Wilding: "A rare and precious thing - a nature documentary with a sense of hope"

Our Programme Director Caroline Hennigan tells us about her Staff Pick of the month - Wilding - and why she chose it to be part of our programme this month.

Based on the best-selling book of the same name by Isabella Tree.

Published in 2019, The Sunday Times called Wilding “one of the landmark ecological books of the decade.” Chris Packham describes it as “a poignant, practical and moving story of how to fix our broken land, this should be conservation's salvation; this should be its future; this is a new hope.”

In the film, Isabella Tree tells the story of the ‘Knepp experiment’, the first large-scale lowland rewilding project in England. In the early 2000s, she and her husband Charles Burrell, took the momentous decision to stop conventional farming on 3,500 acres of land surrounding the ancestral family home, the four-hundred-year-old Knepp Castle in West Sussex. They were essentially placing the fate of their farm (and their family) in the hands of nature. Turning their back on conventional, industrialised farming methods, they ripped down the fences and set their depleted land back to the wild, entrusting its recovery to a motley mix of animals both tame and wild. Throughout the course of the film, we see the results of what has been one of the most significant rewilding experiments in Europe.