Call of the wild | Wild, Manchester Museum

How do you find joy and hope in a climate emergency? When all around you is in flames, it can be difficult not just to give up and look away. As a sector, it’s a problem we’ve been wrestling with for years. How do we strike a balance between sounding the alarm while not scaring people into inaction?

Manchester Museum might just have found the answer with its latest exhibition Wild. Taking a hopeful and inspirational look at the positive difference people can make in the face of catastrophe, it asks us to redefine our relationship with wild spaces and see joy wherever we find them.

Be that in the rolling Pennines or the patch of unmown grass at the side of a car park, this exhibition shows that wildness is everywhere – we just need to look for it.

The story begins by unpicking where our notion of “wild” comes from. Through a gallery evoking the rich splendour of a 19th-century salon, visitors are introduced to a mixture of reproductions of epic landscapes, taxidermy dioramas and wallpaper designs.

Taken together, they argue that our idea of wild is a concoction of Victorian nostalgia, wishful thinking and opposition to industrialisation. This mix results in an idea of wilderness that is both unattainable and unreal.

Harmless exaggeration, perhaps, but as the rest of the exhibition shows, this unrealistic and pristine image of how the wild should be has real implications for the natural world and those living in it.

Through projects that have created or rewilded spaces, the exhibition argues that we shouldn’t think of our relationship with nature as something static. While some may look for wilderness for the sake of nature and the lives of the animals and plants that live in it, others may protect it for cultural reasons or the benefits it brings us as a society.

The exhibition makes no value judgement on which motivation is right and asks what is important to us, as individuals, and why.

It’s interesting that one of the first of these projects is a commercial relationship. When Charlie Burrell found that his farm couldn’t make a profit, he turned to a radical solution. Facing financial ruin, he moved away from the modern farming techniques that had failed his farm and put his trust in nature. 

In 2002, the Knepp rewilding project was born. In the 20-odd years since that decision, Burrell’s 3,500 acres of land in West Sussex have been transformed. The heavy soil that he once struggled to plough is now turned by the hooves of reintroduced deer and other large grazing animals.

Where fertilisers failed, the natural processes Burrell has welcomed back have resulted in an abundance of life. From stags to storks, it’s this life that is on display in a staged diorama of what visitors might expect to see on one of Knepp’s safaris, which is how Burrell now makes his money.

Spiritually motivated

At the other end of the spectrum is the bushland of Nowanup Boodja in Western Australia. Like Knepp, its story is defined by agriculture. Unlike Knepp, it’s motivation for rewilding is spiritual rather than financial. This has resulted in a very different type of rewilding, where the land is shaped not just by nature, but also by the human stories that inhabit it.

The Australian government designated the land in Nowanup as suitable for grazing and it was cleared for sheep farming. Forty years later, the land had was known as “Death Valley” on account of how little life remained. In 2005, Eugene Eades, a Goreng Noongar Elder and leader, was invited by National Trust Western Australia to help restore Nowanup’s land through indigenous farming practices and bushcraft.

The importance of returning this landscape to a place for living stories is explored through a replica of one of the huts in which these take place. Today, nature and culture flourish hand-in-hand in a landscape filled with spiritual meaning.

One of the most fascinating projects shared in Wild is that of the Yellowstone National Park in the US. It’s here that you get a real sense of how an idealised version of nature can actually do harm.

I was lucky enough to get up close and personal in the museum’s conservation studio with the star of this display – a giant buffalo – and it is through this animal that the story of the persecution of the Shoshone people is told.

Moved off the park as they were not considered part of the white American aesthetic that a wilderness was supposed to be, their home was taken away from them alongside their means of sustaining themselves through the systematic extermination of the nomadic herds.

Through many years of struggle for recognition as part of the park, buffalo have been reintroduced alongside the tribes that have been given licence to hunt them again.

Popular culture

My favourite section of the exhibition is a simple collection of toys and children’s films, all with a theme of wildness running through them. From a Sylvanian Families canal boat to a DVD of My Neighbour Totoro, I looked back to my own childhood and reflected on how popular culture continues to shape my relationship with nature, both for better and worse.

Wild is packed to the rafters with positivity. Be it the bright and striking animal portraits by learning disabled artists to the inspirational story of young people visiting the countryside for the first time to learn music, this exhibition is a celebration of people and nature positively benefiting each other. 

This joyfulness is the exhibition’s superpower and points the way to a more effective way of engaging with the climate emergency. Too many exhibitions have filled me with a sense of hopelessness while not giving any answers to what I, as an individual, can do.

With Wild, I want to be part of every story, to get involved and help inspirational people who are making change on a community level. You inspire generational change by putting joy in people’s hearts – much like this exhibition did in mine.