Wilding

July 15, 2019
Let land lie fallow, and things begin to happen. Let 3,500 acres lie fallow, and the world is remade. The lands around Knepp Castle, in the English district of West Sussex, have been farmed intensively for centuries, and the estate was exhausted and was losing money. Enter the aptly named Tree (The Living Goddess: A Journey Into the Heart of Kathmandu, 2015, etc.) and her husband, Charles Burrell. Three decades ago, they came to the land with a pronounced fondness for mycorrhizae--the invisible, microbial life that teems in healthy soil, fed by decaying plant life, sheltered by tree snags, and the like--and a commitment to do something about the declining populations of species such as the turtledove, whose numbers are "an almost vertical dive" thanks to the wholesale industrial remaking of the British countryside. Tree describes the long, laborious process of turning back time, abandoning deep plowing and mass production in the effort to allow the land to regain some of its former health. And how it does: As she writes, triumphantly, just one sign is the "sixty-two species of bee and thirty species of wasp" that now buzz around locally as well as 76 species of moths and battalions of birds, including herons that "deserted their tree-top roosts in the heronry and were nesting a few feet above the water." The author writes without fear of binomials and with long asides into hard science and deep descriptions of things like soil types and the characteristics of heritage pig species, and fans of Roger Deakin, Robert Macfarlane, Nan Shepherd, and other British naturalists will follow right along. Tree describes a success that she began to chart nearly two decades ago but that has been flourishing since: "The land, released from its cycle of drudgery, seemed to be breathing a sigh of relief. And as the land relaxed, so did we." A fine work of environmental literature that demands a tolerance for detail and should inspire others to follow suit.

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