Rewilding book reviews

During lockdown, a few of us have turned to reading books about wildlife while we haven’t been able to visit wild places. There has been a spate of books about rewilding over the last few years, as interest grows in the idea of restoring nature rather than just conserving what is left. Here are some of the books we have enjoyed.

 

FERAL

By George Monbiot 

All across the world nature is in retreat and there are few countries where that process is as far advanced as in the UK. Our environment is shorn of a large proportion of the species that used to thrive here. Feral catalogues and mourns what we have lost, but it also presents a vision of what we might have again. George Monbiot points out that in this country even landscapes that are seen as wild and natural are in fact mainly unnatural ecological deserts. He advocates allowing nature to reclaim a lot of the UK’s deforested uplands, which are currently maintained as barren deserts by management for grouse shooting, deer stalking or only very marginally productive sheep farming.  In part this would be about simply allowing regeneration of natural tree cover, but to establish truly thriving natural ecosystems it would also need to include active reintroduction of key species, particularly larger predators and large herbivores. Rewilding the UK’s uplands in this way would help to combat climate change, by sequestering a lot of carbon and would also help to prevent flooding in more populated areas, by slowing run off. I found the book inspiring.  I believe that protecting and restoring woodland and peat bog has an important role to play in helping to combat climate change, but like Monbiot I also long for a return of some real wildness to my world.  

 

WILDING

The Return of Nature to a British Farm

By Isabella Tree 

This book tells the story of an unproductive farm, whose owners take the decision to stop farming in any traditional sense and instead let nature return. They make some interventions, like sowing areas of wildflowers and filling ecological niches long left empty in our wild spaces by introducing small herds of large herbivores. But their most radical action is to choose to do nothing most of the time. They stop cutting the hedges; the hedgerows spread into wide corridors and nightingales move in. They stop draining a wet field; it turns into a boggy area with wildlife they have never seen there before. If you’ve ever read the reports of what is happening to our biodiversity and despaired, this book is for you. It left me quite emotional and I think the main emotion was relief. Maybe we haven’t broken everything beyond repair after all. Maybe nature can come back.

 

REBIRDING     

Restoring Britain's Wildlife

By Benedict Macdonald 

Benedict Macdonald uses the current fortunes of the British bird population to analyse the current state of our countryside and land use and investigate why we are doing so badly in contrast to our neighbours across the Channel and in Eastern Europe. He uses the evidence from Wilding by Isabella Tree about the success of the Knepp estate in increasing biodiversity, to advocate a bolder use of our outdoor spaces including national parks, with better control of deer populations, introduction of beavers and reductions in sheep and cow herds. He suggests that conservation bodies must change their priorities to buying larger areas of land which will give bird populations, currently at unsustainable levels, a better chance of recovery. The reintroduction of pelicans to a greatly enlarged wetland in Somerset is an appealing vision.

 

NATURE'S ARCHITECT 

The Beaver's Return to our Wild Landscapes

By Jim Crumley 

Jim Crumley is one of Scotland's foremost nature writers and one of the earliest advocates of beaver re-introduction. He describes the earliest personal sighting of beavers in the river Tay who had unofficially reintroduced themselves and visits other sites in Scotland where controlled introduction of beavers has been allowed, such as

an historical experiment on the Isle of Bute and a contemporary release at the Aigas Field Centre. He discusses some of the benefits to river management which might occur as a result and reviews literature from Canada about the role of beavers in their landscape. At regular intervals he returns to the river bank to watch beavers at work and play.

 

BRINGING BACK THE BEAVER

The Story of One Man’s Quest to Rewild Britain’s Waterways

By Derek Gow 

In Isabella Tree’s review of this book, she describes the author as ‘a wry, profane truth teller who is equal parts yeoman farmer, historical ecologist, and pirate’. I can’t improve on that description! This book helped me to understand the role of the beavers in our ecosystems, which I hadn’t properly understood before. It made me hopping mad that the UK government is so ridiculously averse to change and that large landowners still have so much power in this country. But most of all, it really made me laugh. Look out for the explanation of how to sex a beaver – I laughed until I cried.

 

By Malcolm Hunter, Alison Skinner and Hannah Wakley