Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm

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Never has there been a greater need for writers who can communicate about the environment in such clear, immediate and powerful ways, who can envisage the past as well as the future. And if I had enough money to buy every Member of Parliament a copy, and the ability to force them to read it, I would.

Isabella Tree Books — Isabella Tree

I know nothing about farming and next to nothing about conservation, but I was fascinated by this story of a family that turned their 3,500 acres of unprofitable intensive farmland, owned by ancestors for centuries, into a 'wilderness'. The book recounts the battles against local opposition to 'destruction' of the estate's perceived attractiveness, against blinkered bureaucracy and even against thoughtless dog owners. Along the way, we learn how Charlie and Isabella resisted the psychological pressure to set targets and manage the project, instead adopting a hands-off approach that let natural processes take over. The rapidity with which the land, the diversity of animal and plant life and the composition of the soil recovered is the natural miracle that lies at the story's core.This honest, thoroughly researched and deeply hopeful book will appeal to everyone - especially farmers - who is concerned about how intensive farming practices are degrading the environment and how to restore nature to ravaged lands. -- Ten Of The Best Books About Climate Change, Conservation And The Environment of 2018 * Forbes * The thing Tree never mentions is that her husband's family are traditional aristocrats, and the land they are rewilding is their estate. It was historically not just their productive land, but also the home of many tenant farmers. Their land is apparently shot through with roads and paths (it's unclear) maybe even houses and businesses? And as for the dog walkers, it's not just about the universal British law that anyone can traverse anybody's land whatever they want if they're taking a walk. The estate functioned as a kind of public park and event center for the whole community. On one hand, this makes what they're doing all the more valuable and interesting, but on the other hand, it casts a somewhat different light on the dynamic between them and the angry comments they get from the public. Either way, it seems like something that would have been worth explaining more explicitly, because afaik, even in the densely populated Netherlands, Oostvardersplassen was uninhabited before it was turned over to the wild animals. I'm not sure the degree of urban-rewilding integration here has a clear precedent.

Wilding by Isabella Tree | Waterstones Wilding by Isabella Tree | Waterstones

Now the book. Isabella Tree writes a language as floral as the honey produced on the land, and I loved it. I found some messy sentences with missing words or clauses, or that seemed to suffer from having been poorly operated on during revisions, but my enjoyment of the book in spite of this is manifest in the fact that I managed to read it in three days. Three days of late nights spent reading. For context, I'm on my honeymoon. I'm literally honeymooning, as I type. The most interesting parts relate first to the broad debate about the role of mega fauna in European ecosystems, and second, the surprising cultural differences in expectations about farmers, farmland, and public access. Unsurprisingly, Tree and the Knepp project in general are heavily and directly influenced by the Vera school of European paleoecology. Thus, most of the interesting spontaneous effects they observe are the downstream effects of horse, cattle, pigs, and deer browsing, wallowing, distributing seeds, and pooping. Their land of course attracts new species of dung beetle, micromoth, fungi, etc., along with big flushes of weedy flowers and new recruitment of woody shrub species, and consequently settlement by birds and other animals that require those kinds of habitats. More interestingly, in several cases they find that highly threatened species in Britain flourished in new kinds of habitat different from their reported preference, suggesting these kinds of habitats are so rare that species which prefer it are only hanging on by living in suboptimal areas. Overall, it's just a pleasure to read about the unfolding of ecological processes, things difficult for most of us to observe, often entirely forgotten, exposing clear and intuitive gaps the way naturalists and conservationists often approach nature. To note: fallow land can be a massive carbon sink and flood plains and other wetlands, er, absorb water. We don't need to build hugs concrete walls, we need the land to do its thing. And it is also a massive mistake to try to create habitats we think will suit rare species because as Knepp has shown we often misinterpret what those are given so many of these species are hanging on at the margins. We need to make space.Professionally (as I'm a narrative non-fiction writer myself) this is yet one more example of why I believe the publishing world would benefit from paying far more attention to non fiction of all kinds and end the singular hype around more and more young first time novelists. There is more genuine consolation for the soul in this book than in a dozen well written novels. Please give this book to anyone you know that is a struggling farmer or has land. And to everyone else as well. :-)