Wilding

children who spent time in green spaces between the ages of seven and twelve tend to think of nature as magical. As adults they are the people most likely to be indignant about lack of nature protection, while those who have had no such experience tend to regard nature as hostile or irrelevant and are indifferent to its loss. By expurgating nature from children's lives we are depriving the environment of its champions for the future.

We forget, in a world completely transformed by man, that what we’re looking at is not necessarily the environment wildlife prefer, but the depleted remnant that wildlife is having to cope with: what it has is not necessarily what it wants.

The great concerns of our time – climate change, natural resources, food production, water control and conservation, and human health – all boil down to the condition of the soil.

Methane emissions are lower in biodiverse pasture systems largely because of fumaric acid – a compound that scientists at the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen identified as leading to faster growth and reducing emissions of methane by 70 per cent when added to the diet of lambs. Fumaric acid occurs widely in many plants and herbs of the field and hedgerow, including angelica, common fumitory, shepherd’s purse and bird’s-foot trefoil.

Deep, rich orange and speckled with black, every now and again a flick of their wings flashed an underside of green and mother-of-pearl - the silver wash that gives the fritillaries their name. The female flies straight and level, the slow semaphore of her wing-beats and the scent from the tip of her abdomen exuding allure. The male swoops in tight loops under and up and in front of her, stalling so she can pass beneath him through a shower of intoxicating scent-scales shed from his forewings.

People have a famously soft spot for pigs. Intelligent, inquisitive, imperious, myopic, sociable, gluttonous, grunting, ungainly, it is easy to recognize ourselves in them.

Purple emperor-watching with Matthew and Neil is not your average butterfly entertainment, ethereal and somewhat effete. Theirs is a raucous, adrenaline-fuelled spectator sport. The emperors themselves seem to play to the crowd. Pugnacious males dart around the crowns of oaks, staking out their territory, jetting about with muscular flicks of their wings, twirling on their own axes, elevating a hundred feet into the air. They are the SAS of butterflies, fit, fearless and chemically armed.

They estimate that if organic matter in the world’s farmed soils was increased by as little as 1.6 per cent, the problem of climate change would be solved.

The evidence, both in the UK and abroad, is incontrovertible: naturalizing rivers and rewilding river-catchment areas prevents flooding.

Over the years modern farming has reduced soil to....‘dirt’ – a sterile medium in which plants struggle to grow without artificial fertilizers. It is a self-perpetuating cycle of destruction and chemical dependence.

the updated 2016 State of Nature report discovered that the UK has lost significantly more biodiversity over the long term than the world average. Ranked twenty-ninth lowest out of 218 countries, we are among the most nature-depleted countries in the world.

Think testosterone,’ says Matthew, ‘multiply it by πr2 and double it. Forget boys locked in boarding schools. They’ve spent ten months as a caterpillar waiting for this. They’ve pupated, they’re mature and they’re desperate. They’re squaddies in the disco on a Saturday night. They’re sailors in port after a nine-month voyage.

Nothing, I felt, could have encouraged me at that moment beyond shafts of sunlight spun with the dust of butterflies.

caw of every jackdaw, the crooning of every collared dove (‘I-don’t-know, I-don’t-know’) and wood pigeon (‘I-really-don’t-know’),

One of British conservation’s most conspicuous failures in the twentieth century has been to concentrate on individual species to the neglect of ecosystems. This shift in focus is sometimes hard for conservationists visiting Knepp to accept.

At our own back door the exotic is in neutral territory, like an illegal immigrant camping out in an airport.

We rail against ‘alien, invasive’ species like Himalayan balsam and Rhododendron ponticum, while turning a blind eye to pheasants, rainbow trout, snowdrops and sweet chestnut. Snake’s head fritillaries are a defining feature of ‘medieval wild-flower meadows’ protected by SSSIs. Yet they are no more native than the

But the world of academia is a strange, sometimes counterproductive and often sluggish place. Where one may expect it to be open and responsive to new thinking, it can be oddly conservative and resistant to radical ideas.