Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm

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And as she described that work, I was picturing their land as a dairy farm similar to the ones I grew up near: big, rural fields in the country, with a small farmhouse near the sheds and dairy barns on the road. 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.

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

This is a major and refreshing change from the control-freak, focus-on-a-few-species approach that dominated post-war conservation thinking. The results are staggering and challenge some fundamental assumptions that often guide even the most well-meaning of conservation or ecological decisions. Wilding the Knepp Estate is one of the most exciting wildlife conservation projects in the UK, and indeed in Europe. We can make some attempt to reverse the devastating trend even after a decade and whilst farms might not be able to implement all of what they have done, even some of these will have a marked improvement to our natural world.They were finding that they were suddenly one of the top sites in the country for creatures like purple emperor butterflies and turtle doves. The stories we have been telling ourselves about European conquest over vast, dark, closed-canopy forest erases not only indigenous land management, but animal transformation of the landscape. I say this as someone who has only a mild-to-middling interest in nature/environment/ecology issues, at least in terms of prior knowledge and depth of scientific understanding. I am not naive enough to think that there is not another side to the story and I am sure that there are farmers and farming scientists who can paint a different picture, but I did find the arguments in this book very compelling. Wilding (2018) is Isabella Tree's account of how the Knepp estate in West Sussex changed from being a farm to a more natural environment.

Isabella Tree Books — Isabella Tree

The great concerns of our time – climate change, natural resources, food production, water control and conservation, and human health – all boil down to the condition of the soil. This explosion in biodiversity shows what can happen when people surrender the management of nature to nature. The Burrells' degraded agricultural land has become a functioning ecosystem again, heaving with life - all by itself.Of course the obligatory twatty neighbouring landowners/farmers put up a fuss, how vey dare you let the land go to rack and ruin?