Bringing back dinosaurs is one of those ideas that only lives on the big screen. But what about aurochs wandering around Europe? And what about buffalo once again roaming the American west? Those ideas are not the stuff of novels or movie fantasies.

The idea of ‘rewilding’, romantic as it may seem, is a serious and quite practical response to the growing abandonment of farmland in Europe and North America. While I had read long ago about people moving away from the Great Plains in the US, I didn’t realize the scale of this problem worldwide until I began recently learning about ‘rewilding’ farms in England.