When you wander around the six-acre Knepp estate in southeast England these days, it’s noisy – with insects buzzing, birds singing. It’s a huge contrast to the silence of other nearby areas that may look green and pleasant but are effectively biological deserts.

Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell inherited Knepp farm from his grandparents in the 1980s. While it had been in the family for almost 200 years, the soil was wearing out and they soon faced both an existential economic crisis and an existential ecological crisis. They tried several solutions, selling off all their farm equipment and contracting with someone else to farm the land, before trying something completely different – letting the land go back to nature or “rewilding”, starting in 2001. No one had done it before in England and so it was a giant leap of faith, especially in a country where land had to be used so intensively for farming during the Second World War.