A manifesto for the restoration of land-based culture, exploring how a return to the living earth and the creation of land-based communities could help shape a more beautiful future.

Our housing crisis, biodiversity crisis, mental health crisis and climate crisis are usually treated as separate problems requiring separate solutions. This essay argues that they are all symptoms of a deeper crisis of separation: the gradual unraveling of the relationships between people, place and the living world. It explores how Britain’s landscape bears the marks of that separation, and why small land-based communities might become pioneer places where a different pattern of life can begin to take root.

Ecologists know that forests don’t appear all at once.

When a previously forested landscape has been stripped bare by a glacier, it doesn’t leap directly back into mature woodland once the glacier retreats. The conditions simply aren’t there for that. The soil is poor. The climate at ground level is too harsh. The rich web of relationships that actually constitutes a forest has been broken apart.

Instead, the process begins with pioneer species…