Wilderness Works Too: The Promise of Passive Rewilding
Forest management can have a lot of different objectives, from wood products to habitat enhancement. But what happens when your management objective is to protect the autonomy of nature? Passive management, also called passive rewilding, is the practice of standing back and letting nature direct the ebb and flow of life. Learn about the value of passive rewilding through both human and non-human lenses, grapple with the incongruity of human and forest timelines, and consider the merits of building future old forests, even if we might not live to see them ourselves.
This talk by Shelby Perry is a part of North Branch Nature Center’s Naturalist Journeys 2025 Winter Presentation Series: This series focuses on making healthy and sustainable forests in Vermont. You can watch recordings of all talks in the series here.
Shelby Perry is Director of the Wildlands Ecology Program at Northeast Wilderness Trust, an initiative of the trust aimed at conducting, supporting, and sharing ecological research pertaining to wildlands, along with inventorying ecological values on the trust’s protected lands. She is a frequent speaker around the northeast on the topics of wildlands, rewilding, and old forests, and has twice co-taught old forest ecology classes for North Branch Nature Center’s Biodiversity University. When not working in them, Shelby can usually be found playing in wild forests, exploring them on foot, in snowshoes, or through the lens of her camera.