Happy Christmas and happy New Year, etc etc hooray. Like many people, I’ve been spending the holidays with family and seeing more family. I’m in Leicester for New Year and yesterday someone asked me what was my best book I read this year. I had to think about it because I’ve read and listened to a lot of books this year, and also I always have an internal debate about the meaning of “best book:” is it the most technically well-written, the book that challenged me the most or the book I simply enjoyed the most? Because books are basically my job I have consumed vastly more than other people.

I chose to be honest and went with the book that most compelled me the most this year and spoke to my yearning for the natural world, which was Wilding by Isabella Tree. I listened to this book because I saw a screening of the documentary made from it put on by Wimbledon Bookfest, their only non-book event of the year. I guess it paid off though, because I went away and listened to the audiobook, read by the author. It’s a gently political nature-conservation memoir, the full title of which is Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, that came out in 2018 but is still picking up awards, and the documentary was made in 2023. It’s an account of the pioneering project to let a British farm in Sussex revert to being as natural as possible, not having any human interference on the land but letting it grow itself. At the start of the new millennium, the idea of leaving the land to grow how it wanted was a risky choice for the government to allow, but the conservation has paid off. The Knepp Estate has now been managed like this for 20 years (by not being managed?) and is growing in fame as a place for ecotourism in the UK, where people can imagine what Britain could be like.

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As you can imagine, I thrill at imagining what the world could be like. Isabella Tree and her husband Charles Burnell received many comments of dismay and disgust about what they were doing to their ancestral farmland, which many perceived as messy and uncared for. I learnt about the concept of ‘shifting baselines,’ where the baseline of what people expect nature to be like is always changing, because it is based on the landscape of their own childhood, rather than the landscape that could be. For example, the use of pesticides and insecticides means I’ve not grown up in a Britain where a thriving biodiversity of insects means the car windows get littered with insects, so my baseline of what insect populations could be is different from my grandma. Similarly, beavers are only just being re-introduced despite being a native British animal that was killed off, so children now will take it for granted that is normal for them to live around them. We think it is normal that little trees need plastic supports to grow, but ecosystems have been regenerating without us since the dawn of time.

The “revelation” that nature can take care of itself if given the chance is like how disabled people can look after themselves if the system supports them to. Supporting a charity that plants trees is a much more romantic (and economic) way of supporting nature, rather than just giving it the space to thrive. Similarly, you could give charity to disabled people or just create a society that lets them live undisturbed. I could dispose of my waste properly if the council provided a way for me to do that. Another little example is the step-free access on trains in London. Usually, I have to turn up and tell the staff where I want to go, then they get the ramp for me and phone ahead to where I want to go so that a ramp is waiting for me where I want to get off. I’ve experienced when the message has not gotten through, where I was luckily spotted waiting in the open train doors and a very stressed staff member has had to delay the train and get me a ramp. However, a handful of platforms in Central London are level with the train carriage, so that I don’t need a ramp but can just make the journey myself.

I’ve been told that legally staff have to help me. I know that my legal rights as a disabled person have been hard-won by disability activists in the UK. The film Then Barbara Met Alan (2022) is a film about disability rights activists in the lead up to the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act, which was replaced by the Equality Act in 2010, and really kick-started my learning about the history of why I have rights. Most disabled people in the world just have to hope for charity.

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Assistance is great, but imagine a world where I didn’t need it. This is often why I choose to take a longer journey on the bus, rather than the train, because then my travel causes less faff and I have more freedom. I find the very few step-free platforms in London such a tease, because they give me a little glimpse at what the train could be like. Like the British countryside, I want to be left to do as I please. Maybe wilding our society as well as our landscape means allowing people as well as nature to live out of our control.
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(Featured Image is a 2023 print by the illustrator Angela Harding for a children’s edition of Wilding by Isabella Tree.)