Wolves have been reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park Barrett Hedges/National Geographic Creative
“IT WAS a picture postcard of how the English countryside is meant to look,” Isabella Tree tells me. “It was a working farm. We had green fields, manicured hedgerows and ditches, land that was constantly active with maize, barley, rye and grazing cattle. We didn’t realise it at the time, but it was virtually a biological desert. Now it looks much more like Africa.”
She’s talking about her home, the Knepp estate in West Sussex. Seventeen years ago, she and her husband Charlie Burrell stopped trying to coax a living out of its heavy soil. Today, the 1400-hectare estate is the closest thing in southern England to a primaeval landscape: a mosaic of water meadows, thorny scrub, sallow groves and grazing lawns roamed by cattle, ponies, pigs and deer. “The colliding of different habitats has been rocket fuel for biodiversity,” says Tree.
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Knepp is an experiment in “rewilding”, a movement that has swept the Western world in recent years. It takes different forms in different places, but a simple and compelling concept drives it: let nature run things and it can right the wrongs we have done Earth’s wildlife. Habitats will restore themselves and biodiversity will bounce back, along with the vital services that the ecosystems provide, such as pollination and water purification.
Yet even as experiments like…
