This book review of Wilding by Isabella Tree is about one of the most important books I’ve ever read. Why? Because it is a wonderful feel good story for anyone who is feeling helpless about wildlife. Isabella Tree challenges common misconceptions about conservationWhy is animal conservation important? Animal conservation is important, because animals are the only mechanism to create biodiversity, which is the mechanism that creates a habitable planet for humans. Without animals, the energy from today’s plants (algae, trees, flowers etc) will eventually reach the atmosphere and ocean, much of it as carbon. The quantity of this plant-based waste is so More science and in doing so, reveals that the power to make a real difference to our environment, quality of life and future is within all our grasps … all we need to do, is allow nature space and time to recover.
“The need to relate to the landscape and to other forms of life … is in our genes. Sever that connection and we are floating in a world where our deepest sense of ourselves is lost”.
It wasn’t an easy journey for Isabella and husband Charlie though … and the challenges remain as fresh today as they were, when they began their project in earnest, at the turn of the millennium.
Isabella and Charlie are farmers who own a historic English estate, Knepp Farm, in Sussex, England. Like so many before them since the war, scientists convinced them that they could squeeze ever more productivityThe power of an ecosystem to process energy. The most productive ecosystems have reached a steady stable-state with maximum entropy production. That’s to say, the number of species has reached an optimum and the functions they fulfil, have translated free surplus energy into nutrients that is either stored inside plants and animals, or is entrained within the biological cycles that More out of their land. This zealous optimism was funded by agricultural subsidies and it wasn’t until decades later that their marginal land had suffered such ecosystem collapse that they nearly lost everything that had been in their family for generations.
When it seemed there was little hope left, they met arborist Ted and from what they learned about the ecology of ancient oak trees, the fresh shoots of a new and radical idea emerged. They began to question the ideas they’d been sold by agricultural science and turned instead to nature for a solution.
“As it grows old a tree sometimes lowers its branches to the ground for stability, Ted explained, like an old man using a walking stick. To the modern eye, this self-buttressing tendency is considered a weakness and the walking stick – the lower branch – is generally removed. ‘We have a fixed image of how a tree should look’, Ted said, ‘like a child’s drawing with a straight trunk and a pom-pom on top”
The book is a story about the way nature can rebound if it’s given space to breathe. It’s also a wonderful record of something almost magical that nobody thought could be achieved until it was done. For all their hardship, they have inevitably proved what others were unable to and that contribution makes them two of the most important people in conservation today. Future generations may have a lot to thank them for.
Knepp farm wasn’t managed for nature, it was left for nature.
Isabella and Charlie made a conscious decision not to intervene with its processes, which initially led to opposition from the local community, so used to seeing manicured British farmland and now subjected to the roughly hewn order of a system recovering from years of persecution.
As Tree describes quite eloquently, the ‘Dig for Victory’ drive after WWII saw the complete transformation of the UK countryside and paved the way for wholesale destruction of the nature-based processes that had protected it forever.
Fallow land came to be considered wasted land. As Charlie’s aunt Penelope Greenwood, now in her eighties, describes it, ‘We were all brought up to believe we would go to heaven if we made two blades of grass grow where one had grown before’.
The transformation of Knepp Farm back to nature was an adventure into the unknown, not just for Isabella and Charlie, but for the whole of the United Kingdom. Government scientists and conservationists, so set in their ways, still prove to be among the greatest obstacles to progress. Tree describes the many years over which research and scientific inertia would hamper their attempts for support. Few were prepared to take a risk, without first being able to prove what would happen–even though such fortune-telling is a panacea. Even the simplest of animal interactions would lead to complex and unimaginable benefits.
They were even lambasted by other farmers and the local community, for wasting the food-bowl potential of their land, though only a quarter (or less) of current land is needed to feed the UK population.
And we have forgotten how to cook with leftovers … in the UK, 7 million of the total 15 million tonnes of food and drink wasted in 2013 was thrown away by households. This level of wastage costs the UK around GBP 12 billion, emits some 20 million tonnes of CO2 and uses around 5,400 million cubic metres of water–two and a half times the entire annual water discharge of the Thames–every year.
Isabella and Charlie pressed on despite everything, inspired by similar Dutch landscape projects and a slowly assembling team of sympathetic experts for encouragement.
Their project succeeded well before the concept of ‘Rewilding’ existed in the mantra of UK conservation (they now lead some of these enterprises nationally). The only way to get there was to experiment, observe and report results … it would take a decade or more to make outstanding changes that no-one could argue against. Only a decade mind … far quicker than anyone could have imagined. Despite the marginal soil quality and years of relentless use of fungicide, pesticide and fertiliser, Isabella and Charlie watched their land heal more quickly than they could have dreamed of.
There is a wonderful moment when the family are faced with an infestation of creeping thistle, a seed-forming, wind-dispersed ‘pest’ that was sure to draw the ire of neighbouring farms. Throughout the book, Tree questions all preconceptions of how ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More work, realising very early on that they are so complex, no scientist can possibly predict the outcome. Within a matter of years, the site had become the UK’s number one spot to see Purple Emperor butterflies. Previously considered confined to mature oak woodland, the species was flourishing with unique behaviour at Knepp Farm, revealing an entirely different ecology, unseen perhaps for a hundred years or more.
As farmers, they would have applied poisonous glyphosphate to all the thistles (and killed everything else in the ground for years) but they stood their ground and yielded to the conditions. It happened that year, that another butterfly, migratory Painted Ladies, appeared in large numbers from North Africa and flooded the fields. The caterpillars busied themselves eating the thistle leaves and because the ground had been mashed up into clods by grazing animals such as pigs and cattle, abundant ants set about dismantling the remaining stems and leaves, pulling them underground into their rotund ant mounds. Within a season, all the thistles were gone.
These moments of unpredictable animal-majesty seem to become the trade mark of everything that Tree writes about at Knepp farm. Time and time again, the abundance of wildlife would prove itself more resilient than anything the land owners could have done with chemicals or machines. And animals would arrange themselves in new patterns and with ecology harking back to times long since forgotten, beyond the living memory of scientists or recently-cited studies.
Tree talks about how strongly biased farmers and conservation ecologists have become, led by simple linear-thinking, or unable to see the true potential of highly complex and adaptive natural systems.
When closed off from the idea that wildlife, left to itself, creates healing processes, scientists end up picking at the wounds, never quite allowing things to recover to full strength and vitality. Then there is the shifting perception of what we consider ‘normal’ and how much ecology has often become more about childhood nostalgia, than experimentation. The urge to return things to how we remember they once looked, means we build barriers to nature’s restorative progress. It’s this restoration that we need, to rebuild a habitable world.
The fact is, the environment is nothing like it was a few decades ago and every year that passes, things change and only an abundance of animals working together, have the resilienceReferring to an ecosystem’s ability to maintain a steady stable-state. The need to build resilience is entirely anthropocentric and symptomatic of ecosystems that are damaged or declining, leading to loss of ecosystem services on which humans depend. More to maintain any semblance of order – like the ability of mammals, ants and butterflies, to temper the destructive force of raging river torrents after heavy flooding rainfall. Even today, many scientists will think you mad to suggest that wildlife can have such profound influence on climate, soil, water and our lives.
When Isabella and Charlie were finally involved with the first authorised trial introduction of Eurasian Beavers in Devon, England, it was after years of stalemate with land-owners, fishermen and government authorities, refusing to allow them the same on Knepp Farm. Yet floodplain projects elsewhere, built at great cost by human animals, had literally saved lives and whole communities – eager beavers would provide this service for nothing.
Knepp farm has rapidly become one of the greatest experiments for wildlife recovery in the world, because it’s been allowed to. It couldn’t have happened without Isabella and Charlie’s open mindedness and it would not have happened so fast, if they’d bluntly intervened to try to control the outcome.
This delightfully written book is a pleasure to read and it is even more important to share its insights widely among anyone who might doubt the importance of wildlife for our common future. For those who may have doubted that we have the power to make a real difference, it presents a source of great hope.
Wilding by Isabella Tree (320pp) is published by Pan Macmillan.
Also read: https://simonmustoe.blog/there-is-no-field-of-dreams-without-animals-to-begin-with/
