<
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/25/rewilding-climate-change-biodiversity-isabella-tree-nature-planet-farming>
"The Knepp estate in West Sussex is home to the first white stork born in the
wild in Britain for over 600 years. It’s a place where endangered bats, turtle
doves and nightingales are thriving, where “officially extinct” large
tortoiseshell butterflies are breeding and where tens of thousands of people
visit each year to experience “a story of hope” 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 – An Illustrated Guide, updating
her readers about extraordinary developments at Knepp and offering practical
advice about rewilding their own spaces, however small.
“We’re 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,” says Tree. “How is
one individual going to make a difference to climate meltdown and biodiversity?
‘It’s impossible,’ you think. Then you come to Knepp and you see what nature
has done, how it’s 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.”
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 – and “simply let things
go”. “We wanted to work with nature for a change, rather than fighting against
it all the time,” writes Tree.
Exquisite illustrations by the printmaker and fine artist Angela Harding reveal
how, step-by-step, wilderness and wildlife then returned to Knepp. “Nature
bounces back, if you let it, wherever it can.”
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."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
