🌿 Rewilding Must Become a Cultural Movement

I had the pleasure of spending a couple of days wandering around the Knepp estate in Sussex last winter. One of the UK's great rewilding success stories, Knepp gives a glimpse into the restorative power of nature if given the chance, and a place I dare even those most indifferent to nature’s allure to not feel a creeping sense of awe. The ecological benefits have been striking; the biodiversity successes of the purple emperor butterflies, nightingales, and turtle doves to only name a few; the recovery of soils and wetlands, along with the regeneration of trees and shrubs serving as effective carbon sinks; and the initial progress of the River Adur restoration project.

The ecological benefits are well established and have served as the source of energy behind the movement’s success thus far. But after spending a few days immersed in the untamed landscapes of the Knepp estate, I knew that to characterise such a project as one of wholly ecological restoration was to sell it wildly short.

Dealing with the ecological crisis no doubt requires systemic change, ranging from the economic to the political. But this transition must go beyond just tackling our external systems, and instead, attempt to resolve our internal separation from nature with equal importance. Tackling the root cause of systemic failures, rather than just symptoms.

These rewilding projects have the potential to become the classrooms of the regenerative renaissance in which learning about the natural world goes beyond the conceptual abstractions and classifications of GCSE biology textbooks. Just as museums, theatres, and galleries make up the majority of our youngest memories of extracurricular excursions, projects like knepp should become those of the next generation. 4 out of 5 children are not ‘adequately connected to nature’, according to a 2013 RSPB study, and if one excludes the cyberpunk-styled solutions of augmented and virtual reality, Britain’s recovering wild may be our best bet.

I recognise that Knepp and many of the other rewilding projects across Britain do offer a variety of ways to engage with their environments. But these experiences are still much too exclusive and finite for the majority of the general public, often becoming examples of upmarket eco-tourism. Instead, democratising access to these landscapes should be as important a goal as ecological restoration.

Eventually bringing us all closer to a little secret kept by the American poet Walt Whitman, that “the making of the best person is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.”