Wilding

Inspirational.

Ranked twenty-ninth lowest out of 218 countries, we are among the most nature-depleted countries in the world.

‘In Africa you have vast herds of ungulates grazing together in the landscape. There are predators, of course, but population density itself is not regulated by predation.’

In man-made plantations thorny scrub became a hindrance; and without thorny scrub to protect the young saplings, grazing and browsing animals caused devastation.

Now, when ancient and medieval texts describe a place as ‘forest’ the modern reader visualizes a closed canopy, when in reality it was anything but. ‘Historians of modern forestry’, says Oliver Rackham, ‘often fall into the trap of assuming that it is the successor of the medieval Forest system, but the two have little in common but the name.’

The largely unpublicized reality is that the world already produces enough to feed 10 billion people. The shocking subtext is that a third of this food – 1.3 billion tonnes every year – is wasted.

In the UK, 7 million of the total 15 million tonnes of food and drink wasted in 2013 was thrown out by households.

India loses an estimated 35–40 per cent of its fruits and vegetables before they reach markets.

By 2020 it is estimated that four out of every five European citizens will be living in urban areas. According to Rewilding Europe, by 2030, more than 30 million hectares (116,000 square miles) of farmland will have been abandoned – 5 million hectares more than the entire area of Britain.

we forget that our landscape is so changed, so desperately impoverished, we may be recording a species not in its preferred habitat at all, but at the very limit of its range.

Rats or goats arriving on a rocky outcrop in the middle of the ocean dramatically and rapidly devastate it – when they arrive on a continent, the continent shrugs them off

The depletion of topsoil is so severe in the UK that in 2014 Farmers’ Weekly announced that we have only a hundred harvests left in the country.