There's a comfortable story we tell ourselves about environmental restoration. When a species returns or a damaged ecosystem begins to heal, we celebrate it as nature's resilience and humanity's capacity for redemption. The recent news that screwworms are re-establishing themselves in the American Southwest after a 1966 eradication prompted the usual response: concern, yes, but also framed around our technological ability to manage the crisis.
This is analysis and opinion.
The obvious consensus says rewilding and restoration are unambiguously good. Species return, habitats regenerate, we've learned our lesson. What's not to like?
The better question is what this recovery trend breaks next in our assumptions about land use, economic responsibility, and who bears the costs of environmental management.
Consider the screwworm case. The United States and Mexico spent decades and considerable resources eliminating this parasite. Now it's back, driven partly by climate shifts and changing land management practices across borders. The agencies preparing for it in Colorado and elsewhere will spend millions on surveillance, containment, and possibly new eradication campaigns. Ranchers will face direct losses. Wildlife managers will have to adjust protocols.
This isn't a celebration moment masquerading as one. It's an inflection point that exposes something we prefer not to examine: restoration and recovery aren't free, and they're not evenly distributed costs.
The rewilding movement has earned legitimate environmental credentials. Removing dams, reintroducing predators, protecting migration corridors - these are substantive efforts to restore ecological function. But the narrative around them often skips over the next chapter. Who absorbs the economic disruption when wolves return to ranching regions? Who funds the perpetual management that nature's "recovery" sometimes demands? Whose land bears the burden of restoration?
We see this pattern across multiple fronts. When states prepare for returning pests like screwworms, federal and state budgets handle initial response, but agricultural producers face operational costs and losses immediately. When national monuments are shrunk or expanded through administrative changes, the stakeholders in those landscapes - extractive industries, rural communities, tribal nations, conservation groups - don't experience the decision equally. The cost distribution becomes political and often invisible in the narrative.
Here's what troubles me about the comfortable consensus: it lets us avoid the harder conversation about environmental justice in restoration work.
If we genuinely believe in rewilding and species recovery, we need to ask whether the economic models supporting it are sustainable and fair. A rancher dealing with predator reintroduction isn't opposed to environmental values; they're absorbing a cost that society has decided is worth bearing. But if that cost isn't explicitly acknowledged and managed, we're not having environmental policy. We're having cost-shifting with a green narrative.
The screwworms returning, the conversations about land management, the shifts in agriculture driven by climate and regulation - these aren't separate stories. They're all symptoms of the same underlying problem: we've built systems of land use that assumed certain conditions would remain stable. Now they're not. Recovery is happening on a landscape that wasn't designed for it.
This doesn't mean we should stop pursuing restoration. It means the conversation needs to mature past celebration and into mechanism. What does a just transition look like for communities whose economic models conflict with ecological recovery? How do we price restoration work honestly? When restoration breaks existing industries, what's our social contract?
The rewilding trend isn't wrong. But it's incomplete, and that incompleteness is becoming expensive. Not in the way that makes headlines, but in the way that shapes whether environmental policy survives contact with actual economies and actual communities.
That's the conversation worth having.