Case Study EIGHTEEN
Lord and Lady Burrell’s Wilding Capstone
The Knepp Blueprint
“People who were angry with us for giving up farming don’t realise that rewilding might be one of the solutions we desperately need – for climate change, water resources, biodiversity and the soil.”
“We should all heed nature’s desperate cry.”
- Isabella Tree
“Knepp has become a blueprint. It’s hard to overstate the impact that Issy and Charlie’s project has had on nature conservation and on land management in Britain and beyond. They’ve broken the mould, such that rewilding is now widely recognised as the best and fastest way to restore nature to a former abundance and vibrancy. I knew the first time I met Issy and Charlie at Knepp that it would be a day to change the course of my life. Once you see it, all limits melt away and everything changes. They’re truly my heroes”.
- Ben Goldsmith
INTRODUCTION: The unlikely trailblazers
So many Capstones not only shine a light on their owners, they also illuminate paths for others.
Isabella Tree and Sir Charles Burrell (Lord and Lady Burrell) didn’t set out to start a movement. But what began as an attempt to salvage a failing farm became one of Britain’s boldest environmental experiments, reshaping policy, rewilding the public imagination, and becoming a blueprint for others to follow.
Critics once dismissed them as eccentric aristocrats with too much land and too little sense. But today, the 3,500-acre Knepp Estate has become a new model of ecological abundance. Sometimes Capstone projects are developed ahead of time so that other powerful and capable people can then run with them to be equally as bold, ultimately having a compound effect on what was once one of Britain’s boldest environmental experiments.
“Rewilding is restoration by letting go — allowing nature to take the driving seat.”
— Isabella Tree
CORNERSTONE: The rebel and the heir
Isabella Tree grew up in an aristocratic British family as an adopted child. That duality - of privilege and displacement provided her with an element of objectivity and a curious mind:
“I was always looking for the hole in the fence,” she said.
A rebel at school, she never felt settled, challenging authority that expected her to follow religious rules. She was expelled from two girls’ schools as a teenager.
Charlie Burrell, meanwhile, inherited Knepp Castle Estate at the age of 21. The land had been in his family for centuries. But it was about to test every tradition he’d inherited.
CORNERSTONE
~ Breaking the system ~
Isabella married Charlie (full title Sir Charles Burrell, 10th Baronet) in 1993. By this time, Isabella was a successful, award-winning author and travel journalist. She published her first book aged 25, a biography of English ornithologist John Gould, who played a crucial role in Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
They were living on the Knepp Estate, struggling to make the finances work. For years, they tried conventional farming, but they had inherited marginal land, not suitable for agriculture. Kept going by subsidies, paying for fertilisers, pesticides and fungicides, trashing the ground. The place was dirt not soil, devoid of organic matter which then required more artificial fertiliser to grow anything at all – compounding the problem further. They knew it wasn’t sustainable.
KEYSTONE
~ Letting nature lead ~
In 2003, inspired by Dutch ecologist Frans Vera and nudged by oak tree expert Ted Green, they made a radical decision: give it all back to nature. The radical scheme was a giant leap of faith, throwing out all preconceptions of landscape and agriculture, giving nature the space and opportunity to generate biodiversity. They admitted they didn’t know what would happen, instead trusting nature to work it out. No goals. No intervention. No tidy boxes to tick. Just trust in nature. They weren’t managing the land, they were letting go of control. Plants would grow unpruned, and wild animals would be allowed to roam free.
Initially Lord and Lady Burrell felt under siege. Locals were outraged, many seeing it as abandonment.
But slowly, wild returned and the place began to sing again. Knepp has become a showcase for their optimism, as birds, insects and other animals have returned in their droves to the now-untamed landscape and begun to breed. An ugly thorny piece of land was becoming a haven.
Today, more than two decades on, Knepp is home to:
The highest density of breeding birdsongs in Britain
All five native owl species
Turtle doves (vs 96% population decline elsewhere)
13 of the UK’s 17 bat species
Over 600 types of invertebrates
The largest population of purple emperor butterflies in Britain
What many thought was mad, has been vindicated as a trailblazer for environmental thought leadership and heralded as the way to regenerate much-needed biodiversity in our lands. This Capstone case study is a classic example of why people should hold their judgments and have a more open mind. Their story is pioneering and influenced people, politics and policies far and wide.
They were initially accused of doing it only because they were in a position of privilege.
“The experiment is showing new solutions – changing the way we look at the land and Knepp is showing us how we can do that”.
AMPLIFICATION
~ The movement they sparked and the message of recovery ~
In 2018, Isabella shared their story to the world via the bestselling book Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm. Her writing skills were put to good use to tell the compelling story and importance of the Knepp Project. The book was described in the Sunday Times ‘Books of The Year’ as one of the landmark ecological books of the decade, a ‘beautifully written masterpiece of persuasion.’ TV crews came. Awards followed. No longer eccentric — Knepp was the blueprint for a new way of restoring the land back to ecological richness.
The ripple effects were seismic:
Rewilding Britain, co-led by Charlie, now campaigns to rewild 1 million hectares (4.5% of Britain’s land) within 100 years
Wild East aims to return 20% of East Anglia to nature by 2070
Rewilding Europe has launched projects in Spain, Romania, Italy, and Switzerland — citing Knepp as the inspiration
Even the UK government shifted stance. The Agriculture Act (2020) now pays farmers for restoring nature, a landmark policy change rooted in the proof Knepp provided.
A CAPSTONE INSPIRING OTHERS
The project has inspired a generation of landowners, policymakers, and young ecologists, to think differently about our role in the natural world.
Ben Goldsmith, financier and Defra board member, when I asked him of the impact of the Capstone, told me:
“The notion of ‘rewilding’ has risen in the public consciousness recently. And more and more people have seen for themselves the results of initiatives such as the extraordinary Capstone project that is Knepp.
Knepp has become a blueprint. It’s hard to overstate the impact that Issy and Charlie’s project has had on nature conservation and on land management in Britain and beyond. They’ve broken the mould, such that rewilding is now widely recognised as the best and fastest way to restore nature to a former abundance and vibrancy. I knew the first time I met Issy and Charlie at Knepp that it would be a day to change the course of my life. Once you see it, all limits melt away and everything changes. They’re truly my heroes”.
SUMMARY
~ The Knepp project is the conduit to sparking a very British debate ~
“At a time when governments and communities are grappling with the intertwined crises of climate change and ecological collapse, Knepp has come to represent a beacon of hope — but also a nexus of societal and environmental conflict.”.
Financial Times July 2021
At a time when we are more empowered with data, it’s depressing reading: in Britain we’ve lost 97 per cent of wildlife meadows, 1/4 of all mammals in Britain are on the verge of extinction, we are one of the most depleted countries in the world.
The wilding movement has its critics, including the National Farmers Union, with some people concerned about the effect it had on the countryside. They are concerned that we do not yet fully understand the potential impact or reintroducing all these species.
The role of farmers is central to a debate in Britain. Post Brexit, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is phasing out the European Union’s Basic Payment Scheme. The scheme was a taxpayer-funded handout to farmers. In order to keep the money flowing, farmers had to remove important habitats. This was a disaster for nature. British farmers were paid subsidies at a huge cost to the environment:
“Our heavy clay is among the lowest-calibre farmland in Britain and our enterprise only came close to working at all because of EU subsidies. Providing farmers with an incentive to intensify farming on every inch of their land, no matter how suitable for food production, has led to Britain being one of the most Nature-depleted countries in the world. The fabled Highlands of Scotland, part of the British uplands, is probably the most ecologically degraded landscape in all Europe.” Says Defra board member Ben Goldsmith.
“Farmers have been doing it a certain way all their lives. The only time they are going to change is if — like us — their farming business hits the wall and there’s no way to go on. It’s intensely painful and distressing, but it does shake you up.” Says Isabella.
“The government’s new sustainable farming road map, launched in November 2020, provides incentives for farmers and pays for local nature recovery activities, including habitat restoration and natural flood and species management. Knepp’s rewilding project has become a blueprint for other farmers keen to use their land to help regenerate nature”. Says Ben Goldsmith.
“Farmers really are thinking differently for the first time in decades. If your basic farm payment is being removed, you have to think again. And if the carrot is: ‘We’ll pay you for ecosystem services, flood mitigation, restoring your soils, for providing tree cover, biodiversity, water purification, a place for people’s health and wellbeing,’ that’s a massive, massive opportunity.” Says Isabella.
~ A long way to go ~
“Most of us are conscious that the natural fabric of our country has been degraded and depleted over the centuries, but few realise the full extent of the catastrophe that has unfolded around us, particularly in recent decades. Depressingly, the UK now ranks among the most nature impoverished nations. Expectations diminish from one generation to the next as we become conditioned to what we know in our own lifetimes, in a process known as shifting baselines, so that most of us have no inkling of the extent of our losses.” Ben Goldsmith.
“ReNaturing recognises that humans are part of nature and that the world is at its best when we play that part properly. It accepts that humankind has a role to play in the ordering of nature, but it is as stewards and not as pillagers. Man is neither master nor is he redundant. He should stand proud as a productive steward. It is not wilderness that we are aiming for, but the kind of farmed landscape where the soil is respected, where man works with Nature to manage its fecundity and where he understands and enables the ecosystems upon which we all depend.”
~ Championed as a leading light for many to follow ~
“if we hadn’t seen the magic, blissfully ignorant of this sweeping change”
From a project that came out of desperation has now taken over their lives, Isabella and Charlie couldn’t have imagined their actions would be championed as trailblazing or a leading light for many to follow. They couldn’t have predicted the depths of the climate crisis or that in 2019 the United Nations General Assembly declared 2021 – 2030 the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.
They are demonstrating blended values also: “We’re doing it for ourselves as well as for the planet — for our own sanity, you know, and our wellbeing, of course. We will go completely nuts if we lose nature and we need to connect with it.”
“Eventually, I see conventional conservation and rewilding being the same thing; it will be the same approach, and one day we won’t need nature reserves at all because we’ll have connected them all, and populations will be thriving and we won’t need to protect anything.” Isabella Tree
Whether it’s rewilding or reNaturing, regenerative or sustainable farming, the likes of Isabella, Charlie and Knepp will be central in the discussions thanks to their Capstone.
The Knepp Capstone has shown just how quickly nature can come back… If you let it. Like nature, it creates something that is greater than the sum of its parts. Counterintuitively, letting go can sometimes be the most radical and regenerative act of leadership.