A review by samdalefox
Wilding by Isabella Tree

hopeful informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

4.0

I listened to this as an Audiobook, I would recommend reading in this format as the author has a very calming voice to listen to. People who are well read in this field, there is overlap with other books out there, however I still learnt a lot and would recommend. For people who are new to this area and would like to read more, I've listed my suggestions below. All of these overlap with 'Wilding' in some way, so if you find this book interesting you are likely to enjoy these others too. I recommend to anyone interested in conservation, rewilding, climate change, and British nature.
 

The conservationist Aldo Leopold once wrote that 'one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. ' But if everyone has an ecological education, we will not live alone, and it will not be a world of wounds.”

Complimentary reading suggestions:

• Regenesis - George Monbiot (2022)
• The Red Deal: Indigenous action to save our earth - The Red Nation (2021)
• Life on our planet - David Attenborough (2020)
• The hidden life of trees - Peter Wohlleben (2015)
• Entangled life - Merlin Sheldrake (2020)
• The garden jungle - Dave Goulson (2019)

Overall, I enjoyed learning about the Knepp project. It appealed to me as a scientist, an enviornmental activist, and a normal person interested in my country's land (England, UK). Despite the narration being soothing to listen to, I found the long lists, statistics, and especially the romantic descriptions of feudal England boring to listen to. I ended up doing other tasks while listening and only stopping to really concentrate or take notes when something new or of particular interest came up.

The major pros of 'Wilding' are the breadth (and sufficient depth) of conservation science, politics, farming, and cultural resistance. Tree has organised the chapters and progression of the book cleverly imo; the structure makes sense the further along you read. The first couple of chapters focussing on her family's estate's history nearly made me DNF, but I'm glad I persisted. Tree uses anecdotes from the chronology of the Knepp rewilding project to focus on specific scientific and political subjects along the way. There is simply too much covered for my to give a comprehensive summary, but I'll list a taster of subjects covered here: biodiveristy, rewilding (minimal intervention), shifting baseline, the history/politics of intensive agriculture, farm subsidies, soil science, emergent properties. My absolute favourite chapter handsdown was the one about Ragwort. It was fascinating and makes me proud to cultivate the ragwort in my garden for the moths.

The cons are few; I can only think of two, and of those two only one really bugged me. The first is the slow and sometimes overly descriptive writing. The second is that I found Tree frustrating. She stated so many excellent facts and explained the relationship between complex biological, cultural, and politcal spheres that impact the enviornment, she came so tantilising close to joining these dots together, but ultimately didn't. To me, this is a critical failure. I forgave David Attenborough in 'A life on our planet' for doing it because he actually joined the dots together and acurrately described the problem and the solution, but just didn't say the name directly of the villain *spoiler alert* capitalism - I believe in an attempt to be broadly read and accepted. But I can't and won't forgive Tree, because it is obvious in the text that she knows what the villain is, and hasn't fully accepted it. This is evidenced in the final chapters.

In short, she accurately describes the horrific affects of capitalism on the climate crisis and in particular land use, agriculture industry, and loss of biodiversity in Britain, but her solution is still capitalism. She directly acknowledges this e.g., "We should certainly question a basic payment scheme which rewards people for doing nothing other than owning land". And, "Rewarding ecosystems for purely human benefit could harm biodiversity in the long term.". She also knows that land ownership is bound up with Britian's class problem, made blindingly obvious by her many references to her husand's noble bloodline and inheritance, and more practically in various pieces of legislation such as the The Allotment Act 1950 and the perverse incentives given to farmers through farm subsidies, financial penalties, and how land is 'valued'. e.g., "Not all rewilded land will produce charasmatic headline species that tourists will flock to see, and it is in the nature of rewilding habitats to shift, for species to move. Incentivising farmers and land owners to give land over to nature has to rely in ways that value that transition and acknowledge the public services that dynamic self willed natural processes provide. This involves changing the way we measure things like productivity, prosperity, sustainability, profit and loss, the business models that evolved at a time when nature's bounty seemed limitless. Payments for ecosystems services, natural capital accounting, pro biodiversity business, and biodiversity offsetting, are all now being explored as ways that the value of nature can be measured in tangible financial terms. Providing cost benefit analyses for the protection of such natural assests as soil, water, air, bees, vegetation, biodiversity, and uplifting views." Tree briefly acknowledges the controversy, amorality and and logistical impossibility of rewilding through capitalism. But ultimately she argues for it, her rationale being that one needs to be visible to the economic system in order to be accommodated for. e.g., when the thing (in this case rewilding, or nature) is not included it is tossed aside. I disagree, under capitalism nature is not merely tossed asside as an after thought it is actively and conciously exploited. All she is suggesting is changing the mode of exploitation. The clincher for me that Tree is not really wedded to actual change (besides her obvious love of the class system) was this quote: "Had intensive farming been profitable for us we would undoubtedly be doing it still". My closing comment is thus: in order to achieve the necessary and desired changes to Britain's land for rewilding and vastly reduced farming, we need LAND REFORM NOW.

Quotes 

"We've become trapped by our own observations, we forget that in a world completely transformed by man that what we're looking at is not necessarily the environment wildlife prefer, but the depleted remnants that wildlife is having to cope with. What is has it 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. Open up the box, allow natural processes to develop, give species a wider scope to express themselves and you get a very different picture."

"We have become a nation obsessed with ordliness and boundaries."

"[NIMBYs], dislike mess, say they love nature but don't feel it should look like that. "It feels like a foreign land, it looks abandoned".  

"Though we protest that we love nature, is seems that this is only on our own terms. We have become a nation of gardeners, more interested in exotic flowers than natives."

"Once again predjuice and alarm outpace science."

"Lack of unfamiliarity breeds unbridled fears"

"Lack of empathy and knowledge of nature seems to be at the route of much of this behaviour"

"How many trees flowers birds and insects can an average person identify today?"

The Ragwort (1832)

Ragwort, thou humble flower with tattered leaves
I love to see thee come & litter gold,
What time the summer binds her russet sheaves;
Decking rude spots in beauties manifold,
That without thee were dreary to behold,
Sunburnt and bare-- the meadow bank, the baulk
That leads a wagon-way through mellow fields,
Rich with the tints that harvest's plenty yields,
Browns of all hues; and everywhere I walk
Thy waste of shining blossoms richly shields
The sun tanned sward in splendid hues that burn
So bright & glaring that the very light
Of the rich sunshine doth to paleness turn
& seems but very shadows in thy sight.

John Clare (1793-1864)