Wilder Blean Staff Images

For me, Wilder Blean is the next step in how we think about managing nature reserves and land for wildlife. For many years nature conservation has focused on habitats or species and humans being humans, we have put things into boxes or classifications, and managed areas as per a prescription for what a habitat should be or look like (woodland, meadow, heathland). The approach we are taking with Wilder Blean looks to what a truly wild space might look like, letting nature take the lead rather than our interpretation of what a habitat “should" look like. We have been using grazing animals , introducing natural processes more and more on our nature reserves and the affects we have seen on these sites in smaller areas is fantastic. I’m excited to see this at scale with animals and natural processes having effects on over 500 hectares! I hope that Wilder Blean will not seem so radical in the coming years and that this approach will benefit wildlife across the UK.

To me the Wilder Blean project is about making a radical change in how we think about nature; to start looking after nature in its full complexity, and letting wildlife take the lead. The Wilder Blean project is about proving that we can have wild spaces full of nature embedded within the densely populated southeast of England. Spaces where people and wildlife share the space and co-exist. The Wilder Blean project is ambitious and provides hope that we have the tools, motivation and community buy-in to fight the climate and biodiversity crises locally and beyond.