Rewilding: Letting nature take over

in no small number of ways what's old is new again as proof consider this postcard from the British County of West Sussex from David Pogue for over 200 years Charlie Burrell's family has lived in NEP Castle anyway so here's some of the about an hour from London so that's the guy that built the castle and he married an heiress look at her she was an Aries and very beautiful and there she was marrying this boring academic with no money the castle sits on 3 500 acres of land I'm the 10th baronet and does that carry with it certain rights and responsibilities no no um I mean in certain circles but he was responsible for the estate and the farm when he inherited them in 1983. it's so hard for 17 years he and his wife Isabella tree tried everything to compete with modern industrial Farms spraying the new technologies and new crops that were coming on but the wet heavy clay in the soil made efficient farming impossible we were 1.5 million pounds in debt by then so it was really looking desperate and then in 2000 they learned about a new idea in Land Management called re-wildings that's where you give away your land to Nature you stop plowing irrigating mowing applying chemicals and you let Wilderness return [Music] what has been absolutely astonishing is how quickly Nature has bounced back so from being one of the most depleted sort of pieces of land you can imagine to being one of the most important biodiversity hotspots in the UK after 20 years nap now teams with an incredible variety of plants animals birds and insects some of them endangered the rarest species in Britain turtle doves Nightingales purple Emperor butterflies we have peregrine falcons nesting in a tree which is almost unheard of what I wanted you to see was the first breeding stalks to be back in Britain for 600 years and there they are so that stork would not have been here when you guys arrived no the last time stalks nested in the UK successfully was 14 16. the year after the Battle of Agincourt is King of the castle oh man to kick start the transformation the couple introduced a few heavy Critters like cattle horses and pigs they root or they trample they debug trees the way they spread seeds from one area to another and they're Hooves their fur and their gut if you put these animals back into a landscape they can create habitats again take for example this ancient breed Old English Longhorns where generations of the same family roam free so the great great great great grandmother will be there and then all the daughters they were working here so do you feed them anything no supplementary feeding they're just finding whatever they need from this landscape some of these cows will become beef for sale burrow and trees say they produce tastier meat because of their natural diet cows don't just eat grass they eat plants and twigs and leaves once they're eating what nature intended them to eat they metabolize much much better wood a few minutes later we came across these Red Deer enjoying some shade those antlers are pretty absolutely amazing to us they look really outlandish on a red deer but that is probably naturally what they would grow to if they were allowed to live in their most optimal kind of habitat quite often we see them just submerged in water so if I read about a red deer in a in a book it might not note that they are river creatures exactly exactly it's only when you allow rewilding for habitats to naturally emerge that then you have species showing their innate natural behaviors so in some ways what we're seeing here is what we might have seen a thousand years ago maybe 10 000 years ago the pigs are also changing the landscape by starting a chain reaction oh my gosh these are hairy pigs the pig is by its rooting and it's opening up of the ground has allowed things like salad which is a food planter purple and the Butterfly to then flourish and to top it off the NEPA estate now generates more money as a Wilderness than it ever did as a farm we have ecotourism tree houses and glamping and camping and and African safaris and that's now a business that brings in about a million a year the rewilded land does a favor for surrounding Farms too it's going to provide clean water it provides that crop with pollinating insects is going to provide physical buffers against extreme weather events down the road with what's happening to climate and what's happening to the biodiversity loss we need to have hot spots for nature we need to have corridors running through our landscapes for nature the nap story is a big deal in the UK the couple has just published a guide to rewilding and the British government is funding additional rewilding programs thanks in part to Aleister driver we've gone on ambition in rewarding Britain of five percent of the country by 2030. about a foot down in here he's the director of rewilding Britain a non-profit devoted to attracting more government dollars and more landowners to rewilding we know that 56 of our species are declining we have a biodiversity crisis we have a climate emergency I mean we've got to do something different we cannot continue the way we are today rewilding projects are underway in more than 30 countries around the world most of the countries where rewilding is going on are those countries which have inadvertently screwed things up for wildlife we need to start reversing this decline where man and nature can work more together in harmony rewilding may be the future of the Napa state but it's a huge break from the past what would he say if he knew that you'd taken the farm he labored to create and let it go to seed so I think we're very pragmatic in this family so from the pragmatic standpoint he might have said dude you've doubled the estate's income I'm not sure what dude was coming to his sort of 18th century brain but you know I get your meaning dude

Channel: CBS Sunday Morning

Views: 34,258

Keywords: CBS Sunday Morning, CBS News, news, Knepp Castle, rewilding, biodiversity, nature

Id: 2czsbweIYZY

Length: 7min 12sec (432 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2023