Fifteen years ago the owners of Knepp Castle estate near Horsham, West Sussex made a decision to abandon conventional and financially ruinous dairy farming, and let nature choose what happened next.
Knepp now feels like a parallel universe: there are thickets of hawthorn and dog rose; red deer and Tamworth pigs roam freely; there’s the riotous cacophony of chaffinch, yellowhammer, chiffchaff, skylark, blackcap, wren, nightingales and cuckoos.
We’ve become used to things being otherwise. Habitat destruction, exploitation of nature and pollution mean that half of all animal life on Earth has disappeared in my lifetime. The world has lost about 60% of wild vertebrates since 1970. Declines in insects (pollinators, detritus-eaters and foundations of carnivorous food chains) threaten to catastrophically destabilise global ecosystems. And the emission of greenhouse gases needs to be addressed if we are to have a chance of preventing climate catastrophe; the government’s climate advisers reported this month that UK emissions must fall to zero by 2050.
The biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis are linked. But there is a solution that addresses both – and that can revitalise local economies: a 2017 report by the Local Government Association and Public Health England notes that “within even the most affluent [rural] areas, there can be real hardship, deprivation, ill health and inequalities” because of seasonal work and poor access to services.
A new plan, published by Rewilding Britain, calls for billions of pounds of farm subsidies to be redirected towards creating more places like Knepp: native woodlands and meadows, and protecting peat bogs and salt marshes. The group claims that wildlife would benefit, farmers would not lose out financially and food production would be maintained. The new wild environments would also be a boost to rural economies: in the UK, tourism already brings in more revenue – £18.6bn – and provides more employment for the rural sector than farming.
Rewilding, wilding or ecosystem restoration would put nature back in the driving seat. When living systems – forests, peat bogs, saltmarshes and the seabed – are allowed to recover, they sequester carbon from the atmosphere, mitigating or even avoiding the dangers of global warming.
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