The most recommended books about rewilding

I am a biologist and I have a passion, a deep love indeed, of the natural world. I always have. It boosts me and nurtures me–body, mind and spirit. But at the moment, with everything that is happening to the world, I think it is easy to lose hope.

Feral is everything you would expect from Monbiot–elegant prose and well thought out ideas building on solid knowledge. But it is more than that. It is a book that brings hope and makes me feel that, even if Monbiot’s vision isn’t the way, there most certainly is a way through the mess we are creating.

Positivity, action, hope–these are things we need more of right now.

This reminds me strongly of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac - a classic of the ecological literature, and I can think of no better comparison to give you an idea of this book’s content, quality, and worth. It is set largely in Highland Scotland and comprises 52 short essays on wildlife and land use.

Many of the essays start with an observation of a species or place, then the author fills in the background, muses on the wider picture, and how the world could be better. It’s a simple and effective way to tell a story.

Roy Dennis is an elder statesman of the UK conservation movement, one of its doers, and one of its thinkers. This book is well worth a read.

Vicki is a fellow insect enthusiast, so perhaps it is inevitable that I would love her new book on the wonders of the ‘bug’ world. Insects are vital, pollinating crops and wildflowers, keeping soils healthy, recycling leaves, dung and dead bodies, and controlling crop pests. Love them or loathe them, we all need them. This book gives lots of practical tips as to what you can do to encourage bugs in your space. 

It’s hard to ignore the personal testimony of Sir David Attenborough, based on 70 years of exploring and documenting the natural world. Like Attenborough’s films, this is a masterpiece in storytelling and making science and nature accessible. This has been his enduring legacy. But this book is different. Here, he combines a severe warning about the breakdown in the web of life with hopeful solutions aimed at rewilding the land and oceans. His message is clear: we can turn the precipitous decline of life on earth due to human impacts; but we need to act fast and at scale. I especially like how he distills the essence in a quote that says: “in this world, a species can only thrive when everything else around it thrives too.”

A few years ago, I took a road trip from the East Coast to the Southwestern United States, camping in my car and exploring New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. This was the first book I had queued up in my audiobooks for the trip.

The author lives in Utah and explores her love affair with the arid, desolate landscapes of the Southwest as she grieves accruing environmental and personal losses. It’s a poignant, poetic book by an environmental activist that deepened my own commitment to the connection between love of the earth and a willingness to stand up for it. 

I love that this book builds on the author’s previous personal account of rewilding a rural Sussex farm in the bestseller Wilding to promote the wider potential of rewilding in cities, including our own back gardens.

I believe urban rewilding is crucial for the benefit of wildlife, people, and sustainable cities, so it was gratifying to read something that will raise public awareness of broader interpretations and applications of rewilding. It is packed with practical advice, helpful illustrations, and comprehensive endnotes for further sources of information (It was, of course, a bonus to see my own project included here, but not the reason for my recommendation.)

I hope as many people will read it as have read the first book to ensure we all do our bit to make all human environments, from the rural to the urban, fit for nature too.

This book was given to me by an Anglican priest in Valparaiso, and it’s probably been the single biggest influence on my thought of anything I have ever read. It is a series of letters from Mayne to his grandchildren, explaining his view of the world. It’s a bit quieter than Annie Dillard’s exuberant sense of enchantment, but no less filled with wonder. It’s packed full of quotations from other authors, gleaned from a lifetime’s reading. The title is a quote from GK Chesterton, "At the back of our brains, there is a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this sunrise of wonder." 

Here’s how an intense, almost obsessive focus on wildlife can bring solace from chaos and alienation. Young bird-lover Hannah Bourne-Taylor moves to Ghana as a ‘trailing spouse,’ and it’s the fauna that keeps her going as she struggles to rebuild her identity. Two stray dogs leap into her life; a pangolin needs saving from someone’s dinner table. But it’s the act of saving a swift and a mannikin finch, nurturing and releasing the birds back into the wild, that provides the key to this closely observed, touching story. At first, the finch doesn’t want to re-wild – and Hannah realizes with a shock that she’s humanized it. Explores interesting dilemmas about intervening on nature’s behalf, and whether one act of compassion can really make a difference. A book full of hope.

Like Lisa Wells, I’ve spent years looking up to many possible heroes in my dream of making the world a better place. So much inspiration out there, and yet all our heroes become flawed the more we learn about them. How to remain hopeful when we find out the truth? Only through poetry, art, beauty, intensity. One of the finest books of the year, impossible to categorize.

This book offers a response to a deep longing to be in the world with childlike curiosity. It encourages our direct perception of life through the energetic heart field. Although it is meant as a knowledgeable guide for listening to and communicating with plants, it elicits a poignant call during a time of profound alienation. Encouraging the letting go of top-down linear thinking, Buhner offers a step-by-step somatic path for decolonizing the soul. I discovered by exchanging the word “psoas” for “plant” the book easily becomes a personal guide for increasing our core awareness as it inspires opening the heart by rooting into a reciprocal relationship with the living Earth. To me, re-wilding my relationship with the deepest aspects of self is vitally personal and imperative if all life is to truly flourish.