Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery: 14 (Hot Science)

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What Feral has done, though, by pushing the envelope – apart from get people talking heatedly about apex predators – is to make other introductions more possible.

The author takes you on ajourney to meet the incredible people behind these projects, many of which have come to fruition against all odds. e. the baseline gradually includes more and more of the effect that the project is aiming to counter. So, rather than being cast as the enemy of farming, rewilding should, I think, be seen as its greatest ally.The story Tree tells is about her land and their management decisions, largely made by expert advice and steering committee, and none of it feels especially personal. She also draws attention to unsung heroes like wasps and kestrels while providing tips on how to attract wildlife to your garden. Isabella Tree is an award-winning author and journalist and lives with her husband, the conservationist Charlie Burrell, in the middle of the rewilding project at Knepp. With an abundance of invertebrates come predators and this rippled up until they realised that they peregrine falcons back. More interestingly, in several cases they find that highly threatened species in Britain flourished in new kinds of habitat different from their reported preference, suggesting these kinds of habitats are so rare that species which prefer it are only hanging on by living in suboptimal areas.

Make it lovely and neat like my artificially fertilised, subsidised, chemical laden waste ground, with my animals that are cooped up day and night with intensive farming wearing them out before they've reached adulthood! And what comes is not just wildlife in super-abundance, but solutions to the other environmental crises we face. It is not only compelling, but necessary – not just a tale, but a companion that will teach you things you wish you had always known. And that is how we can create resilience for wildlife populations in the face of climate change and pollution.We still have time to change the world: that’s the message from Greta Thunberg’s new collaborative book. Together these books shine alight on the people, projects and species behind rewilding and its climate-storing and biodiversity-boosting powers. In an enclosed 7 acre site run by the Devon Wildlife Trust, a small family of beavers have totally transformed a 200m canalised stream into a braided system of channels, willow coppice and ponds with 1,000 square metres of open water, in just a few years.

Overall, it's just a pleasure to read about the unfolding of ecological processes, things difficult for most of us to observe, often entirely forgotten, exposing clear and intuitive gaps the way naturalists and conservationists often approach nature. For avid readers always on the lookout for new books to fall in love with, finding a good author and reading every single book they've ever written is a not uncommon strategy. This change presumably - surely - started with this book and with what the author and her husband undertook at their farm in West Sussex.

It is both a disheartening look at our failure to husband the natural resources and processes with which we have been blessed and at the same time a hopeful sign of the benefits of 'letting nature take its course'. In The Book of Wilding Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell take us on a fabulous adventure that demonstrates how almost every single one of us can contribute to the grand project of rewilding. I know nothing about farming and next to nothing about conservation, but I was fascinated by this story of a family that turned their 3,500 acres of unprofitable intensive farmland, owned by ancestors for centuries, into a 'wilderness'.

Millie Kerr shares insights from her new book, Wilder: How Rewilding Is Transforming Conservation And Changing The World, and recommends five of her favourite books for further reading.

It was thus more of a book for my ecologist husband (though he already knew a lot about Knepp and has been there twice). Rewilding is possibly the most important and empowering revolution to have evolved out of the conservation movement in the last hundred years. Our great-grandparents, even our grandparents, would be astonished and saddened at what we now consider normal in terms of countryside and wildlife. This book should be required reading, and I hope the lessons learned from it will impact agricultural and environmental policy for the coming decade. Most surprising is the increase in the variety and abundance of birds including nightingales and turtle doves whose dwindling numbers have made them endangered.