It's the little things that citizens do...*
Wilding: Returning Nature to Our Farm by Isabella Tree. New York, New York Review of Books (2020). 362 pages.
It is the age-old dilemma of the English aristocracy — the ownership of massive estates without the income needed to maintain them. The old solution (marry an American heiress), being both frowned upon and impractical (as he was already married), meant Sir Charles Raymond Burrell, 10th Baronet, and his wife, Isabella Tree, were forced to think outside of the box to save the ancestral lands. Farming was no longer a viable option. Neither was dairy. So, they made the unconventional decision to convert their home, Knepp Castle Estate in West Sussex, into “a biodiverse wilderness area.” Wilding: Returning Nature to Our Farm is Tree’s account of their remarkable and inspiring journey.
Allowing land to revert to a natural state is not as simple as you might think. At least, not if done correctly. There are layers to the natural world. The owners of Knepp had to travel 600 km, approximately 373 miles, to find an example of what they hoped to accomplish in West Sussex. The Oostvaarderplassen, a nature preserve in Lelystad, Netherlands, is a fascinating experiment that Tree describes as “one of the most extraordinary and controversial nature reserves in the world.” It appears to operate under two seemingly conflicting guiding principles. The first is minimal intervention with the landscape. According to the Dutch ecologist Frans Vera, responsible for the Oostvaarderplassen, it is necessary to stand back and let nature return and “reveal herself.” If only because many of our preconceptions are incorrect.
“‘We’ve become trapped by our own observations. We forget, in a world completely transformed by man, that what we’re looking at is not necessarily the environment wildlife prefer, but the depleted remnant that wildlife is having to cope with: what it has is not necessarily what it wants. Species may be surviving at the very limits of their range, clinging on in conditions that don’t really suit them…’”
Conditions we believe are their natural environment, because we’ve left them with little else.
The second principle involves reintroducing animals—the species that once lived in the habitat or the closest approximation available. At Knepp, this would mean reintroducing red and fallow deer, Tamworth pigs to take the place of wild boar, Old English longhorn cattle for aurochs (extinct since the 1600s), Exmoor ponies for wild horses, and beavers. Of course, predators also play an essential role, but bringing them into a park surrounded by farms and residential homes was controversial. And yet, even without them, the results at Knepp were/are magical.
After allowing the former agricultural fields to go fallow, the couple found themselves infested with sallow, ragwort, and – in 2007 – an outbreak of creeping thistle. Weeds. The neighbors, of course, complained. By 2009 the thistle covered acres of land. There were tense moments. And then, one day, a cloud of painted lady butterflies, arriving at a rate of 42 per minute, descended upon the thistle. That summer, the caterpillars they left behind decimated the plants. By the following year, both butterflies and thistle were no more. Tree refers to this as “boom and bust, Nature’s cardiograph of population explosions and cliff-falls.” Reminding us that everything in nature has a purpose. So much of the vegetation we dismiss as weeds and scrub, and work so hard to banish from our borders and lawns, has an important function. Sallow, milkweed, and ragwort are necessary to the life cycle of butterflies. In my own garden, I recently had an explosion of Canadian clear weed. The plan was to weed it out this weekend. But based on the experiences at Knepp Park, I did a little googling and learned that four species of butterflies feed on the plant.
Weeds and scrubland created by multi-stemmed shrubs and plants like blackberries and creeping thistle also provide a protective barrier for insects and small mammals. And allows seedlings to establish themselves unmolested by deer and squirrels.
In addition to being a lepidopterist’s paradise, Knepp Park is also home to turtle doves, peregrine falcons, and the English nightingale. All birds on the cusp of extinction in the UK. Thirteen of the UK’s seventeen bat species call Knepp home, as do all five UK owl species. Rare species of plants, like water-violet and certain varieties o fungi, have also appeared. A star attraction is the estate’s 500-year old oak.
Tree is an engaging and savvy writer as well as a smart businesswoman. Knepp Estate offers “camping, glamping, and safaris,” so, to a certain extent, Wilding functions as a 335-page tourist brochure. But that is the world we live in, and recognizing financial realities doesn’t have to lessen our enjoyment or the accomplishments at Knepp. Each section is entertaining while still focusing on the science and statistics that form the experiment's foundation. And because neither Tree nor her husband are scientists, their story is accessible to the reader and, perhaps more importantly, appears attainable. Tree, Charlie, and the reader learn together. For example, in the chapter on purple emperor butterflies, Tree writes, “It was becoming clear to Charlie and me that had we set out with the intention of creating the perfect habitat for purple emperors, we would never have achieved the numbers that have spontaneously emerged through rewilding.” She then goes on to explain the concept of emergent properties.
Reading Wilding, you can’t help feeling hopeful. Here in the U.S., the outlook tends to be bleak on the environmental front. And for good reasons. Enormous forest fires are burning on the West coast as I write this. And an extreme heatwave and drought in the Pacific Northwest are cooking fruit on the trees and killing marine life. The general consensus is that without the government stepping in and enacting sweeping systematic change, we can do nothing on an individual level that will make a difference. So why bother? But that doesn’t seem to be the driving narrative in the UK. Shows like Gardeners World encourage their audience to create wildlife-friendly gardens, citing a Wildlife Trust study that back gardens occupy more land than all the National Nature Reserves combined. There’s a move to eliminate the use of peat in potting soil to preserve peat bogs which provide carbon capture and to embrace the critical role of insects in our environments. The use of plastic shopping bags dropped by 59% in one year, and 95% since 2015, according to the Guardian. Simply by implementing a 5p charge. And while these might seem minuscule in the face of what is coming – it’s something.
What’s happening at Knepp is a part of that narrative of possibility. These small pockets of environmental success are comforting, but they are also inspiring. And make me wonder how much more we could accomplish if we put in a bit of effort. If there is a message in Isabella Tree’s book, it is that nature wants to work with us.
* “It’s the little things that citizens do. That’s what will make the difference. My little thing is planting trees.” — Wangari Maathai, Nobel Laureate