They create a mosaic of different habitats, that are ever-shifting, constantly changing – a system with lots of messy margins and transitional vegetation like emerging scrub. So, in a sense, they’re the energy, the compulsion that stimulates dynamism on our depleted post-agricultural land again, that pulls the glider up into the air so it can fly. Together with red deer and fallow deer they drive the system here, creating vegetation complexity through their different grazing preferences and their natural disturbance of soil, and by moving seeds and nutrients around the landscape. But we can use free-roaming grazing animals like old English longhorn as a proxy for the aurochs, Exmoor ponies as a proxy for the tarpan and Tamworth pigs for wild boar. At Knepp, on 3,500 acres, in the densely populated south-east of England, we obviously can’t have apex predators like the wolf or lynx, or even bison (probably impossible with dog-walkers, as bison just don’t like dogs – they consider them to be wolves). So I think wilding – or ‘ rewilding’ – is essentially about trying to recreate dynamism in a landscape, and you can do that to varying degrees, depending on where you are in the world, and how much land is involved. All we can hope to do is stimulate something interesting for nature with the tools we have left to us, in the environment in which we now find ourselves. I consciously didn’t call my book ‘ Rewilding’ because that pesky little ‘re-‘ prefix suggests to many rewilding detractors an attempt to recapture the past – something we know, in this totally altered world of the Anthropocene, is impossible to do.

Foreign Policy & International Relations.

Wilding isabella