When he moved to Howorth and started to participate in the wilding project, he found himself transformed by the transformation taking place around him. The paradox of forcing a landscape to become wild was no longer a paradox in the Anthropocene Age, which was bound to reverse man’s absorption in nature’s rhythms and force nature to mimic favourite human narratives. Wilderness, after being exiled from paradise, could find salvation in national parks and conservation areas. It was too late to let it be itself, but it could be legally exempt from exploitation, placed beyond the reach of utility and, as a place of ‘Outstanding Natural Beauty’, like the Quantocks, acquire some of the glamorous self-justification of art. The lost paradise had of course not been one of bloodless harmony, but of self-regulating abundance and predation, before the devastating advantage of machines fell into the hands of a single species. The passenger pigeon, once the most numerous bird in North America and perhaps the world – with one flock, observed as late as 1866, a mile wide and three-hundred miles long, with three and a half billion birds in it – was extinct by 1914, without the assistance of an asteroid or an Ice Age.

In the Yellowstone National Park, the reintroduction of wolves had rebalanced the entire ecosystem, breaking up large herds of grazing animals, keeping elk away from favoured pastures, leading to the regeneration of aspens and cottonwoods, and to an increasing number of eagles and ravens, which were able to feed on the carcasses of wolf kills, and so on: a ‘trophic cascade’ correcting the extermination of the wolves initially endorsed by the Park authorities. Wilderness enthusiasts argued for the reintroduction of wolves and lynx in Scotland, but they ran up against the opposition of livestock farmers and sporting estates. Instead, a hundred thousand deer had to be culled each year to prevent them from overgrazing and impeding forest regeneration.