And then how would you persuade HM Treasury not to give the money to the NHS or education instead?What has been achieved at Knepp is amazing – I’ve never visited (though I’ve been asked) but without exception the people I know who have been there have been blown away by the place and what has been achieved. While I was reading I began to think, surely everyone knows this is how conservation works? This is a good idea – but how do you measure the delivery of those services? In the BBC Wildlife mag, Charlie Burrell advocates more “pop-up” Knepps elsewhere for a similar period of time, with the option of returning to farming if farmers want to do this. Any mention of White Storks in the book? live in the real world and, unfortunately, our government isn't yet allowing lynx re-introduction.

Knepp is an example of land-sparing – land is taken out of agricultural production (not entirely, but mostly) and instead managed for wildlife, carbon, clean water etc. On the nose: More intense, deep and heavy-duty than the Little Pomona.

What Mark (Fisher) appears to lack is an understanding that a) the English lowlands used to have herds of aurochs, lots of rooting boar etc, that b) they were significant ecosystem engineers, that c) the Burrells would likely far rather have had aurochs and wild boar if possible but that d) they had to go for domesticated forms which are far from ideal but that are behaviourally quite similar to these wild forms.

The acting is quite decent but the story feels underdeveloped, sloppy and it also contains some unecessary cheesy teenage romantic moments. From challenging the public’s perception of how countryside should look, questioning what baseline we should take our conservation data from, through to how we truly approach rewilding land. You can't assert that a single study from Galicia 'confirms' what's gone on at Knepp - that's scientifically illiterate (to borrow a term you frequently throw at others). With an overwhelming disappointment, Wilding taught me there and then – not for the first time recently – how little we know about our planet and its life. Fritz Bohm’s debut, 'Wildling,' is a contemporary creature feature starring Bel Powley and Liv Tyler. ‘Rewilding’ land is something I have known to work since a child, some thirty years ago. I suspect an awful lot of grouse are killed there too.Here’s the irony about the dependence on funding at Knepp – the delay in receiving agri-environment funding for the Southern Block meant that it scrubbed up in the absence of grazing. Review by . Knepp will receive ~£4.2m in CAP payments over the life of the HLS to 2020. And this is on a big scale – 3,500 acres (1400ha) – bigger than many a perfectly decent nature reserve. My contention is that we know that turtle dove territories are strongly associated with proximate fresh water and annual plants, and that large browsers and grazers may help to maintain wet pools and disturbed ground in among the scrub. Wanting an option to stop after a certain period of time, highlights the problem of the lack of publicly owned land in the UK, which is there for nature - as in private hands, land use is always at risk of being changed or sold.Good points re the public purse and the lack of land available.Surely, a fair and effective way forward is to tax land, thereby slashing land prices and opening up the countryside to regeneration and large scale rewilding.It's about time we loosened the Plantagenet's grip on it's horizon to horizon ownership.All of the big arable operations across Wessex, the Brecks etc - the ones that have driven nature from the countryside, have been in receipt of payments of hundreds of thousands - some over a million - each and every year, for decades! I hope they think twice.An interesting point is made in this month’s BBC Wildlife article about Knepp. They are apparently concerned that the site may end up qualifying as an SSSI for one of the species it supports – for eg, if there are further declines elsewhere it could become for Turtle Dove what Lodge Hill has become for Nightingale.

What it does offer is a mindset for challenging data and self-research with helpful suggestions for new methodologies for conservation mixed alongside productive farming. And it's an experiment which is yielding unexpected and useful results, on private land. Let's not pick on Knepp without some context!Messi – I’m quite happy to criticise the conservation orgs you mentioned too, as I feel that they are over-reliant on agri-env funding, but this book review is about Knepp.My main gripe is the temporary nature of the whole thing if they were to change the land use after 25 years. But these aren’t trivial sums of money. Which would you do? Storks are regular visitors to England but there is no evidence that they used to be regular breeders. A blossoming teenager uncovers the dark secret behind her traumatic childhood. But one of my favourite places to walk is an area (I'm guessing about 40 acres) bought by the community and 're-wilded' with native trees, a wildflower meadow and large pond. Mark, you kind of have to live and let live sometimes. We have to rely of public policy to correct such market failures if they're to be delivered.