Beavers in paradise: Prefiguring London’s urban wilds

Beavers have emerged as the flagship species for rewilding in Britain. Absent from the landscape since the sixteenth century, legal and illegal releases across the British countryside have driven rapid increases in their population and range and, with this proliferation, it is widely anticipated that beavers will soon colonise British cities, including London. A growing population now borders the city and is expected to expand and establish in London’s waterways in the not-too-distant future. In anticipation of this re-beavered urban future, a cohort of urban rewilders seeks to prepare Londoners to welcome the rodent’s imminent return by reintroducing beavers to the city. At Paradise Fields in Ealing, west London, they have designed and staged a high-profile experiment in how to live well with a family of reintroduced beavers in an urban environment called the Ealing Beaver Project. In this paper, we argue that this evidences a new type of prefigurative urban ecological politics that leverages encounters with urban wildlife to forge new (re)wilded (human and nonhuman) citizens and to experiment with new forms of urban wildlife management. In doing so it also prefigures what we term ‘municipal wildness’, whereby the wild is positioned as a universal public good delivered via collaboration between the local state and civil society. Prefigurative urban ecological politics describes political programmes that summon the future to anticipate and nurture desired configurations of urban socio-ecological relations in the present. The paper develops a conceptual framework for studying this new mode of urban rewilding and then deploys it to critically analyse beaver reintroduction in London.