Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm

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Anyone with any interest in land - from a window-box to a National Park - needs to read this book. -- Simon Barnes, author of T he Meaning of Birds Nancy and Jake are farmers. They raise their cows and pigs, and grow their crops with machines and chemicals. Never has there been a greater need for writers who can communicate about the environment in such clear, immediate and powerful ways, who can envisage the past as well as the future. A hugely important addition to the literature of what can be done to restore soil and soul . . . Tree writes with grace about a legion of doubts, obstructions and delays. The book contains moments of lyricism and revelation. -- Caspar Henderson * Guardian * 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!

Wilding by Isabella Tree | Goodreads Wilding by Isabella Tree | Goodreads

Wry, perceptive, intelligent and irreverently funny. The best of travel writing… Wonderfully successful.’ The Times Literary Supplement What to do from here? Pay more attention to local environmental initiatives, get involved. Don't just succumb to tree planting outings, because they aren't the answer. This honest, thoroughly researched and deeply hopeful book will appeal to everyone - especially farmers - who is concerned about how intensive farming practices are degrading the environment and how to restore nature to ravaged lands. -- Ten Of The Best Books About Climate Change, Conservation And The Environment of 2018 * Forbes * Tree, Isabella (April 2015). "The Living Goddess of Nepal". History Today. 65 (4) . Retrieved 16 September 2016. 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.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. 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?). Wilding shines brilliantly . . . . Isabella Tree writes [. . .] with infectious enthusiasm . . . The project she writes about so winningly . . . is inspirational - and inspiration is needed. * Evening Standard * So yes. this is my review. I loved it, and unlike me, I didn't skim read any passages. I absorbed every word.

Wilding Quotes by Isabella Tree - Goodreads Wilding Quotes by Isabella Tree - Goodreads

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. The book begins and ends with the soil. During the WWII, Britain faced severe food shortages and the only way to survive was to increase food production somehow. So began intensive farming which increased yields and enabled the country to survive those war years. When the war finished, however, the country did not return to the pre-war methods, but rather intensified the the pressure on the land to produce more and more at cheaper and cheaper cost. Today, the cost of food takes a remarkably low percentage of our income compared with previous generations. But we pay for this in other ways. There is scientific evidence to suggest that food quality has dropped significantly, even to levels that could explain the apparent sudden rise in things like lactose intolerance or other allergies: there could be more of this around nowadays because the products themselves have altered in response to the intensive farming methods used to increase yields. Isabella Tree would argue, I think, that this pursuit of higher yields has gone beyond the point where it is self-defeating: we apply more and more pressure to the land to produce more when the reason it does not is because of all the pressure we have already applied that has damaged it. a b "Award-Winning Author Isabella Tree Presents Her New Book Wilding: returning nature to our farm". Bard. 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.

We forget, in a world completely transformed by man, that what we’re looking at is not necessarily the environment wildlife prefer, but the depleted remnant that wildlife is having to cope with: what it has is not necessarily what it wants.” Excellent….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.’ Sunday Times The author has seen incredible changes to the environment over the years. Whole chapters of this book are dedicated to the “glamour species” that have returned to the land - the nightingale, the turtle dove, the purple emperor. But it is the less glamorous creatures sitting low down in the food chain that are, for me, the real stars of the book. Knepp may be a familiar name if you follow British environmental news: it’s synonymous with what’s known as rewilding. Tree’s husband, Sir Charlie Burrell, inherited the estate in 1987 and tried running it as an intensified dairy farm, but the enterprise was bleeding money and in 2000 they gave up and let the land return to nature. That wasn’t a totally hands-off process, though; it involved restoring the forest and river ecosystems and reintroducing traditional species like fallow deer, Exmoor ponies, ancient-breed cattle and Tamworth pigs. The project has become a leading light for nature conservation in the UK, demonstrating how a hands-off,'process-led' approach can restore land and wildlife in a dramatically short space of time.

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We are treated to the delights of recovering wildlife in dazzling and sometimes confusing variety. Sometimes the vocabulary is unfamiliar, but the meaning is almost always clear from the context. I wasn't familiar with the verb 'cover', for example, when appplied to a bull and cows. Not hard to work out. But the world of academia is a strange, sometimes counterproductive and often sluggish place. Where one may expect it to be open and responsive to new thinking, it can be oddly conservative and resistant to radical ideas.”

Summary

Not just my book of the year but I think the most enlightening book I have *ever* read in my, ahem, almost 50 years on earth. 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. We know NOTHING! This book and the 20 years the Knepp estate has been allowed to find its own way shows there is no need to do anything other than have the guts to let nature take over and change our business practices accordingly. That’s what all good farmers do, isn’t it? And yet, hardly any wildlife lives on their farm. The animals look sad. Even the trees look sad! One day, Nancy has an idea... what if they stopped doing all that, and just went WILD?