Isabella Tree

Environmentalist, Journalist, Writer/Editor

Isabella Tree lives with her husband in the middle of a pioneering rewilding project in West Sussex in the southeast of England. Her book ‘Wilding’, about the story of rewilding their failing farm, was voted in the top ten science books in 2018 by The Smithsonian and made into a major motion picture ‘Wilding’ in 2024. Her subsequent ‘Book of Wilding - a practical guide to rewilding big and small’ (2023) has been described as a ‘handbook of hope’ and ‘a manual that builds hope for a better, wilder world’. In 2021 Isabella received the Royal Geographical Society’s Ness Award ‘for the popularisation of geography through her writing on biodiversity and the relation between humans and the environment’. She and her husband Charlie Burrell were jointly awarded the Zoological Society of London’s Silver Medal in 2023 ‘for outstanding contributions to the understanding and appreciation of zoology’. Her latest book, an illustrated children’s version of ‘Wilding’, published in 2024, received this year’s British Book Award for children’s non-fiction. She is currently writing ‘The Return of the White Stork’, the story about the couple’s successful reintroduction of white storks to Britain after an absence of 600 years - a project that began in 2016 in the heart of their rewilding project. It’s a story that shows the importance of reintroducing lost species, and the joy it can bring to our lives.

Rewilding, big and small.

Rewilding - restoring natural processes to depleted land - shows how fast nature can bounce back, if we let it. It’s the most positive message we can hear at the moment - that, with the right encouragement, and by stepping back and giving nature space, we can recover lost wildlife and capture carbon. It’s one of the most powerful solutions for the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change. And it’s transformative for ourselves too. But it can also happen at small scale. Anyone with a garden, a balcony, a window box, can rewild. We can all play a part in restoring nature to our planet. It’s all about mimicking the natural processes in the wider landscape and thinking like a keystone species. It’s about changing our aesthetics and our obsession with always being in control. It’s about rewilding ourselves.