By Colin Wiles, housing consultant. 

A friend of mine recently booked a trip to Chernobyl. It was, unsurprisingly, cheap, given that the site is still a tad radioactive (although travel companies assure potential visitors that it’s perfectly safe).

But that hasn’t stopped nature from returning en masse.

After the nuclear powerplant explosion of 1986, 100,000 people were forced to move and a 2,800 square kilometre exclusion zone was created. Since then, wildlife has multiplied – lynx, wolves, wild boar, bison, elk, and brown bears roam the area – and hundreds of rare plant and animal species have been recorded. Chernobyl is now a pre-lapsarian natural paradise.

Leaving nature to itself, albeit accidentally, allows us the chance to see what the world might look like without human influence. The answer is generally very positive.

In southern England the Chernobyl story has been repeated, albeit on a smaller, less accidental scale, at the Knepp estate in Sussex.

The story is told in a book I’ve been reading over Christmas called Wilding by Isabella Tree. In 2001 she and her husband Charlie Burrell, faced with mounting losses, decided to return their arable farm of 1,400 hectares to nature.

With government support, they fenced the entire area, added cattle grids, and stopped cultivating the fields. Pesticides and fertilizers were banned, and Longhorn cattle, Tamworth pigs, Exmoor ponies, and deer were brought in and allowed to roam freely. Scrub and saplings spread across the fields.

The results were remarkable. Within just a few years biodiversity had multiplied tenfold. Rare species such as nightingales, turtle doves, storks, and emperor butterflies arrived in numbers. Bats and insects multiplied.

In the longer term, Tree and Burrell have a vision of a savannah-type landscape where animals can roam free with little human intervention, and where apex predators such as lynx or wolves can be introduced (as they have at Yellowstone National Park with dramatic results). They also want to introduce beavers to manage the water systems.

What has this to do with housing, I hear you cry. Well, the book deals with three key themes that I’ve been banging on about for well over a decade: climate change, land use, and flooding.

Firstly, increasing the biodiversity of trees and plants has made the Knepp landscape more resilient to climate changes and allows more carbon to be stored away.

In terms of the use of land, Tree and Burrell were attacked for wasting good agricultural land that could be feeding the nation. But Tree makes it clear that this urge to use every inch of land for food harks back to a nostalgic wartime mentality that’s now extinct. We have more than enough land for food.

In fact, the planet could easily feed 10 billion people and a third of the food we produce – 1.3 billion tonnes a year – is thrown away. In 2015/16, Tesco alone admitted to throwing away 50,000 tonnes of food from their UK stores.

When I was at school leftover food (including bacon rinds) would be scraped into a metal dustbin and sent to the pig farm. That all stopped in the BSE and foot-and-mouth crises of 1996 and 2001, and all waste food now goes to landfill. But food yields have also increased dramatically due to new technologies.

World cereal harvests have increased 20% over the last decade. And, increasingly, prime agricultural land is being used for non-food uses, including bio-fuels. It’s estimated that 40% of US maize is used to fuel cars.

So, the truth is that we have more than enough land for the food we need, not to mention the land also wasted on non-food uses, such as pony paddocks and golf courses

More land could be made available for housing, including marginal land close to existing settlements and green belt land close to transport hubs. On top of this, development can often be good for wildlife, replacing sterile chemical-soaked fields with biodiverse back gardens and open spaces.

The third issue is flooding. You can rest assured that we will face catastrophic floods across England over the next two months, with thousands of homes, including social homes, being affected. It’s happening more and more frequently.

Isabella Tree makes it clear that this has come about as a result of three things: the canalisation of rivers from the 19^th century onwards which disrupted the natural flood plains of river systems; the drive towards monocultural agriculture and intensive grazing of upland areas that compacts low-lying soils and creates close-cropped hills, both causing water to shed too fast; and the philosophy of draining every inch of land and sending rainwater to the sea as quickly as possible instead of allowing it to be soaked up in natural flood plains and dense upland vegetation.

The solution, says Tree, is to re-wild rivers, restore their former winding courses and flood plains that will soak up water, re-plant the upper slopes to allow water to be stored by a wider diversity of trees and shrubs, and, above all, to bring back the beaver.

Beavers are on a par with the Dutch as the best water engineers in the world. They have an astonishing ability to build dams, to make lakes and ponds, and create new eco-systems that bring in a plethora of wildlife. And all of this reduces flooding downstream.

In housing, we sometimes can’t see beyond the ends of our noses. There’s a wider world out there and a wider debate to be had about how the future could look.

Books like Wilding offer the chance of making strong arguments about the way we use land and how smart development and a re-connection with nature can improve our wellbeing. I thoroughly recommend it.

At our upcoming Climate Change annual conference, we will be looking at what housing can do to play its part in tackling the issue, as well as some of the best practice already happening in the sector.