Book Review - Wilding by Isabella Tree

Have you ever walked around an area of intensivly managed farmland, and wondered what it would be like to revert it back to nature. Imagining all the flowers and birds and butterflies returning to what is a dead, ploughed field. Us humans have destroyed a lot in the march for progress, but its not too late, nature can be restored, and it has been proven, in the book Wilding.
Wilding is the story of how one landowner did just that, just let nature breathe again. They found that their intensively farmed land was literally dying and was not productive any more, was not making any money. They chose the bold decision to stop farming and let nature take hold again.
Amazingly this had never been done before in the UK, and they had to turn to examples on the continent. From the places they visited there, they found that if every aspect of nature was included in the system, it would be self functioning. When everything was added to the mix there would be a balance. One of the biggest absentees from European ecosystems were the big herbivores, the wild cows and horses, now extinct. They discovered our natural landscape is not wall to wall tree cover but a kind of variety of different habitats always in a state of flux. This was caused by big herbivores grazing areas, opening them up. So by letting the landscape rewild and adding large herbivores they were able to get an approximate to what our natural environment was pre civilisation. And what they learnt was that species aren't as confined to certain habitats as we are meant to believe, and they can move from place to place, not so locked in to our definition of countryside.
Of course they had difficulties to begin with. We have a view of our countryside as being farmed, given over to food production, but that is something artificial, only been around since after the second world war. Rewilding was such a new phenomenon that no one knew how to class it. There were obstacles from government, from local farmers. But now following on from their example wilding or rewilding has become a big word in conservation.
You can see it on nature reserves such as Minsmere, where they allow their Konik ponies loose to graze areas of land, without fences, using less intensive nature management, letting nature manage nature.
Wilding is an inspirational document of how its never to late for wildlife, that it can always come back. There are exceptions, the complete collapse of turtle doves in this country, for which its maybe too late. But to combat climate change, species extinction, and agriculture infertility rewilding seems a good system, if not maybe the full answer.
If you have any interest in nature conservation then this is a seminal book, it will inspire, even if it just means letting the garden grow wild, but maybe their message will reach government, maybe some other struggling farmer, telling them that its ok, it has been done and it does work. Work done by our nature charities to protect our jewels of nature reserves against intensive agriculture, may just pay off as nature can once again spread out from them into our wider countryside.