Rebirding: Winner of the Wainwright Prize for Writing on Global Conservation: Restoring Britain's Wildlife

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Some practitioners simulate birth by putting you in an enclosed environment meant to resemble a womb and coaching you to escape from it. This may involve blankets, pillows, or other materials. I didn't realize the impact of historical large herbivores on the landscape and that birds evolved with these herbivores and their predators. Plants respond to the presence of herbivores by changing their growth habits and thus providing birds with the infrastructure they need to thrive. What we think of as farmland birds were grassland birds before farming. Birds, animals, insects, fungi and plants all need to be allowed to grow naturally with each other. Rebirthing breathwork on its own isn’t necessarily dangerous. If you’re supervised by a trained instructor and you don’t have any preexisting lung or heart conditions, it’s probably as safe as other types of breathwork used in meditation and yoga. 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.

Should the swifts and their migratory cousins the swallows and house martins one year simply not return to Britain from their epic 6,000 mile sub-Saharan migration, the Prince admitted, his “world would come to an end”. For anyone who still needs winning around to our planet’s beauty – and wants to know how we can save it – this is the book they should read. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

Just as Isabella Tree laid out a comprehensive and clear case for rewilding at the Knepp estate, Benedict MacDonald continues the call to rewild the UK and restore the great natural diversity that has been decreasing drastically for years, robbing us of natural wonders, especially a rich variety of birds. MacDonald charts the massive impact that people have had on the UK’s environment from the moment the very first people first came ashore in prehistoric times up until now, and despite moments where nature and people were able to coëxist, the recurring theme is that we have had a deleterious impact on the natural world, especially its birds.

Healthline has strict sourcing guidelines and relies on peer-reviewed studies, academic research institutions, and medical associations. We avoid using tertiary references. You can learn more about how we ensure our content is accurate and current by reading our editorial policy. Last December, a few months after he had given that interview, came news which would have alarmed not just Prince Charles, but anyone invested in the fate of the birds, which are a symbol of the British summer. Both swifts and house martins were being added to the red list of Britain’s most endangered birds following a catastrophic decline in their numbers. Swift numbers have declined by 58 per cent since 1995, while house martin populations have similarly suffered. 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.The decline in the birds has been mirrored by a similar catastrophic collapse in insect populations in Britain, depriving them of a vital food source. Creating bog gardens with species like marsh bedstraw and purple loosestrife is valuable for providing muddy nesting material for swallows and house martins, but also encouraging the insects upon which the birds feed. So too is planting trees such as hawthorne. Macdonald’s plans to reintroduce the Dalmatian Pelican to the UK, which were covered widely by the media, are less advanced – although he certainly hopes that the species will become part of the UK’s birdlife sooner rather than later. Even though the decline has been happening for a long time, it is only in the past few decades that the dramatic drop in numbers of all species has become very evident. The act of strimming, weed killing and obliterating anything that looks slightly scruffy form our urban and rural landscapes has been the final death knell. The memory of the way that the landscape and natural world used to be, has almost faded from our collective memories. There is no substitute, with such species, for afull restoration of our vanished invertebrate abundance, something, again, that is being seen at Knepp with its small herds of free-roaming animals. Dung beetles, in particular, benefit from the presence of free-roaming cattle herds, but most farms are now deserts for them. Avermectins, the standard worming drug, sterilise modern cow dung and wreak immense damage on insect communities in thesoil. 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.

Even in my own childhood, small tortoiseshell caterpillars were incredibly easy to find – now you can see fewer than ten in the course of an entire summer. There is no research in the medical literature to support the use of rebirthing for mental health symptoms. It is not recognized by the American Academy of Pediatrics or the American Psychiatric Association. In many areas, the landscape changes happened so long ago that nobody remembers the land in a less altered state. Indeed, many Britons resist measures aimed at releasing nature from their vice-like grip. This would be unproblematic were nature not dying off in this tidiest of lands. Thankfully some young environmentalists, Macdonald among them, have had enough.Yet, Ben is right that we can do more to scope and articulate a vision for how our rural economies can evolve to work for people and for nature. While we have done work to account for the value of our nature reserves and also to assess the contribution of nature conservation to local employment, I think Ben is right that we can and must do more to fulfil the potential of these economies of nature.