Chapter 12 - Wilding by Isabella Tree

Welcome along to Chapter 12 of The Never-ending Book Story. I hope you are well and staying nice and alert. The weather is improving again and that makes the lockdown a bit more bearable, doesn't it? Imagine if this had all kicked off in mid-November. I think we'd all be struggling a bit more if we were faced with constant rain and freezing cold weather. Mind you, it would be an excellent excuse to snuggle up with a great big pile of books in front of a blazing log fire. 

I've slowly regained some concentration skills and am able, now, to read a lot more than I was at the start of the pandemic. I'm hoping to feel confident enough to take a little detour into The Mirror and the Light in the next week or two. I've been dipping regularly into The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstein which I would thoroughly recommend if 'fantasy fiction' floats your boat. It's beautiful and beguiling. Just the ticket for these troubling times.

You'll recall from the last chapter that I have been submerging myself in nature writing to help calm the Covid storm. In this chapter, I'm looking at Wilding by Isabella Tree. Fantastic nominative determinism at work there. You couldn't make it up! I'd guess most of us are familiar with the phrase 're-wilding' - where land is returned to the way nature intended. Wild and natural. Or as close to that as possible. Here's some of the blurb to help explain things:

Forced to accept that intensive farming of the heavy clay soils of their farm at Knepp in West Sussex was driving it close to bankruptcy, in 2000 Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie took a spectacular leap of faith and handed their 3500 acres back to nature. With minimal human intervention, and with herds of free-roaming animals stimulating new habitats, their land is now heaving with life. Rare species such as turtle doves, peregrine falcons and purple emperor butterflies are now breeding at Knepp and biodiversity has rocketed.

The book begins with some quite startling - frightening even - statistics about the state of the world and the massive decline in the health of the countryside over a relatively short period of time. Many of the problems are linked to farming and the changes in processes used. Fields, for example, have been made bigger in order to accommodate modern farming machinery. Between World War 2 and the 90s, some 75,000 miles of hedgerow have been lost. That's a lot of lost habitat. 97% of Britain's wildflower meadows have also been lost since the war. There are 40 million less birds in our skies than in the 1960s. 40 million. The facts keep on rolling out revealing a rather depressing state of affairs to say the least. It's dreadfully sad. We all read about the environmental issues facing our planet on a daily basis. Plastic in the oceans, the Amazon rain forest being decimated, so many species on the brink of extinction. Sometimes it all feels too much to fix. How can we possibly turn things around? 

Well, the good news is that things can change. This book is the proof. It doesn't take a long time for nature to get a foothold if we let it. And if we do, it will - quite literally - erupt. It's now thirty-odd years since the Chernobyl disaster. In that fairly short timeframe the exclusion zone might be a no-go area for humans, but it has become a haven for wildlife: brown bears, wolves, lynx and more than 200 species of bird. And many of these animals appear to be making adaptations to live quite happily with the radiation levels. For example, some of the frogs living within the zone have been found to have darker skin than those of the same species living outside the zone. It's thought this change is a mechanism for handling the high radiation levels. This shows that even when humans try their very hardest to utterly destroy the planet, it can bounce back pretty quickly. At least there is hope for our rain forests and coral reefs.

Sometimes it's the little things in life that make the biggest difference. One such little thing I was enormously delighted to read about in Wilding is green bridges. These were pioneered in the Netherlands and are effectively bridges for animals which are landscaped to include trees and even ponds to allow animals to move without needing to cross roads or railway lines. Within 6 years of one of the earliest bridges being constructed, it was being used by 3 species of deer, wild boar, foxes and badgers. I honestly don't know why these aren't everywhere. What a simple but brilliant idea.

My Grandpa was a farmer and two of my uncles are both farmers so I've spent a lot of time on farms during my life. I spent long, hot summer days out in the fields watching the combine harvesters and riding in tractors. When I stayed on my grandparents' farm during the school holidays we would have milk fresh from the cows - still warm - on our cereals. I look back with some very fond memories. The sounds and smells of the farm still seem so vivid all these years later. But we rarely think about the less pleasant side of farming. The average cow in the wild produces 3-4 litres of milk a day for her calf. On a dairy farm, the average cow produces about 22 litres of milk per day every day of the year. I feel a bit guilty about all that fresh milk we had down on the farm. Especially as the straight-from-the-udder warmth really made me feel sick. 

Don't let these facts put you off the book, though. It's a fascinating read and full of hope for the future. I think we all need a bit of hope at the moment and this fills the gap rather neatly. Consider this mind-blowing fact: a study in Romania found that a nest of 7 woodpecker chicks consumed an estimated 1.5 million ants before leaving the nest. There can't be many other books containing such amazing titbits of information. If you know of any, do let me know in the comments below!

When I was thinking about where to go on the next leg of the Never-ending Book Story, I was struck by the fact that both Wilding and Under the Rock (see Chapter 11) both have a fondness for bats. The Knepp Estate is now home to 13 of the 18 native British bat species thanks to the rewilding project. So, where else could we go next but to Whitby Abbey and an appointment with Count Dracula himself. I haven't read this classic tale for a good 15-20 years so a re-visit is definitely overdue. Stay safe and don't forget to join me for Chapter 13 (yikes) very soon...don't forget to follow and subscribe. And come and find me on Instagram and Twitter, too!