Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery: 14 (Hot Science)

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As we live in the midst of a climate catastrophe it can be hard to find hope, but we must. Rewilding as a concept feels like it can be a vital source of positivity in dark times. It seems to hold not only a potential way to help repair the damage of our past actions, but also a way to transform our future relationship with the natural world and that is exciting. 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. Intervention is kept to a minimum and species start to flourish like never before, with plentiful habitats and safe spaces to breed.

You had already been wilding for more than a decade when your next choice, George Monbiot’s Feral, was published in 2013. What does his book add?

Books for children

One idea put forward for restoring nature's balance is the re-introduction of mega-herbivores, with increased grazing enabling soil carbon levels to be restored and thus negating the release of methane from thawing of the permafrost (particularly needed in Arctic regions). The story is understandably simplified, perhaps a little too, and I can imagine eagle-eyed young children (5-8) pestering parents and teachers with questions: “but why did the land soak up the water, mummy?” “Miss, why do people use chemicals if they kill all the animals?” My first introduction to rewilding was through Isabella Tree’s book Wilding, which chronicled the experiences of Isabella and her husband, Charles Burrell, as they sought an alternative to the failing intensive farming of their familial estate at Knepp in Sussex. Wilding goes deeply into the experiment at Knepp and the results that they have observed, whereas Rewilding is a broader discussion of the science and developments around the world. Often we think of conversation as human non-interference (leaving nature alone and letting it run its course) - this even being an end within itself.

Jake is very much a bloke’s bloke. He’s the kind of guy you might meet down the pub on a Saturday night chewing over what that stupid politician did now, or talking incessantly about the weather. A gamekeeper for many years, after a short, successful stint in the London club scene, he’s not someone you would expect to be at the forefront of rewilding. I met him at an event and he was exactly how I expected – honest, enthusiastic and raw. That’s what makes this book so bloody brilliant – it’s relatable. In recent years, rewilding has become a hot topic among conservationists and individuals concerned about environmental declines. The term — which rolls off the tongue more easily than conservation or biodiversity — is now mainstream in the UK, but rewilding is more complicated than people realise. All of these are covered. I like that the authors aren’t America-centric and we learn what Europe and Africa are doing right. As more people leave farms and rural areas for jobs in cities what should we do with abandoned farms? What about global warming? What happens when you remove that pressure and let the land recover? It takes time (something we are notably not prepared to give much of in our modern world), but it turns out that nature is remarkable. What happens challenges some of our most basic assumptions about the land. There is a thing in ecology, or at least in this book, called “shifting-baseline syndrome” and this refers to the fact that often the baseline for a project, the goal it sets out to achieve, is derived from data that consistently gets more and more recent i.e. the baseline gradually includes more and more of the effect that the project is aiming to counter. We make wrong assumptions: as the book points out, we label nightingales and purple emperor butterflies as “woodland” creatures because that is here we see them, but, if we stop interfering and watch what nature does, we learn that they are not really creatures of that environment. Once you begin to learn things like this, the whole basis of many conservation projects is called into question (should we really be micro-managing woodland environments to encourage the purple emperor butterfly when that butterfly would, left to itself, prefer to be somewhere else?).

Reviews

Rewilding, says David Woodfall, is about how people “engage with their environment through the natural world.” There’s truth in that, though it will take more than engagement to reverse wildlife declines. Reading about the mishaps in Argentina reminded me of the reindeer discussions in Finland. It's not all or nothing, but rather finding a way and a solution that as many interest groups as possible can live with. Perhaps the most interesting environmental commentator of our times, Monbiot will find a large audience with this book. His own encounters with the wild are lyrically described, and his arguments against the primacy of the sheep-farming and fishing industries compelling. His encounters with politicians will make you angry, while his ability to find the wild in unexpected places may fill you with hope.

They touch on numerous rewilding projects – from the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone to the rewilding of England’s Knepp Estate – helping readers get a sense of rewilding’s many shapes and sizes. Writing style appealed to me with very rich references to other studies, books, and rabbit holes of reading material that I may actually pursue for once. With Ben’s history working in Natural History TV, there’s a strong sense of story here with some astonishing statistics thrown in to emphasise quite how badly we need a conservation rethink. This is an inspiring read, though, with the final section giving a real sense of hope and building concrete ideas for the future. It’s a book I always recommend to nature enthusiasts who want an introduction to rewilding. Having found the book heavy going at first, re-reading it made me appreciate how crucial a fresh and innovative approach is if we are to preserve the world we live in for future generations. Although many rewilders consider it weird science, the stuff of Jurassic Park, I find it compelling, not least because rewilding often begins with a baseline. Who’s to say what that baseline should be?The narrator of the audiobook has a beautiful Scottish brogue, which had me talking quietly to myself while walking around listening to it, regularly trying to mimic the ways he pronounces familiar words such as "book" (the "oo" is more like the sound from saying "boo" or "dew") or anything containing a soft "e," which made me realize how much more phonetic and natural the Scottish way sounds than the way I'm used to speaking.

Rewilding and ecological restoration narratives are still a very tiny genre of nonfiction, so I'm always excited to see a new one. 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. The first half of this book does all of that pretty well. Unlike some of these books, there really isn't much memoir to it. The story Tree tells is about her land and their management decisions, largely made by expert advice and steering committee, and none of it feels especially personal.

For instance, America’s increasingly litigious culture means that playground owners and parents are resistant to kids playing outside unsupervised. When I was growing up in the 1980's, I was allowed to ride my bike all over my neighbourhood in San Antonio, Texas, without my parents knowing where I was. Nowadays, American parents risk prosecution if they allow their children to go places alone! What I find exciting about rewilding, apart from the opportunities for resurrection in our natural world, is the way that it changes the way that we think about the world around us. For example, one criticism of rewilding is that it can lead to de-domesticated fauna dying in their environment, such as cattle dying from the cold, in ways that are considered inhumane and should not be allowed. This highlights both our arrogant relationship with nature and also our hypocrisy given the many cruel deaths (and lives) we happily inflict on such animals to provide cheap food.