Everything herein is supported and backed-up with the rich personal experience they have gained on their own estate, so much so that I lost count of the number of times I read “At Knepp…”. This said, much is made in the book about the key concept of ecological connectivity – Sir John Lawton’s “Bigger, Better, More Joined” – that could mean small bits of rewilding here-and-there are connected into a landscape-scale network of core and corridors such that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; bridging the barriers to wild nature created by our landscape of intensive agriculture, urbanisation, and transport corridors. I say this as someone who has only a mild-to-middling interest in nature/environment/ecology issues, at least in terms of prior knowledge and depth of scientific understanding.

Knepp may be a familiar name if you follow British environmental news: it’s synonymous with what’s known as rewilding. Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell know firsthand how spectacularly nature can bounce back if you give it the chance. There are no starving animals here, no “nature red in tooth and claw”, just high value premium ‘free range’ steaks. Her advice is invaluable; it reaches everyone who wants to make a better world out of the mess we humans have created. This brilliant book tells us how * Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change * Rewilding has a firm place in my heart and it's great to see it presented as a possibility for everyone, regardless of where they live.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. Tree devotes time and careful discussion to the academic theories and popular perceptions that make rewilding especially hard to achieve in Britain, relative to other parts of Europe; George Monbiot also observed this peculiar tendency. We’re getting questions all the time, not just from people with land but who have a back garden or a window box,” said Tree.

On the back cover Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Joanna Lumley provide more plaudits: “brilliantly readable” and “a handbook of hope”. Isabella Tree is an award-winning author and journalist and lives with her husband, the conservationist Charlie Burrell, in the middle of the rewilding project at Knepp.There is scientific evidence to suggest that food quality has dropped significantly, even to levels that could explain the apparent sudden rise in things like lactose intolerance or other allergies: there could be more of this around nowadays because the products themselves have altered in response to the intensive farming methods used to increase yields. Clearly, there is a limited amount that one person living in an urban environment can do to affect the national state of the land, but it does require individuals to make some decisions and this book is a huge encouragement to show you what could happen if enough people made those decisions and if government etc.

nagyon remélem, hogy egyre több Knepp-projekt létesül szerte az országban, mert óriási szükség van rájuk és a hasznuk-hatásuk felbecsülhetetlen. This book really opened my eyes even more and I learned many things despite being an ecologist and life long conservationist. 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. A book like this will age quickly in such a progressive field, with the section on Biodiversity Credits in particular reading more like a PR piece.I found the argument that Britain was not covered in closed-canopy forest during pre-history convincing, as well as useful. Most surprising is the increase in the variety and abundance of birds including nightingales and turtle doves whose dwindling numbers have made them endangered. Note: I saw Isabella Tree speak about the Knepp Estate experiment at the Slightly Foxed Readers’ Day on November 2, 2019.

At a meeting in Sheffield shortly before Covid, Charlie gave a new presentation that he said he wanted to test out on us. Apparently, I’m a “Re-establishment of Wild Nature” zealot and I am to be admonished for my extreme views: “Are you sure you want to remove human involvement from nature?Provide something back to the community and it doesn't have to be at the cost of yourself or others. There’s a chapter on planning, majoring helpfully on funding and income streams (see later) and there’s even some ‘science’ with a chapter on recording and monitoring biodiversity gains. 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.