WILDING - A huge ray of hope

This book is just the biggest ray of hope I've seen for ages...

I drive over to Dundee regularly to help two brilliant gardeners there and the journey takes me through wall-to-wall industrial landscape. There's acres and acres of polytunnels of strawberries and raspberries, and acres and acres of fleece covered veg. There's huge fields of just one cereal crop - running through them you can see the perfectly straight tracks of the colossal chemical spraying machines which we often see lumbering through Perth at the moment.

So what would happen if we just stopped industrial agriculture - either because we came to our senses or if and when there is a collapse of this unsustainable way of life, (more likely I think)?

The Knepp estate in about 2003 and now, with the post-industrial, wilding experiment in full swing

That's what "Wilding" by Isabella Tree is all about. Industrial agriculture was not making a profit on the 3000 acre Knepp estate so, partly by design and partly by chance, the owners tried an alternative - letting Nature take back control. The results have been truly astonishing and have come amazingly fast. Nature bounced back at every level: trees, hedgerows, scrub, plant life, birds, butterflies, moths, and the degraded soil itself. The soil may even hold the key to the ever-more evident problem of climate change. The world's soils "hold more carbon as organic matter than all the vegetation on the planet, including rainforest". 82% of carbon in the terrestrial biosphere is in the soil. There's a fascinating passage about glomalin, something I hadn't even heard of, which coats the hyphae of mycorrhizal fungi and has amazing potential for carbon sequestration and the enhancement of soil structure. Here's a couple of links to articles about the wilding process at Knepp, but I recommend you read the whole book yourself! Guardian article. Daily Mail article.
The book speaks to me on a personal level too, as by a strange coincidence I was living very near Knepp, just outside Brighton, at about the time they started their experiment there. I used to walk in the Downs and travelled about many of the villages and towns mentioned in the book: Shoreham, Lewes, Worthing, Steyning - all familiar names. All the time I was painfully aware of the lack of wilderness and the feeling that every inch of the land had been thrashed to death for every last ounce of financial profit it could give. Those feelings and the global loss of ice led me to my own travels and adventures in Eco-land and the start of Ian's Eco Blog.
A brilliant read!