The Knepp estate in West Sussex is home to the first white stork born in the wild in Britain for over 600 years. Itâs a place where endangered bats, turtle doves and nightingales are thriving, where âofficially extinctâ large tortoiseshell butterflies are breeding and where tens of thousands of people visit each year to experience âa story of hopeâ about the resilience of nature in the face of the global climate emergency.
There have been many exciting changes at Knepp since 2018, when Isabella Tree wrote Wilding, her award-winning book about rewilding an unprofitable 3,500-acre arable and dairy farm. Now she has written a captivating illustrated book, Wilding: How to Bring Wildlife Back â An Illustrated Guide, updating her readers about extraordinary developments at Knepp and offering practical advice about rewilding their own spaces, however small.
âWeâre living in a world of eco-anxiety and most of us, I guess, stick our heads in the sand because these problems are so enormous,â says Tree. âHow is one individual going to make a difference to climate meltdown and biodiversity? âItâs impossible,â you think. Then you come to Knepp and you see what nature has done, how itâs rebounded in 20 or so years. It really is such a story of hope that I think people find it quite galvanising. It restores your energy and your belief that you can do something.â
The book, out on 7 March and is aimed at older children (aged 9+) and adults, explains how and why Tree and her husband, Charlie Burrell, sold off their dairy cows and farm machinery in 2000. They stopped ploughing and spraying fertilisers and pesticides, pulled up their barbed wire fences, smashed their Victorian land drains, quit clearing their ditches â and âsimply let things goâ. âWe wanted to work with nature for a change, rather than fighting against it all the time,â writes Tree.
Exquisite illustrations by the printmaker and fine artist Angela Harding reveal how, step-by-step, wilderness and wildlife then returned to Knepp. âNature bounces back, if you let it, wherever it can.â
Some of the rarest creatures in Britain have now made Knepp their home, including kingfishers, hazel dormice, scarce chaser dragonflies and purple emperor butterflies. The river has returned to its natural course and the soil is now storing as much carbon per hectare as a 25-year-old plantation of trees does, according to recent tests.
âThatâs really exciting, because rewilding has been seen as fantastic for wildlife and recovering biodiversity, but people say it doesnât answer the problem of climate change. We can say now, categorically, it does. That, actually, you can restore your soils by allowing an area to rewild â and just the soils alone will be the same as a carbon storage in a plantation.â
This comparison is important, Tree says, because putting trees in the ground with a spade is not good for biodiversity. âWhat youâre creating as a single generational plantation with standing trees is a closed canopy woodland, which is very species poor.â By contrast, Knepp has wetland, scrubland, mature trees and deadwood, as well as mycorrhizal fungi and root systems under the ground. âAll of that is way more significant for storing carbon than just planting trees.â
Yet, in 2000, Knepp was merely an âunpromising piece of land underneath the Gatwick stacking systemâ. âIf it can happen here, it can happen anywhere.â
The release two years ago of a pair of breeding beavers was particularly important: last year, they had two kits, the first to be born in the wild in Sussex for centuries. âSeeing what the beavers have done during all these storms and floods is astonishing â theyâre holding back probably four or five acres of standing water and helping to prevent flooding downstream.â
During the 2022 heatwave, the beaversâ dams created something similar to a âlittle emerald oasis in the middle of an African savannahâ, which is now âheaving with lifeâ.
Tree says: âItâs absurd we still have to have beavers under licence in enclosed pens in England, when theyâre living free in Scotland and on the continent. Everyone knows how powerful they are for cleaning polluted water and restoring biodiversity.â She and Burrell have been campaigning to âget beavers back in Englandâ for 15 years: âWeâre so risk averse in the UK, while the planet is in meltdown. Weâve got to get braver and start reintroducing the keystone species that are crucial to restoring nature.â
Wild-living beavers were recently given protected status in England, but farmers are concerned that reintroducing the native species â which was hunted to extinction in the 16th century âwill threaten their crops or livestock, for example by redirecting rivers and flooding agricultural land. Similarly, critics of rewilding argue that the governmentâs decision to offer farmers incentives to rewild their land, in order to restore 741,000 acres of wildlife habitats in England by 2042, is putting food security at risk, when the UK is already heavily reliant on global food supply chains.
âPeople say we canât rewild everywhere â how are we going to produce food? Thatâs the big pushback weâre getting against nature, certainly from the National Farmersâ Union,â says Tree.
While she accepts that not everywhere can be rewilded â âwe will always need land for food productionâ â she thinks that it can protect crops and provide farmers with a âlife-support systemâ they desperately need.
âWe cannot carry on ploughing and using chemicals and artificial fertiliser. We know the pollution that causes, we know weâre losing our soils. So, for the long-term security of food production itself, weâve got to shift to regenerative agriculture. But also we need to have rewilded areas around our food production to provide the dung beetles, the pollinating insects, the pest control, the clean water, the water storage and the buffers against extreme weather events.â
Surrounding agricultural land with wild land is the only sustainable way forward. âRewilding works hand in glove with food production. We can have both,â she says. âWeâve got the space for both.â
Wilding: How to Bring Wildlife Back â An Illustrated Guide by Isabella Tree and illustrated by Angela Harding will be published by Macmillan on 7 March