An interview with Rebecca Wrigley

A little over a decade ago, Rewilding Britain was just a twinkle in the eyes of a few enthusiasts.

It was 2013, recalls Rebecca Wrigley, and nature in the UK was not in a good place. Despite the best efforts of conservationists, she says, ​“it had been declining for the past 30 or 40 years.” It was all too clear that traditional conservation strategies alone, focused often on saving a specific species or habitats, weren’t up to the scale of the challenge. ​“What was it that Einstein was meant to have said about the definition of madness? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result…?”.

Fresh thinking was badly needed. It came first in the form of a book: George Monbiot’s Feral. Subtitled Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding, it caught hold of the public imagination, and helped put the very term ​‘rewilding’ into the national consciousness. Rebecca recalls how ​“people were getting in touch with George saying we have to do something to make [rewilding] happen.” 

A loose network of conservationists and supporters came together to explore possibilities of doing just that. They included Rebecca herself. A lifelong environmentalist, she’d worked in conservation and development for over 30 years, including lengthy spells on environmental frontlines in Mexico and the Pacific. More recently, she’d led a team back in Britain at Oxford City Council exploring how to help local people participate in the decisions that would affect them. Both experiences were about to prove hugely useful for her in a new role.

Among all the ferment of ideas in those early discussions, one question kept arising: did rewilding need a new organisation? ​“We were very open to not having one”, says Rebecca, ​“because God only knows, there’s no shortage!” Eventually after a lot of consultation, they decided a new body was indeed needed. Why? ​“Two reasons, really. To push the boundaries, the debate, particularly within the conservation sector, since it seemed obvious the ​‘usual suspects’ weren’t really doing that. And to catalyse rewilding in practice.”

A new organisation, of course, needs someone to get things started. After taking a year out with a new daughter, Rebecca was ready for a fresh challenge. She had relevant experience of both the environmental charity sector, and of bringing people together to make change happen. It made her a natural choice, in more ways than one. (Disarmingly, she herself explains it as: ​“When the subject came up in a meeting, everyone else just looked at their feet, but I was looking up, and well….”).

There followed the usual time- and effort-consuming tasks of setting up a registered charity, not least securing early funding, as well as its first staff, but in 2015, Rewilding Britain was born. It wouldn’t be long before Rebecca would step into the role of CEO, in 2017. 

And so, the inevitable question: just what, in her own words, is rewilding? ​“It’s the mass restoration of naturally functioning ecosystems, to the point where nature can start taking care of itself and us again. And what distinguishes rewilding [from other conservation approaches] is its emphasis on restoring natural processes as a whole, rather than managing for particular habitats or species.”

But it’s not just a new attitude to ecology. At its heart, says Rebecca, Rewilding Britain has been about putting rewilding into the mainstream, to ​“make it part of the way we both perceive and manage the land and the sea. In my mind, partly because of my experience of working overseas, it’s always been about people and about ensuring that nature restoration also boosts local livelihoods and drives economic regeneration.”

Six years working at the sharp end of environmental issues in Mexico had taught her a lot about ways in which communities respond to external interference, however well meaning. ​“Much of the land in Mexico is communally owned. I was living and working in Oaxaca, on a forest conservation project, and the community basically said: ​‘If you try to impose a national park on us, we’ll burn down our forests.’ And that really shaped my view that you can’t do conservation without development, and you can’t separate people from nature”.

Which means if rewilding is to be more than a pipe dream, it needs to be relevant to people’s everyday experiences and needs, says Rebecca – especially those living and working on the land and at sea. ​“We need to normalise rewilding: to be able to say ​‘we know how to do it, we know it works, and we can share tools about it. Then it can become just another option for land or marine management. So for a given area of land, a land manager might decide whether it makes sense to, say, produce food or timber intensively in a particular patch, or to rewild. So rather than think of yourself as either a farmer, or a forester or a conservationist, you can be any combination of those things.”

Ten years on from its launch, what does Rebecca see as some of Rewilding Britain’s most striking achievements? It’s been this ​‘normalising’ of the whole notion of rewilding – bringing it into the heart of the public realm, she says. ​“It’s also been how we’ve worked with people to put it into practice, so they can feel and touch it, and then you have more leverage with the powers that be.” As an example, she points to rewilding’s great success story, the Knepp Estate in Sussex, which thanks to all its publicity, the many visitors who come to experience it, and now the film that’s been made about it, has helped swing opinion round. ​“The more you do that, the more you shift people’s mindset, then the more they see, say, a denuded upland part of the country in a very different way, and think ​‘actually, that’s not natural’.”

It hasn’t all been plain sailing, of course. Rebecca’s well aware of the complexity and challenges of making change happen at scale, whilst also bringing communities onside as you do so. ​“You learn a lot more when things don’t go well, than when they do”, she says. 

One of those learnings was that Rewilding Britain can have the most impact acting as a catalyst for those rewilding on the ground. ​“We thought, ​‘actually, we should set up a network’ – and that’s really taken off.” The Rewilding Network now has over 1,000 members, ranging from clusters of small farmers in Devon, to a rewilded municipal golf course in Derby, right through to a project restoring native oysters in Wales.

In part, it’s a response to the sheer volume of enquiries the organisation was getting from would-be rewilders, but it also reflected the growing interest among communities in taking ownership of their home patch – sometimes literally. Rebecca cites the example of the Tarras Valley Nature Reserve (pictured below) at Langholm, where this Scottish community successfully bought out a swathe of 4,000 hectares, including former grouse moors, a richly wooded valley and upland sheep farms, and is restoring it for nature with the enthusiastic support of local people. 

And she points to the Community of Arran Seabed Trust, where residents, horrified by the destruction of the island’s marine habitats and a dramatic decline in fish stocks due to bottom trawling, were the driving force behind the establishment of Scotland’s first – and still only — No Take Zone. They’re two examples of how rewilding is proving a potent way of reconnecting people with the land and sea that surrounds them, and so subtly reshaping power dynamics. 

Meanwhile, she’s also impressed by the growing scale of ambition shown by some in the Network. She recounts a recent visit to the Idle Valley in Nottinghamshire, where the local Wildlife Trust is working with landowners to bring nature back to a series of wetlands, making a home for water voles and beavers, otters and lapwings, and where it’s now poised to reintroduce elk to the UK for the first time in 3,000 years. ​“We were walking round there, seeing all the little beaver highways, where you could actually smell the castoreum [beaver scent], and we were imagining these bloody great big elk wandering through one day! It was a pretty bold move for a Wildlife Trust, and I don’t think that would have happened 10 years ago.” 

Such boldness is of a piece with what Rebecca describes as Rewilding Britain’s ​“entrepreneurial nature…. Right from the start, we’ve had an attitude of trying things out…throwing a bit of energy out there, and seeing how people respond.” 

It’s an attitude that’s generated a few surprises, she says – not least ​“winning the Chelsea Flower Show!” In 2022, a beaver-themed garden inspired by Rewilding Britain won ​‘Best Show Garden’ at the iconic annual event staged by the Royal Horticultural Society. Along with the emergence of a rewilding storyline in BBC Radio’s The Archers, it symbolised just how rewilding has crept into the heart of the British establishment. Chelsea Flower Show and The Archers. You don’t get more established than that…

As rewilding slides into the mainstream debate over the future of the countryside, so its relationship with the nation’s food security comes into the spotlight. For Rebecca, there’s no conflict between the two. ​“There are huge areas of Britain that are highly marginal for food production, like deer stalking or grouse shooting estates, and others that aren’t producing any food at all.” These have great potential for rewilding, as they also tend to be some of our most degraded landscapes, she says. By contrast, ​“when it comes to our highest graded agricultural land, then absolutely it shouldn’t be rewilded; it should primarily be producing food.” In between the two, there’s ample opportunity for doing both, she says, pointing to plenty of examples where rewilding sites are selling meat, from Wilder Doddington in Lincolnshire to Kingsdale Head in Yorkshire.

What about costs? Letting nature do its thing sounds very hands-off, but it’s rarely completely cost-free. Some form of human intervention is usually involved, especially at the start of the process. But as Rebecca points out, financing rewilding properly through public subsidies and grants provides a whole raft of public benefits, from carbon capture and storage to natural flood management and dealing with increasing extreme weather events. All of which benefit the wider public as well as those producing food.

Compare that to the costs of installing hard engineering solutions for flood management, let alone paying for flood damage, or of investing in complex – and still largely unproven – carbon capture technologies, she adds, and rewilding starts to look like a very good economic bet indeed. Then there’s all the benefits to health and wellbeing, leading to savings on the NHS budget, not to mention a cost-effective way of meeting the government’s declared ​’30by30’ target [protecting 30% of land and sea for nature by 2030]. ​“It’s like a case of ​‘buy one and get six free’”, she concludes.

Overall, says Rebecca, there’s an argument that ​“rewilding is vital national infrastructure, and we should invest accordingly”. As and when that view becomes established, then ​“there’s pension funds or water companies or insurance companies who could potentially be interested in investing in it.” Rewilding Britain is currently exploring what kind of investment models might offer the most promising way forward.

That in turn might lead to a ​“shift up in terms of extent, so we scale up rewilding initiatives, for example working across national parks”: something that could deliver all this range of benefits, while featuring ​“nature-based enterprise zones”, hosting businesses producing everything from ​‘wild’ meat, to walnuts, to birch water, timber, fibre, maybe green burials – even ​‘rewilded gin’!

“Like the green energy transition, we need a nature transition. We need the government to recognise its benefits, say ​‘this is what we’re going to do’, put some lines in the sand, and so provide some stability and confidence for investors.” By way of parallels, she cites major urban regeneration projects, like King’s Cross in London, where government commitment and early-stage funding gave business the confidence to invest in its turn.

Ten years in, then, time to gaze ahead: what does the future look like if Rewilding Britain continues to make waves? 

“I’d like to see rewilding completely normalised – just part of the scene. Britain is an incredible place, and could have a huge natural diversity, because we’re an island, and we’re geologically so diverse, so that could bring with it incredible abundance. I’d like to be able to stand on Dartmoor, say, looking down at a valley where the river’s flowing free in braided streams, where it’s a bit scrubby and scruffy. And you can wander down the path and see evidence of beavers, and maybe an elk in the distance, and you know that lynx are out there, somewhere. There are people experiencing it all, and working in the landscape. And you can hear the noise and the pulse and the thrum of nature.”

“I’d like to see people enjoying wild parts of their garden, and stepping out into the local park and being able to walk through wilder areas where nature’s thriving, and seeing it as something that’s not challenging, but rather normal and natural. And, thinking, ​‘I like a nice manicured bed of roses, yes. But I also like this’.”

Published November 2025