‘Wilding’: A Farming Revolution
A review of ‘Wilding’, a film by David Allen, reviewed.
Isabella Tree was adopted. It is because she was adopted, she believes, that she is at peace with dissenting, with doing things others wouldn’t do. Her father used to tell her, ‘You’re always looking for a hole in the wall’ — meaning: she was always looking for some weakness in the established order, or some means to go beyond it.
So when she and her husband’s mightily ambitious project to rewild Knepp, a historic but despoiled English estate, came under fire, she held firm. And ambitious doesn’t quite capture what they were trying to achieve. She and Sir Charles Burrell and were attempting to ‘heal’ the 3,500-acre grounds of the latter’s ancestral home by releasing into it pigs, horses, cattle and other animals who would then be left, if you like, to their own devices, enduring whatever misfortunes would befall them.
This is the subject of Wilding, a short documentary film based on Isabella’s account of this undertaking. At the age of 21, her husband had inherited the farm from his grandfather, and tried to run it unsuccessfully for 17 years. Now deeply in debt and still unable to increase productivity, Sir Charles sold the dairy herd and farm equipment and embarked on a mission to ‘rewild’ the estate, helped by funding from the government’s Countryside Stewardship scheme. The inspiration for this was the Dr Frans Vera, a Dutch ecologist who — to simplify — hypothesised that Western European primeval forests at the end of the Pleistocene age did not consist only of ‘closed-canopy’ conditions but also included pastures. Large herbivores, Vera suggested, maintained this open landscape.
Dr Frans Vera hypothesised that European forests at the end of the Pleistocene age did not consist only of ‘closed-canopy’ conditions but also included pastures.
Sir Charles and Isabella set about seeding the grounds with grass, clearing away the fences, and reintroducing free-roaming herds of old English longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies and Tamworth pigs as proxies for the aurochs, tarpan and wild boar that would once have roamed the British countryside, as well as red and fallow deer. The idea was that the natural behaviour of these animals — grazing, browsing, dispersing seeds, fertilising the soil — would rejuvenate the land. And it did. Over the course of a decade, a place that had been stripped of organic matter by over half a century of modern farming was brought to life. Plants flourished, trees grew, the animals multiplied — a thriving and dynamic ecosystem emerged. Species that had not been seen in England since the 15th century, including the white stork, appeared.
The project, in other words, was a success; and yet Isabella and Sir Charles faced criticism. Local farmers attacked the couple for allowing destructive wild flowers like ragwort proliferate; and politicians (of course) piled in, accusing the couple of allowing animals to suffer. Purist rewilders say that due to the absence of apex predators at Knepp it does not qualify as ‘true’ rewilding. Admirably, the couple endured this and simply carried on, and as the success of Knepp continued and even grew, those dissenting voices went quiet. Now, many travel to the grounds to witness ‘the miracle at Knepp’.
The central theme of this story, I think, has to do with control and with failing to understand the interconnectedness of things, and I think that the lessons we can take from the episode at Knepp are ones we can apply elsewhere. Every time we plough, we turn a ‘whole living world upside down,’ says Sir Charles, and if we keep doing that for long enough, we kill everything off. Soil is critical component of nutrient cycling; it supports plant growth and biodiversity; it absorbs and stores water; it traps carbon; it is a habitat for organisms and micro-organisms. We want to eat and eat, and so we farm and farm, and consequently we wreck the soil, which leads to the ruin of everything else.
Every time we plough, we turn a ‘whole living world upside down, and if we keep doing that for long enough, we kill everything off.
Isabella’s and Sir Charles’s approach was hands-free: they stepped back, realising that it the intervention of people that was the problem. We could say that they practised non-intervention in the Buddhist understanding, realising — to quote Pablo d’Ors — ‘que buena parte de las cosas en este mundo funcionarían mejor sin la intervención humana, que tiende a violentar su ritmo natural o a crear efectos secundarios de incalculables proporciones’ — that ‘many of the things in this world would function better without human intervention, which tends to disrupt their natural rhythm or create side effects of incalculable proportions.’
The story is rendered beautifully in documentary form by David Allen, who also directed Ocean Odyssey and The Serengeti Rules. It is incredibly moving to see animals returned to the wild, for all the suffering that freedom necessarily involves. (In one memorable scene, a horse from the farm next door seems to look wistfully through the fence at a free and shaggy-maned Exmoor pony on the Knepp estate.) The film is gorgeously made; yet Allen and his team do largely avoid sentimentality, choosing instead to focus on the miracle of nature itself (or perhaps ‘herself’), which is exactly the point of the story: that we must consider ourselves and every other part of nature in context, and come to understand that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. In other words, there are now animal-characters here, no Disneyfied horses with fluttering eyelashes.
This is a really good film, and one that tells a fascinating story about nature and our place in it. It will give courage to those dismayed by the state of the natural world, and, more than that, remind us that the world is often much wiser than we are, and that things can often take care of themselves if we would only get out of the way.
