The highest grossing UK documentary shows you don’t need dystopian fantasy to bring nature back

A Tamworth piglet goes on a journey from tame to wild in documentary *wilding*. photo courtesy of garage films.

When animal and plant life reclaim urban spaces in movies and TV series, humans have usually made a big, big, big, mistake. Think re-greened cities in walker (and zombie-adjacent) franchises The Walking Dead and The Last of Us, coveted oases glimpsed at in the water-starved world of Mad Max, or the lush, ethereal jungle that emerges from an unexplained flood in the Oscar-winning animated feature Flow, an event that leads a singular cat on an extraordinary journey.

But regeneration can happen in the here and now without needing a catastrophe like the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion to precede it. Shipwrecks have become the centres for new underwater ecosystems, abandoned sites have given way to wildlife sanctuaries, and evacuated lands have been returned to their true roots.

In the documentary Wilding, based on conservationist Isabella Tree’s 2018 book of the same name, Tree and her husband, Charlie Burrell, propose something a bit more proactive: instead of waiting for tragedy, why not work alongside nature to create productive, nurturing landscapes?

When the cumulative damage of large-scale farming on Burrell’s 400-year-old Knepp Castle Estate in Sussex saddled the couple with debts and an uncertain fate for the viability of their 1,400 acres of land, they followed the their own gut instinct to just let nature take over, a decision that stunned and confounded their neighbours. They released several herding animals, such as deer and their horses, cattle and Tamworth pigs, and waited for them to survive winter and shed their domesticity. Through their actions, insects, plants and other animals returned, turning over the soil and allowing the parts of the property still allocated for farming to thrive, while also sparking a tourist haven for nature lovers.

As Tree explained to The Guardian in June 2024, “The way we see it is that you need that rewilding to build a sustainable future for agriculture. We can’t carry on [with intensive methods]… Rewilding can provide the life-support systems for regenerative farms. It can help you restore your water tables, put an end to the nitrates and chemicals that pollute our rivers day in and day out much more than human sewage.”

For a limited time, Wilding will play in Australian cinemas, where the current state of Tree and Burrell’s 24-year effort shines through in stunning images. More than just a movie-going experience, Australian experts in environmental causes are hoping to galvanise interest and support for rewilding.

Sally Hawkins, a leader in rewilding research working with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), co-founded environmental NGO The Lifescape Project to offer practical ways communities can work together to restore local lands and waterways, and frameworks to help change environmental law and policies. I spoke with Hawkins about her thoughts on Wilding and its applications for Australia.

Wilding is such an extraordinary film both in its serenity and the information that it conveys. For you watching it, knowing the Knepp Estate, what has been the most effective part of that film in reaching an audience that may not be familiar with the concept of rewilding?

I think for me, it’s the story and the kind of ethos and philosophy that Isabella and Charlie promote in the film. You know, not everyone is going to have a farm or a piece of land that they can rewild, but it’s certainly an ethos that people can take with them and apply to their everyday lives as well. But I must say, the end of the film, to me, was kind of the most inspiring bit. And it was so great to see that kind of vision for the future that they are working towards, because I think that’s one key thing about rewilding – it’s about thinking what’s next and what is our future landscape going to look like, and working towards that. So that was great.

Of course, it’s very difficult for them in 2000, 2001, when they’re facing financial difficulty, to really be able to see that manifest in the future. One of the things that they talk about in moments throughout the film is just the immense challenge in laws and regulations and attitudes that they had to overcome to see this vision through. How have they been able to establish new pathways for people who want to undertake these efforts?

I think their biggest success, really, has been in demonstrating what it could look like and that it can work. When I started working in the rewilding sphere in the UK – this was about five or six years ago now – rewilding was very much a very negative term among farmers. And I’ve seen change hugely over the last five years, and Knepp was a key influence in that change because they took the risk and, as you say, [they] absolutely had no idea what it was going to look like in the end, and they probably couldn’t envision that future at the point that they started. But that’s the thing with rewilding – it’s kind of a process and you have to start somewhere. They took the risk and they carried on with it and they showed people that it actually can work.

Have you visited Knepp? What were the most exciting either new animal behaviours or introduced species that you saw?

I actually have never gone to Knepp, so I don’t know. So I lived in the north of England, but I have been to farms that have been influenced by Knepp. I think it’s probably important to say that rewilding is a process and it doesn’t always look [like Knepp]. A lot of these farms have only just started, so I think the most exciting thing for me was just seeing the influence and seeing a lot of the farms starting this process. I did go to one farm where they had beavers. And I mean, this farmer – and this is in Cornwall – he had reintroduced beavers purely for reasons around water supply for his farm, but he had become totally enthused by these animals and how they behave. I got splashed by a beaver smacking his tail! So it kind of just kind of demonstrated to me that once a kind of process can start, it starts to open a lot of doors and changed a lot of mindsets, especially with farmers. And this farmer in particular just saw the benefit immediately. When the rest of the farms were experiencing drought, he had a water supply from the beaver dam. So it’s a win-win for people and for nature.

Two of the animals they highlight in the documentary are the dung beetle and the pig in terms of how they were able to kickstart this change in the land and also in the behavior of other animals and the cycles of the land. How overlooked are those animals normally to humans? And why was it important to emphasise those particular ones here?

Well, I think dung beetles are certainly overlooked by humans. They are small; people in the UK probably don’t even realise that there are dung beetles. In the UK context, we’ve lost so much of our biodiversity that people are really disconnected. I think it was so important to highlight dung beetles to show that rewilding is very expansive – we’re talking about microorganisms in the soil right up to the apex predator. It’s a whole functional approach. It’s a big picture. It’s not just about reintroducing cute, cuddly or scary, charismatic species like wolves and lynx, or even pigs. I think the pig is really important because people perceive it to be a product, you know, pork for human consumption. And to understand that it’s not just a food product and that pigs have functions. And I love the pigs in this film. I must say, they were super cute! A highlight.

Rewilding is often referred to as a compassionate conservation. You see that in this film. What would you call it? And is that term appropriate?

Yeah, absolutely. It is compassionate conservation. It’s about changing our relationship with other species and, trying to change the human mindset as was kind of demonstrated with the pig. It’s not just about us extracting resources from nature, but trying to understand the links and the interdependence. It’s about changing the value of natural resources or nature to see how it influences our wellbeing and how we can influence the wellbeing of ecosystems. It’s a reciprocal thing. It’s not just all take and no give.

It’s taken, of course, more than 20 years to achieve the results that they have so far at Knepp. Is it now the appropriate time then, since you have those results in hand, for other rewilding efforts around the world to use that as that model?

Absolutely. But what I should say is it’s not really a model. Rewilding is not really about replicating what has been done elsewhere. We’re not gonna say, “Go and do Knepp here in Australia,” for example, because it’s such a different social and ecological context here. Yes, if you want to reform grazing on livestock-intensive farms here in Australia, then Knepp is probably a good model. But we have completely different ecosystem. And actually in Australia, we don’t have native mega herbivores like bison and oryx. We don’t have native pigs even though we have wild non-native pigs here. So we would look to reintroduce other species that kind of perform those ecological niches. Here in Australia, we have cultural burning that actually performs the same function as the mega herbivore grazing pressure and creating that disturbance in the landscape. But we also have native species like the bettong that are diggers and seed dispersers, the emu are seed dispersers, so it’s about thinking about the context and what rewilding might look like here. And essentially, it’s about trying to reintegrate nature and culture and have much wilder, more resilient landscapes.

I’ve spoken to people such as Matilda Brown, who is very active in the idea of having farm shares, crop rotation and those aspects of regenerative farming that can help rebuild soil or use farming in more productive and local ways. Is that kind of an adjacent field or related to what the efforts of rewilding do?

Yes. Rewilding is a spectrum and it certainly doesn’t just happen in agricultural areas. But it certainly does when you’re talking about the scale that we’re talking about with rewilding, and that’s a very large landscape scale. These are living, working landscapes where we have to produce food, we have to accommodate people, but we also have to accommodate other species and have those kind of resilient ecological functions including disturbance as well. So yes, regenerative agriculture is one form of rewilding, but I would say that regenerative agricultural focuses on agricultural landscapes, whereas rewilding thinks of the bigger picture and how to integrate that within the landscape mosaic.

In Australia, are the people currently in government more conducive to altering laws or allowing regulations that would permit people to be more active in rewilding?

Rewilding is a very new concept here. I think traditional approaches to conservation are very prevalent in our policies and that’s, for example, maintaining protected areas. But there certainly is a shift happening and it’s happening all over the world, really, about thinking of the bigger picture. It’s about nature-based solutions to climate change. So rewilding can help to create that connectivity that species can migrate because of changes to climate. It can also make our human communities more resilient to flood and drought. So there definitely will be a shift and there are those shifts happening with the help of research. Also, one of the advantages Australia has is this very rich history of traditional owners and how they’ve managed the land very sustainably over tens of thousands of years. So we have that rich history of knowledge to be able to influence our policies and our land management practices. So we are certainly in a good place, but there’s a lot of change that needs to happen.

after an infestation of creeping thistle, The rewilding project is saved, in 2009, by a migration of 10 million painted lady butterflies. photo courtesy of garage films.

Wilding is in Australian cinemas now. For more information on the film, go to https://garage.com.au/wilding, and for more information on rewilding, go to https://rewildingaustralia.com.au/

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