In their landmark 1998 article, “Rewilding and Biodiversity: Complementary Goals for Continental Conservation” (p.22), Michael Soulé and Reed Noss define “rewilding” as the restoration of the wilderness through the reintroduction of large predators, for their regulatory function. At its heart, rewilding concerns the return of nature to itself. It seeks to restore ecological integrity and vigour
to the world. In his book, Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea, and Human Life, George Monbiot (2014) suggests that people have come to exhibit a sort of ingrained ennui as a result of modern life. He terms it “ecological boredom” and argues that many people in the 21st century long for a return to nature – a reignition of an existence at one with the world. Thus, he avers, not only is the physical
environment in need of rewilding – humans are as well (London, 1915). These missions, though ostensibly separate, are fundamentally linked. Both people and the world stand in need of rewilding; we need to immerse ourselves in the natural world as much as the natural world needs the biodiversity to which it once staked a claim. This imperative is taken up by Jack London in his celebrated dog story, The Call of the Wild (1903) (hereinafter Call). Call traces the development of Buck – part St Bernard and part shepherd dog – as he is uprooted from his life of comfort in the Santa Clara Valley in California and cast into the wilderness of Alaska and the Klondike region of Canada. His return to the wilderness engenders his transformation to a more authentic, wolfish existence. This essay argues that such a transformation can also be effected in humans: reconnection with the natural world is integral to remedying the spiritlessness and restrictive routine of modern society.

“According to London,” Jonathan Berliner asserts, “the individual must return to an environment that will engage him directly with the innermost self ” (p.66). The environment in which Buck realises this innermost self – his lupine self – is the wilderness. Wilderness stems from the Old English term wildēornes, which translates as “self-willed land” (Foreman 2004, p.1); it is this state
– in which the land governs its own development – to which rewilding as an ecological process aspires. Soulé and Noss put forward three features of the contemporary rewilding project: large, protected reserves in the wild; interconnectedness among habitats; and keystone species (pp.23-24). The goal of rewilding is not to preserve stasis in habitats; rather, it seeks to reduce humans’ part
in ecosystem management to a passive role, thus favouring their organic development (including disturbances like natural disasters and diseases) (Ceausu et al. 2015). It opens up the possibility of valuing nature for itself rather than regarding it solely as instrumental in society’s ends – corporate, capitalist and corrupt. Rewilding, for humans, shares a kindred goal: just as it seeks to minimise human influence in the ecological community, it also aims at reducing society’s influence in the lives of individuals. In a society in which issues such as alcohol and drug abuse, crime and delinquency, mental health difficulties and even suicide have been correlated with deep-seated boredom (Brissett & Snow pp.237-38), the project of rewilding seems more vital now than ever before. It is in the wilderness that people are freer from contemporary societal constraints; located as it is beyond the bounds of civilisation, the wilderness is the site wherein humankind can reawaken its more primitive self. There, the demands of modern life are absent; there, people may find a sort of haven. Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson (1984) coined the term “biophilia” to describe human beings’
innate and genetically-determined affinity with the natural world. He argues that people possess an “urge to affiliate with other forms of life” – the need to escape domesticity and return to a wilder state of being (p.85). In order that people can return to themselves in the wilderness, its integrity is paramount. Restoring the wholeness of ecosystems will in turn create spaces in which people can reclaim their own integrity, independent of social pressures.

Conjuring images of scorched deserts, formidable tundra and verdant expanses, the meaning of wilderness has changed considerably through history. It entered the North American lexicon in the nineteenth century as a state of nature which needed protection from rapid technological development. In the American imagination, the wilderness came to represent liberation, natural beauty and a refuge from the dangers and temptations of modern life (Ceausu et al. 2015, p.26). It wasagainst this backdrop that Jack London’s The Call of the Wild was published in 1903. Retrospectively, Call was prescient in its characterisation of nature as brimming with rewilding potential, symbolised by Buck’s ultimate return to the natural world. It is when Buck crosses the boundary between the
camp (a vestige of civilisation in the vast wilderness) and the forest that John Thornton recognises the “transformation” that takes place in Buck; “[a]t once he became a thing of the wild” (p.80). Such is the effect of the wilderness on Buck: he gains agency and reverts from canine to a truer, more archaic lupine self. London was aware of the hostile majesty of the wilderness; he termed the vast
expanse of wilderness in the Northland “The White Silence”, characterised by coldness, austerity and inviolability. In his first novel, A Daughter of the Snows, he would say of it,

…in the young Northland, frosty and grim and menacing, men… stripped likewise much of the veneer of civilisation – all of its follies, most of its foibles, and perhaps a few of its virtues. … but they reserved the great traditions and at least lived frankly, laughed honestly, and looked one another in the eyes (p.202).

In order to survive in such a harsh clime, London maintained that people must adapt; divested of the trappings of civilisation, virtues such as fraternity and courage are of prime importance in the wilderness. Earle Labor (1962) credits London with striking a positive note about our place in the wilderness and our potential to impact it: according to Labor, London believed that “man… must
become a self-appointed guardian of the wilderness, protecting it against all attempts to assault and corrupt morally or materialistically” (p.155). This position is exemplified in the character of John Thornton – the only human character in Call who is in touch with his inner wildness. A seasoned gold prospector, Thornton lives in close proximity to nature and is versed in the ways of
the wilderness (he urges Hal, Charles and Mercedes not to venture out on the ice as it is melting and will not bear their weight, p.57). It is clear from the novel that people may benefit from their relationship with the wilderness and indeed enter into a kind of symbiosis with it, as when Buck, at the close of Call (when he has truly become one with the wilderness), roams the vastness of the North, carefree and empowered: “It was a boundless delight, this hunting, fishing, and indefinite wandering through strange places” (p.74).

It is not only the natural landscape which London attempts to rewild in Call; in his return to the natural world, Buck’s psychic landscape is also rewilded. London’s mission is made plain in the epigraph with which Call opens:

Old longings nomadic leap,
Chafing at custom’s chain;
Again from its brumal sleep
Wakens the ferine strain (p.5)

Deep within every individual, it suggests, there lies a “ferine strain” which can emerge at any moment. The “brumal sleep” to which the verse refers intimates the dormancy of such primitiveness; it lies in hibernation and will awaken when needed, when called upon by circumstance – when one is unfettered from the constraints imposed by society. Taken from John Myers O’Hara’s poem, “Atavism”, the lines epitomise the process which Buck undergoes over the course of Call. From the moment he is deracinated and cast into the wilderness of the Northland, Buck is said to be able to “adjust himself to changing conditions”; he “unconsciously… accommodated himself to the new mode of life” (p.21). Via free indirect discourse, it is with Buck that readers are aligned for almost the entirety of Call (save for a few moments in which John Thornton is the focalising character). In a vignette with which the opening chapter draws to a close, Buck experiences snow for the first time (having lived in sunny California until then, he has had no experience of it). London deliberately withholds the labelling of the snow, however; as Buck experiences “this white stuff ” (p.14) for the first time, it is defamiliarized and readers experience it anew alongside the callow Buck. It is a pivotal moment for the young wolf, as he encounters an element of nature with which he will have to contend for the rest of his life. In such moments, London advocates a sort of ontological reset; unity with the environment can bring people back to a foundational existence, from which a greater consciousness – of the self and the world – can be sought.

Buck attains a new identity over the course of Call, one which is greatly at odds with his former self under Judge Miller. W. C. Harris (1997) acknowledges the lengths to which Buck goes to formulate his rewilded identity: “He [Buck] labors at his new sense of himself – he actively engages with new urges and thoughts: sometimes he resists; sometimes he obeys. Buck is learning something, certainly, and learning it by engaging with it” (p.96). It is Buck’s forbears whose fierceness he comes to embody as he reconnects with his inner wildness. On cold nights, as Buck points his snout toward the moon and howls, wolf-like, “it was as though his ancestors… [were] pointing their noses at the stars and howling down through the centuries with him” (p.23). This moment of affinity with his ancestors foreshadows the long-drawn howl Buck hears repeatedly as his transformation nears completion. As he lives a life of devotion to John Thornton, Buck often wakes from sleep with a start, to a sound “like, yet unlike, any made by a husky dog” (p.76). Eventually succumbing to the call, he follows it to a glade where he spies a lean timber wolf howling at the sky. After uniting with this wolf (his “wood brother”, p.78), he runs through the forest with him – he has answered the call of the wild. Buck’s inner rewilding manifests in his responding to the howls of his lupine brothers: his forming an alliance with them represents his reunion with the wilderness and his primitive ancestry. Buck “[comes] into his own again” as the “ancient song” of his forbears surges through him (p.23). In his book, The Nature Principle, Richard Louv urges reconnection with the environment in which we evolved, in order to recover a primal element of our humanity. He notes that in prehistory, humans evolved in hunter-gatherer societies and therefore unity with the environment inhered in their survival (as they killed and foraged for food) (p.228). Modernity – its individualism, urbanisation and technologisation – is marked by its remoteness from the natural world; like Buck, answering an atavistic call can enable us to uncover a more “authentic” self, as Louv maintains.

Thus, by the close of Call, Buck is rewilded. The former domesticated dog is now unshackled and free. He leads a pack of wolves and becomes mythic in proportion. Herein lies an example of rewilding; Buck’s re-establishment in the wilderness is emblematic of the potential of the rewilding project to reinvigorate the natural world and the people within it. In “Rewilding and Diversity”, Soulé and Noss (1998) put forward two non-scientific justifications of rewilding: human responsibility and the restoration of the ‘wildness’ of the wilderness. They argue that the essence of nature is undermined when it is devoid of its natural hierarchies and wildlife dynamics; it is “incomplete, truncated, overly tame” (pp.23-24). Taking their thesis as his point of departure, Monbiot suggests that we – humanity – are afflicted with a sense of dissatisfaction arising from contemporary life, its superficiality, busyness and pleasure seeking. In order to reconnect with our inmost selves, we must strive to immerse ourselves in the natural world. This is the achievement of London’s protagonist in The Call of the Wild – though it is not of Buck’s own accord that he is thrown into the wilderness of the Northland, he adapts nonetheless. By the close of the novel, Buck has not only answered the call of the wild; he has become the wild. With respect to humankind, rewilding is principally concerned with restoration: succeeding the ‘back to the land’ movement of the 1970s (Dunn 2016, p.38), it seeks to heal the wounds caused by modern civilisation. In his introduction to Upton Sinclair’s Cry for Justice (a volume of writings on the struggle of humanity against social injustice), London commented: “We know how gods are made. Comes now the time to make a world” (p.11). His comment is particularly germane to the project of rewilding, for it is fundamentally about the creation of a new world in which the self can be truly realised.

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