The Book of Wilding: A Practical Guide to Rewilding, Big and Small

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The Book of Wilding: A Practical Guide to Rewilding, Big and Small

The Book of Wilding: A Practical Guide to Rewilding, Big and Small

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The Book of Wilding] is an eloquent yet hard-hitting synthesis of how a little helping hand can allow nature to heal itself, resulting in astounding outcomes for wildlife, while enriching our own lives in every conceivable way. With rare honesty and thoughtful reflections, the authors share their experiences and vision for greening farmscapes and cityscapes at every scale. This book is not merely important, it is epoch-making and world-building”— Dr Gabriel Hemery, author of The New Sylva Evan Bowen-Jones, chief executive of KWT, said: “Knepp is an iconic project in UK conservation terms now. All these serendipitous benefits have proved the case around things like nightingales not being dependent upon coppicing.” He also noted that letting pigs roam freely had churned up the ground and allowed for goat willow, the favoured food of purple emperor caterpillars, to regrow. Isabella Tree is an award-winning journalist and author, and lives with her husband, the conservationist Charlie Burrell, in the middle of a pioneering rewilding project in West Sussex. She is author of five non-fiction books. Her book Wilding, the story of the ambitious journey she and her husband Charlie Burrell undertook to rewild their farm, has sold quarter of a million copies worldwide, been translated into 8 languages and won the Richard Jefferies prize for nature writing, been shortlisted for the Wainwright prize and was one of the Smithsonian's top ten science books for 2018. In 2022, Isabella served on the Mayor of London's Rewilding London Task Force. 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.

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 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!”— Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall Rewilding and ecological restoration narratives are still a very tiny genre of nonfiction, so I'm always excited to see a new one. Most of the reasons I love them are probably obvious: they're stories about nature that aren't just positive, but also proactive, progressive, and full of tantalizing hints of unexpected ecological mechanisms. The first half of this book does all of that pretty well. Unlike some of these books, there really isn't much memoir to it. The story Tree tells is about her land and their management decisions, largely made by expert advice and steering committee, and none of it feels especially personal.We need to be trying different things and the fact that Knepp tried something so different and it has proven so successful is fantastic.” 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. This is probably the first book I've ever read where I consider it an honour that it exists for me to read.

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. What an amazing book, a profound and passionate guide to returning the land to its natural state, a must, I think, for anyone who hopes for a sustainable future”— Raynor WinnThe Book of Wilding – a practical guide to rewilding big and small – will be published by Picador in Spring 2023, and her second children’s book When the Storks Came Home in 2022. One of the wisest women alive, Isabella Tree has produced a handbook of hope. Her advice is invaluable; it reaches everyone who wants to make a better world out of the mess we humans have created. Buy it, read it, start changing things right now”— Joanna Lumley

The only issue of contention for me was her mention of using wild Exmoor ponies for meat!!! Wtf?!!! Apparently once wild ponies breed and their numbers become undesirable, they bring little income when sold (!!), so the theory has been bandied about that they should be allowed to breed and used for meat! Erm, no!

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.

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. 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?). The first half of the book is a great read for anyone with an interest in British nature, but the second half might be of more limited appeal. I read through most of it, but I skipped some sections; it delves into the real nitty gritty of the practical applications of wilding, even down to stuff like securing funding and getting permissions for projects, which is only really of use to people actively embarking on rewilding projects. For me personally, this was of limited use, but I wouldn't say it all detracts from the value of the book. In fact, it adds to it immeasurably; I'm glad a book like this exists, to provide more than just the vague theory of how to make a positive change.Rewilding is possibly the most important and empowering revolution to have evolved out of the conservation movement in the last hundred years. This book shares the knowledge and wisdom of that movement that we all need to better understand how we can all play our part in helping nature restore the planet”— Benedict Cumberbatch Rewilding is possibly the most important and empowering revolution to have evolved out of the conservation movement in the last hundred years. This book shares the knowledge and wisdom of that movement that we all need to better understand how we can all play our part in helping nature restore the planet All of that is the core topic of the book. But the other interesting aspect was something so obvious to Tree that it took a while to dawn on me. She starts the story by describing her and her husband's efforts to intensively farm their land, winning awards and setting records for dairy production despite unfavorable heavy clay soil. 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. So when they got their land fenced and introduced feral cows and pigs, it seemed fairly reasonable. It was only when she started talking about how conflicts with dog walkers limited their breed choices, and how the wild pigs tried to steal food for a wedding they were hosting, that I remembered just how different things are in Britain. Then she mentions the castle and it all fell into place. This book really opened my eyes even more and I learned many things despite being an ecologist and life long conservationist. The chapter on soil and worms is especially thought provoking. Bel Mooney, 'The Year's Best Books on Nature', Daily Mail Particularly timely . . . an excellent primer, and anyone who is interested in how we share the planet — what it looks like, what we eat, and what nature can teach us — should read this book.



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