Rebirding takes the long view of Britain’s wildlife decline, from the early taming of our landscape and its long-lost elephants and rhinos, to fenland drainage, the removal of cornerstone species such as wild cattle, horses, beavers and boar – and forward in time to the intensification of our modern landscapes and the collapse of invertebrate populations. Julia comments: “ The Diary of a Young Naturalist is a significant nature book – made all the more so because it is Dara McAnulty’s first, completed before his 16th birthday. Our Wainwright Prize winner this year is nuanced, passionate and caring. It’s a wonderful diary that fits around Dara’s personal endeavours and family experiences, but ultimately, shaped by the nature that surrounds us all. The judges were almost breathless from reading it and would like to call for it to be immediately listed on the national curriculum. Such is the book’s power to move and the urgency of the situation we face.” Leonard Orr tours the world, training followers in how to supervise rebirth and selling books that tout its benefits. His organization, Rebirthing Breathwork International, claims to have affected tens of thousands of lives.

Powerful book that not only discusses the decline of the UK's bird population, but also wildlife in general. Gives some proactive ideas on how this could be solved, but also some ideas that don't quite sit right with me. It would literally be built into our future homes and could be a big game changer,” Stammers says. “I would like to see it as part of a wider and more generous vision about how we cohabit with the natural world.” Well articulated look at the British landscape and its failure to support functioning ecosystems. This book focuses on birds, but large herbivores and beavers and the like are needed as the ecosystem architects that will allow Britains bird life to flourish.British birds have evolved over millennia, part of the ecosystem which developed as the glaciers retreated, then as humans settled and farmed. They evolved in a landscape populated by the large mammals which are now extinct - aurochs, wolf, boar, lynx - and some have adapted to our farms. Over the centuries, populations and diversity have declined to the drastic point we see today where many birds are on the brink of extinction. I never remember the moment of fascination itself, but Ido remember that by the time Iwas five, Iwould make weekend visits to Berkeley Castle Butterfly Farm. Iwas entranced by watching the butterflies drinking salts from my fingertips, and Ibegan acollection of ones passed to me by the lady running it — after they had died of course.

Given achance, they remain eminently capable of managing for awhole range of species that do not, in fact, require tortuous and expensive action plans to survive. Of the species lost to Britain, which do you most regret not being able to seehere?It is truly mind blowing that 16% of the UKs land is given out to grouse and deer parks adding virtually nothing to the economy, used by virtually no one and destroying wildlife. 88% of Wales is grazed by sheep. An industry almost completely held up by government subsidies. The more I learn about animal agriculture the more insane it seems that anyone can actually argue that it can continue in its current form. Drugs fed to cattle come out in their dung destroying beetle populations and causing extinction of insectivore birds. Aim for a baby who is not full, but not actively hungry. About an hour after a feeding is usually a good goal. Temperate woodlands are remarkably resilient. As Knepp has shown, even in astaggeringly small space of time, our wonderful lost oak-lands can begin to recover and thrive. What prompted you to write Rebirding? As larger rewilding projects get underway, and free-roaming animals return to our countryside at alandscape-level, Iam sure that in my lifetime we’ll see the triumphant return of the Butcher Bird aswell. And which of the current reintroductions or recolonisations gets you most excited? Whilst I’ve been awed by the teeming grasslands in Kenya’s Maasai Mara and the jungles of Borneo and Sumatra, Imust admit that eastern Europe remains my favourite place.

Where the book loses a little clout, in my opinion, is in the simplification of some of the arguments. The author suggests, with good evidence, that rewilding and letting go of vast swathes of our country is what is needed to save wildlife. It is hard to argue that point. However, at the end of one chapter he states Knepp is "more profitable, more diverse, more humane, more robust - and better for both people and wildlife alike". There are other forces at play here that the author doesn't touch on. Knepp's organic, expensive, meat, which I have tasted and love, isn't affordable or accessible to everyone. Organic food comes at a premium and requires much more land footprint. Overpopulation (which the author dismisses based on the relatively small physical land footprint we take up) and our dietary choices are two fundamental issues not touched on as key enables of lessening pressures on land. Do we import our food instead when we should be encouraging more local produce and reducing our carbon footprint? The owners of Knepp themselves concede not all farming can be like it is there. I think any book which is trying to rewrite aspects of our agricultural system should touch on these fundamental societal issues we are facing, that there are simply too many of us living too lavish a lifestyle. I did, however, warm to the idea of us hunting and eating more deer, which, in the absence of predators, have overpopulated and decimated some of our countryside. This is one of the reasons why aRomanian cattle pasture will still be crawling with beetles – and aparadise for shrikes – and amodern British farm willnot. Some revolutionary (to me) ideas within this volume: For the longest time that fact that humans had either wiped out or outcopeted by stealing the food source of all the large herbivores that used to exist within the British landscape did not matter, because the local, nomadic, in tocuh with nature type of farming that humans practiced meant they engineered the landscape in much the same way as these extinct species did. This in turn meant that a whole cascade of species of birds, insects and other could continue to thrive in Britains mosaic of habitats (wood pastures, scrub grasslands and wetlands). It was only after the industrial revolution that we started to implement ideas of hughest yield, monoculture farming that everything went down hill. At the end of WW2 the CAP (common agricultural policy) paid farmers to manicure their farms and thereby removed huge chunks of habitat for birds and their food stuff (seed and insects). In countries like Poland and to a lesser extent Germany, where either this traditional type of farming is still practised, or where the systematic manicured natural state was not encouraged, birds and insects that have gone extinct in Britain are still thriving. He proposed a radical upheaval of conservation in the UK. Instead of managing small nature reserves, Macdonald advocates for the acquisition of enormous tracts of land that can be returned to nature through rewilding. The honest answer is no. You have only to spend one evening at Ham Wall in Somerset, with thousands of people of all ages gathering to watch the starling murmurations, to glimpse the economic potential of nature if fully realised in our country.Let’s be the first generation since we colonised Britain to leave our children better off for wildlife,” Macdonald exhorts. All rational argument seems to be on his side. Any digging into the comparative economies of, say, grouse shooting as opposed to nature watching, in similar areas, then yielded the expected result that nature fuels asection in the economy worth billions each year – and that’s even before we’ve reinstated true national parks and many of our lost charismatic animals. You write: “[T]he inability for many nature reserves to embrace scruffiness is why many of our counties already have more avocets than they do willows tits or spotted flycatchers.” What do you think we need to do to make ​ ‘scruffy’ agood thing? While I have to admit to occasionally skim-reading some nature books as they can turn into endless lists of unconnected stories, Ben has a structure that works, that builds an argument, that takes you from imagining the past to imagining our future.