We can’t control words. Their roles are cast and recast by the people who use them most, and when a word gains traction, and becomes popularised, as rewilding has, it can become weighted by baggage.

We hear it now and many of us think of carbon offset, natural capital, green lairds, and a world in which the rich own the so-called wild, and the rest of us may merely glimpse or visit it.

Perhaps we also tune into some of rewilding’s deeper historic baggage, in the related word 'wilderness'. We catch the way it conjures a colonial view of the North American landscape, as a wild space to be subdued by frontiers-people, regardless of those who already lived there.

We feel its shimmering offerings of salvation, of return to wholeness and the Garden of Eden.

Every time I read it, I find myself wondering if there isn’t a better word we might use to replace it. But none of the others – restoration, regeneration, managed wilding, conservation, recovery, protection – really feel much better.

Restore seems too bland, conserve seems conservative, protect seems a lie we’ve become accustomed to that never entirely works, and all of them seem loaded now with credit and offset. They also don’t have the fizz and inspirational drive of the ‘wild’.

No wonder Anders Povlsen called his rewilding project Wildland Ltd, and BrewDog takes the romantic name, Lost Forest. They are tapping into myth and folktale, not just for the on-looking world, but perhaps as a story to tell themselves.

I’ll confess the buzz in the word wild is one I’ve coopted myself, when I write about outdoor swimming. I tell people I use the term wild swimming because most people assume swimming is done in a pool, but it’s also because of the SEO power of the word wild, and what that taps into.

A key question now is who owns rewilding? Who in Scotland has ownership of the word? And if we can talk about it without it just seeming like a backlash against nature restoration?

The answer to that question of who owns it looks very like the pattern of land ownership - and comes down to an answer of the rich, an aspiring Unicorn, a crowdfunded company fuelled by 'citizen' investors, a pensions giant, and yes, a few communities and charities and less wealthy individuals. 

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The debate over rewilding rattles on frequently on Scottish social media. Many different bodies and individuals seem keen to distance themselves from it.

A recent article in Bella Caledonia by Heather Urquhart, Rewild or Re-wilderness: The dangers of colonial masculinities, examined some of those feelings. Part of the issue around the term, she observed, is that “the power to change landscapes in Scotland continues to be vastly unequal”.

The problem, in other words, is not just the term itself – but the relations of power it attaches to. As Alastair McIntosh has put it in a paper titled The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black Black Carbon: “Much of the public concern around estates being bought up for 'rewilding', usually now with carbon offsetting, concerns the relationships in rural Scotland between ecological science, money, and social class.”

It’s hard now to see how rewilding can now extract itself, as a concept, from this context – of not just land ownership, but a whole new market system for monetising nature.

It wasn't always entirely thus. The original concept was imported from North America, where it was created by conservation leader, Dave Foreman, in the 1980s, and later featured as a driving force in the Yellowstone Conservation Initiative. It was about protected areas, and seeing ecological systems for themselves, without consideration for human costs or benefits - though notably, it did feature "corridors and carnivores".

However, since its arrival on the scene in Europe, many have declared it inappropriate. Arguments include the fact that it is difficult, given the duration of human impact, to know what to rewild back to, or even, given that the climate is changing, towards.

"Our landscape since it was virtually wiped clean by the last of the glaciers 12,000 years ago has been impacted by the hand of man, almost continuously," wrote Robbie Blackwood-Miles in a recent blog.

READ MORE: Who will profit from rewilding Scotland? The rich, as usual

But these, for me, aren't now the biggest arguments facing rewilding. Those revolve essentially around who gets the power, and who is in control of how we cede our control to nature.

I worry, however, that there's a danger the nature restoration process itself will get ditched in all the noise around this. There's a possibility that, as we focus on the fact that the rich get to wildwash away their guilt, while the rest of us do little more than look on, we will lose sight of nature once more.

I don't want to give up on rewilding. Do we really want to leave it to the greenwashers of the world to define it? Can we really allow it, at a time when change, for the sake of climate and biodiversity, is so necessary, to remain flavoured by these associations forever?

We can’t control other people’s use of words – though some try. But we can make our own attempt to invest our own meaning in them, to rewild them if you like, and take them back from big business and wild-washers.

I started out this column thinking I wanted to do away with the word ‘rewild’. But, in fact, I don’t. I want to take it back, make it something that all of us can own, not just the super rich. Isn’t it time we rewilded rewilding?