Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Picador (2018), Edition: Main Market, 384 pages
Description
"For many years Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell struggled to make a go as farmers, doing everything they could to make the heavy clay soils of their farm at Knepp in West Sussex as productive as possible, while rarely succeeding in making a profit. By 2000, facing bankruptcy, the couple decided they would try something new. They would restore their 3,500 acres, farmed for centuries, even millennia, to the form that they had had before human intervention. They would bring back the wild. This was no simple matter. What form did the land have before it took on the form that human beings have given it? The answer to that question was controversial and required real, and fascinating, research. And then the land had once been open to whole hosts of animals that had since been prevented from running wild, if not killed off or made extinct. These had been a crucial actor in the landscape and its ecology, and how were they, or their likes, to be reintroduced into it? And finally there were the neighbors, often appalled at the sight of once tidy fields now running riot with what they considered dangerous weeds. The experiment however, was a success. With minimal human intervention, and with herds of free-roaming animals stimulating new habitats, Knepp is now full of new life. Rare species such as turtle doves, peregrine falcons and purple emperor butterflies breed there. The fabled English nightingale, heard less and less in modern times, sings again"--… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member thenumeraltwo
Straight up wildlife pr0n for me. Isabella Tree certainly has a view of what a wild UK should look like—less forested than I've thought—but which is compellingly argued.
I was surprised how uncomfortable I felt at the idea of starvation culling a herd and the carcasses being left out. The lack
Pasture-fed meat sounds like a delicious way to avoid vegetarianism. Charcuterie pony. Mmmm
I was surprised how uncomfortable I felt at the idea of starvation culling a herd and the carcasses being left out. The lack
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of "land bridges" sounds like starvation is too harsh, but it does happen in "wild" Africa too. Maybe too much city in me. Pasture-fed meat sounds like a delicious way to avoid vegetarianism. Charcuterie pony. Mmmm
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LibraryThing member splinfo
one of my favorites in a long time. awesome. Fun to learn more about creatures and history of England.
Highly recommended.
Highly recommended.
LibraryThing member PDCRead
Their land at Knepp in West Sussex had been farmed by them and the family before, for years, but it had reached the point where the farm had become unviable as a business. Not sure what to do with the land, Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell made that decision to let nature take over
Wildlife under the modern capitalist economies is taking an absolute pounding. A recent report says that we have lost 60% of our global wildlife and figures in the UK show this too; we are ranked 29th in the world for biodiversity loss: 56% of species are in decline and 15% are threatened with extinction. The species that we used to regularly see and hear are no longer around; when did you last hear a cuckoo?
Locals objected to several elements of what they were doing, ragwort was a particular issue with some people, but slowly the recovery began on their land. Species that had plummeted in the weald, begun to return. They were finding that they were suddenly one of the top sites in the country for creatures like purple emperor butterflies and turtle doves. With an abundance of invertebrates come predators and this rippled up until they realised that they peregrine falcons back. In fact, there were several species that had appeared that were not fitting in the niche that would normally be expected.
This inspirational book shows what can be achieved in just a decade, how we can regain a wilder country. Ensuring that we put things in place to support the natural world will make the world and our own lives a richer place. We can make some attempt to reverse the devastating trend even after a decade and whilst farms might not be able to implement all of what they have done, even some of these will have a marked improvement to our natural world.
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again. Fences were taken up and they selected some hardy breeds of pigs, Exmoor ponies and cattle to wander freely around the 3500 acres site.Wildlife under the modern capitalist economies is taking an absolute pounding. A recent report says that we have lost 60% of our global wildlife and figures in the UK show this too; we are ranked 29th in the world for biodiversity loss: 56% of species are in decline and 15% are threatened with extinction. The species that we used to regularly see and hear are no longer around; when did you last hear a cuckoo?
Locals objected to several elements of what they were doing, ragwort was a particular issue with some people, but slowly the recovery began on their land. Species that had plummeted in the weald, begun to return. They were finding that they were suddenly one of the top sites in the country for creatures like purple emperor butterflies and turtle doves. With an abundance of invertebrates come predators and this rippled up until they realised that they peregrine falcons back. In fact, there were several species that had appeared that were not fitting in the niche that would normally be expected.
This inspirational book shows what can be achieved in just a decade, how we can regain a wilder country. Ensuring that we put things in place to support the natural world will make the world and our own lives a richer place. We can make some attempt to reverse the devastating trend even after a decade and whilst farms might not be able to implement all of what they have done, even some of these will have a marked improvement to our natural world.
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LibraryThing member arewenotben
A frustrating, hopeful, inspiring, angry, depressing and subtly life-changing book.
LibraryThing member emmakendon
At a smaller scale than Oostvaardersplassen, Knepp stirs wonder and frustration in me. Ditto the book. The tone of superiority and privilege is irritating, but bushwack through it with your head down, and nature manages to find its way through.
Mostly. (The chapter about pasture-fed meat is
Where the book really wins is in the actual observations, and in the honesty about funding, research, public taste and distaste about the brutality of nature - hence the shooting at Knepp, Oostvaardersplassen, Rum etc -, public vandalism, and the absence of altruism within the farming and landowning community.
A beautiful read, a painful read, and a book to keep for reference after reading it - it's good that it's been written.
Mostly. (The chapter about pasture-fed meat is
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boringly blinkered, but without wolves and lynx, and with the gun in their place, we're stuck with this nonsense for now.) Where the book really wins is in the actual observations, and in the honesty about funding, research, public taste and distaste about the brutality of nature - hence the shooting at Knepp, Oostvaardersplassen, Rum etc -, public vandalism, and the absence of altruism within the farming and landowning community.
A beautiful read, a painful read, and a book to keep for reference after reading it - it's good that it's been written.
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LibraryThing member murderbydeath
This is one of those books where the content overcomes the writing. The writing isn’t bad by any means, but it definitely lacks the spark of personality. Either Isabella Tree lacks anything resembling charisma, or she was holding herself back. I choose to believe the latter, because I believe
In spite of what was often bland writing, the book is a brilliant record of the amazing achievements Tree and her husband managed on what was poorly producing farmland that was losing money. By allowing it to revert back to its natural state, with as little human interference as possible, they accomplished so much on so many fronts. The wildlife recovery, the flood mitigation, the general health of the land itself – all of it happening at speeds that make me optimistic that humanity hasn’t completely destroyed our planet just yet. Lest I got too optimistic though, Tree’s documentation of the uphill battle they had to fight with government agencies who nominally existed to protect the environment put me right back into my proper, cynical, place.
Wilding is a thoroughly well researched, excellently laid out recounting of one couple’s determined efforts to restore their patch of British soil to what it was meant to be, and all the excellent rewards that came with it. The writing may be less than enthralling but the content more than makes up for any missing sparkle or wit. If you’re interested in the natural state of things, this is definitely worth the time and effort.
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anyone willing to embrace the project she and her husband embarked on has to be inherently likeable and not a little bit charismatic.In spite of what was often bland writing, the book is a brilliant record of the amazing achievements Tree and her husband managed on what was poorly producing farmland that was losing money. By allowing it to revert back to its natural state, with as little human interference as possible, they accomplished so much on so many fronts. The wildlife recovery, the flood mitigation, the general health of the land itself – all of it happening at speeds that make me optimistic that humanity hasn’t completely destroyed our planet just yet. Lest I got too optimistic though, Tree’s documentation of the uphill battle they had to fight with government agencies who nominally existed to protect the environment put me right back into my proper, cynical, place.
Wilding is a thoroughly well researched, excellently laid out recounting of one couple’s determined efforts to restore their patch of British soil to what it was meant to be, and all the excellent rewards that came with it. The writing may be less than enthralling but the content more than makes up for any missing sparkle or wit. If you’re interested in the natural state of things, this is definitely worth the time and effort.
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LibraryThing member breic
Interesting and a bit inspirational. But it can also be long-winded, and especially in the second half Tree uncritically presents a lot of poorly supported research. I did appreciate, though, her emphasis on the importance of habitats that are transitional, in time and in space; and on the fauna
> Could grazing animals prevent the succession of trees on dry land, just as the geese had done in the marsh? And if we left the grazing animals to their own devices, as we had with the geese, might they, too, generate something even more interesting and more valuable in terms of biodiversity?
> Climax vegetation theory, originally propounded by the American botanist and author of Plant Succession , Frederic Clements, in 1916, and subsequently further developed by the English botanist Sir Arthur Tansley, author of The British Islands and Their Vegetation (1939), among others, throws up a further powerful psychological barrier for conservationists devising strategies for nature management. Closed-canopy forest is demonstrably species-poor compared with managed habitats like meadows, pasture, heaths and traditional farmland. ‘What it looks like, if you subscribe to the closed-canopy story,’ says Frans, ‘is that, in Europe – before we embarked on the destructive practices of modern industrial farming – man actually improved biodiversity because traditional farming and forestry practices like haymaking, pollarding and coppicing clearly sustain a much broader spectrum of habitats for wildlife than closed-canopy woodland.
> the old Sussex dialect has over thirty words for mud. There’s clodgy for a muddy field path after heavy rain; gawm – sticky, foul-smelling mud; gubber – black mud of rotting organic matter; ike – a muddy mess; pug – sticky yellow Wealdon clay; slab – the thickest type of mud; sleech – mud or river sediment used for manure; slob or slub – thick mud; slough – a muddy hole; slurry – diluted mud, saturated with so much water that it cannot drain; smeery – wet and sticky surface mud; stoach – to trample ground to mud, like cattle; stodge – thick, puddingy mud; stug – watery mud; and swank – a bog.
> Our footsteps often feel heavy. Rewilding Knepp has changed the way we look at the world and much of it is depressing. When we go for a walk with friends elsewhere in the countryside – the same walks we used to enjoy without thinking in the past – chances are what we notice most is the silence and the stillness. As the landscape flashes by on a train or motorway, we now know what isn’t there. Compared with Knepp, most of Britain seems like a desert. It brings an aching sadness, a sense of loss and frustration articulated best by the great American conservationist Aldo Leopold almost a century ago: ‘One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.’
> With the grazing animals no longer taking avermectins – the powerful wormers and parasiticides with which most domestic horses and all livestock on non-organic farms are habitually dosed – we were seeing cowpats and horse dung unlike anything we had seen outside Africa, latticed with the holes of dung beetles. For Charlie this became something of a fixation, taking him back to the bug obsessions of his childhood in Africa and Australia. He would lie next to a pile of fresh Exmoor dung and count the minutes (the record was three) that it would take for the dung beetles to arrive. Summoned by the smell and zeroing in like attack helicopters, the beetles fold their wings and plop straight into the dung. If a crust has already formed, they bounce off and then have to scamper back into it, burying themselves headfirst in nourishing excrement. Before long the kitchen counter was forested with glass vials containing all the species Charlie could find, to be dispatched to Professor Paul Buckland at Bournemouth University for identification. Triumphantly, after a summer of fecal rummaging, he had identified twenty-three species of dung beetle from a single cowpat.
> The does milling under the oak trees focus wisely on the business of loading up calories in preparation for winter. The bucks, on the other hand, will enter winter half-starved and exhausted. The weakest will die.
> The aurochs was hunted to extinction; the last died in Poland in 1627.
> All three subspecies of the European bison were hunted to extinction in the wild: Bison bonasus hungarorum from the Balkans died out in the mid-1800s, the last wild Bison bonasus bonasus was shot in Bialowieza forest on the Poland–Belarus border in 1921, and the last Bison bonasus caucasicus was shot, appropriately enough, in the north-west Caucasus in 1927. The European bison that survive today are descendants of a dozen animals held in zoos across the Continent.
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can affect ecological succession. > Could grazing animals prevent the succession of trees on dry land, just as the geese had done in the marsh? And if we left the grazing animals to their own devices, as we had with the geese, might they, too, generate something even more interesting and more valuable in terms of biodiversity?
> Climax vegetation theory, originally propounded by the American botanist and author of Plant Succession , Frederic Clements, in 1916, and subsequently further developed by the English botanist Sir Arthur Tansley, author of The British Islands and Their Vegetation (1939), among others, throws up a further powerful psychological barrier for conservationists devising strategies for nature management. Closed-canopy forest is demonstrably species-poor compared with managed habitats like meadows, pasture, heaths and traditional farmland. ‘What it looks like, if you subscribe to the closed-canopy story,’ says Frans, ‘is that, in Europe – before we embarked on the destructive practices of modern industrial farming – man actually improved biodiversity because traditional farming and forestry practices like haymaking, pollarding and coppicing clearly sustain a much broader spectrum of habitats for wildlife than closed-canopy woodland.
> the old Sussex dialect has over thirty words for mud. There’s clodgy for a muddy field path after heavy rain; gawm – sticky, foul-smelling mud; gubber – black mud of rotting organic matter; ike – a muddy mess; pug – sticky yellow Wealdon clay; slab – the thickest type of mud; sleech – mud or river sediment used for manure; slob or slub – thick mud; slough – a muddy hole; slurry – diluted mud, saturated with so much water that it cannot drain; smeery – wet and sticky surface mud; stoach – to trample ground to mud, like cattle; stodge – thick, puddingy mud; stug – watery mud; and swank – a bog.
> Our footsteps often feel heavy. Rewilding Knepp has changed the way we look at the world and much of it is depressing. When we go for a walk with friends elsewhere in the countryside – the same walks we used to enjoy without thinking in the past – chances are what we notice most is the silence and the stillness. As the landscape flashes by on a train or motorway, we now know what isn’t there. Compared with Knepp, most of Britain seems like a desert. It brings an aching sadness, a sense of loss and frustration articulated best by the great American conservationist Aldo Leopold almost a century ago: ‘One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.’
> With the grazing animals no longer taking avermectins – the powerful wormers and parasiticides with which most domestic horses and all livestock on non-organic farms are habitually dosed – we were seeing cowpats and horse dung unlike anything we had seen outside Africa, latticed with the holes of dung beetles. For Charlie this became something of a fixation, taking him back to the bug obsessions of his childhood in Africa and Australia. He would lie next to a pile of fresh Exmoor dung and count the minutes (the record was three) that it would take for the dung beetles to arrive. Summoned by the smell and zeroing in like attack helicopters, the beetles fold their wings and plop straight into the dung. If a crust has already formed, they bounce off and then have to scamper back into it, burying themselves headfirst in nourishing excrement. Before long the kitchen counter was forested with glass vials containing all the species Charlie could find, to be dispatched to Professor Paul Buckland at Bournemouth University for identification. Triumphantly, after a summer of fecal rummaging, he had identified twenty-three species of dung beetle from a single cowpat.
> The does milling under the oak trees focus wisely on the business of loading up calories in preparation for winter. The bucks, on the other hand, will enter winter half-starved and exhausted. The weakest will die.
> The aurochs was hunted to extinction; the last died in Poland in 1627.
> All three subspecies of the European bison were hunted to extinction in the wild: Bison bonasus hungarorum from the Balkans died out in the mid-1800s, the last wild Bison bonasus bonasus was shot in Bialowieza forest on the Poland–Belarus border in 1921, and the last Bison bonasus caucasicus was shot, appropriately enough, in the north-west Caucasus in 1927. The European bison that survive today are descendants of a dozen animals held in zoos across the Continent.
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LibraryThing member Treebeard_404
The synopsis for the book made it sound like the book was going to dwell much more on the economic difficulties the Knepp estate faced in pursuing their rewilding project. That deterred me from reading the book for some time. Happily, the focuses far more on the evolution of the estate: the plants,
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insects, birds, and animals that are benefiting from the unmanaged approach to land ownership. This slim book provides a quick and painless education to a number of important ecological points. Show Less
Awards
Books Are My Bag Readers Award (Shortlist — Non-Fiction — 2019)
James Cropper Wainwright Prize (Shortlist — 2019)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
2018
Physical description
384 p.; 6.42 inches
ISBN
1509805095 / 9781509805099