I’ve had a nice pocket of time today to read (since I was coming back to Singapore) and so I managed to finish Wilding by Isabella Tree! It’s a fascinating book that looks at what can happen when we let nature take its course instead of trying to force land to yield increasing amounts of wheat/corn/produce or trying to conserve a specific species.

In fact, my main takeaway from reading this is that our problem is that we try to fix our environmental “mistakes” by focusing on a single aspect instead of the whole – for example, trying to save one particular species instead of seeing how that species interacts with the whole ecosystem. What the Knepp estate did, by slowly reintroducing native animals and then interfering as little as possible, allowed for even more plants and animals to flourish and I think that’s truly amazing.

The book reminded me of a phrase in economics called “ceteris paribus”, which means “all else being equal”. It’s commonly used as a shorthand for “if we only changed one variable and kept everything else constant”, which is very useful for students who are entering the field and need to figure out what, say, raising wages would do to prices.

But I think we often have these blinders on when we try to tackle real-world problems and think that if we can only change one thing, we can solve the problem. But the truth is, when it comes to the environment, we probably can’t change just one thing, we’ll have to understand the whole ecosystem to know how to interfere or, as Tree’s book shows us, learn to be more hands-off and let nature heal itself. I liked her idea of rotating “rewild” areas to let the land rest for half a century before being used for agriculture or some other industry again. I do wonder how practical that is for small countries like Singapore, but I think we can afford to let some nature in; we just have to resist the urge to have things as tidy as we think they should be.

There was a chapter in this about cows and that reminded me that I have a book titled “The Secret Life of Cows” (I just removed the “Buy 1 get 1 Half Off” sticker, which means there’s now a dark circle on the cover ooops) and since I cannot remember if I’ve read Lady Susan before, I shall probably reread that next. And then if I can find a copy, I would like to reread more Austen! I feel that she’s one of the authors I reread most often which shows how much I enjoy her works.

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