A Yellowstone for Europe? Inside the bold effort to rewild the continent

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.

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.

In 2000 my husband, Charlie Burrell, and I put theories to the test in our own rewilding project on 3,500 acres of unprofitable farmland at Knepp Estate in West Sussex, England. Allowing thorny scrub to colonize our fields and then introducing red and fallow deer, old English longhorn cattle to stand in for their ancestor, the extinct aurochs, Exmoor ponies for the tarpan, and Tamworth pigs for wild boar, we have stood back and watched as biodiversity has soared. In just over 20 years, our depleted land has become a haven for some of the U.K.’s rarest species, including nightingales, turtle doves, and purple emperor butterflies, and draws thousands of tourists annually. I told our story in the book Wilding, now a documentary film, and Charlie, having helped establish the nonprofit Rewilding Britain, joined the board of Rewilding Europe.

In 2018 the U.K. government showcased Knepp as a restoration model, and other landowners are following our example. They are often drawn by the economics: Our estate makes a healthy income from ecotourism, a shop, a restaurant, and meat from our free-roaming animals, and employs 80 people, compared with 23 when it was a farm. What’s more, Knepp is now a significant carbon sink. Research shows our rewilded soils alone store carbon at least as fast as models predict 25-year-old broadleaf woodlands do.

Among the visitors to Knepp are others embarking on large-scale rewilding projects across Europe—including, a few years ago, Christoph Promberger and Barbara Promberger-Fuerpass.

(Eight incredible rewilding projects to discover in the U.K.)

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.

(Top 4 myths about wolves, busted by experts.)

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.”

Conservation Carpathia has amassed 68,000 acres of land and plans to secure a further 17,000 acres of private land over the next few years. But until the organization can convince the surrounding villages of the value of committing their forests to a park, logging surges on in virtually every remote valley. Data collected between July 2019 and July 2024 identified 247,000 trees felled from forests age 130 years or more in the Făgăraş. The Romanian government has been cited by the EU for failing to prevent illegal logging and remains equivocal about creating a national park. For Conservation Carpathia, everything rides on local support, which it hopes will sway the government.

One who will take winning over is Ion Pîrnuţă, mayor of Rucăr, in the core of the proposed park. A timber merchant, he’s angered by Conservation Carpathia’s interventions and buying up logging rights. “A national park would be a great thing one day, but the economic benefits will be slow in coming,” Pîrnuţă says, as Christoph and I sit in the conference room of his new but undersold 34-room hotel. “We have more empty than inhabited houses. We need jobs and investment now,” he says. “Our stomachs are hungry today.”

Pîrnuţă is one of the area’s biggest entrepreneurs. A coal miner during the communist era, he now owns a butcher shop, several grocery stores, a road construction business, and a sawmill. “Timber and cattle—that’s how we make a living in this region,” he says. “Natural resources are there to be used … you cannot live on pretty views alone.”

Across Europe, similar debates about land use are raging. As pastoralism declines, beleaguered cattle and sheep farmers argue the value of maintaining traditions. Many survive only because of agricultural subsidies. Some see rewilding as a threat to identity, and the resurgence of wolves and bears articulates this sense of cultural assault.

(Northern Italy's 'problem bears' show the challenges of rewilding carnivores.)

But rewilding has gained considerable traction in Europe since it evolved in the 1990s in response to the failure of traditional conservation to stem catastrophic biodiversity loss. In Europe, less than half the size of North America, heavily industrialized, and historically fragmented, rewilding is a more human-inclusive approach to nature restoration where vast wilderness areas typically don’t exist. Even remote mountains and national parks in Europe contain people, and rewilding will always involve them.

As one of the continent’s most densely populated countries, the Netherlands has been at the forefront of the rewilding movement, generating space for nature in small, unexpected places and restoring floodplains for water management and wetlands habitat. Influential Dutch ecologist Frans Vera helped frame free-roaming animals as the creators of habitats. He argues that primeval Europe would have been sustained by herds of large herbivores such as aurochs, bison, water buffalo, wild boars, and elk. But as humans settled and cultivated the area, wild animals were relegated to the remotest areas or hunted to extinction. Bringing them back can help restore land that could otherwise take thousands of years to become a fully functioning ecosystem again. Where the original species are no longer available, their domesticated descendants, or novel replacements, can be introduced as proxies.

Around 2005 in Kraansvlak, an 800-acre reserve next to the Dutch casino town of Zandvoort, a sudden die-off of rabbits had allowed trees and shrubs to colonize a sensitive dune ecosystem owned by a water company concerned about not only the loss of habitat but also the impact of trees on water reserves. Building on an idea he’d heard about at a conference, the company ecologist proposed importing bison—“chainsaws on legs”—as landscape engineers. The result was an ecosystem far richer than under the previous regime of grazing rabbits.

In Portugal’s Côa Valley, “tauros”—selectively bred in the Netherlands from ancient breeds of cattle to a genetic approximation of the aurochs—have been introduced to help restore the soils of fire-prone rocky heathlands and oak forests, reducing dry vegetation and encouraging the germination of native plants. These are two of hundreds of rewilding projects that show how allowing natural processes the freedom to flourish results in astonishing outcomes for biodiversity.

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Mayors carry considerable influence in the Făgăraş region. While some villages on the northern fringes remain opposed to the park, others have begun to see it as an opportunity. A community shield on the wall of the Nucşoara mayor’s office features chamois, edelweiss, an apple for its orchards—a synopsis of the breathtaking scenery around us.

Nucşoara has only 1,294 inhabitants. Mayor Ion Cojocaru aims to have 2,000 residents and 2,000 guest beds by 2030. “People want to live here,” he says. “And it’s not just holiday homes. They’re putting down roots, planting vegetables, working from home, setting up guesthouses. They love it for the same reason I do: nature.”

Initially skeptical about a national park, Cojocaru had a change of heart following the death of his wife in 2019. He grappled with his physical and mental health. His doctor prescribed up to 10,000 steps a day as a way to cope. As Cojocaru walked the local trails, the scale of the logging brought tears to his eyes. “Nucşoara has the most virgin forest in the Făgăraş, but it’s also suffered the most from clear-cuts,” he says.

Impressed by Conservation Carpathia’s repair efforts in the area—5,000 acres of clear-cuts planted with four million saplings of native trees grown in local nurseries—he accepted the Prombergers’ invitation to visit Germany’s Bavarian Forest National Park to see how something similar might work in the Făgăraş. “I saw all these jobs, guesthouses, visitor centers, local produce for sale, infrastructure around the park, a high standard of living—in an area as remote as ours,” he says. “I thought, this is it: We can make money from protecting nature.”

A month before, the mayor had launched a project to draw others into the forest. “On my walks I was passing these extraordinary trees, some hundreds of years old, every one of them unique,” he explains. “They gave me hope and strength, a reason for living.”

A network of trees forms a new tourist trail project called the Forest of Immortal Stories. As Christoph and I climb the pastures above the village and some of its remaining sheep flocks, there are wolf, deer, wild boar, and bear prints in the paths, muddy after rain.

(Wild boars are wreaking havoc in Europe, spurring creative solutions.)

Soon I’m surrounded by mighty beech trees. Scanning the QR code pinned to a trunk, I listen to the audio of one of the few hundred tree “adopters.” Tree 41 tells the story of Răzvan Nedu, the blind captain of Romania’s paraclimbing team, conqueror of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. Nedu’s vignette relates sensing direction “with all his skin,” feeling sensory power in the depths of his soul, the freedom of height. Another tree commemorates partisans of Nucşoara who, hiding out in these mountains, resisted the communists until 1958.

The mayor plans to keep development small-scale and high value, preserving the charm of the area (boutique hotels, a museum, guided hikes, and bird-watching), along with expanding the market for local cheese, honey, and preserves from orchards. He is also looking to the carbon credit market. But he differs from the Prombergers’ ambitions in one respect. A keen hunter in his youth, he sees the sport as part of the mix—the abundance of chamois, capercaillie (grouse), and wild boar a lucrative draw—and a solution to the bear problem.

My phone sends out an alarm that jolts me out of the front seat of Barbara’s pickup. We’re bumping along village roads on our way to look at some of Conservation Carpathia’s community projects: a microbrewery, forest school, ranger field station, beaver education center. “It’s a bear sighting,” says Barbara. The emergency alert system “is not doing us any favors. It’s sending out the signal that every bear is a menace.”

Since 2019, she and her team have been taking DNA samples from hair left by bears at conflict sites. Of the 247 bears they’ve logged, “only 10 are causing trouble. They can be attracted by beehives, garbage, and waste meat left out by abattoirs. A local hunting club is putting cookies out to attract them to bear-watching spots for tourists—so perhaps they’re getting a taste for junk food,” Barbara says. “Whatever the reason, it’s the problem bears we need to target. Simply reducing the overall population isn’t going to help. It’s up to us humans to avoid attracting bears to where we live.”

Protection and compensation will be vital if communities are to find a way to live with bears, Barbara adds. So far, Conservation Carpathia has helped more than 60 farmers install electric fencing and provided sheepdogs—a heritage breed that can fight off large carnivores—to 28 livestock owners in places where the use of dogs had dwindled. As traditional livestock grazing wanes, though, pasture around villages is being lost to scrub, creating prime habitat that allows the bears to move under the cover of trees. “Bears are able to enter villages undetected, sometimes right up to back doors,” Barbara says. She’s now developing a deterrent system with a nonprofit that will use camera traps to trigger scarecrows and sound and light repellents, turning bears away before they reach the villages.

In the end, payment for Florin Horia Baros’s pigs took months to process and was two-thirds of the market price. Conservation Carpathia made up the shortfall. A more welcome mitigation for farmers is immediate livestock replacement. The Prombergers gave Baros a cow from their herd to replace one he lost to a bear in 2022. They don’t offer pigs yet, but instead have provided electric fences to prevent another attack. Amazingly, Baros’s injured pig survived and has since produced piglets.

Even in the rawness of his loss, Baros had spared a thought for his nemesis. “I love bears,” he told me. “The forest is not just mine. They have a right to live in the forest too. They just need to stay there.”

George-Daniel Bădileanu, a ranger for Conservation Carpathia, tiptoes through old-growth spruce forest holding a large antenna in his hand, a battery and receiver in his backpack. We are high above Nucşoara. Every now and again, as Bădileanu angles the cross-rods through the trees, the receiver’s beeping pulse rises like a quickening heart. We’re in range of the radio collars. I’m about to see an animal that we dream of, one day, being able to introduce at Knepp. I stumble after Bădileanu across the spongy floor of bilberry bushes and moss, over fallen trees thick with lichens and a gushing stream banked with ferns. A whiff of musk and clouds of flies tell us we’re close.

Bădileanu stops and points 40 yards ahead at arching silhouettes sliding like ghosts between the trees. A herd of 12 bison passes before us, their woolly heads and crescent-moon horns swaying below hefty shoulders, long tails swishing from sloping rumps. Their silhouettes conjure up the ocher figures of prehistoric European rock art. The Carpathians were one of the European bison’s last strongholds after they’d been hunted out of the rest of the continent. They disappeared from Romania about 200 years ago. Breeding programs in zoos and private parks brought them back from the brink. Around 7,000 European bison now roam rewilding projects across the continent.

(Scotland could become first ‘rewilded’ nation—what does that mean?)

The herd in front of me, introduced to Nucşoara in 2022, is one of eight established in the Făgăraş and monitored with help from a 2020 National Geographic Explorer grant for Barbara. The great beasts, the largest weighing 2,200 pounds, tear at tufts of grass tougher than any other extant European herbivore can digest. In the winter they’ll gnaw the bark of trees, sometimes killing them—a random thinning that brings patches of light into the forest where flowering plants and shrubs can flourish. They’ll make other impressions on this mountainside, pawing with their hooves and tossing turf aside with their horns, creating wallows like the bunkers on a golf course, which they roll in to rid themselves of fur and old parasites—microhabitats for fungi, lichens, wildflowers, mosses, lizards, and insects. And they’ll be helping the climate too. Not far away, at the southern end of the Carpathians, a herd of bison introduced in 2014 have, according to the Yale School of the Environment, stimulated almost 10 times more carbon capture in nearly 20 square miles of grassland than before they were there.

(Wild bison return to Europe after a century.)

Unlike the bears, the bison are often welcomed in Romania. Their memory is enshrined in place-names and folklore. In Lereşti, about 50 miles from Nucşoara, a bison-themed visitors center is under way in the heart of the village. The mayor has named his local soccer team the Bison.

I watch through my binoculars as slowly, purposefully, the bison shepherd three calves up to the alpine meadows to graze. I could be gazing into the past but also, I realize, into the future.