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

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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.

As a proud yellow belly, I am surrounded by both a lack of central and local investment in rural and coastal areas and large landowner's/farmer's preachings of a lack of support. You can see the level of investment that has gone into the estate using the time tool in Google Earth.I suppose it mismatched my expectations: I was hoping for writing about the natural world in England, about environmental degradation and how we can reverse or at least improve it.

He said Knepp showed that “the open-ended restoration of native habitat in a dynamic way has huge biodiversity and bioabundance benefits that have not been replicated anywhere else on sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) or national nature reserves or all these other alleged jewels in the crown that we’ve been trying to preserve against the tide of climate change. In Wilding, Isabella Tree tells the story of the ‘Knepp experiment’ and what it reveals of the ways in which we might regain that wilder, richer country.The second half is a lot more about the practical applications of wilding, at a variety of different scales, from full-on farm estates to gardens. 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! Evan Bowen-Jones, chief executive of KWT, said: “Knepp is an iconic project in UK conservation terms now. Ten multi-choice “pick a statement from A-D that you most closely agree with” questions later, and I score mostly Ds.

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. However, the book's aim is to educate those people interested in re-wilding and saving our green spaces. It is written in a beautiful, engaging and simply captivating style which holds you attention in a way few books can. Large landowners have turned to rewilding in the hope of matching the profits at the formerly loss-making Knepp. Some of the species we are likely to encounter are shy or can be frightened by loud noises or sudden movements.e. farming) to keep herd numbers at a level that allows the development of the desired wood pasture landscape in a stress-free environment. It will become the holy book of rewilding - packed as it is with useful advice for rewilding at all scales. This book really opened my eyes even more and I learned many things despite being an ecologist and life long conservationist. 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.