Even nightingales and turtle doves, whose numbers have crashed nationwide, are returning. The increase in the variety and abundance of birds has been particularly astonishing. Scrubland, wetland and other habitats are gradually rewiring themselves as herbicides and pesticides disappear.
Formerly common plants – but also rare ones – have returned in profusion, together with insects, bats and other organisms. In what has become a glorious “mess”, the animals live out in the open all year round and give birth unassisted by humans. The project, which began in 2001, is perhaps unique in England, and the results have been spectacular. The book describes an attempt to renew the ecosystem, after decades of intensive agriculture of some 1,400 hectares owned by Tree’s husband Charlie Burrell at Knepp in West Sussex.
“We have reduced the forest to a wasteland,” says the eponymous hero: “How shall we answer our gods?” That such despoliation has accelerated in recent decades is now a familiar idea, but I recommend anyone prone to despair to read Wilding – for Isabella Tree’s apparently quixotic tale of Exmoor ponies, longhorn cattle, red deer and Tamworth pigs roaming free on an aristocratic estate is a hugely important addition to the literature of what can be done to restore soil and soul. L ament for the human destruction of the non-human world dates back to at least The Epic of Gilgamesh, which was written in about 2100 BC.
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