Original subtitles

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It was really just an experiment.

That this unloved area became a sanctuary.

They come from the inhospitable landscape out there.

And seeks Knepp.

It's like a fairy tale.

The earth coming to life behind them.

Isn't that a great sound?

We didn't understand it at all when we were farming.

We hadn't seen the magic.

But it happened here.

It started a long time ago.

Charlie and I were very young, in our twenties.

We drove through this wonderful, traditional agricultural area.

It was an English idyll.

As we now know, it is something quite different.

A lost landscape.

We were blissfully unaware of the insidious developments that were underway.

But since we were born in the 60s,

We have lost millions of birds from the sky.

Our native mammals are threatened with extinction.

We are one of the most exhausted countries in the world.

Back then we saw it as normal.

Knepp Castle was built in 1812

and is surrounded by agricultural land of approximately twelve square kilometers

in south-east England.

Charlie was a trained farmer

and was ready to take over the family farm.

He was already told at the age of 14,

that it should skip a generation and go to him.

What a privilege.

And yet something was bubbling beneath the surface,

which we did not understand.

The area was completely plowed up.

Field after field of crops, drowned in chemicals.

Fertilizer and fungicides and weed killers.

And it is well known that the soil here is difficult to cultivate.

It is simply not suitable for industrial agriculture.

Intensive farming was practiced all the way down to the lake and around the house.

Everything was plowed, sprayed and fertilized.

And it was all financed via subsidies.

And that probably applied to everyone around here.

We farmers were dependent on subsidies.

Which, among other things, helped pay for tons of fertilizer and pesticides.

- There you are. - Yes, in the cornfield.

Geez, look at that 80s hairstyle.

But that is not sustainable in the long run.

And it destroys the land on which we depend.

And not having a plan for the future,

but knowing that we couldn't continue as we were doing,

was depressing. All those sleepless nights.

And no one mentioned the earth?

You didn't walk around smelling it and saying, "What a nice organic material."

Not that way.

Maybe it was just me giving up, but...

Our story is about the earth.

The layer that covers the planet.

Which we depend on for everything. And we were in the process of destroying it.

Something is not right.

You sense that something is wrong.

It was only when we realized how bad things were,

that we started listening.

I believe that the one who made us look at the earth in a completely new way,

was Ted Green. The Nestor when it comes to farming.

He was a bit of an untamed child.

He is symbiotically connected to the trees.

He is a wandering mycorrhizal fungus.

He doesn't take a shower. He thinks it's a terrible thing.

That we are all bacteria and fungal spores. He thinks completely differently.

Ted came and advised us about our oak trees at Knepp.

There was something wrong with them. He was horrified by what he discovered.

Wherever I looked, I saw a sea of ​​wheat.

And I thought, “Oh, they’re killing them.

They die."

He said that the tree's roots extend

almost fifteen meters out from the crown.

Away from the crown. All the oak trees seen here,

are connected via microscopic fibers.

Mycorrhizal fungi that run through the soil and collect minerals and nutrients.

They're really small threads. Like cotton.

He described it as a seething, chemical circuit beneath our feet.

The life-giving system that keeps almost every plant on the planet alive.

Plants and trees can actually talk to each other.

Communicate about diseases. About attacks from plague and insects.

Or about being eaten by animals.

Some claim that mycorrhizal fungi can span continents.

Over hundreds of kilometers

without affecting their system.

And we've been getting through it every year.

And sprayed the soil and mycorrhizal fungi with poison.

It was we who destroyed the vital system,

on which the trees depend.

The earth eventually turns to dirt. Without organic life.

And it needs fertilizer if anything is to grow in it.

A young couple, two children and a huge area.

To take them out here and show them trees

like this, and consider them.

To look at the tree in a different way.

And they understood it.

When I went home, I thought:

They're going to do something. Something's going to happen.

In a way, we couldn't look at the earth the same way anymore.

People like Ted told us how connections

can start a chain reaction,

which can start a whole cycle.

And recreate the landscape that we have missed for hundreds of years.

Ted told Charlie,

that if he really wanted to understand what a landscape should look like,

then he was to visit and take a closer look at a radical experiment in the Netherlands.

Sometimes it is called Oostvardersplassen.

Here, an ecologist, Frans Vera, had a radical idea:

how animals integrated into the landscape long before humans changed it.

Science believes that all of Europe looked like this.

Covered by trees. I think that's wrong.

Few believe my idea of ​​what the natural landscape looked like.

My theory is that the natural landscape

driven forward by large hordes of large animals.

Frans began a startling experiment.

He introduced Konik ponies, a herd of ancient horses,

and heck cattle, a wild breed of cattle.

The herds imitated the ancient animals that once roamed across Europe.

The large animals would hold down the trees, turn the earth,

change the landscape and show us what Europe may have looked like in the past.

A landscape that we can no longer imagine.

Even scientists believe that you are crazy if you believe in such an idea.

"It doesn't make sense. It's not going to work."

You only believe it when you see it.

The trees did not take over the terrain.

Instead, a patchwork of different species emerged,

which supplied an enormous number of animals,

where so few had survived before.

Charlie came. I didn't know him.

He watched the cattle and the wild horses and deer.

I didn't expect it to lead to anything.

Why would a crazy Englishman adopt such an idea?

He liked it, but I know from experience,

that you will encounter a lot of resistance if you adopt such an idea.

Instead of constantly fighting against nature,

I would adapt the idea to Knepp.

If we come home with this idea, it will bring about great change.

It's never been done before, and there are so many laws,

which prevents one from even thinking along such lines.

If you are a farmer, or especially belong to a generation of farmers,

is the moment when you decide to stop,

burdened with so much guilt and so much pride.

SALES OF AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY

The Burrell family has farmed the land here for over 200 years.

Good morning and welcome to Knepp Castle's farm.

On this wet September morning.

They sell their agricultural materials and equipment for cattle farming.

For those who have never been to an auction before...

All your efforts, hopes and dreams.

They admit to the outside world that it has all been in vain.

It is incredibly painful to watch.

Sold for 25 pounds.

Charlie couldn't stand to watch.

He was in his office.

It was still too new.

Francis' message was clear:

We were going to tear down the fence. Tear everything up.

And let the animals roam freely.

It was incredibly exciting when we let the Exmoor ponies out.

They kicked and jumped around.

They have a robust appearance that takes you back to the Ice Age.

There is a wildness about them that domesticated animals do not have.

We were looking for ancient breeds.

Cattle that are as close to their ancestor, the aurochs, as possible.

Instead of wild boar, we acquired Tamworth pigs.

Like that, yes. Off you go.

It was the beginning of a journey for all these animals.

From domestic to wild.

I remember the pigs best. They seemed so incredibly docile.

Is it possible for these animals,

these huge, domesticated animals, to survive out here?

The first winter it would break or bear.

Could the animals really survive out here?

All the long winter?

Farm animals are fed in the winter.

But ours had to take care of itself.

After all the doubts and worries

It was pure joy when you met a sow

walking along an old hedge with a retinue of piglets behind him.

When the day was drawing to a close,

She carefully led them to the shelter of a clearing.

Using the leaves on the ground

She built a little nest for them.

She had returned to her natural behavior.

They find a small cave where they can stay warm,

because they are quite small and quite thin when they are born.

But it doesn't stop there.

She returns with leaves and moss,

which she puts them in, and which acts as a duvet at night.

And at this time of year, the pregnant cows wander around looking for a secluded spot,

where they can calve.

After generations in captivity

This calf is born one step closer to the outdoors.

After giving birth, she needs iron, so she immediately starts eating nettles.

She doesn't eat them at other times of the year.

And when the time comes, the cow introduces her calf to the rest of the herd.

It is a touching experience to see all the cows, starting with the matriarch,

Welcome the calf and watch it become part of the tribe.

Part of their collective consciousness.

You realize that these instincts are completely unattainable.

In a farm environment.

Charlie doesn't like to talk about the past.

He focuses on us creating a new landscape for the future.

But we are definitely trying to awaken ancient relationships.

Our animals may look like tame ponies and shabby old cows,

But right from the beginning, the animals

begin to become something completely different.

That's not to say there weren't challenges on the journey.

From the domesticated to the wild.

Not least with the rather complicated Duncan.

Duncan was not afraid of people at all,

and he fell into a heap outside the door of the property's office.

They do this to mark their territory.

One day he broke into the office and went straight to the reception.

He scared the life out of our secretary.

Out with you now.

He was problematic because he didn't know if he was wild or tame.

He found himself in a strange borderland.

It wasn't just Duncan who was too tame.

At that time we collected money

through fairs and polo tournaments.

He has to go all the way.

And the pigs, of course, began to associate party tents with food.

They went straight into the tent and began mingling with the guests.

And eat canapes.

He takes the ball.

They are looking for an opportunity up the field.

They broke into a catering tent.

And ate boxes of Mr. Whippy's ice cream mix.

They are moving forward. Now they have the ball and are approaching the goal.

And then Duncan appeared.

They press and move the ball forward.

It looks like a track runner. A wild Exmoor pony.

Stay calm.

Duncan is mixing with these precious polo ponies,

and is ready to fight.

We have a few problems, but the game continues.

Just stay calm.

There was always total chaos.

Oh, no. He's heading for the marquee.

He comes out and knocks over the table! The lemon cake is ruined.

He's returning to the field. He's definitely not a polo pony.

He is on his way to the goal. The pony is flying all over the place.

It's funny here afterwards, but that kind of behavior

could have easily turned the public against us.

If that happened, we risked the state removing their support.

The clock was ticking.

Could this motley assembly of animals reshape the landscape?

In the way that people like Ted and Frans claimed they would?

The first signs of how animals could change this small part of England,

came from the pigs.

The first thing they did was plow the edges down along all the driveways.

Furrows on both sides of the driveways.

The reason was that these areas had never been plowed before.

It was the only part of the area that we had never plowed or sprayed.

Which were full of life, with the worms, insects and roots that they sought.

It was as if they were showing us what we had done to the earth.

The places that we had not cultivated were the ones that the pigs flocked around.

Suddenly, Charlie had a clear vision.

That's what happened to the earth,

which would show us whether the project would be successful.

Whether life actually returned.

There is a circular ornament outside the main door.

With a stone statue of a dog in the middle.

Of course, we have never plowed there.

They went straight for it.

But pigs digging in the lawn was a bit too much.

Not even Charlie, no matter how much he

wanted to, could let go of the grass circle.

He always has a whip hanging by the umbrellas.

It's hard to get a giant sow to turn around,

when she is determined to turn upside down on the lawn.

You only need to do it a couple of times because they are quite intelligent.

They remember that and tell the piglets not to go there.

"There's free play everywhere, except for the circle there."

I get crazy when they mess up the lawn.

They're fast.

Yes. You have to ride a bike to catch them.

Imagine Indiana Jones on a bike.

Okay, another red one.

Whoops, it flew away.

The strangest things happen sometimes.

There was a dead owl in the freezer next to the ice cream for six months.

There's a lot of junk in it.

I have stored a lot of different things in the freezer.

We tried to create a database.

A beginning of the story and our starting point.

A form of scale.

Early on, we saw no signs of change.

And it was an eye-opener.

What had we been up to?

What were we thinking?

A kind of guilt.

We share that mindset now.

We are responsible for a period of massive destruction.

We'll have to think about it.

And we do. We've started to think about it.

The farmer I married had become an insect collector.

He crawled around and rummaged through cow crates to see what he could find.

It was important, because from nothing I could find in the coke boxes,

when we were farmers,

we began to consider them as a kind of new universe for life.

Even at a very early stage

we began to see life return to what had been farmland.

You can feel the lightness of the earth,

when it starts to recover thanks to all these little creatures.

And the life that returns to the dead earth

after a hundred years of plowing, is amazing to observe.

We did something that was completely without purpose.

We had to rely completely on nature

and see what would happen.

It was a challenge after 200 years of so-called progress in agriculture.

And it required careful communication with our farming neighbors.

Hello there.

Charlie stood up and talked about free-living animals

and the re-creation of the earth.

And he explained that agricultural support had to be changed.

He showed pictures of Knepp

and pictures of what we expected Knepp to look like in ten years.

We had expected a great degree of enthusiasm.

Please come and have a chat with us. Thank you.

But there was deafening silence.

But then some of them spoke up.

- It doesn't put food on the table. - That's the problem.

They said it was a disgrace.

That's pure madness.

That we were irresponsible.

Should we have wild boars running around on the main road?

That there would be weeds growing everywhere, and worst of all, meadow fire.

It will kill cattle and horses. There is no doubt about that.

This kind of thing has to be handled by the individual.

The anger they felt when they saw our fields covered in them.

This journey would not be as easy as we had hoped.

We were trying to raise two young children.

We tried to build a life.

We felt under a lot of pressure.

I've felt like a bit of an outsider for much of my life.

I'm adopted, and so you probably always experience some kind of distance.

And a vague feeling of not being part of the group,

or that one is not born to follow the conventional path.

I think it can help you when you think everything is going wrong.

My dad always said I was looking for the hole in the fence.

In a way, that's what we're doing. We're looking for a way out of a mindset that

which has limited us for so long.

We needed some signs that it wasn't leading to nothing.

We needed to see that something would actually come of it.

It was at that time that we went out at sunrise

and suddenly became completely overwhelmed by birdsong.

It took us back to our childhood.

The nightingale quickly returned,

and they were now more numerous than ever before.

But then something quite amazing happened.

That wonderful coo.

We had never had lovebirds before.

That one of the country's most endangered birds had found us...

This is Chaucer, Shakespeare. The kind we sing about at Christmas.

"My true love gave me." We are losing this species.

They are our second most endangered bird.

Suddenly there is a place in Southern England,

where the number of lovebirds is actually increasing.

This goes completely against the trend.

No one expected that.

Something quite amazing is happening here.

This ugly, thorny, unloved piece of land began to become a sanctuary.

And other rare animals found their way to us.

The small animals that many of us have forgotten.

And I love the idea of ​​the dwarf mouse.

We had not observed this mammal before the start of the project.

They found us somehow. I enjoy imagining,

that they somehow instinctively seek us out,

now that we have an area for them.

You can imagine them in the hostile terrain out there.

Out on an adventure. In search of a better place.

They come in through viaducts. Under the roads.

And end up in places like here, with perfect opportunities to build nests.

And they build the most beautiful little nests.

Where they balance everything.

They weave them around these long stems,

and then they feed them with thistle seeds.

So it ends up being these incredibly beautiful and luxurious nests.

We are amazed every day by what we find.

What animals are coming to find us?

We never know what little thing will make a difference.

That butterfly effect that can initiate a transformation.

Wherever you look, animals and plants are rediscovering connections,

which has long been lost in the modern landscape.

When a cow leaves a footprint, even the footprint in the ground can

become a whole universe of fantastic creatures.

A place where you can find water lilies and snails.

We even found a small fly that has never been seen before in the UK.

All of these creatures become food for crops, bats, and birds.

Thanks to the cows that wander around the landscape.

Even oak trees have complex relationships.

They need open spaces to grow.

And it is the large ruminants that create these open areas.

With a little help from the forest damage.

This is how oak trees grow in the open.

Their life begins under thorny bushes.

This way, the young tree is protected from gnawing mouths.

Until it is strong enough to fend for itself.

Just as with Oostvaardersplassen, the changes in the landscape took place

through the influence of animals.

In the Netherlands, the project was

eventually regulated due to public concerns.

People believed that natural deaths caused unnecessary suffering.

Here at Knepp we take care of the animals.

But we have our own problems with public opinion.

A letter to Charlie said his grandparents would be turning in their graves,

horrified at what he had done.

That we were unpatriotic.

One woman simply said that what we were doing hurt her feelings.

It was perceived as an insult by those who saw the village

as something controlled, managed and as something with its own ideal of beauty.

And that we turned something beautiful into something very ugly.

It actually came close to breaking us from time to time.

It became personal and hurtful.

And it caused the feeling that you are no longer welcome.

You stand outside society. You feel ostracized.

We were under great pressure and criticism was growing.

Large areas of land are left to nature.

But questions can be asked about this.

TV broadcasts.

Last summer there were reports of fields infected with meadow fire blight.

Angry letters to ministers.

This horrible weed. It makes me nauseous.

Radioindslag.

You can do this because you are so immensely privileged.

We could have thrown in the towel.

But we stood firm.

Because throughout the entire period we saw how life returned.

I've spent my whole life looking at insects,

so I could see that something was up.

The worms that migrated here and moved in the soil...

Something that scientists thought could take a hundred years,

happened in ten years.

Now we have 19 different species of earthworms.

All the material from the surface that is

pulled down into the small holes creates soil.

It is the building block of life.

All the millions of worms that contribute life and organic material

and provides nourishment for all the small insects.

And nourishes Ted's network of mycorrhizal fungi.

That's impressive.

The renewal of the earth.

That's what the transformation of Knepp is all about.

Encouraged by the changes in the earth

Charlie took his obsession with landscape change to a new level.

He would now re-wild the river Adur,

which runs through our land and which had been compressed into a straight channel.

He wanted to restore the beautiful curves,

which can still be seen casting shadows of the past across the plains.

But of course, it required a huge amount of equipment and investment.

Ten years of studies on the environmental impact

in collaboration with the authorities. It was a huge project.

Then Derek Gow appeared.

We showed Derek around, and he rolled his eyes and said:

A couple of beavers would have fixed it for free in six months.

And they would have done a better job.

I clearly remember saying to Charlie,

that beavers have been doing this for hundreds or millions of years.

They are far better at restoring wetlands than we will ever be.

Derek has created a sanctuary for European beavers on his farm in Devon.

He is Britain's leading beaver specialist.

He invited us over so we could meet the beavers,

which he hoped to be able to put out into the open one day.

You can see the water but not many visible branches.

When they build the foundation,

You can clearly see that they are made of branches, wood and stone.

This creature is going to change the landscape.

You can see that the water that the beavers dam up,

cuts off the forest, which opens up in response.

And it all turns into a big, wet, hanging garden.

Full of life.

They make a landscape that is in bad shape better.

These destructive relationships,

where the water flows directly from the fields,

directly down the main canal, down to the city

and "bang". Flooding schools and single-family homes.

Cars are overturning and people are standing and crying into the drain.

It will be over soon.

When Charlie met Derek, we knew that one of the most important things

that we had to bring back here were beavers.

They have been missing for over 400 years.

If we were to release beavers,

We had to get approval from the authorities.

That's totally ridiculous.

A permit to keep two beavers in an enclosure.

An animal that can prevent floods, purify the water,

restore biological diversity. What is the problem?

They're not radioactive. It's not an allosaurus,

which we release into nature.

Who overturns buses in central London.

It's just an animal that does an incredible amount of good.

There were already a number of beavers in

England, but they had been released illegally.

Of the guerrilla within rewilding, you could say.

No matter how sympathetic we found this approach,

It wasn't something we could do.

I'm not going to talk about covert operations. That won't work.

- What is this about? - My mouth is closed.

There are many ways to bring beavers back to an area.

We do it with a license.

We had to wait eight years for the permit.

We may not have beavers at Hammer Pond yet,

But the pigs show us something completely new.

A behavior that we never expected.

They swim, or rather dive.

They can hold their breath. That's quite unique.

I don't think cows can, but pigs can hold their breath underwater.

And they come up with huge pond mussels in their mouths.

With each passing year, we saw how one species could set off a chain reaction,

which we could never have imagined.

Like the seeds of the willow tree, drifting like down through the air in May.

They need to find moist, bare soil. Otherwise they will die.

The pigs create the open areas,

where the willow's seeds can grow.

So now we have a lot of willow trees where the pigs have been messing around.

And willow is food for the larvae of the small Iris butterfly.

One of our most rarely seen butterflies.

There are now hundreds of them around Knepp.

We now have the largest population in the country.

So one of the rarest butterflies thrives here thanks to the pig.

There are so many similar connections,

that extends out and makes the landscape more complex.

And there is also a new complexity in their lives.

You see their personality emerge. A whole spectrum of expressions,

interaction and interest.

And you realize that farm animals are a shadow of themselves

because of the context in which we place them.

It arouses emotions to see the animals express themselves.

I remember a special moment,

where one of the foals led the herd to the boundary around Knepp,

and a beautiful thoroughbred horse looked in

from the human world outside.

It's easy to have a romantic view of it all,

but I couldn't shake the thought that she must have looked on with longing.

Perhaps with a form of the horses' response to jealousy.

It wasn't just the horses who were watching.

It felt like the whole world was watching as a new threat to our credibility arose.

Began to spread across the yard.

We had unleashed a monster from the earth.

A plant that farmers have always feared and fought against. Milk thistle.

Its roots spread like wildfire underground,

when it clones itself and creates huge colonies.

Only powerful pesticides can knock it down.

Even in this country, where it belongs,

There are government regulations to control its spread in the fields.

It was not the new landscape we had expected after so long.

Charlie began to doubt and thought,

Maybe we should just spray them.

Too much was at stake.

We were sure that an official would come.

And close the project down.

Incredibly, and without our knowledge, our rescue is being mobilized in North Africa.

In 2009, for the first time in over ten years,

A huge number of thistle butterflies migrate to Europe.

They arrive with a high pressure

and are moving across the channel in ever-increasing numbers.

On the morning of May 25th

A radar station in New Hampshire detects a migration

with eleven million butterflies heading towards Britain.

I don't know how they found Knepp.

They descended from the sky outside the front door and flew towards the thistles.

Tens of thousands of butterflies.

If you closed your eyes, it sounded like a distant waterfall.

It was amazing. You could feel their presence.

They laid their eggs on the thistles.

The caterpillars began to eat the leaves.

Soon only the stems remained.

They were completely molested.

We were saved for a while. By a cloud of millions of butterflies.

People are still talking about the amazing year 2009.

They didn't come back the next spring. Not a single one of them.

Finally, we got a glimpse of how nature works.

A group of species that connect and cover an English landscape,

which no one has seen in hundreds of years.

It's magical. An unreal landscape.

With tall, thorny, white flowers.

And birds chirping everywhere.

The highest concentration of songbirds in the country.

Paths that open up the shrubbery and intersect like the mushroom network below.

And creates a fantastic, complex, dense and deep vegetation structure,

which is like rocket fuel for wildlife.

The feelings you get, the things that well up inside you,

relegates one to the past.

It feels like you are in a completely different place.

Think about how a small microcosm like Knepp

can create something much greater than the sum of its parts.

The feeling of having accomplished that.

Just by letting go.

The years of watching this happen have also changed us.

It has made us more and more aware

about the loss that occurred continuously.

All around us.

Fourteen million birds have disappeared from the sky.

We have lost 97 percent of our wildflower meadows.

We have plowed up 120,000 km of hedges.

We have lost tens of thousands of old-growth forests.

A quarter of all mammals in the UK are threatened with extinction.

We are one of the most exhausted countries in the world.

Fifteen years after we first heard our lovebirds on Knepp,

I found a dead dove on the ground.

It may have died of old age, stress or during migration.

And it coincided with a scientific report,

which showed that many of these species are doomed to extinction.

Knepp can never stop extinction on his own

of lovebirds in Great Britain.

It underlined how small the project is.

Knepp is a bubble. It's a drop in the ocean.

In relation to the enormous transformation that this planet needs.

The experiment showed us solutions.

How to tie a rewilded landscape together.

But after fifteen years, our message of recovery had not caught on.

It must go beyond these limits.

Beyond Knepp's fortress.

It should reach other people.

But a new animal should profile us in a way,

which no cow or pig could ever have done.

This new chapter at Knepp would in a way

become the most important thing.

Like that, yes.

Head first.

Hello.

Sixteen years after the start of the project

we introduced an animal,

which was not reported breeding in the UK

since 1416.

It feels like magic.

This thing about storks coming with babies in their beaks.

They still symbolize luck, rebirth and a new beginning.

It's so beautiful when the birds take off from the enclosure.

They spread their wings and immediately they hover over you.

And looking down at the new world.

The big question for us:

Can our birds even figure out how to build a nest,

when storks haven't bred here for hundreds of years.

When they collect branches, I think:

My God, do they even know how to build a nest?

Later they begin an even stranger process,

where they try to do it on a seemingly uncomfortable bed of branches.

And as the crowning glory

One morning I heard a noise from the chimney.

I never thought they would be so confident,

that they would dare to build a nest on our roof.

Now we have to wait and see if any chicks hatch.

Which will be the first wild storks to be born in Britain in 600 years.

And after waiting for permission for ten years,

We finally got our beavers.

An animal that has been extinct in Britain,

and which we have eradicated through hunting, had returned to British soil.

And they were there completely legally.

It was so exciting.

Beavers are amazing engineers.

They create complex watercourses that absorb storms and prevent flooding.

It's amazing how an animal's actions

can not only heal the earth but also change people's lives

far away from Knepp.

Incredibly, we now have two stork babies.

And they are ready for their first flight.

Inspired by this amazing story

People are arriving.

It has aroused some public interest.

So people now know what has been lost

in other parts of the country.

I found a butterfly!

A summer evening in June

The first stork chick in Britain in 600 years hatches.

It left its nest.

And flew.

Now I have a big pile of branches on top of the chimney.

An excuse to get Charlie to climb up there.

Are they on all three chimneys or just two?

He doesn't seem to be listening. That's not unusual.

- Charlie. - And?

- What does it look like up there? - There are meadowsweet growing up here.

Oh, no.

It may feel like the end of our story, but of course

Charlie has new ambitions and dreams.

About a future far away from Knepp.

From up here I can see

the path through the Downs to the River Adur.

The cattle, pigs and deer

and the ponies are looking for the water.

Think about how corridors can be shaped like veins in a body.

Throughout the UK.

And change the landscape.

Throughout our country, our world, our planet.

There is something magical about this enormous transformation.

On this exhausted piece of land. Most of the planet is exhausted.

It's amazing to imagine these large herbivores

wander around and recreate the landscape where they emerge.

It's possible that our pigs will reach all the way down to the beach.

Where they root in the seaweed and bring nutrients

from the coastal areas all the way up to the mountains.

It felt lonely for so long.

In one of our darkest moments, a friend sent this film clip of a man...

There's a crazy dance going on.

And everyone sitting around him thinks he's crazy.

But soon other brave people start dancing.

Soon everyone joins him.

And suddenly they have formed a movement.

And the few who are still sitting down suddenly appear strange.

They are not participating.

We are no longer lonely lunatics,

who dance like crazy to attract our attention.

We are part of a large movement of people who understand.

If we want to save the systems on which all life depends,

then we must change our way of looking at the earth.

And Knepp has shown how we can do it.

It shows that we can bring life back to places

where it did not previously exist.

We know how to do it. We know how to let nature back into our lives.

♪