The great rewilding conspiracy: the right fight the science while Britain burns

As Britain surfaces from a summer of prolonged drought, record heat and wildfires, the evidence is becoming harder to ignore. Climate change is increasing the likelihood of the extreme heat and dry conditions that make wildfires more common and dangerous.

Scientists overwhelmingly agree that human activity is driving climate change, yet the right-wing media appears determined to find almost anything else to blame.

Their latest target is rewilding, the restoration of ecosystems by allowing vegetation and natural processes to return with less human intervention. Their argument is that allowing vegetation to grow has created vast ‘tinderboxes’ and that environmental policies are therefore responsible for Britain’s worsening wildfire problem.

There is a serious discussion to be had about how land should be managed to reduce fire risk, but turning that discussion into a conspiracy about rewilding is another matter entirely. It also creates a notable contradiction. Newspapers claiming to defend ‘evidence-based’ land management are promoting a narrative that ignores much of the scientific evidence about what is actually driving extreme wildfire conditions.

The Telegraph’s rewilding blame game

When a 371-acre wildfire began at the RSPB’s Minsmere reserve in Suffolk before spreading to National Trust-owned Dunwich Heath, the Telegraph sought to pin the blame on ‘rewilding.’

The paper reported claims that the area had become a ‘tinderbox’ because of the RSPB’s ‘rewilding agenda,’ quoting Countryside Alliance chief executive Tim Bonner, whose organisation has consistently opposed rewilding.

Bonner accused organisations of refusing to manage vegetation because of ‘political ideology’ and an ‘obsession with rewilding.’

Yet the organisations actually responsible for managing the land gave a very different explanation.

The RSPB said the summer’s fires were “unprecedented in scale, driven by drought and prolonged heat exacerbated by climate change.”

The National Trust likewise pointed to prolonged drought and exceptionally low rainfall across England and Wales.

The Trust’s communications director Celia Richardson summed up the absurdity: “Some of the oldest surviving heathland in the UK burns in unprecedented temperatures and Telegraph headline says “rewilding” is to blame.”

There is an obvious problem with treating vegetation management as the primary explanation for catastrophic fires. Devastating wildfires have also occurred on intensively managed land. Scotland’s first recorded ‘megafire,’ at Dava on a managed grouse moor in June 2025, is one example.

And talking of grouse land. A recent article in the Murdoch-owned Times headlined “Wildfires suggest rewilding needs a rethink,” claims that “Green enthusiasm for ignoring the old-fashioned thinning and clearing of land does create habitats – and kindling.”

But there is a wider vested interest behind this particular vision of ‘traditional’ land management. Grouse moors are managed to support driven grouse shooting, a pursuit associated with Britain’s wealthy landowners and the ultra-rich, for whom vast swathes of upland Britain are maintained as private shooting estates.

That matters because much of this land is managed through intensive heather burning. Environmental campaigners have long argued that such burning can damage peatlands, which are naturally wet ecosystems that store carbon and support a wide range of wildlife.

So, when the right-wing press present burning and intensive management as the sensible alternative to rewilding, it’s worth asking whose interests that version of ‘sensible’ land management serves.

Climate science tells us that higher temperatures dry out vegetation and make it more flammable.

Indeed, there is evidence that some forms of ecological restoration can make landscapes more resilient to extreme weather. Rewilding can increase carbon storage, restore water-retaining soils and wetlands, provide shade and diversify vegetation.

Rewetting peatlands can also reduce the continuity of flammable vegetation. RSPB senior policy officer Tom Aspinall has explained that burning can encourage heather, an oily highly flammable plant, while rewetting and diversification can introduce a wider range of vegetation and disrupt the ability of fires to spread.

A balanced debate?

In response to a front-page story in the Daily Mail claiming that ‘eco-dogma’ and Labour’s environmental policies had caused the record number of UK wildfires, Rachel Millward, deputy leader of the Green Party, accused the newspaper of “turning reality on its head” by blaming rewilding while denying readers the facts about climate change.

“This is another deeply irresponsible headline from a deeply irresponsible newspaper,” she told Left Foot Forward. “The Mail seeks to blame the climate crisis on anything other than its main cause – burning fossil fuels.”

There is, of course, a legitimate debate about whether particular landscapes are being managed in the best possible way.

University of York associate professor Andreas Heinemeyer, who has studied UK moorland ecology for 15 years, widens the discussion to include the common practice of vegetation control through burning. He argues that the supposed conflict between those who support burning and those who oppose it has become a “false culture war.”

For Heinemeyer, policy should be based on “unbiased and robust evidence” rather than “false and misleading claims about burning.”  

Amen to that but there seems little prospect of the right-wing media presenting a balanced discussion any time soon.

Trump’s war on conservation

And such misinformation isn’t confined to Britain. As with so many of the culture wars peddled by the right, the inspiration comes from across the Atlantic, where the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal recently ran an editorial arguing green policies were fuelling fires in Europe.

It’s a depressingly common thread. When wildfires become more frequent and extreme, the right-wing media repeatedly looks for an environmental policy to blame, anything, it seems, except the fossil fuel emissions driving global warming.

Donald Trump has taken a similar approach to environmental protection in the US.

His administration has rolled back protections covering huge areas of public land and weakened conservation safeguards. He has repeatedly attacked environmental regulations as the work of “radical climate activists,” including complaining that endangered-species protections have placed land off limits to development and even military training.

The same political instinct is visible on both sides of the Atlantic, to portray environmental protection as an ideological project, then use environmental problems as evidence that environmental protection has failed.

But the consequences of weakening habitat protections are not ideological. Habitat loss remains a leading driver of extinction. The Rewilding Institute has warned that rolling back habitat protections removes the foundations needed for ecosystems and wildlife to recover.

 

France’s far right exploits the fires while opposing green policy

The same contradiction is playing out in France which suffered a summer of record heat. By the end of July, the area burned by wildfires had already broken the annual record. 

Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally has spent years opposing green regulations. Yet the party seized on France’s worst blazes in years to accuse President Emmanuel Macron’s government of failing in one of its most basic duties, protecting people and their homes.

As Politico noted: “As France has sweltered through record heat, the National Rally has so far paid little political price for its lack of credibility on climate and environmental policy.”

Rather than addressing the causes of climate change, the party focused on adaptation, how governments can protect people from its consequences. During a June heatwave, for example, it proposed financial assistance for installing air conditioning in homes and public buildings, presenting the measure as an immediate response to concerns about health and safety.

It is a familiar political manoeuvre: exploit the consequences of a warming climate while sidestepping the policies needed to tackle its causes.

The French example makes clear that this is not simply a British media obsession with rewilding. Across the right, climate impacts are increasingly being used to attack environmental policy, even when the policies being attacked are aimed at addressing the underlying crisis.

Follow the evidence not the culture war

The Met Office says 2026 is on course to be the hottest UK summer on record. Temperatures reached 38.1°Cat in Kew Gardens, while 2026 became the first year on record in which temperatures reached at least 35°C in May, June and July. A summer this hot has been made around 130 times more likely by human-induced climate change, according to the Met Office.

Dr Stephen Cumbers, a medical doctor and chartered scientist, summed up the implications: 

 “None of this means every wildfire, death or hot day can simply be labelled ‘climate change’,” he wrote. “Nor does the evidence dictate a single policy programme. But it does make continued delay increasingly difficult to justify.”

His conclusion should be the starting point for the debate.

“The message to government should be neither alarmism nor complacency.

“Take the evidence seriously. Be honest about the risks and costs. And make energy and climate decisions on evidence rather than short-term political convenience.”

There is nothing wrong with questioning how particular landscapes are managed, or examining whether controlled burning, grazing, rewetting and other interventions can reduce wildfire risk.

What is wrong is turning that legitimate scientific and ecological debate into a political conspiracy in which rewilding is blamed for a wildfire crisis occurring amid record heat and drought.

The right-wing media’s argument ultimately collapses under its own contradiction. It demands that environmentalists “follow the evidence” while repeatedly ignoring the evidence when it points towards climate change.

Britain might need better land management, but it also needs an honest conversation about what is making wildfires worse.

Blaming rewilding won’t make the climate crisis disappear. In the meantime, the debate (or lack of debate) does feel like those astronomical arguments of the early modern period. Long after scientists and seafarers had proved that the earth was round and went round the sun, there were still those who insisted on the opposite. Are climate change deniers the flat earthers of our time? 

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch