A proposed national park in Romania is one of hundreds of landscape recovery projects in Europe driving the movement known as rewilding. Capable of transforming ecosystems, bison and other large herbivores are key to rewilding processes. Here, a bison in transit will soon range with others reintroduced to the Carpathian landscape after an absence of over 200 years. As these foragers roam and fertilize the soil, they enrich the habitat for other species. But some residents are concerned about the challenges of living with wild animals. Florin Horia Baros waits outside his two-story, wood-shingle farmhouse in Sătic, a village in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains, his face like thunder. Around midnight the farmer was startled by a commotion from the sheds holding his pigs. “The bear came along the street, over the fence, broke the door off the shed, and attacked the pigs. I chased him off with my dogs,” he says. Hours later, the brown bear circled back, targeting another shed. Now, two pigs lie dead in the yard. A third, though still alive, staggers stupefied around the pen, its back stripped by the bear’s teeth and claws. A fourth is missing. Baros, also a veterinarian, is considering putting the wounded pig out of its misery but has decided to wait for a local commission to arrive. “I want them to see what that bear has done,” he says. It’s the morning after the attack, and I’m accompanying Bogdan Sulică, whose unrattled self- assurance suggests he’s used to difficult conversations. Sulică heads a rapid intervention team at Foundation Conservation Carpathia, an organization that, since 2009, has been working to win local support to protect the region’s endangered forests and wildlife. Funded by international philanthropists and one of the largest European Union environment grants, Conservation Carpathia has its sights set on establishing a new national park covering 500,000 acres in the Făgăraş range of the Carpathians. Some see it as the Yellowstone of Europe: With so few wilderness areas left, it’s perhaps the continent’s last chance to create a national park on a vast scale. Home to golden eagles, Ural owls, otters, wild boar, wolves, lynx, and brown bears, the Carpathians—here on the outskirts of Sătic, Romania—are one of Europe's last stretches of wilderness. And it's getting a bit wilder, thanks in part to the return of European bison and a reforestation project.
The forested ravines and 8,000-foot peaks of the Făgăraş make up one of the largest unsettled areas in central Europe, sheltering spectacularly diverse habitats: coniferous forest with wetlands, alpine ridges and meadows, and high-altitude willow, rowan, and birch forests, with spruce, fir, elm, sycamore, and beech on lower slopes. At least 1,500 animal and plant species—including rare birds such as golden eagles, wall creepers, and Ural owls—are found here, as well as wild boars, wolves, lynx, and, of course, bears. Sulică’s job is to help resolve wild animal conflicts in towns and villages scattered around the fringes of the project. He’s had little sleep. “This bear has killed 11 pigs in the last four days,” he says. “But worse, it shows no fear of humans or dogs. And it’s clever. It never comes to the same place twice.”
(Bears, wolves, and rewilding in Romania's southern Carpathian Mountains.)
For Sulică, one of Conservation Carpathia’s 149 employees and a native of the region, the dream of a national park is at stake. Over two months in the summer of 2023, there were dozens of human- bear conflicts. A serial marauder known as Imobiliaru (or “real estate bear”) for breaking into houses and stealing food from fridges was recently euthanized. “We’ll be judged by how we manage this problem,” says Sulică. Bear incidents in the Făgăraş region have fallen in some recent years, to 95 in 2023, but Sulică knows 95 is still too many. In July, after a hiker was fatally mauled, the country’s annual kill quota was raised to 481 bears from 220. “These attacks risk demonizing all bears,” Sulică says. “But as a species, they play an important role in the ecosystem. We need them.” Brown bears are impressive seed dispersers. They can eat a third of their body weight in berries a day and excrete them nearly a mile away, ready to germinate in a nutrient-rich pile of dung. They also compete for carrion with red foxes, badgers, and wild boars, allowing the prey of these smaller predators to rebound. The need to mitigate human-animal conflicts is a scenario that is set to play out increasingly across Europe, where, by 2030, an estimated 49 million acres of mostly remote and marginal land will be abandoned as agriculture wanes and urban areas continue to grow. Wolves, bears, and lynx, once persecuted to the verge of extinction but vigorously protected today by law, are rebounding in the EU, which now has 20,300 gray wolves—about two and a half times as many as in the much larger contiguous United States. Germany alone has close to 160 packs. This historic opportunity for nature coincides with a landmark law passed in June to restore at least 20 percent of EU land and sea by decade’s end. Nonprofits such as Rewilding Europe, based in the Netherlands, and the Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme, in the United Kingdom, envision the return of other animals that have not been seen for centuries, including elk, water buffalo, bison, beavers, and other large herbivores. As wildlife rebounds, there’s potential for tourism to boost declining rural economies. Even a single charismatic species can have enormous pull. Visitors who travel to Scotland’s Isle of Mull to see white-tailed eagles generate the equivalent of at least six million dollars a year for the island. Nature restoration on this scale can also provide services such as holding back flooding and soil erosion, restoring water tables, supplying pollinating insects for farming, and—crucially—storing carbon for climate resilience. With two billion dollars spent on the voluntary carbon market in 2022, it’s emerging as a major driver for rewilding.
Europe is working to restore and rewild its natural environment.
The 2024 Nature Restoration Law aims to renew and protect 20 percent of the European Union’s degraded territory by 2030. Europe is fostering hundreds of bold rewilding initiatives, which leads to a cascade of benefits for wildlife and people.
Intense human pressures, predominantly urban development and heavy agriculture, degrade and fragment habitats. More ecologically intact areas tend to be remote and mountainous. Many projects now under way are helping to restore nature’s balance. Rewilding efforts seek to bolster water systems for flood mitigation, reintroduce critical species to sustain habitats, use natural grazing to lower fire risk, and promote coexistence of predators to maintain biodiversity. German-born Christoph and his Austrian wife, Barbara, met when they came to the Făgăraş in the early 1990s to study wolves and loved the region so much they stayed. A decade later, they found themselves witnessing the destruction of the forests around them on an industrial scale. The Romanian government had just begun restituting land seized earlier by the communist state to its private, often absentee owners. Logging suddenly became big business, and much of it was illegal. “It was heartbreaking to watch,” says Christoph. “Many were out to get whatever they could. Not even nature reserves were safe.” In 2007, after the Prombergers took Swiss billionaire and philanthropist Hansjörg Wyss on a helicopter survey over the Făgăraș Mountains, he put up the money to purchase the first thousand acres to protect the land from logging. (Wyss also coined the Yellowstone moniker.) Others intent on saving one of the last great old-growth forests in Europe joined forces, and Conservation Carpathia was born. “We realized we could do something really ambitious,” says Christoph. A conversation with Doug Tompkins, an American businessman and conservationist who, with his wife, Kris, was buying more than two million acres of wilderness in Chile and Argentina to create national parks, convinced the Prombergers they could also aim big: a national park encompassing all of Făgăraş. Around 75 percent would be reserved for wildlife recovery; a buffer zone covering the remaining quarter would be open for tourism and low-impact businesses, such as foraging and sustainable extraction of timber for local use. The Prombergers first visited Knepp in 2015, after we were introduced by one of their Conservation Carpathia board members. On a bracing March morning, we took them on safari around Knepp’s emerging scrub and wetlands. Their focus had been almost solely on monitoring large predators and protecting virgin forest, but seeing Knepp’s free-roaming animals lit a spark. They began to think about restoring the missing keystone species in Făgăraş, such as beavers and bison. (By 2020, that work was under way as bison were reintroduced, followed by beavers in 2022.) They ultimately invited Charlie to be their board chair. The rewilding network in Europe fizzes like a circuit board. Now, years after our first meeting, I’m in Romania with Barbara and Christoph as my guides as I come to learn about the challenges and potential of rewilding on a massive scale. “This is a poor region, and young people are drifting away,” says Christoph. A national park could reverse that exodus. “It would take economic activity away from logging, where most of the profits end up in the hands of big, often foreign timber companies,” he adds, “and into tourism, where the profits would stay right here.” Conservation Carpathia commissioned a study from Munich-based consultancy Roland Berger to compare the economic impact of three scenarios: business as usual, enforcement of existing protected areas, and a new national park encompassing the Făgăraş. This last had the best outcome by far, with a projected increase in income in the region of more than a hundred million euros by 2030. “Romania itself needs this national park,” says Christoph. “Bucharest depends on the Făgăraş Mountains for its drinking water. Deforestation is playing havoc with the rainwater catchment and water supply.” Like all EU countries, Romania has obligations to restore biodiversity and sequester carbon. “But above all,” says Christoph, “Romania would benefit from the enormous national pride that would come from establishing a national park that is right up there with the best in the world.”
