Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Annabel Heseltine. I'm a journalist and broadcaster and you're very welcome to the very first episode of Hope Springs, a new podcast from the Resurgence Trust.
Resurgence is a movement, a magazine and a manifesto for hope. And in this series, we'll be speaking with people working on the front lines of the environmental crisis who have found reasons to be hopeful.
[00:00:31] Speaker A: Think of it as a guide to recovery and to discovering a sense of optimism and purpose even in the midst of grave challenges. And I can think of no one better to open this series than the author and rewilding activist, Ben Goldsmith.
Ben's story is coloured by a tragedy that most of us can only imagine.
In 2019, his 15 year old daughter Iris was killed in an accident on their farm in Somerset.
And over the five years since then, he has channelled his grief at losing her into something truly remarkable, the ripples from which are already spreading out across the west of England and beyond.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: I hope you get as much from our conversation as I did.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Edward Abbey famously said that the idea of wilderness needs no defending, only defenders. Ben, over the last few years, you've clearly established yourself as one of the defenders of wilderness in this country and beyond. What has motivated you?
[00:01:44] Speaker C: I love that you used that quote. You know, I have that on my twitter handle, the Edward Abbey quote. I thought that's why you chose it. I read the monkey wrench gang when I was at school as a teenager and I loved it so much. Edward Abbey was the great defender of wilderness. I mean, I grew up dreaming of wild places in this country, the country in which I grew up, and really, there aren't any. We've lost so much.
We really can't fathom the abundance of nature and wildlife that's been lost in Britain.
If nature is wealth, then Britain, alongside Irelandhood, is among the most impoverished countries on the planet. And so I have made it my business and my passion since I was very young to try to do everything I can to restore that wildness. Because what we know is it recovers very, very fast if given the chance. And things have happened, especially in the last decade in this country, the return of beavers, the return of wild boar, the growing number of acres being rewilded, that I would never have even dreamed of really, 20 years ago. It's kind of happening. So this is. I think this is the purpose of my life.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Yes. I mean, it is embarrassing that we've lost 50% of our biodiversity. Can we just go into that? And what actually that means? I mean, why is it that our country is so poor and badly depleted.
[00:03:10] Speaker C: I mean, I think at the heart of it is this idea of.
Of low expectations. There's a term, shifting baseline syndrome, which describes the notion that when we get old, we yearn for nature to be as vibrant and abundant as it was when we were children, without realizing that when we were children, it was already terribly depleted and nothing as compared with the nature that our parents or our grandparents or our great grandparents knew. So we've lost touch with the idea of what nature is meant to be in this country. Now, eyewitness accounts describe rivers of migrating birds up east anglia just three, four generations ago. Enormous numbers of wading birds and geese and huge flocks in the sky turning dark for days on end with the volume of birds or the eel migration out of the seven estuary. So many eels migrating out to start their march to breed in the Sargasso sea that it was as if there was no water, only eels. And I saw a statistic recently that scared the bejesus out of me, which is that the total salmon catch on just one scottish river, the tweed in 1822, was a thousand times larger than the salmon catch on that same river in 1922. And the salmon catch on that one river in 1922 was a thousand times greater than all the salmon caught in all the British Isles in 2022. So we're talking about reductions in natural abundance that aren't 50% or 70%. They're 99.9 recurring percent. When you look at things like salmon or herring or eels or migrating birds, we simply can't imagine the abundance that once hummed and chirruped and sang all around us.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: But in that time, the population has doubled of the entire world. And population is the sort of the elephant in the corner that we don't talk about. But ultimately the pressure that is put on human wildlife conflict has grown exponentially. And so now what are you trying to do to change that?
[00:05:12] Speaker C: But I don't think population is the be all and end all. I mean, just take two countries. Take Sri Lanka and Ireland.
Those are both islands of roughly the same size.
Sri Lanka has four times the population of Ireland, and yet they still have enormous tracts of native forest. They have 1000 wild leopards. They have 7000 wild elephants living on that island. It's a place of unbelievable natural abundance and vibrancy, a place in which people have figured out how to deal with the challenges of coexistence. Now, it's not always easy. It's not easy to live alongside leopards or elephants. But the idea that population pressure prevents you from doing so is proven wrong by places like Sri Lanka or India or lots of countries that have eastern philosophies of coexistence and harmony with nature. But it's not easy. That's the point. No one pretends that it is. But in this country and across much of the west, we are simply seemingly incapable of putting up with wildlife. I was on the board of Defra for five years, so everyone gave me their pennies worth on what Defra was doing wrong and what needed to be managed better. And the default was, we need to get rid of stuff, we need to kill stuff. The seals are causing collapse in salmon numbers, forgetting, of course, the fact that not so long ago there were a lot of salmon and a lot of seals. Beavers are creating a terrible mess along the river and got to get rid of these bloody beavers. So I think at heart, we're kind of zoophobic in this country. Even if we project our animal loving and our wildlife loving credentials to anyone who'll listen, we make the best nature documentaries. David Attenborough is our national icon.
We give money to wildlife charities such as the WWF, that are working in places like Sri Lanka to help foster greater protection for wildlife. And yet, when it comes to actually living with anything more charismatic than. Than a blue tit, you know, we have real trouble in this country. So I think the shift that needs to take place isn't practical, it's psychological. You know, we need a shift of consciousness in which we make it our goal to reinsert our systems back into natural ones without friction. We need to put ourselves back into the miracle of nature. And once the consciousness shift takes place, the practical elements become much more straightforward.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: So really what we're talking about is the worst case of nimbyism that you can imagine. But you talk about black inkblots at your home in Somerset, you have started an inkblot that is spreading across with five different owners, one of which is an ngo now heal. For people trying to imagine what it means to rewild, perhaps you'd like to explain a bit about what you did.
[00:07:56] Speaker C: Yeah, I love that term that you've just used, Nimbys. I think there is a kind of exceptionalism among the British in that we think it's great for people elsewhere to live with wildlife, even big and tricky wildlife like leopards. But not us here. No, no, we're far too civilized here in Britain. We couldn't possibly do with the mess of beavers or the fear of wolves.
I think we are wildlife, Nimbys, but that is all changing.
And it's changing partly because people, more than ever before, are experiencing a kind of upwelling of love for nature. People are excited about the idea of restoring storks and beavers and wildcats and pool frogs back to our island. They want more nature. The idea of rewilding has really caught the zeitgeist in a way that you couldn't possibly have predicted not that long ago. And I think that it's not as difficult as people think to restore landscapes in this way because, remember, 85% of the food we produce in this country comes from just 20% of the land. And no one is suggesting rewilding, grade one or grade two farmland.
[00:09:06] Speaker B: There are five grades of farmland, and you're suggesting that all of the grade five should be turned back into wilding.
[00:09:15] Speaker C: So about 85% of the food we produce in this country comes from just 20% of the land in those highly productive areas on which we are dependent for our food. Nobody is suggesting rewilding. What people are suggesting is a way of farming that doesn't trash the soil, the watercourses, the pollinators and all the natural capital on which farming depends. In other words, loosely kind of described as regenerative farming. We need much more regenerative approaches. If I have eczema on my inner elbow, I don't soak my entire body weekly in steroid cream. You know, I have a precision approach in which I use a small amount of that cream. Well, it's the same with productive farming. They can use drones and soil sensors to use far less chemicals. They can use practices such as no till to protect the soil and reduce soil erosion. They can step back from the water courses and let the water courses be more free. In order to protect the water, we need regenerative approaches in the productive land. The least productive 20% of our land in this country produces less than 1% of the food. Now, the idea that Dartmoor or Bodmin or the Lake district or the Yorkshire Dales or the Somerset levels are making any impact whatsoever on feeding the nation is laughable. And in fact, most of those landscapes are farmed with sheep. More than 80% of the lamb and so on that is produced using those sheep is exported anyway. So what I suggest is that in landscapes which are simply not productive, that we switch to a much wilder way of farming. You can call it rewilding, you can call it silvo pasture, you can call it woodland pasture. But it is a form of farming that I'm suggesting because we have a 3000, 4000 year. Farming culture in this country and the communities that farm our national parks are the sole and the backbone of those areas and of the whole country. And it really matters that there is a just transition for them. And I think that it would be a complete tragedy to see people leave the land in these places. But there is a perfect silver bullet, and that is to ask those farmers to move back to farming extensively in the traditional way with native species. In other words, native old english longhorn cattle or belted galloways or Scotland highland cattle. Because cattle have been in this island forever for tens, hundreds of thousands of years, they're perfectly evolved in our ecosystems where sheep aren't sheep, they've come from the Near east and they're used to trotting about on warm, dry, rocky hillsides. In Asia, minority. Someone said once that they've got even the wrong feet. It's like going to a festival in stilettos.
They're not happy. 10% of them die of exposure every year. In our upland landscapes. If they eat the acorns from english oaks, they get sick and die. Sheep are not meant to be in such numbers in these landscapes. But native cattle have the opposite effect. The forensic grazing by sheep leaves you with a bare hillside of the kind that you see from the train window. If you go through any of our remote landscapes, a landscape grazed extensively by traditional native cattle is one that is a kind of mosaic woodland pasture with pockets of scrub, with wildflowers, with the odd tree that got away and became an open grown oak or what have you. These are the landscapes that simply thrum with life.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: And how is that going to be afforded?
[00:12:31] Speaker C: So these landscapes that are most suitable for ambitious nature recovery are not producing any food anyway. It's negligible the amount of food they're producing and they're also not providing livelihoods. The people farming sheep in these national parks are deriving 80 or 90% of their total revenues from taxpayer handouts. So all that is suggested today is that England's new environmental land management scheme, which replaces the old european scheme, rewards farmers in our national parks and other remote landscapes for making a transition to the kind of farming that keeps them in business, but also which fosters the meaningful restoration of nature. And that's super easy. It means getting rid of 1000 sheep on your farm and having instead 80 or 100 longhorn cattle. And the cattle will do the business. They graze in such a way. They browse, they trample, they've got dung. The cows are in the ecosystem, whereas the sheep are on the ecosystem. I mean, just one native cow produces a quarter of its own body weight in invertebrate life every year. So if you put a wildlife cam on the dung, just the dung, in springtime, you'll see wading birds, you'll see amphibians, frogs, all coming to eat the dung beetles and the other invertebrate life that gathers around it. And where I am in Canwood in South Somerset, there is an inkblot of wildness that's growing outwards, partly on account of the changing subsidies and changing incentives.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: And can you tell me more about that inkblot? And zero in on it, as if I was in a drone hovering above. How you've changed the water course. What has happened with the arrival of the beavers? I've walked there and I've seen the stumps that look like sharpened pencils sticking out and the water that's flowing in different directions. What was the inspiration of this?
[00:14:16] Speaker C: Yeah, it's great, isn't it?
So I'm lucky enough, like you, to live in a part of South Somerset which was historically known as Selwood Forest. So it was a bit like the new forest. It would have been a great, quite marshy, oak and willow dominated wood pasture stretching from bath down to frome, across one way to Winkanton, across the other way to wells.
40 or 50,000 hectare hunting forest. And the reason why it wasn't plowed up and turned into fields is because it's terrible land. It's clay, which means that half the year it's concrete and half the year it's like the battle of the Somme. So it just. It's in that grade five category of low productivity. But, of course, with the arrival of steam machinery, the forest was plowed up and turned into the great patchwork quilt of neon green fertilized fields overlaid with a grid of neatly cropped hedges that we see today.
But nothing's profitable there. It's not a productive landscape. And so in my part of Somerset, my farm, I set out to farm it originally in the way that I felt I was supposed to. So let's make space for nature around the edges, but fundamentally, we'll have 50 cows, 50 sheep, and shunt them around up to their knees in mud. And I realized there was just no way this was going to be profitable, even with the subsidies. It was just not workable. It's just not the land for highly productive farming. It's at the center of this historic wood pasture, selwood, and a place of really interesting history, as well as it was the last repository of shamanistic witchcraft, a place where the wild spirit of people and of nature lasted a lot longer than everywhere else. But, of course, the arrival of steam machinery and then subsidies for farming did for all of that. So I was getting fed up. And then the disaster of losing my daughter in an accident on the farm in July 2019, my daughter Iris, led me to change radically how we run.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: Our farm, which you wrote the most beautiful book about. God is an octopus.
[00:16:17] Speaker C: Well, I.
When such things happen to you, you, yeah, you're engulfed in an unimaginable darkness. And what I found is that being in nature helped me in some way. There was solace and meaning and, in time, joy to be found just being in nature. I mean, in the early days, I went. There's a bend of a river at the bottom of the valley where the beavers are. And I went swimming there six, seven, eight times a day, because being submerged in that water and coming out, blinking into the kind of evening sunshine, sort of frog's eye view of the world with dragonflies and butterflies and just the gentle hum of nature all around me, it just made me feel okay. And I think a lot of people who are going through difficult times will associate with that. Just a little walk in the park, a warm cup of tea in the garden, in the birdsong, just makes you feel better for a moment. You feel held by nature. And Iris, of course, spent her life in the wilder corners of our farm, around the pond and along the woodland edge, and her pony and with her friends. And I thought, well, why am I doing this? Why not just prioritize nature here? It's the perfect place for it. Clay may be rubbish for farming, but it's pretty good for trees in nature. So we just set about on this rewilding mission. We got rid of all the sheep, all the cows, ripped out all the fencing, removed the gates, opened up some gaps in the hedges, pulled up the field drains, filled in some ditches and re wiggled others.
And then we just sat back and watched nature reawaken. And it was like watching a kind of giant awakening from a long slumber. And suddenly little orchids and flowers popping up in the strangest of places. Little pockets of dog, rose and hawthorn and blackthorn were coming up in the middle of the fields. Bird numbers on a kind of j curve trajectory. I mean, 800% increase in yellowhammers we've had in four years. There are unbelievable increased kestrels back goshawks, barn owls, and, of course, beavers. And beavers are, in my opinion, the keystone of all keystone species. This idea of keystone species is that some creatures have a disproportionately important impact in the system.
All species are important, they all have their role, but some are keystone in which they hold up the whole system.
The native cattle are one.
[00:18:39] Speaker B: Like the archway.
[00:18:40] Speaker C: Yeah, the keystone, exactly. The idea is derived from an architectural technique in medieval bridges where you had a keystone and if you pulled the keystone out, the arch would collapse, which was convenient for a retreating army. And the native cattle are a keystone species. They are the key to restoring vibrant mosaic wood pastures in the uplands. For example, beavers, I think, are the most important of all because they build these little dams along the creeks and streams in order to create themselves a linear swimming pool in which to escape predators in which to hide and so on. And in so doing, they create what looks at canward like a kind of like a string of japanese rice terraces or something, which just absolutely sing with life. At certain times of year, there are so many baby frogs and toads that it's like a carpet and we have to stop walking close to the water. We've got two pairs of kingfishers within half a kilometre.
Birdsong is riotous and they've built little canals out sideways so they can reach the aspen and black poplar and other trees that grow in the. In the woodland. And those little canals have become an extension of the watercourse. So what we have is this kind of linear, funny, meandering wetland that is just the hub of all life on our farm. It's, to the untrained eye, it's messy. You could say, well, what's all this water doing? You know, this water is meant to disappear within 24 hours of rain, preferably into people's living rooms in froome. Poor people have froome flooded every single year. And now the beavers are catching up all that lovely rainwater and holding it and releasing it slowly through the year, and they're holding it in a wetland that really is incredibly important for nature and wildlife. But it's completely changed the look of a 30 yard thick strip of our valley bottom. So, yeah, it's. It's. It's paradise. It's becoming paradise. And my neighbors have followed suit. We now have three neighbors doing the same on 1200 acres combined. And we've just put in a bid for a landscape recovery scheme with Defra. And if we get that, which we'll know by the end of the year, then there'll be 30 farmers joining us in creating wetlands and wood pastures over a 12,000 acre area, which is a good chunk of the old selwood forest. It's a good 15 or so percent of the old selwood forest area.
And this is happening up and down the country. There are these inkblots expanding outwards from particular farms or clusters of farms in places from Bodmin to Dartmoor up to. I was just in Cumbria, in the Lake district near Kendal, where there's a 50,000 acre landscape recovery project ongoing. And all these really ambitious projects are happening on land which is not suitable for highly productive, intensive farming, like at.
[00:21:15] Speaker B: Knepp, which, of course, was a cattle farm, but again, wasn't productive.
[00:21:19] Speaker C: Well, nep, of course, is the inspiration for all of this. I mean, it's hard to overstate the impact that Charlie Burrell, Isabella tree and their family have had in 25 years at Knepp, witnessed the most extraordinary recovery of nature. And I was there the other day with a group and one guy said, wow, it feels like Africa here. It doesn't feel like England. And Charlie said, well, in fact, England doesn't feel like England now. This is what England is meant to be. These ecosystems don't exist anymore. They have the highest density of breeding songbirds of any site in Britain. They've got storks now in large numbers, kettling above these huge wood pastures over nearly 3000 acres. And the place is just so intense with life that you feel it through your bones.
And they're making more money than they've ever made.
There's a business model in all of this now.
[00:22:12] Speaker B: There are some very large landowners in this country and there are people who feel distanced from those lands with elms, with this idea of environmental land management, is there going to be an inclusion for accessibility for people who aren't part of that movement?
[00:22:30] Speaker C: Yeah, I think those images you see on the british newspapers have a hot day and people crammed like sardines on the beaches are a bit depressing because people don't have anywhere else to go in Spain or Portugal or Italy. People fan out from the cities and go in all directions to wherever it is, the village or the particular landscape that they know and the one that they've been used to visiting. And then in terms of all those sardines on the beach, people who don't have a piece of land to manage, there are ways, and it's starting to happen. I co founded and co chaired with Sadiq Khan, the rewilding London task force, and we found myriad ways to weave wild nature back through the fabric of our capital city. If you go for a walk in Primrose Hill or Regents park or Hyde park or pretty much any of our open areas, you'll find these pockets of scrub, little exclosures in which we've planted hawthorn and dog rose and so on.
The watercourses in London's parks have now got wild reed beds, Wandsworth Common. The wandl, which is a stream that's been culverted for the last 150 years, has been resurfaced and is now meandering in the open sunshine and kids are playing along it. There's loads of rewilding happening right where people live.
[00:23:43] Speaker B: I loved the comment by the environment minister. I believe it was in Mumbai about seeing more buildings amongst trees, amongst forest and the landscape. And London's always been known for. For its parks, but the idea that we could take that further and grow the wetlands, I love that idea.
[00:24:02] Speaker C: Our dita thackeray from Shiv Sena, who was the environment minister of Maharashtra, he said several times, he said, I don't want us to think of Mumbai as a place of trees among the buildings. I want us to think of this as a forest with buildings in it.
[00:24:17] Speaker B: When I did my thesis for my conservation masters, I did it on the heather beetle, which necessitated me walking across the moors of Scotland. And one of the biggest problems I saw there was the overgrazing, the ungulates, the deer. And we have this problem across Scotland. But it seems to me, from that brilliant podcast you did recently with Steve Bickelwright in the Afric Highlands, that they are finding ways to reduce the pressure on the land and let what was originally forest come back. And I know you've been up there, so I'd love to hear more about it from you.
[00:24:53] Speaker C: Yes, Scotland. I mean, like everyone else, I used to think it was natural, you know, those kind of vast, beautiful, bleak vistas of hills and mountains and glens without a single tree or single patch of scrub. You see the odd meadow, pipit, maybe a crow, and enormous numbers of deer huddling on the side of the hill, or sheep in some parts of Scotland. And I just thought that's how Scotland was meant to be. And I once was there as part of a small group and a swedish ecologist said, this is the most ecologically degraded landscape I've seen in my whole career. And it got me thinking and I realized that actually, these landscapes used to be incredibly complex. They used to have forests that were famous all the way to Rome 2000 years ago. The caledonian forest. The Romans used to round up the last of the wild aurochs, the wild cattle, and the last caledonian bears to fight in the Colosseum. This was a place full of wildlife and it wasn't brazilian style trees on trees, dense, closed canopy forest. It was a much more open mosaic forest engineered by the people who grazed native highland cattle and also the wild boar, the beavers and the other animals that lived there. And the whole lot, of course, was cleared as part of the highland clearances. And you talked earlier a little bit about, is rewilding going to bring about a new kind of clearance of the land in England or Scotland? Well, evidence suggests that when land enters nature recovery as a priority, with continued extensive traditional farming, you get a doubling of jobs and you get a tenfold increase in participation in the land by people as volunteers or students or what have you. So it seems that rewilding is bringing people back into the land. And nowhere is that more true than Scotland. These vast deer estates that may employ one or one and a half people, hoards of deer, and you get an overweight american or German who comes along and pays to shoot ten deer out of the window of their jeep. It's basically like canned shooting. It's like shooting cows in Hyde park. It's a terrible economic model and it doesn't create jobs and it leaves the land completely stripped of nature. So those keystones, Scotland, the beaver, the wild boar, which is nature's gardener, the native cattle and the wolf, which, of course, keeps deer numbers in check, were all removed at roughly the same time. And so the entire bridge collapsed. Well, now there are people putting it back together. Anders Holtz Poulsen, my friend who's got a large estate near a place called Glenfeshy and a tributary of the spey, reduced deer numbers from something like. Something extraordinary, like 50 deer per square kilometre average down to fewer than 2.
[00:27:34] Speaker B: /Km² which is about what it should be.
[00:27:36] Speaker C: Yeah, any less than any more than three and you get no recruitment of young trees at all.
This place, it's like moving from black and white into technicolour, driving through the land south of Inverness and into glenfeshy, because suddenly there are trees and little saplings growing all the way up to the top. There are orchids and wildflowers. At certain times of year, there's birdsong. The river's been allowed to breach its banks and you've got this wonderful multi braided, shallow, meandering river that periodically has a torrent pouring down it and periodically forms into all these little pools in which the salmon come and breed. It's a dynamic landscape, and deer are far fewer. And they don't have all the keystones back yet. They're reintroducing beavers. At the moment, beavers are spreading nicely. The wild boar is back in Scotland as a result of illegal releases.
There are no large grazing bovines, a bison or aurochs yet, but there are highland cattle in small numbers, and they play an important role, and I think, in terms of carnivores, we'll see the lynx back in Scotland soon. There's a growing clamour for the reintroduction of lynx, which is a big cat native to Britain. A thousand years ago, the last ones were killed, probably in Wales, and about the size of an alsatian dog. They hunt. They are ambush predators that hunt roe deer. They will be back. And my view is that once lynx are back, it will become unstoppable. A movement to bring back wolves as well. And imagine the economic opportunity in that. Imagine if you knew there was a place in Scotland where you could travel with your family and you could sit on a little veranda or outside a tent, and you could hear the howl of wolves in the mountain. We'd all be going, we'd spend a fortune, everyone would go up there. And I think that we shouldn't have to get on a plane and fly to Kenya or Romania to see wildlife. We should be able to get on the train and go and see wildlife in our own national parks. And I think that that's becoming more and more obvious. And Scotland, I think, will be Europe's first rewilding nation. I think it's right now inexorably being woven into the identity of Scotland, this idea of nature recovery.
It's almost quaint now when you come across a landowner or policymaker who still clings to the idea of intensively driven grouse, or intensively canned deer stalking, or intensively managed sheep ranching.
What planet are they on? These things simply don't have a future in the way that they're currently configured. So that's all very exciting.
[00:29:54] Speaker B: The wolf is.
Oh, it's the most emotive of all animals. I was in Yellowstone in 2001 when they were reintroducing it, and bear track had said, before you leave, you have to walk out there and experience what it's like to not be top of the food chain. And I knew there were wolves there, and I had actually seen the wolves very close up, and the bears, and I had no idea how bumpy the land was as you walked along it and how terrifying it was. But in this time, where we have so many different challenges, where life is so difficult, nature means something to us. And I think the knowledge is just there in the way that you talked about with your search for solace following the death of iris.
[00:30:39] Speaker C: I mean, I think there's something really. There's something profoundly mysterious and magical about being in an ecosystem that still has its component parts in one place that still works in the way that it's meant to. To be in a landscape of wolves and bears is something truly thrilling. And it's a thrill that is currently not available to people in this country. And I think there's also a moral duty to put back the things which our ancestors destroyed. They got rid of all these species, and I think it's our duty to put them back. And from a practical angle, we're simply not on top of the number of deer in this country.
There aren't enough hunters. It's not working. We have to shoot something like 600,000 deer as a minimum each year, and we're not even getting close. People don't eat wild venison as much as they should. It's the most sustainable meat to eat is wild venison. But we need predators back in the ecosystem before we witness further ecological collapse, the undoing of the recovery that has been taking place. And so I think it's an inevitability that wolves are brought back. They're not so hard to live with, really. Coexistence has been shown to be very doable in northern Spain, the Apennines of Italy. I mean, every single european country, continental european country, now has wolves back. There are wolves in Normandy and Brittany and France. So wolves inside the city boundaries of Paris, Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Madrid. No one's to been killed, no one's been hurt. They might take a few sheep, but in France, where the arguments are loudest, around wolves taking sheep, only 0.02% of all sheep in France were killed by wolves last year. It's nothing. It's not even a rounding error. And they were all generously compensated. So we can easily live alongside wolves. And going back to the landscapes that actually feed us.
85% of our food comes from East Anglia, around 20% of the land. And deer are a major problem, harming crops, eating crops and so on. The hunting is not working. Is it really so mad to consider that we could have wolves back in East Anglia? Why is it so mad if there are wolves in Luxembourg? You can go wolf watching in the suburbs of Luxembourg. Why is it so mad to imagine that we wouldn't delegate to wolves the autonomy to manage our deer in East Anglia.
[00:32:48] Speaker B: It feels like it's pressing on some innate fear which is almost incomprehensible. The wolf itself is the most extraordinary animal. It's sort of vilified north of the alps, you know, as the demonic creature with the red eyes. But yet south of the alps, it's the maternal, nurturing mother of Romulus and Remus.
But I think it's really important to examine that what it is about is fear, which causes so much hatred. And there is a cultural thing that is happening here and it's also happening in Romania. And I know that you are good friends with the prombergers, where I also visited last summer. They've had death threats for what they're trying to do to protect 300,000 square hectares of the Fagalas mountains. And then I also heard you talking to a friend of yours who's trying to protect the turquoise coast in Turkey. And he's also said that he'd had death threats because he's up against the fishing industry. So everywhere you go, you find this conflict, but a lot of it is emotive.
I'd love to talk a bit more about the prombergers, because I think their work is amazing.
[00:33:56] Speaker C: Yeah. When we started this conversation, we talked about consciousness.
My father used to have a saying. He used to say that if the crook knew how profitable it is to be honest, he'd be honest out of his own crooked nature. And I think that what's lost on people is that the.
Is that the attachment to control over nature, the attachment to exploitation and domination, is actually not the most profitable way to live. When you establish a marine protected area, as my friend Zafar has done in the Turkwest coast of Turkey, fishing, people find that they end up catching way more fish on the outside of the new protected area than they were ever catching when they were able to fish inside it. When you restore nature in a national park in Italy, suddenly the influx of visitors and tourists, as well as people prospecting to buy voluntary carbon or biodiversity credits and so on, become so profitable that suddenly neighbouring communities are lobbying for their own national parks. So I think the consciousness problem is one of exploitation and control. And when we realize that releasing our grip over nature and reinserting ourselves back into the miracle of nature and living within it as part of it is phenomenally profitable, it's a way more resilient way to live than we get the shift that we need, that the problems are not pragmatic. We know how to do all these things. We know how to live with wolves. Christoph Promboge and Barbara in the mountains of Romania are showing how you coexist with bears and how you profit from the existence of bears. They're blazing a trail, and it's working. The nearest town to their headquarters has changed the name of their football team to incorporate the term bison. They are now the bisons, because there are bison in that landscape, and people come from all over Romania to see them.
What we need is a shift of consciousness. We need to rediscover the sacred in nature. And that's a process, I think, that's underway, you know, and I think that we need not just ordinary people to rediscover that sacredness. We need politicians to understand that nature is sacred. Nature is everything. We are dependent upon the natural world for everything we have and everything we do, and trashing it and controlling it and exploiting it is the highway to hell. And restoring it is the pathway to meaning and joy, solace and to prosperity. And I think that's starting to happen. I think, you know, I once read a journal that said, if you can rewild Iowa, you can rewild anywhere. Well, here in Europe, I think the same stands for England. If we can rewild here in England, we can do it anywhere. And the movement's underway. It's happening.
[00:36:33] Speaker B: Do you think that the 30 by 30 is feasible?
[00:36:38] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. 30 by 30 is a really important pledge. The nations of the world coming together to say, we will restore good natural health to 30% of land, 30% of sea by 2030, and it creates this kind of international commitment that implies a certain degree of shame if it's not achieved. So in this country, if we're not going to do it in our national parks, then where the hell are we going to do it? And by the way, add the commitments to restore nature in the Environment Act 2021, a whole bunch of legally binding targets, which, if not met, will lead to a judicial review of the government in office at the time. And suddenly we find that we are committed in this country, internally and externally, to restore nature.
And so I think things are looking quite rosy. I think it's quite hard for any future government not to continue on this course of nature recovery, no matter how the naysayers may kick and scream and tell us that we're going to starve, and those that don't starve are going to be eaten by beavers or whatever it is. They say it's nonsense. It's nonsense. It's a win, win, win, restoring nature in our remote and national park landscapes and so on. And I'm really excited that we're leading the way in Selwoode. Around you and me, it's a place of unbelievable change.
[00:37:51] Speaker B: So what is your hope for the future?
[00:37:56] Speaker C: My hope is that maintaining harmony with the biosphere becomes the overriding human purpose and the purpose for which our emotions and our intelligence were originally designed. That's my hope. And I think we're at the bottom of the mountain, but we're certainly on our way.
[00:38:16] Speaker B: Thank you. Ben Goldsmith, it's been a huge pleasure to talk to you.
[00:38:19] Speaker C: Thank you so much for having me on. Annabel, it's been a great pleasure.
[00:38:29] Speaker A: If you've enjoyed today's conversation, please leave us a review wherever you're listening and recommend the series to anyone who you.
[00:38:36] Speaker B: Think might enjoy it, too.
[00:38:39] Speaker A: We'll be back in a fortnight with an equally inspiring conversation, this time with Christiana Figueres, the puerto rican diplomat who orchestrated the 2015 Paris agreement and who is working tirelessly to inspire a young generation of activists.
[00:38:57] Speaker D: I could easily portray my personal disaster as a fire that burns burned me down to the ground. What has happened since then is that I've been able to pick myself up and emerge with little shoots of green that are, in fact, quite different to many things that were there before.
[00:39:24] Speaker A: This episode was produced by Pete Norton and brought to you by the Resurgence Trust, a movement, a magazine, and a manifesto for hope.
To find out more about their work, click the link in the show notes of this episode.
I'm Annabel Heseltine, and thank you for listening to Hope Springs.
