PBS debuts Wilding tonight at 10 pm ET across PBS, PBS.org and the PBS App, a 72-minute feature based on Isabella Tree's bestselling 2018 book about the rewilding of Knepp Estate in West Sussex. [1] David Allen directed. Passion Pictures — the three-time Oscar-winning company behind Searching for Sugar Man — produced, with Rhiannon Neads playing the younger Isabella in recreated scenes alongside Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell in the present-day material.

The film documents what is now one of Europe's most significant rewilding experiments: a failing 400-year-old estate whose soil had been exhausted by decades of intensive plowing and chemical inputs, handed back to natural processes and to animals that mimic ancient herbivores — Exmoor ponies, Tamworth pigs, English longhorn cattle close in lineage to the aurochs. [2] In 20 years the land transformed from barren farmland into one of Britain's most important biodiversity hot spots, drawing back species from the brink of regional extinction and recording the first wild-raised white stork flight in Britain in roughly 600 years.

Wilding is PBS's Earth Day counter-programming to the morning's Disneynature release. Same day, different thesis. Where Orangutan argues for conservation at the scale of the Leuser forest and the Disney Conservation Fund, Wilding argues for rewilding at the scale of one farm, one couple, and one decision to stop. Tree and Burrell fought neighbors, regulators and entrenched agricultural tradition to make the estate what it is; the film includes that fight. [3] The film opens Wednesday on PBS and runs simultaneously on the PBS App for member-station audiences.

Passion Pictures' third collaboration with Silverback Films — following The Serengeti Rules (2018) and My Garden of a Thousand Bees — Wilding picked up festival attention at Sundance, Cannes and the London Film Festival in its theatrical run. [4] Tonight's PBS premiere opens the U.S. broadcast window. For the American audience watching the Disneynature release in the morning and the PBS film at night, the Earth Day bookend argues the same point from two budgets: the ecology holds where someone decides to let it.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles