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

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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 is a spectrum of possibility, and everyone is on it. Whether you have a garden, roadside verge or window box, there is no space too small. Rewilding is learning how to contribute to a living landscape, to connect with other areas of nature and help forge the life-support system that will save our planet from calamity and provide humankind with a prosperous and sustainable future. Deeply researched and with original illustrations by Jeroen Helmer, Europe’s foremost environmental artist, this book explains why rewilding is important and how every one of us can play a part. The Book of Wilding is a practical guide and call to action. Above all, it is a manifesto of hope.Until it was explained in a book, in a story, nothing was happening,” said Burrell. “Then the book came out and it was a constant, constant flow of visitors.” The Book of Wilding is a handbook for how we can all help restore nature. It is ambitious, visionary and pragmatic. 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. It is inspired by the requests they receive from people wanting to learn how to rewild everything from unprofitable farms, landed estates and rivers, to ponds, allotments, churchyards, urban parks, gardens, window boxes and public spaces.. The Book of Wilding has the answers. Personal and inspirational, Wilding is an astonishing account of the beauty and strength of nature, when it is given as much freedom as possible. The most interesting parts relate first to the broad debate about the role of mega fauna in European ecosystems, and second, the surprising cultural differences in expectations about farmers, farmland, and public access. Unsurprisingly, Tree and the Knepp project in general are heavily and directly influenced by the Vera school of European paleoecology. Thus, most of the interesting spontaneous effects they observe are the downstream effects of horse, cattle, pigs, and deer browsing, wallowing, distributing seeds, and pooping. Their land of course attracts new species of dung beetle, micromoth, fungi, etc., along with big flushes of weedy flowers and new recruitment of woody shrub species, and consequently settlement by birds and other animals that require those kinds of habitats. More interestingly, in several cases they find that highly threatened species in Britain flourished in new kinds of habitat different from their reported preference, suggesting these kinds of habitats are so rare that species which prefer it are only hanging on by living in suboptimal areas. Overall, it's just a pleasure to read about the unfolding of ecological processes, things difficult for most of us to observe, often entirely forgotten, exposing clear and intuitive gaps the way naturalists and conservationists often approach nature.

This book has left me distraught, hopeful, happy, sad, angry and overjoyed at what can be achieved. Probably the best book I have read this year. I have been to Knepp on several occasions and spoken with both Isabella and Charlie and their passion for rewilding is amazing. They are also genuinely nice people. An aristocratic couple struggling to run a large farm may not elicit much sympathy. And the tale of how they turned around a loss-making business may seem a niche interest.The thing Tree never mentions is that her husband's family are traditional aristocrats, and the land they are rewilding is their estate. It was historically not just their productive land, but also the home of many tenant farmers. Their land is apparently shot through with roads and paths (it's unclear) maybe even houses and businesses? And as for the dog walkers, it's not just about the universal British law that anyone can traverse anybody's land whatever they want if they're taking a walk. The estate functioned as a kind of public park and event center for the whole community. On one hand, this makes what they're doing all the more valuable and interesting, but on the other hand, it casts a somewhat different light on the dynamic between them and the angry comments they get from the public. Either way, it seems like something that would have been worth explaining more explicitly, because afaik, even in the densely populated Netherlands, Oostvardersplassen was uninhabited before it was turned over to the wild animals. I'm not sure the degree of urban-rewilding integration here has a clear precedent. The words Isabella Tree uses to describe the journey from unprofitable farm, to a haven for endangered species and reintroduced species are magical. This book is not a heavy scientific tome but it contains enough information to make you question your purchasing decisions at the supermarket, and what you consider beautiful in the natural environment.