The Oostvaardersplassen Fiasco

The now infamous rewilding experiment in the Dutch Oostvaardersplassen was terminated in 2018 as a consequence of repeated public outcries against the massive crashes of the reserve’s herbivore populations during severe winters, particularly the winter of 2017–2018. This essay discusses the background and aims of the experiment and analyzes the causes of its failure. It argues that one of the main causes was the general public’s conception of nature as a self-regulating whole that strives for equilibrium, a notion with deep historical roots. The experts involved in the project not only paid insufficient attention to this expectation; they even strengthened it at times, inadvertently or not. If the management regime of the reserve had been better attuned to the public’s anxieties about the wildly fluctuating herbivore populations, the 2018 fiasco might have been prevented.