Wild Talks: Born to rewild

Born to rewild

with Sir Charles Burrell

Rewilding is has become something of a buzzword in recent years.

Today you can rewild practically anything, from your garden to your gut microbiome! But the origins and relevance of rewilding, as shown in the Wild exhibition, relate to the practice of rewilding at a landscape-scale.

Who better to discuss this approach to ecological recovery than Charlie Burrell, owner of Knepp Estate, home to one of the UK’s leading rewilding projects?

Charlie will talk about what his family has done with the 1400 hectares of the estate over the past 20 years and how the landowning community have the skills and wisdom – after centuries of land management – to come up with innovative and novel solutions for the climate and biodiversity collapse.

Born to rewild is the third in our series of Wild Talks, chaired by Manchester Museum’s Curator of Botany, Rachel Webster.

Sir Charles Burrell

Charlie studied for a Higher National Diploma in Agriculture and Advanced Farm Management at Cirencester Royal Agricultural College. He inherited Knepp Castle Estate in West Sussex from his grandparents in 1983. Despite intensifying the Estate’s arable and dairy business for 17 years, farming on the heavy Sussex clay remained unprofitable. All 3,500 acres of the Knepp Estate are now devoted to a rewilding project involving free-roaming herds of cattle, horses, pigs, and deer as drivers of habitat creation.
Charlie chairs Carpathia in Romania, creating what’s been dubbed the Yellowstone of Europe. He chairs Nattergal and is vice-chair of RePLANET, both companies involved with trying to solve the problem of capturing private finance to restore nature to landscape scale projects. He sits on the advisory board of Arcadia and is an oversight committee member, for one of Arcadia’s flagship projects, The Endangered Landscapes and Seascapes Program. He has retired from the board of Rewilding Britain that he chaired for many years and is now on the supervisory board of Rewilding Europe.

Dr Rachel Webster

Rachel is Curator of Botany at Manchester Museum. She looks after the 900,000 dried plant specimens in the collections, as well as the houseplants and garden spaces in the museum galleries. She spends her time looking after and making the botanical collections accessible; supporting student teaching and engagement projects, public events and museum outreach. Rachel has most recently been working on the Wild exhibition.