Book Review: The Book of Wilding - A Practical Guide to Rewilding, Big and Small

"A wilder, more resilient world is within our reach."

As the year winds down and January approaches, many people begin to look ahead and think of their New Year's Resolutions.  Resolutions are all about doing better - for yourself, for your friends and family, for your community.  This year, why not consider expanding your circle to include the whole planet?

At first glance, The Book of Wilding: A Practical Guide to Rewilding, Big and Small might look more like a textbook than a light read.  The hefty tome, written by Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell, focuses on the art and science of modifying our human-dominated landscapes to create a more sustainable world for wildlife.  The book's central example is an ancient family farm that Burrell inherited years ago, poorly suited and unprofitable for farming after years of unsustainable practices.  Instead of giving up, the authors worked to rehabilitate the land to create a nature reserve, a slice of Ancient Britain.

When rewilding is discussed in the press, the focus is largely on the reintroduction of large carnivores, such as wolves, some of which may have been absent from a landscape for centuries.  This book acknowledges that such events are unlikely, distant-horizon projects, and instead focuses on smaller-scale, more sustainable rehabilitation efforts.  Emphasis on large animals is largely limited to herbivores - both long-absent large herbivores as well as proxies for extinct species - which the authors see as the landscape engineers which shape habitats both in their lives and their deaths.  While much of their book is focused on larger landscapes, such as farms and urban parks, there is also a chapter on the smallest-scale of rewilding, our own backyard plots.  (The book is well-organized in such a way that you can easily skip over parts that aren't relevant to your case and move ahead to sections that are).

Also, whereas many critics of rewilding sense a distinctly misanthropic streak in the concept ("Four legs good, two legs bad, humans out of everywhere), this book strongly acknowledges the realities that humans need places to live, work, and raise food, and we're not going anywhere.  The emphasis of the book is on finding ways for all species - including our own - to coexist and thrive together.  So much of what is bad for the natural world, it is pointed out, really isn't that great for us either.  Likewise, many people seem to think that rewilding is about going back to a set point in time, a pre-human age where everything was perfect, and then freezing it there.  The authors disagree with the notion, noting that natural landscapes are always in flux, and there is no perfect past postcard that we should be trying to recreate; that's in part why they call their work The Book of Wildling, not Rewilding.  

Written in the aftermath of COVID-19, the book highlights how isolated so many of us have become from the natural world, and much we benefit from connection with wild spaces.  In improving the world for wildlife on any scale, we improve it for ourselves.

The Book of Wilding: A Practical Guide to Rewilding, Big and Small at Good Reads