Time to Get a Little Wilder: Jon Conradi's episode

By Sandy Glanfield

A couple of days ago I was driving across Bosnia Herzegovina and Montenegro, and the smoke was never quite out of sight. At one point the police turned us back, waving us away from a road with smoke billowing towards us. The wildfires breaking out across Europe this summer are frightening up close, and I could only imagine how devastating they've been for the people living in their path.

I had also been rattled watching my garden die this summer. Out there with a watering can, I still watched things go, not the fussy newcomers, but the stalwarts, the ones that shrug off every winter and come back without fail. There's a particular heartbreak in losing the plants you thought were unkillable.

And then, into all that, came the Guardian article, and I actually cheered.

You'll have seen the photograph. At the National Trust's Holnicote Estate they'd rewilded the land, restored the wetlands and let the rivers wiggle back to their natural courses, and it sat green and lush beside countryside gone brown and parched through five heatwaves. One strip green, one strip brown, in a single frame. You didn't need a caption.

What struck me was how practical it was. Nature being sensible. Long grass holds the dew. Wetlands act like a sponge, storing water in drought and slowing it in floods, so you escape the parched-then-swamped cycle we keep ending up with. It just works. And somehow, hearing the National Trust say so out loud made it feel the message might finally travel beyond the usual circles.

Which brings me to this week's guest, Jon Conradi. Jon founded Wild Mosaic, which lets people rewild without owning a field, you follow a small tile of land as it comes back to life. 

I love this part. Jon says there are two kinds of people who join him. There are the ones who get it instantly, who were already there. And then there are the ones who have never heard of rewilding - they hear it, come to understand it, and then sign up. I find the actions of the second group particularly moving. The people who weren't sure, who listened, and who found their way to acting. Because it means that our need for belonging can tip the another way. If enough of us make caring for nature the normal thing, the obvious thing, then fitting in and doing right by the planet stop pulling in opposite directions.

That, for me, is where our golden rule quietly walks in. Treating others, and the planet, as we'd wish to be treated. Because the green strip is really just the land being allowed to do for itself what it does for us: hold water, offer shade, keep things alive through the heat. We look after it, and it looks after. 

And maybe that's the invitation from Jon, and from that one honest photograph. To worry a little less about how it looks to care, and to trust what we can plainly see.