The Book of Wilding: A Practical Guide to Rewilding Big and Small

Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell

Bloomsbury, New York, 2023, 560 Pages

Hardback: £28.99 | ISBN 978-1-5266-5929-3

Review by Steve Carver

When I offered to review this book, I thought it was going to be a small(ish) paperback, not 560 pages long, two inches thick and weighing in at just under 4lbs. The Book of Wilding by Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell, assisted it must be said by a small army of advisors, artists, and editors, is certainly some tome. Well-known rewilding experts Stephen Fry and Benedict Cumberbatch provide front-cover endorsements describing the book as “wonderful and urgent”, “important and empowering”. On the back cover Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Joanna Lumley provide more plaudits: “brilliantly readable” and “a handbook of hope”. A bible for the aspirant rewilder! Afterall, a rewilded country estate is “last year’s must have” according to Tatler Magazine.

To be fair, the experience gained by Charlie and Issy’s experiment with their Knepp Estate is invaluable and hats off (doffed?) to them for what they’ve achieved. The gains for wildlife have indeed been remarkable, and what a story! The Book of Wilding is part sermon, part practical guide-cum-Haynes Manual of Rewilding, all illustrated liberally with colour photographs, maps, pencil sketches and beautiful cartoons of how the British countryside could look in a rewilded future. 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 is the message that comes through loud and clear, and so I think the book will appeal most to those lucky enough to have inherited a country pile somewhere in the Shires.

The book itself is broken down into chapters on what rewilding is about, how it looks in the UK setting, followed by a series of thematic chapters looking at water, plants, animals and, of course, large herbivores, given their notable presence at Knepp. 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. Only when we get nearly 400 pages in is the question of how we, The People, fit in. And here we are given ideas on how to rewild our gardens and, if we don’t have one of those, a window box. For most of us living in cities and the suburbs, there’s advice on how we can bring nature back into the urban fabric, though this chapter seems to be mainly aimed at city planners, engineers, and architects. The book is interspersed with sections on ‘putting it into practice’, all helpfully colour-coded with green paper (what else?) so that they’re easy to find. I was amused to find a quiz after the final chapter on “How Wild are you?” Ten multi-choice “pick a statement from A-D that you most closely agree with” questions later, and I score mostly Ds. 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? If you remove management how might your neighbours react? Are there species that exist thanks to human-managed habitat, and can you accept that those species might disappear?”. Oh well, not for the first time have I been labelled thus. There are set of online notes linking to the numbered citations in the text should you wish to verify the claims made therein. Why they are online is not clear as they could easily be included in the book itself, but at least there’s a list of further resources that any would-be-rewilder worth their salt will want to follow up on.

Going back to the reason I agreed to review the book, it is because I wanted to know if it provided any insights into the four key questions that were left unanswered in Issy’s earlier book Wilding. The first of these is when the Burrells stopped farming, what came first, the regeneration of the scrub or the livestock? Of course, it was the former, demonstrating that with light, natural grazing from deer and rabbits, ecosystem recovery can occur under its own steam. It was only on the insistence of Frans Vera (desperate to prove his theory correct?) that domestic herbivory was reintroduced to act as a disturbance mechanism to ecological succession.

My second, and related question was answered by Charlie himself over breakfast in a Cambridge college one morning. “Charlie” I asked, “how do you decide how much meat to harvest from the estate?” He looked quizzically at me and asked if I could elaborate. “If you take too much then the natural regenerative capacity of the scrub and the trees will be greater than grazing pressure and eventually, you’ll end up with closed canopy woodland” I said. He nodded in agreement. “But if you take too little” I continued, “the natural fecundity of the herd will mean that over time grazing pressure will grow to outstrip regeneration so that you’ll end up with a kind of Kneppvaardersplassen of overgrazed grass and no trees” (akin to the landscape and habitat of the signature Dutch rewilding project Oostvaardersplassen). Again, he agreed. “So how do you decide?” I asked. “I take enough to get wood pasture” was the answer. This was what I’d been looking for since here it is, the desire for a Capability Brown parkland landscape or mini-Serengeti in a West Sussex country estate. The section on Stocking density in the new book (page 214) brings this into close focus when we’re told that the Tamworth pigs had to be removed from the Middle Block because their ‘rootling’ was “damaging the parkland aesthetic”. Thus, the need for human intervention in any fenced and farmed landscape, should be obvious, because fences limit movement, constrain animal behaviours and control grazing pressure leading to possible unwanted consequences; an issue that we’ll return to shortly.

My third question concerned profit margins. At a meeting in Sheffield shortly before Covid, Charlie gave a new presentation that he said he wanted to test out on us. He was due to deliver this talk to around 300 farmers the following week and he wanted our reactions. “Ask me questions as if you were a farmer” he said, so I did. “What’s the bottom line? How much profit are you making?” I thought this was the first thing any farmer would want to know but he was rattled and literally told me to “Bog off!”. Charming. At the time I suppose it was commercially confidential, but I was guessing the answer was “very” (profitable that is). We learn now on page 9 of this new book that they generate a 20% margin on £1million turn over per year, so I guess I was right.

My final question is somewhat more controversial: “How does the Burrell’s support for the local Crawley and Horsham Hunt sit comfortably with their rewilding credentials?” A quick Google search reveals that the C&H have several criminal convictions for illegal fox hunting and harassment, and while the Knepp Estate only allows trail hunting on their land, they still, it would appear, host the C&H’s opening meeting each year. This perhaps goes some way toward explaining why Tim Bonner, CEO of the Countryside Alliance, supporter of hunting with hounds and outspoken critic of rewilding, thinks that Knepp is “wonderful”, yet there’s no mention of this in either book.

Unfashionable as it may be, given all the plaudits and glowing reviews, I find the new book disappointing and lacking in certain key regards; such are the perils of knowing more about the science regarding a populist topic than your average reader. Firstly, the book (like its predecessor) can’t really make its mind up as to what rewilding really is. For starters, its full title is: The Book of Wilding: A practical Guide to Rewilding Big and Small and so mixes up the terminology from the outset. This lack of clarity as to what rewilding really means isn’t helpful and, despite the opening chapters covering much of the basic background such as history, shifting baselines, extinctions and reintroductions, proxy species, scale, connectivity, etc, it still can’t put its money where its mouth is. I suspect this is because Issy and Charlie know that what they’re really doing is regenerative farming rather than rewilding per se. Much is made of the role of large herbivores at Knepp and elsewhere, but while mentioned en passant, the top-down regulatory role of carnivores in modifying herbivore behaviours and controlling herd numbers is largely ignored (or avoided). Why? Perhaps it is just too difficult a topic to broach with English sensibilities and wouldn’t have allowed Knepp to have risen to its lofty heights of rewilding stardom?

The inspiration behind Knepp is clearly Frans Vera and his experiment at Oostvaardersplassen which, if anything, has shown that even with a site of nearly 6000 ha you cannot have uncontrolled herds of wild grazing animals inside a stock-proof fence without mass starvation and ecological meltdown. The problems with OVP are plain for all to see, yet the book cannot bring itself to voice these concerns. Connectivity, allowing animals to migrate to find fresh browse in the lean months, is essential. That, and a meaningful predatory pressure creating a landscape of fear for the herbivores. The ecological recovery seen at Knepp, however, is down to careful harvesting of a meat product from domestic livestock (i.e. farming) to keep herd numbers at a level that allows the development of the desired wood pasture landscape in a stress-free environment. There are no starving animals here, no “nature red in tooth and claw”, just high value premium ‘free range’ steaks.

Thus, I’m left with the feeling that all we can hope for here in little old England is a kind of rewilding-lite in the form of traditional, high nature value farming a la the 18th Century bucolic of Gilbert White wherein, despite claims to the contrary, we (or the few) remain largely in control of our ‘wild’ nature. Nothing wrong with that – in its place – but it mustn’t limit our aspirations for rewilding-max or “re(al)wilding” in other spaces that may ultimately allow the return of large carnivores and genuinely free-roaming herbivores; for as I said, back in ECOS 35 (3/4), we need to recognise that rewilding is part of a broader continuum of approaches, scale and levels dependent on contextual setting and long-term vision.

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. As regards Knepp, the controversy over the Buck Barn housing estate proposal seems to have died down (the developers Thakenham are now proposing a £5m eco-bridge over the A24; the result of some high-level diplomacy I wonder) and plans are in place for building ecological connectivity with fellow rewilders’ land at Climping near the coast and the Ashdown Forest further inland via the Weald to Waves project. This is at least a 2C’s model (Cores and Corridors) you might think but is sadly missing the 3rd C (Carnivores) despite there being potential for lynx in the heavily wooded Weald landscape. Comparisons to wolf recovery on the continent beckon, but while the only thing physically stopping wolf returning to a rewilding site near you is 20 miles of salt water, our lack of ecological maturity as a country remains the principal sticking point; witness the hoo-ha over a few beavers.

Before I sign off, I’ve got to say something about money, that thing that makes the world go round. The Burrells have been hugely successful in making Knepp work for them, turning around an unprofitable farm into a rewilding cash cow, if you’ll pardon the pun. You can see the level of investment that has gone into the estate using the time tool in Google Earth. Zoom in to Knepp Castle and scroll through the years from 2001 to present day and you’ll see what I mean. Not satisfied with Knepp, they have now set up the consultancy and advisory service Nattergal to “deliver nature recovery at scale to provide vital benefits for society and sustainable financial returns” with a vision for “Global biodiversity recovery driven by focused investment into rewilding degraded ecosystems”. This applies green financing to rewilding projects to capitalise on the push for natural capital investment in emerging biodiversity and carbon markets. It has two sites currently on its books: Boothby in Lincolnshire, and High Fen in Norfolk. I’m thinking that my window box won’t be next.

Verdict: As it says on the cover, The Book of Wilding is indeed wonderful, important, brilliant, hopeful, and dazzling… an indispensable guide. It will appeal to a broad readership dreaming of something more optimistic than the diet of doom and gloom we see on the nightly News and could act as a road map for those starting along the path of rewilding their corner of this green and peasant land. At £35 it is a snip, and less than the price of a kilo of Knepp Wild Range rump steak. I do hope that, in time however, we can see beyond the current horizons of regenerative farming towards re(al)wilding with large carnivores back in the British landscape, because without a predatory pressure, that is missing the point, and we’ll be forever needing to intervene and manage. Squabbling over definitions may seem counterproductive but there needs to be a minimum threshold of what is and isn’t rewilding, such that we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet. To be brutally honest my threshold sits with agriculture and at the end of the day “If it’s farming, it ain’t (really) rewilding” but the cartoon visions of a greener, wilder future offer up a glimmer of hope that things can be different. I just hope I live long enough to see it.