Hope Springs with Annabel Heseltine Trailer

[00:00:05] Speaker A: My name is Annabel Heseltine. I'm a journalist and broadcaster, bringing you a new podcast from Resurgence, which is a movement, a magazine and a manifesto for hope. Over the last three decades, I've been reporting on stories about climate change, conservation and the environment. It can be a depressing area to cover. So much of our natural world has been lost or damaged. And everywhere you look, there are reasons to feel anxious, fearful or sad. But my travels have also brought me into contact with people working on the front lines of the environmental crisis, who have found reasons to be hopeful. They come from different backgrounds and different parts of the globe. Some are farmers, others are diplomats or campaigners or conservationists fighting to rewild a corner of their world. And as I got to know these people, I realized that there was a common thread uniting them all. [00:01:14] Speaker B: 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. [00:01:27] Speaker A: Each of them had experienced deep personal trauma and had found a way of channeling it into something positive with the help of the natural world. In Hope springs, I'll be sitting down with each of these people in turn and asking them to share the lessons they've learned across a lifetime of environmental work. Think of it as a guide to recovery and to discovering a sense of hope and purpose, even in the midst of a grave crisis. Across the series, we'll speak to Satish Kumar, the world renowned peace pilgrim who founded resurgence over half a century ago. [00:02:11] Speaker C: 'Natal' is the original etymological word for nature. A woman is pregnant. She has a prenatal check. Nature means birth, so we are all born, so we are nature. We cannot separate ourselves from nature. And the moment you realize that, you can start on the right path. [00:02:33] Speaker A: And we will hear from people like Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat whose tireless work made the Paris Climate Agreement possible. [00:02:44] Speaker D: When our tears become rain on parched soil and on burned forests, there is a new life that springs forth that is perhaps unexpected, surprising, beautiful, new. And it is the miracle of life. [00:03:04] Speaker A: We'll talk about building bridges between the generations with Doctor Maya-Rose Craig, one of the UK's most inspiring young environmentalists. [00:03:14] Speaker E: I get a lot of leading questions where it's like, "surely you must be so angry at the older generations for leaving it like this." And it's like, it's not a generational war. There wasn't someone who's now in their eighties, kind of plotting to destroy the planet. [00:03:30] Speaker A: And we will begin our journey with the rewilding activist Ben Goldsmith, who took his grief at losing his teenage daughter in a tragic accident and channelled it into a piece of land in the West of England. [00:03:44] Speaker B: We got rid of all the sheep, all the cows, ripped out all the fencing, 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, Kestrel's back, goshawks, barn owls, and of course, beavers. [00:04:07] Speaker A: To listen to these and many more conversations like them, click follow or subscribe wherever you're hearing this or search for Hope Springs podcast in your favourite search engine. Episode one will go live on the 24 September, with new episodes every fortnight after that.