Urban rewilding is an effort to restore natural ecological processes and habitats in city environments. Many
cities around the world have embraced rewilding as part of larger movements to promote ecological
conservation and environmentally friendly design. Now, a movement to promote urban rewilding is beginning
to take shape in the United States as well.
Carefully read the six sources, including the introductory information for each source. Write an essay that
synthesizes material from at least three of the sources and develops your position on the extent to which
rewilding initiatives are worthwhile for urban communities to pursue.
Source A (infographic from Fastnacht)
Source B (Jepson and Schepers policy brief)
Source C (NRPA article)
Source D (Garland article)
Source E (graph from McDonald et al.)
Source F (Chatterton book excerpt)
In your response you should do the following:
• Respond to the prompt with a thesis that presents a defensible position.
• Select and use evidence from at least three of the provided sources to support your line of
reasoning. Indicate clearly the sources used through direct quotation, paraphrase, or summary.
Sources may be cited as Source A, Source B, etc., or by using the description in parentheses.
• Explain how the evidence supports your line of reasoning.
• Use appropriate grammar and punctuation in communicating your argument.
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AP® English Language and Composition 2023 Free-Response Questions
Source A
Fastnacht, Sarah. “The Necessity of Rewilding our Cities.” Makers of Sustainable Spaces,
MOSS, 29 Apr. 2021, moss.amsterdam/2021/04/29/rewilding-our-cities.
The following infographic is based on an image in a blog post published by an architecture and design company
that specializes in sustainability.
Note: Priority areas refers to ecosystems identified by researchers as particularly important for biodiversity.
Sequestration is the capture of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere so that it does not contribute to global
climate change.
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AP® English Language and Composition 2023 Free-Response Questions
Source B
Jepson, Paul, and Frans Schepers. “Making Space for Rewilding: Creating an Enabling Policy
Environment.” Rewilding Europe, Rewilding Europe, May 2016, www.rewildingeurope.com/
wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Making-Space-for-Rewilding-Policy-Brief1.pdf.
The following is excerpted from a policy brief published as a collaboration between the University of Oxford and
a nonprofit organization that promotes rewilding in Europe.
Rewilding is a powerful new term in conservation. This may be because it combines a sense of passion and
feeling for nature with advances in ecological science. The term resonates with diverse publics and seems to
have particular appeal to a younger urban generation and among those who want a voice in shaping a new rural
environment. Rewilding is exciting, engaging and challenging: it is promoting debate and deliberation on what
is natural and the natures we collectively wish to conserve and shape.
Rewilding is a multifaceted concept with three broad dimensions that interact with each other: 1) restoring and
giving space to natural processes, 2) reconnecting wild(er) nature with the modern economy, and 3) responding
to and shaping cosmopolitan perceptions of nature conservation among European society. The following
principles are coming to characterise and guide rewilding as a distinct approach to conservation.
1. Restoring natural processes and ecological dynamics—both abiotic such as river flows, and biotic such as
the ecological web and food-chain—through reassembling lost guilds 1 of animals in dynamic landscapes.
2. A gradated and situated approach, where the goal is to move up a scale of wildness within the constraints
of what is possible, and interacting with local cultural identities.
3. Taking inspiration from the past but not replicating it. Developing new natural heritage and value that
evokes the past but shapes the future.
4. Creating self-sustaining, resilient ecosystems (including re-connecting habitats and species populations
within the wider landscapes) that provide resilience to external threats and pressures, including the impact of
climate change (adaptation).
5. Working towards the ideal of passive management, where once restored, we step back and allow dynamic
natural processes to shape conservation outcomes.
6. Creating new natural assets that connect with modern society and economy and promote innovation,
enterprise and investment in and around natural areas, leading to new nature-inspired economies.
7. Reconnecting policy with popular conservation sentiment and a recognition that conservation is a
culturally dynamic as well as a scientific and technical pursuit.
As a new conservation frame, rewilding brings together established and newer conservation worldviews. People
are combining these in different ways creating different ‘shades’ of rewilding, many of which have labels. This
is a limitation and opportunity. On the one hand it exposes rewilding to sensationalists media interpretations
and charges of a lack of clarity, consensus and evidence by groups within conservation science. On the other
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AP® English Language and Composition 2023 Free-Response Questions
hand it reflects innovation and creates the possibility for a common, but differentiated (situated) mode of
conservation: one that is guided by a set of principles that member states or regions can interpret in ways suited
to their nature conservation traditions, landscapes, culture and economies.
1 Groups of organisms that use natural resources in similar ways
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AP® English Language and Composition 2023 Free-Response Questions
Source C
“Urban Rewilding.” Parks and Recreation, National Recreation and Park Association,
1 Nov. .2016, nrpa.org/parks-recreation-magazine/2016/november/urban-rewilding/.
The following is excerpted from an article in a magazine published by a nonprofit organization that promotes
parks and environmental conservation.
“Close your eyes for a moment and picture a place from childhood that’s extremely meaningful,” directed
Opening Session keynote speaker Dr. Scott Sampson. “Imagine what it looks like, feels like, who you’re there
with, what the smells are.”
By an almost unanimous show of hands, Dr. Scott, host and science advisor of the Emmy-nominated PBS
KIDS television series “Dinosaur Train” and author of How to Raise a Wild Child: The Art and Science of
Falling in Love with Nature, illustrated how, for a large number in the audience, that extremely meaningful
childhood place involves the outdoors. The audience largely consisted of Baby Boomers/Generation Xers who
remember enjoying abundant, unstructured outdoor playtime as kids. For many of today’s youth, those
childhood places will look much different.…
Imagine 25 years from now, he posits, how many hands would be raised in response to the same question about
a meaningful childhood place involving the outdoors. “If people don’t spend any time outside, why are they
going to care about their local places let alone the national parks in the distance,” he asked.
Dr. Scott suggests that “urban rewilding” in our cities and towns is what’s needed to head off this crisis.
Rewilding is a term usually used in connection with reintroducing an apex predator into an ecosystem in an
attempt to restore balance. A familiar example of this top-down approach to restoring balance would be the
efforts to return wolves to Yellowstone Park. Urban rewilding is a bottom up approach that starts with the
simple act of planting mostly native plants. They are critical to attracting native insects, which in turn attract
birds and various animals back to the local ecosystem. And, if we do urban rewilding right, cities could become
places where nature is welcome. And once that happens, we need to help children develop NEW eyes to see
nature: to notice it, engage with it—play is an important way for kids to engage with nature and it also allows
them to gain some experience with risk-taking, while developing a sense of wonder about it.
This movement to “rewild” or “wild” children touches on all three NRPA Pillars—Conservation, Health and
Wellness and Social Equity. However, it’s a movement that requires big thinking about what we want the future
to look like and for each community that future will look different. It also will require deep collaboration
among multiple organizations that bring their various areas of expertise, each doing their part to achieve the end
goal of successful, thriving communities. “We’re at a juncture where the decisions we and the next generation
make will determine the course of this planet for thousands of years to come,” Dr. Scott noted. He then
challenged us to go out into our communities and think about what those collaborations could be, look like and
grow into, and to think big because “that’s where success resides.”
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AP® English Language and Composition 2023 Free-Response Questions
Source D
Garland, Lincoln. “Let Go of Some Urban Domestication: How Would You
Convince the Mayor to Re-wild the City?” The Nature of Cities, The Nature
of Cities, www.thenatureofcities.com/2017/11/13/re-wilding-make-cities-betterjust-wilder/.
The following is excerpted from an online discussion of urban rewilding in the United Kingdom hosted by a
nonprofit organization that publishes research and writing about cities. The author is the associate director of an
environmental consultancy.
There are certainly opportunities for introducing re-wilding in rural parts of the UK, in particular in upland
regions where, without subsidy, agriculture is economically unviable for the most part. With respect to the UK’s
cities, nature should also be allowed to take its own path in certain select locations to create some semblance of
wildness. I am unconvinced however that re-wilding is the appropriate terminology or the approach to wildlife
restoration that we should be pursuing in UK cities at any meaningful scale.
The large expanses of greenspace that would be required to recreate fully functioning wildwood, including
relatively large numbers of herbivores and viable populations of naturally scarce predators at the top of food
chain, are simply not available in our cities, where space is increasingly at a premium. Sustainable urban design
should be seeking to avoid low-density sprawl and instead promote compact, transit-oriented,
pedestrian-and-bicycle friendly urban development that provides easy access to services. This development
model is crucial for tackling congestion and for reducing CO2 and other harmful emissions. Given this compact
city imperative, the proposition of devoting large areas of urban space for re-wilding in anything approaching
its true sense is untenable.…
Some authors/practitioners respond that there should be no minimum area thresholds for wilderness and
re-wilding from an ecological perspective, frequently quoting Aldo Leopold who declared that “no tract of
land is too small for the wilderness idea”. While it is true that ecosystems can be considered at the
microcosm, there really is not the space available to recreate complex self-sustaining food webs, with
meaningful ranges of predators and prey, in accordance with the true principles of re-wilding.
Even ignoring the seeming disregard for matters relating to population viability analysis and the principles of
island biogeography, other concerns remain. In those small areas where nature can be left to its own devices,
many people may have a profound dislike for the outcome that sometimes emerges. Negative comments may be
expressed relating to perceptions of safety, the appearance of neglect, reduced accessibility and visual/aesthetic
preference. With respect to the last of these concerns, while education programmes can attune people’s
valuation patterns, within an urban context a great many people will continue to favour more ordered,
manicured environments. Undeniably, a previously accessible urban greenspace that has been left to nature,
which then rapidly succeeds into a monoculture of impenetrable bramble or butterfly-bush, is unlikely to be
well-received by most local residents.…
The disturbed nature of urban soils is likely to be another major limiting factor, impoverished as they frequently
are in terms of seedbank, organic material and soil organisms. Without active management newly emerging
urban woodland would also be subject to degradation by trampling, visual and noise disturbance, fire, invasive
species, effects of predatory pets etc. To reiterate, unencumbered natural succession may well produce
landscapes in urban areas dramatically less visually and ecologically appealing than anticipated.
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Source E
McDonald, Robert Ian, et al. “The Green Soul of the Concrete Jungle: The Urban Century, the
Urban Psychological Penalty, and the Role of Nature.” Sustainable Earth, vol. 1, no. 3, 2018,
sustainableearth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s42055-018-0002-5.
The following is based on a graph published in a community-focused academic journal dedicated to advancing
environmental sustainability. It shows responses from a survey conducted in three towns in the United Kingdom.
Forest cover in urban neighborhoods and its impact on mental health. The bar chart shows the fraction of urban
dwellers who live in neighborhoods with varying levels of forest cover.
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AP® English Language and Composition 2023 Free-Response Questions
Source F
Chatterton, Paul. Unlocking Sustainable Cities: A Manifesto for Real Change. Pluto Press, 2019.
The following is an excerpt from a book exploring the benefits of urban rewilding.
We are beginning to see a proliferation of hybrid natural and built forms through, for example, living walls,
rooftop farms, vertical or sky gardens and breathing buildings. These can have significant beneficial effects. For
example, urban street canyons refer to the effect created by high buildings lining a street, which can become
hotspots for harmful pollutants, such as nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter. A study by Thomas Pugh and
colleagues from the Lancaster Environment Centre suggests that strategic placement of vegetation in street
canyons can cut air pollution by up to 30 per cent. They can also stop urban overheating and provide effective
insulation and shading for buildings, as well as reducing noise pollution. And of course, there are the
psychological and aesthetic benefits of being proximate to an abundance of natural greenery.
Green corridors and linear parks can be retrofitted into the existing city. For example, the High Line project in
New York transformed an old rail line into a nearly two-mile urban park. It opened in 2014 and became a short
cut for walkers and one of the city’s favourite parks featuring art installations and places for hanging out. Other
cities are following suit including Chicago’s 606 Park and Toronto’s Bentway, which has slotted 55 outdoor
rooms under its Gardiner Expressway featuring farmers’ markets, performance spaces and a children’s garden.
Miami is also building the Underline, a nine-mile linear park underneath its metrorail line. In my own city of
Leeds, a community group is attempting to do the same thing on one of Leeds’ abandoned Victorian train
viaducts. The Madrid Rio project was one of the most exciting urban reclamation projects in Europe—burying
a former ring road to create over 600 hectares of parkland. Efforts are being made not just to create
greenspaces, but to create interconnected green corridors. For example, the All London Green Grid (ALGG) is
the green infrastructure strategy for London, which sets out a vision to create an interconnected network of
green and blue spaces across the entire city. It is this interconnection that is so important in terms of creating
space for biodiversity to move more extensively.
Singapore is one of the pioneers of placing nature at the heart of its planning and urban design process. As a
self-labelled garden city, it now prefers to call itself ‘the city in a garden’. To realize this vision of living in an
urban park, Singapore implemented a landscape replacement policy whereby any greenery removed during
construction has to be reinstated as part of the development. It is estimated that the amount of urban greenery
has been at least doubled, but mainly through sky gardens. The city has also built nearly 300km of park
connectors to create deeper connections between parks and neighbourhoods.