of Oregon and California. But if you look at the river now, you might not know that four dams had ever been in place.”

4. Wildlife for All, New “Military Defense Zones” Endanger Wildlife and Democracy [May 19, 2025]
“In January of this year, the Trump administration quietly invoked National Security Presidential Memorandum-4 (NSPM-4) to transfer over 100,000 acres of public lands in West Texas and eastern New Mexico from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Defense. These lands—part of the rugged and biodiverse Chihuahuan Desert—are now classified as ‘National Defense Areas,’ a previously unused legal designation that gives the military unprecedented policing power over civilian lands.”

5. In August 2024, a Global Rewilding Alliance Wetlands Task Force was formed to contribute a report to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, exploring how wild animals shape inland and coastal wetlands. This team, comprising ten GRA members across four continents, co-authored the report “Taking Animals into Account,” launched on World Wetlands Day, 2 February 2025. It features a literature review and eleven compelling case studies (nine from the Task Force members), demonstrating that when wild animal populations are restored, wetland functionality, and the benefits it brings to people and planet, can be dramatically enhanced.

6. Vox, These Photos Are Literally Saving Jaguars [May 21, 2025]
“Ranchers in Mexico once commonly killed jaguars. Now they’re earning thousands of dollars to help save them.”

7. Wolf Conservation Center,  Endangered Wolf Pups Born in New York Fostered into Wild Dens in New Mexico [May 29, 2025]
“Born on April 24 to parents Trumpet and Lighthawk at the Wolf Conservation Center, located in South Salem, New York […] With the assistance of LightHawk Conservation Flying, a nonprofit aviation organization supporting conservation efforts, and Dr. Jim Micinilio, the two pups flew from New York to New Mexico, where they were met by the Mexican Wolf Interagency Field Team (IFT) and taken to wild wolf dens.”

8. Deceleration, Wolves and Humans Can Coexist, Efforts Across the U.S. Borderlands Show [May 29, 2025]
“Apex predators are critical to healthy ecosystems. These determined biologists and wildlands advocates are out to prove that wolves and ranchers, scientists and politicians can coexist in the recovery of Mexican gray wolves.”

9. Southern China Morning Post, Wolves in Japan: could their reintroduction restore nature’s balance? [June 3, 2025]
“The Japan Wolf Association says returning wolves to the wild would help curb costly agricultural damage by deer, wild boar, and monkeys. […] A plan to reintroduce wolves to Japan more than a century after they were hunted to extinction is gaining traction as conservationists warn that the country’s rural ecosystems are increasingly out of balance and costly to maintain due to booming wild animal populations.”

10. Fisheries, The Hudson River Eel Project: A community science framework for management and education [April 8, 2025]
The report describes fourteen years of “glass eel” (juvenile American Eel, Anguilla rostrata) monitoring at six sites along the Hudson River estuary by diverse groups of volunteers, students, and researchers.

11. New York Times, A Public Lands Sell-Off Is Struck From the G.O.P. Policy Bill [June 28, 2025]
“Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, said he would withdraw his proposal after it faced intense intraparty opposition.”

12. Coming this fall to the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is the world’s first research center dedicated to the study of animal sentience. Per LSE, “The Centre will develop guidance for policymakers around how to shift public attitudes and behaviour and conduct research designed to help NGOs in the emerging animal advocacy sector design more successful interventions.”

13. Animal Wellness Action, Superstition, Politics, and Junk Science Threaten Mexican Wolves [July 3, 2025]
“The Mexican wolf (El lobo), native to Mexico and America’s Southwest, is the most genetically distinct, most imperiled, and smallest subspecies of gray wolf. Humans nearly succeeded in wiping lobos off the planet. All alive today are descended from just seven known survivors. […] As of late January 2025, there were 286 wild lobos in Arizona and New Mexico, the ninth straight year of population growth. There are 16 breeding pairs in New Mexico and 10 in Arizona. An additional 350 are maintained in captivity. All this is indeed stunning, considering that managers originally had only seven lobos to work with. But it doesn’t follow that recovery has been a stunning success.”

The Rewilding Institute’s Carnivore Conservation Biologist Dave Parsons was interviewed and is quoted in this article.