'These small efforts are so important': How seven keen conservationists are creating the blueprint for a better countryside - Country Life ( www.countrylife.co.uk )

Although the term 'rewilding' is contentious, most agree that our countryside could be better managed for wildlife. Yet what should we actually be doing to improve it?

‘The idea that we can carry on what we’ve been doing for the past couple of centuries, which is the war against Nature, is over,’ declares Prof Sir Dieter Helm, professor of economic policy at the University of Oxford, who believes that the damage wreaked can be reversed if we all play a part in the rejuvenation of the natural world.

Taking issue with the term ‘wilding’, however, he states: ‘Going back to the wild, or just going wild, suggests that there’s a separation between us and Nature, but we’re a part of it and nothing in Nature is now non-human, and so I prefer the old-fashioned idea of conservation management.