Published August 26, 2022
20 min read
NORWICH, England—“A big thorn bush and a load of brick rubble,” says Sarah Smith, recalling the pre-pandemic state of her printing company’s yard on the outskirts of this medieval east England city.
A couple of years on, it has been transformed into a miniature mosaic of wildflowers, grasses, lavender, and poppies. There are ponds, a rock garden, a vegetable patch, herbs, and a little compost heap decomposing merrily in the sun. Birdsong battles with the thrum of the refrigeration unit at the meat wholesaler next door, bees stock up on nectar as they pass by the warehouses, and field mice scurry through the chain link fence in search of shade, seeds, and insects. It is messy and bursting with life.
This patch of converted wasteland may be only a few hundred square feet, but it is part of a broad movement that aims to reconnect people with nature—and repair some of the catastrophic biodiversity loss that has led to the disappearance of nearly half of Britain’s wildlife and plant species since the Industrial Revolution. Smith and her project are part of a rewilding campaign run by WildEast, a nonprofit encouraging people to let 20 percent of whatever they have grow wilder, whether by creating a pond for wildlife in the backyard, letting churchyard grasses grow long, or turning acreage on private estates back to nature.
Similar efforts are underway across the United Kingdom, involving non-profits, local government, and ordinary folk. So far, a fifth of Britain’s county councils—43 of 206 councils—have already created rewilding projects or are drawing up plans for them, according to a survey by the Guardian newspaper and Inkcap Journal, a nature and conservation newsletter. They range in size and scope, from reconnecting an industrial stretch of a river to its natural floodplain in East Renfrewshire on the outskirts of Glasgow, to rewilding a golf course in Brighton on England’s south coast where wildflower meadows once thrived.
In London, Mayor Sadiq Khan is pursuing an ambitious $723,000 (£600,000) campaign to restore degraded sites for plants and wildlife across 20 percent of the city. Using patches of urban land to create more green space in the city and by connecting corridors of overgrowth to larger reserves on the outskirts, Khan says he wants to give his city’s 9.5 million residents a “thriving web of nature on their doorstep.”
The plan imagines Londoners contributing their window boxes, rooftops, and gardens, just as Smith did in the industrial park in Norwich. There are benefits for people as well as nature, she says. “I got so much from this project. Getting that balance between me and nature.” But it also, she says, “was about mental health.”
Smith had invested her savings into the new printing business, only for the COVID pandemic, with its rolling lockdowns keeping customers away, to trigger a slowdown that fast became a standstill. Staring at bankruptcy with less than $1,000 in the bank, Smith relieved her frustration and worries by “sobbing into my coffee cup,” then stepping outside and “just digging and forgetting about it” to create her oasis. Becoming part of WildEast’s effort, she says, allowed her to feel part of a community of people taking similar actions. Sitting in her garden, surrounded by plants and insects, Smith says, “People come here and we start talking about WildEast, and my pledge to give back to nature, and I ask them, what if we all joined in?”
Encouraging all to join, even if only with a window box
Early efforts at rewilding in the U.K. are usually credited to Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree, who two decades ago let 3,500 acres (1,400 hectares) of their farmland in West Sussex, known as the Knepp Estate, go wild, turning their marginal arable fields into a thriving expanse of wildlife and native plants.
While the concept of rewilding as a conservation strategy continues to gain support as the effects of climate change are increasingly in evidence—Britain now languishes close to the bottom of global biodiversity rankings—the idea of rewilding has drawn mixed reviews. It has been derided as an elitist campaign of wealthy estate owners, an image that persists today, so much so that the Guardian headlined its list of U.K. projects, “Rewilding ‘not just for toffs,’” using British slang for the upper class.
The WildEast campaign signals a shift, as that Guardian headline suggests, toward a more expansive definition of restoring nature: Rewilding is not just for estate owners, but for everyone, and projects can be as simple as a window box of flowers that attracts bees or letting hedgerows, used for centuries to demarcate property lines, go untrimmed. To that end, Britain has 435,000 miles of hedgerows, about half what it had a century ago; they not only store carbon, but are considered the country’s largest wildlife habitat.
Some methods of rewilding, however, raise legitimate environmental questions, and controversy. Many who make a living from the land scorn the idea of abandoning it, while some large-scale tree-planting programs are derided as “greenwashing.” Returning wildlife can be even more problematic. Apex predators such as wolves get much of the attention—whether in Scotland or northern Europe—and wildcats and lynx worry both sheep farmers and pet owners. More benign reintroduced animals can also alter regions in ways not anticipated by the humans trying to help them. Because beavers can change the course of rivers, for example, their reintroduction across the U.K. after 400 years of extinction triggered concerns about flooding.
Dieter Helm, an Oxford economist, warns against such purist strategies that he says can undermine restoration efforts. “The rewilders should be very careful what they wish for,” he says in his 2020 paper “Is rewilding the answer?”
Instead of approaches that involve “nature without people,” Helm encourages “improving human management of nature,” meaning greater benefit could be obtained by the purposeful neglect of gardens, bolstering of hedgerows, seeding of abandoned plots, or “hiving off” of field edges and allowing them to go wild. All of those actions, he says, strengthen nature by increasing the number and variety of species while creating direct human benefits as well.
Farmers are essential to rewilding’s success
In the U.K., farmers are especially skeptical of rewilding, as most have neither a vast estate nor the money to leave it be. They also question taking land out of food production and worry about the loss of farm jobs. Yet any serious effort to restore the environment must include farmers. F