Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm

"One of the most promising threads to emerge from the recent glut of nature writing is the idea of ‘rewilding’. The two most important books in this respect are George Monbiot ’s Feral and, for different reasons, Isabella Tree’s Wilding . It was a close call, but I chose this one over Feral because, as important as Feral was in terms of popularising the idea of Europeans having a Serengeti on their own doorstep, Wilding is about the author and her husband’s attempts to create just that. Books such as Feral are only useful in so far as they lead to places like Knepp, the scene of Wilding . As soon as you finish The Road or The Uninhabitable Earth , start Wilding . As much as we need honest reality checks, it’s also good to understand the potential for a meaningful response to it all. Wilding is about an extraordinary experiment at the 3,500-acre Knepp Wildland Project , and an example of what can happen when we learn to do the hardest thing of all: nothing. What’s happening at Knepp is already changing out-dated notions of conservation in Britain and beyond. It’s a compelling illustration of how our landscapes could look and feel if we stopped trying to control the rest of life. Control is the enemy of wildness. Knepp demonstrates what can happen in a remarkably short space of time when you allow nature to take the driving seat, unencumbered by our preconceptions and meddling and narrow-minded goals. Without trying to conserve anything in particular, they’ve conserved more. Rare species—such as nightingales, purple emperor butterflies, turtle doves, peregrine falcons and countless others—are finding sanctuary there, and not always in the types of habitat conservationists and scientists were expecting. I was moved, quite deeply, by this book. It’s a real story of hope at a time when genuine examples are as rare as some of the species making home there."