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This book contains some fantastic nature writing and - its real strength - brutal and unsentimental honesty about the economics of farming, the economics of giving up farming and the compromises involved. It makes a convincing case for wilding (which largely involves leaving land alone; a mix of large grazing herbivores were involved, but there was no control field) and for wilding being incentivised by policy. Which is a good thing. I think that sometimes when people write “This is an important book” what they mean is “Finally I have found a book that agrees with me.” At the risk of falling into that trap, I’m going to start by saying this is an important book. The book gives guidance on everything from keeping water buffalo to reducing light pollution in gardens; from preventing flooding in cities to rewilding schools. Protecting the ecosystems we have left is no longer enough. Given our long delays we must actively support the regeneration of our web of life. This brilliant book tells us how”— Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
This beautifully written and lavishly illustrated book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in rewilding, landscapes or indeed nature”— Tristan GooleyThe Book of Wilding is a handbook for how we can all help restore nature. It is ambitious, visionary and pragmatic. The book has grown out of Isabella and Charlie’s mission to help rewild Britain, Europe and the rest of the world by sharing knowledge from their pioneering project at Knepp in Sussex. It is inspired by the requests they receive from people wanting to learn how to rewild everything from unprofitable farms, landed estates and rivers, to ponds, allotments, churchyards, urban parks and public spaces.. The Book of Wilding has the answers. 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. This book has left me distraught, hopeful, happy, sad, angry and overjoyed at what can be achieved.
Her best-selling book Wilding – the Return of Nature to a British Farm is published by Picador. It won the 2019 Richard Jefferies prize for nature writing and was one of the Smithsonian’s top ten science books for 2018. What stands out from this beautiful book is the invitation for us, as humans, to become and create the wild at whatever scale we are able. As well as being full of practical examples of what we can do in our gardens, it highlights our birth-right and responsibility as a keystone species to enhance the natural world for all other species, as well as ourselves”— Frances Tophill So yes. this is my review. I loved it, and unlike me, I didn't skim read any passages. I absorbed every word. Having read Isabella Tree's previous book about their rewilding project on the Knepp Estate, I was looking forward to the release of this follow-up... and it absolutely did not disappoint! This book is, in essence, two books in one; the first half is a general guide to the appalling state of biodiversity in Britain, the causes of it, and the broad strokes of the theory of rewilding/wilding. The second half is a lot more about the practical applications of wilding, at a variety of different scales, from full-on farm estates to gardens.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. This is not another book telling you to install nest boxes and to stop mowing in May, filled with pretty garden photos. It is a book about re-wilding our society. It will no doubt have influenced how I view and support government policies and local council/charitable projects. Five Years ago, Isabella Tree's phenomenal book Wilding started a national conversation about restoring our flat-lining landscape. The Book of Wilding, co-authored with her husband Charlie Burrell, takes that conversation to the next level. It is both brilliantly readable and incredibly hard-working, offering all of us the opportunity to get involved. Let's do it! I can already say, with absolutely no hesitation, that this will be one of my books of the year. There is no book I’ve learned more from, or been more enthralled by reading. 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. Isabella Tree is a great storyteller who manages to convert quite a lot of technical information into a plot - a drama, even - which any reasonably intelligent and diligent reader can follow. This is a deep, dazzling and indispensable guide to the most important task of all: the restoration of the living planet”— George Monbiot
Just in case you're someone who thinks that 'rewilding is an exotic, elite activity for a few rich landowners,' The Book of Wilding will more than set you straight on that score! It's something very different: a way of seeing, thinking, affirming, sharing and recrafting our relationship with the natural world”— Sir Jonathon Porritt, Environmentalist The vast lands of the family estate are given over to native seeds, wildflowers, natural processes, grazing wild animals and the re-wilding of the earth. Intervention is kept to a minimum and species start to flourish like never before, with plentiful habitats and safe spaces to breed. Rewilding is a spectrum of possibility, and everyone is on it. Whether you have a garden, roadside verge or window box, there is no space too small. Rewilding is learning how to contribute to a living landscape, to connect with other areas of nature and help forge the life-support system that will save our planet from calamity and provide humankind with a prosperous and sustainable future. The result, a proliferation of threatened species find a home in this wild estate. Turtle doves, purple emperor butterflies, peregrine falcons, multiple owl and bat species all find a place at Knepp. It takes on traditional notions of conservation that aims to save specific species in favour of building an ecosystem that allows endangered species to thrive. This explosion in biodiversity shows what can happen when people surrender the management of nature to nature. But this rewilding of Knepp estate delivers even more unexpected and significant changes right down to the soil itself and the land's ability to mitigate against flooding.The language is sometimes too florid for my taste. At times, I was itching to take out a copy editor's red pencil, to make sentences or passages clearer. 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. I was given this book, which I would never have considered buying, as a Father's Day gift. I am so grateful!
When Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell realised that it was not economically feasible to continue their farming of land in Knepp, West Sussex, they made a bold and radical decision: they decided to step away from the land and watch as nature took over. This book describes the almost twenty years of that project/experiment. The results are staggering and challenge some fundamental assumptions that often guide even the most well-meaning of conservation or ecological decisions. There is a gathering trend in the UK for 'wilding' or re-wilding - returning agricultural landscapes to nature in a (mostly) hands-off way. This is a major and refreshing change from the control-freak, focus-on-a-few-species approach that dominated post-war conservation thinking. This change presumably - surely - started with this book and with what the author and her husband undertook at their farm in West Sussex. Isabella is recipient of the CIEEM Medal for 2020, and the Royal Geographical Society’s 2021 Ness Award.What happens when you remove that pressure and let the land recover? It takes time (something we are notably not prepared to give much of in our modern world), but it turns out that nature is remarkable. What happens challenges some of our most basic assumptions about the land. There is a thing in ecology, or at least in this book, called “shifting-baseline syndrome” and this refers to the fact that often the baseline for a project, the goal it sets out to achieve, is derived from data that consistently gets more and more recent i.e. the baseline gradually includes more and more of the effect that the project is aiming to counter. We make wrong assumptions: as the book points out, we label nightingales and purple emperor butterflies as “woodland” creatures because that is here we see them, but, if we stop interfering and watch what nature does, we learn that they are not really creatures of that environment. Once you begin to learn things like this, the whole basis of many conservation projects is called into question (should we really be micro-managing woodland environments to encourage the purple emperor butterfly when that butterfly would, left to itself, prefer to be somewhere else?). Content wise, the book is spot on. Reading it gave me some hope that we may be able to avert the crash course the mass of societal pressures and economic interests would have us follow. It was disheartening to read about the opposition that the project has faced, especially as I have read even recent comments about Alan Savoury's work that adamantly claim that such an approach cannot work. But it's also heartening to have seen the proof that it can work with my own eyes, and to know that at least some are willing to take this leap of faith. Despite other points of contention, no one visiting Knepp could say that grazing herbivores can only have a negative impact on the environments they live in, or that 'wildness' cannot exist in modern lives. Of particular interest is the detailed explanation of challenges and difficulties that the project faced, some practical (how to move wild deer), some institutional (Natural England were wary), some cultural (local objections to the ‘mess’ and ‘waste’ compared to arable land), and some philosophical (allowing control of the land to lapse). Tree devotes time and careful discussion to the academic theories and popular perceptions that make rewilding especially hard to achieve in Britain, relative to other parts of Europe; George Monbiot also observed this peculiar tendency. Defining ‘wildness’ is fraught with difficulty, as is deciding which species have lived here long enough to be considered ‘native’. I found the argument that Britain was not covered in closed-canopy forest during pre-history convincing, as well as useful. Tree also points out (as I’d recently read in this Citylab article) that the changing climate is forcing species to relocate, so rather than try to replicate the past we should allow wild space to accommodate whatever species can find a niche. In short, stop over-managing for the sake of single species and instead interfere as little as possible. Counter-intuitive in such a heavily managed landscape as Britain, yet the results are incredible. Again and again, this book challenges the reader to think about the broader picture. 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.
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