3 tips to make your world beautifully wild | Isabella Tree
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 11.9K Ratings
🗓️ 6 November 2025
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
When conservationists talk about rewilding, most people picture wolves and bison roaming endless landscapes — but Isabella Tree discovered the real revolution is happening in ordinary backyards. She shares the incredible story of how she and her husband transformed their failing farmland into a nature paradise, offering a three-step formula for anyone looking to turn their green space wild.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. |
| 0:12.2 | I'm your host, Elise Hu. |
| 0:14.1 | For environmentalist and conservationist, Isabella Tree, rewilding the process of restoring an area of land to its natural uncultivated state |
| 0:23.0 | isn't just reserved for grand parks. It can and should happen in our gardens too. In her talk, |
| 0:30.0 | she shares the story of how letting animals roam free on her farmland brought the land back to life, |
| 0:35.6 | reviving ecosystems, boosting biodiversity, and even capturing carbon |
| 0:40.1 | just in a few years. She shares some practical tips for rewilding at home and reminds us that |
| 0:46.2 | sometimes we don't have to look further than our own backyards to make a difference. |
| 1:00.0 | You may have heard a lot about rewilding recently. It conjures up visions of vast landscapes, reintroductions of wolves, great herds of bison. It's the most important message |
| 1:06.2 | we can hear at the moment that nature can restore itself given the chance. But it doesn't have to be at vast scale, and it doesn't have to be in the middle of nowhere. |
| 1:15.6 | Rewilding can happen in your own backyard, in an urban park, anywhere there's a tiny patch of space for it. |
| 1:22.6 | And it can happen really fast. And that's transformative, not just for nature and the climate, but for |
| 1:30.5 | ourselves. How do I know? Well, for the past couple of decades, I've been helping to rewild |
| 1:36.5 | big and small. When my husband was 21, he inherited 3,500 acres of farmland in the busy southeast of England. |
| 1:48.1 | Neppest State is on the worst possible land for intensive agriculture. It was already losing money. |
| 1:54.0 | But Charlie had trained as a farmer, and so for 17 years, he tried to turn it around. |
| 1:59.7 | By 1999, we were one and a half million pounds in debt. We knew we had to do something radically different. We wanted to work with nature rather than battling against it all the time. We began to rewild. |
| 2:14.6 | Europe, like Africa and all the other continents of the world, was once home to vast |
| 2:20.0 | numbers of free-roaming animals, animals that we hunted to extinction or close to it. |
| 2:26.2 | Their disturbances shaped the land. They cleared forests, they opened up wetlands and created |
| 2:31.9 | grasslands, they stimulated the soil. They spread seeds. |
| 2:36.5 | We were really excited by large-scale rewilding projects happening in Europe that were showing |
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