Isabella Tree
Conservationist
Award-winning journalist, travel writer and conservationist Isabella Tree pioneers a rewilding project at their family property Knepp in West Sussex in the United Kingdom.
Before their regenerative endeavor, Isabella and her husband worked their 1,400 hectare (3,500 acres) farm conventionally for nearly 20 years. As a business they were struggling and never made it sustainable. Finally, they decided to give up on farming and let nature take over again. They only added grazing animals on the property. The result was astonishing. "I used to travel to the ends of the earth to look at wonderful wildlife – but never considered that we could (or should) be having it in our backyard."
The farm developed into a new space of animal and plant diversity. Knepp today is named one of the most biodiverse and dynamic habitats in the UK hosting many highly endangered species and measuring a carbon content in the soil twice as high as at the beginning of their journey.
Tree is author of five non-fiction books – in the latest "Wilding - the Return of Nature to a British Farm" she describes the story of their pioneering renaturation project.
