When author Isabella Tree and her husband, environmentalist Charlie Burrell, found themselves struggling to make a profit from the heavy clay soils of their West Sussex farm, they decided to try something new. They let it go wild. To enlighten us on the trials and outcomes of this bold plan, Tree joins us on Town Hall’s stage with excerpts from her new book Wilding – The Return of Nature to an English Farm. Tree recounts the questions she faced in the process of letting nature reclaim her 3,500 acre, centuries-tilled farmland. What form did the land have before human beings claimed it? What kinds of animals had been crucial to its ecology, and how could they be reintroduced? What would the neighbors think? Join Tree for a discussion of the challenges and successes of this bold mission to revive land and wildlife by letting nature take its course, reversing the cataclysmic declines in biodiversity that challenge Britain and the world.

Isabella Tree is an award-winning travel writer who has authored five books including The Living Goddess, The Bird Man, and Islands In The Clouds. She writes for publications such as National Geographic, Granta, The Sunday Times and The Observer. Her articles have been selected for The Best American Travel Writing and Reader’s Digest Today’s Best Non-Fiction, and she was Overall Winner of the Travelex Travel Writer Awards.