Wilding: Returning Nature to Our Farm, by Isabella Tree

[rachelmanija]

The aptly named Isabella Tree's husband inherited a large farming estate (3500 acres) in Sussex. They spent seventeen years trying to make it profitable, but failed due to multiple circumstances, one of which is that it's hard to farm in Sussex.

The old Sussex dialect has over thirty words for mud. There's clodgy for a muddy field path after heavy rain; gawm – sticky, foul smelling mud; gubber - black mud of rotting organic matter; ike – a muddy mess; pug – sticky yellow Wealdon clay; slab – the thickest type of mud; sleech – mud or river sediment used for manure; slob or slub – thick mud; slough – a muddy hole; stodge – thick puddingy mud.

But luckily, at the time they realized that they'd given it all they had and it just wasn't going to work, the UK had instituted a program that paid farmers to re-wild their land. They promptly rewilded their 3500 acres, creating Knepp Wildland, the first large-scale lowland rewilding project in England.

Tree's account starts out with an avalanche of mostly-depressing statistics about the loss of nature in Britain, broken up by the occasional bit of charming prose like her mud list above. As she dives into describing the process and theory of their rewilding project, it gets less and less dry and more and more glorious, like this description of the mating frenzy of purple emperor butterflies, first sublime:

The sound of a single butterfly is imperceptible. But tens of thousands have a breath of their own, like the backdraft of a waterfall or an accumulating weather front. It feels as though the oscillating susurration of their wingbeats, pounding away on their supernatural wavelength, might dissolve the world into atoms.

And then hilarious:

“Think testosterone,’ says Matthew, ‘multiply it by πr2 and double it. Forget boys locked in boarding schools. They’ve spent ten months as a caterpillar waiting for this. They’ve pupated, they’re mature and they’re desperate. They’re squaddies in the disco on a Saturday night. They’re sailors in port after a nine-month voyage.”

Tree and her husband introduced large native wildlife or wildlife substitutes to mimic the ecology of pre-industrial times - longhorn cattle substituting for aurochs, Tamsworth pigs for wild boar, Exmoor ponies, and roe deer. They broke up the elaborate Victorian system of drains, and discovered that left to its own devices, seasonal wetlands formed and destructive flooding became less common. (Beavers would have managed the water even better, but as of the writing of the book, they did not have permission to introduce native beavers.)

One of the most striking observations is that conventional wisdom on species' habitats and preferences is often based on their observed behavior in radically altered landscapes, and may not reflect their ideal habitats. For instance, if the only natural landscape available to nightengales is dense woodland, they'll nest in dense woodland. But with a wider variety of landscapes, they might actually choose and prefer scrubland.

She visits other rewilding projects, most notably the Oostvaardersplassen Reserve in the Netherlands, and learns how every aspect of a wild ecology is important, from the soil to the fungi to leaving dead animal carcasses to be scavenged (something that is banned in the UK, unfortunately.) But despite opposition from neighbors and endless bureaucracy, the farm transforms into a haven for native plants and animals, attracting many rare and endangered species.

I highly recommend this - at its best, it's nature writing to rank with Gerald Durrell, and it's very thought-provoking and full of new-to-me insights - but be aware that the first couple chapters are the driest, and it gets better as it goes along.

I cannot WAIT for Jeff Vandermeer's rewilding book. Most books I've read on rewilding are either about enormous projects like this one, or not about America, or both. I'm trying to rewild some of my property, which is just under a half-acre, and I'd love advice that's more applicable to someone who does not have native hedgehogs and can't introduce wild ponies.