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

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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. Reading how letting nature take its course and can heal the earth so rapidly, as well as allow wildlife we thought would soon be gone forever to absolutely thrive has been a real eye opener - I'm a farmers son and our family thinks we know a lot about nature, how it works and what we as humans need to do to help it. It shows how rewilding works across Europe; that it has multiple benefits for the land; that it can generate economic activity and employment; how it can benefit both nature and us – and that all of this can happen astonishingly quickly. Defining ‘wildness’ is fraught with difficulty, as is deciding which species have lived here long enough to be considered ‘native’.

Make it lovely and neat like my artificially fertilised, subsidised, chemical laden waste ground, with my animals that are cooped up day and night with intensive farming wearing them out before they've reached adulthood! 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. The Book of Wilding by Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell, assisted it must be said by a small army of advisors, artists, and editors, is certainly some tome. I'm inspired to give my modest garden back to nature * Lara Maiklem, author of Mudlarking * [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.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. However, the book's aim is to educate those people interested in re-wilding and saving our green spaces. Moreover, I was interested by the unusual perspective - unfashionable in egalitarian times - on the relationship between the 'landed gentry' and the land they own. An excellent book, however if you have read the author’s’ earlier book, Wilding, you will find some of the earlier chapters a bit repetitive.

That hopeful and demonstrably true observation lies behind the urgent optimism of this wonderful book. Everything herein is supported and backed-up with the rich personal experience they have gained on their own estate, so much so that I lost count of the number of times I read “At Knepp…”. I love this book because it is at once humble and expansive, spiritual (with a small s) and resolutely practical.Isabella Tree és férje a támogatásokkal együtt is veszteséges West Sussex-i, 3500 angol holdas farmjukat vadították vissza, azaz pontosan megtervezett ökológiai egyensúlyt állítottak vissza ezen a területen. Knepp may be a familiar name if you follow British environmental news: it’s synonymous with what’s known as rewilding. With an abundance of invertebrates come predators and this rippled up until they realised that they peregrine falcons back. When I offered to review this book, I thought it was going to be a small(ish) paperback, not 560 pages long, two inches thick and weighing in at just under 4lbs.

But the other interesting aspect was something so obvious to Tree that it took a while to dawn on me. 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. 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). 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. And here we are given ideas on how to rewild our gardens and, if we don’t have one of those, a window box.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. 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. A very interesting review but I think of Knepp as a ‘wildland farming’ (if perhaps oxymoron) rather than rewilding project https://www. 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.