What is Wild Card?
we’re campaigning for a britain that is wild and fair.
The British countryside is dying. Our ‘green and pleasant’ land may look lush, but in reality the diversity of wildlife in Britain has dwindled to a terrifying low. Butterflies are vanishing, ecosystems are beginning to collapse and species are dying out fast.
But how can this horror be happening in a nation of nature lovers? The answer is simple. Everyday citizens like us have lost control over the land we love.
Land ownership in Britain is more unequal than almost any other nation on Earth. With 50% of England owned by less than 1% of its population most of us are completely powerless to bring nature back from the brink.
Wild Card is here to change this. We are a citizens’ movement mobilising hundreds of thousands of ordinary people to call for the UK’s biggest landowners to rewild their lands before it’s too late. Be it the royal estates, the Church of England, the Oxbridge colleges or secretive offshore billionaires, we fearlessly confront the vested interests that control our dying lands.
We don’t have to sit in mourning as nature dies around us. Working together, we have the power to rewild.
what’s The Problem?
The state of Britain’s nature is abysmal.
The UK is “among the most nature-depleted countries in the world” and ranks in the bottom 10% of nations for the intactness of its biodiversity. Since the industrial revolution we’ve lost half our wildlife. Where once our ancestors shared these lands with temperate rainforests, wolves, beavers, eagles and lynx today you’re lucky to meet a roadkill hedgehog.
But who can change this? Today it is billionaires, royalty, aristocrats and powerful institutions who hold the cards.
What’s The Solution?
Wild Card is campaigning for a countryside that is wild and fair.
Our vision is to see 50% of Britain fully returned to nature by 2050. We see this as a moral mission. That means calling on the country’s largest landowners to urgently address the climate and nature crisis by beginning ambitious rewilding schemes now. We do this by creating public pressure through petitions, media coverage, marches, investigations and direct advocacy. But to change the rules of the game, we also call on the government to enact land reforms that reverse land inequality and give communities the power to rewild their own local landscapes.
What does rewilding look like? To rewild the land and water is to allow untamed life to return to ecosystems and landscapes, such that they are once again sustained by the natural processes that created them in the first place. In restoring these processes, humans are often intimately involved. Be it from rewetting bogs to reintroducing missing species, humans are very much invited to the rewilding party.
Where did it start?
In 2020, Wild Card’s co-founders found themselves isolated in lockdown and despairful about the ever worsening state of nature. Living in insecure accommodation with limited access to nature, they turned to books about rewilding for inspiration. Reading books like Feral by George Monbiot and Who Owns England? by Guy Shrubsole, these early Wild Cardigans realised two astonishing facts: Britain is both one of the most nature depleted countries on the planet and one of the most unequally owned. Surely these things couldn’t be a coincidence?
But when they looked around to find people challenging the UK’s biggest landowners to act, they found no one. All those big well funded NGOs your gran gives money to every month? Missing in action.
So they decided to act. With no money and certainly no land to play with they decided to launch a 21st century peasants revolt challenging the UK’s biggest landowners to rewild. The first Wild Card campaign launched in 2021 and called on the sprawling, ancient and ecologically devastated royal estates to take action. Against all expectations the campaign went massive. Soon TV celebrities like Chris Packham, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Kate Humble were backing it. Leading climate scientists joined. Over 100,000 people signed our petition. With momentum behind us hundreds of us marched through the streets of London, hundreds more hiked across the moors, we delivered a 5 metre sculpture of a medieval gauntlet to Prince William, we led blistering investigations into royal greenwashing, held community meetings and a few years later… we started to win! Now, beaver releases, rainforest restoration and river rewilding are all taking place on the royal estates: proof that people power works.
Today the rapidly growing Wild Card movement is expanding its campaign to take on other big landowners. With over 250,000 people backing our petitions to date, our public mandate is growing stronger everyday.
Today we have three missions:
1
To persuade the UK’s largest landowners to rewild 50% their estates by 2050.
2
To persuade the UK government to rewild 50% of Britain by 2050 and pass land reforms giving communities the power to control and restore their local landscapes.
3
To help everyone in our country realise our deep and sacred interconnection with nature.
our value statement
We are joyful and welcoming. Creativity, silliness and humour are our weapons.
We are uncompromising. We believe that more-than-human-life has a right to exist without human exploitation in a state of true wildness.
We don’t accept tradition as an excuse. It is the duty of each generation to reforge traditions that are inhumane and unjust.
We welcome everyone. We do not tolerate bigotry, and we stand in solidarity with all oppressed peoples.
We recognise the complexity of the issue. We know that reaching a half-wilded country will take time, but believe it’s essential to aim big and to start now.
We want a just transition. Rewilding gives us the opportunity for people and nature to work together for mutual benefit to progress towards a more sustainable future.
Who funds us?
Initially we were completely run by volunteers and powered by our supporters’ donations.
In 2023 we received our first grant funding and are now proud to receive funding from Gower Street, The Frederick Mulder Foundation, The Climate Majority Project, The Network for Social Change, The Movements Trust, Ben Goldsmith, The Kreitman Foundation and the Lister Trust.
Today we have a small funded team working part time but are majority powered by volunteers. We rely heavily on supporter donations and every single pound donated goes towards campaigning for a wilder and fairer Britain.
