Ben Goldsmith: The Englishman and his castle and the neat straight hedges and every sprig exactly where it’s meant to be and spraying and flailing and mowing and chopping and tidying. And suddenly there’s this other species that know labrador-sized rodent that comes in with its family and changes the whole dynamic along the bottom of the valley. And you have no choice but to step back and grant another species autonomy over that part of the landscape. That is an enormous mindset shift, which is why the reaction to beavers making an illegal reappearance after 6-700 years on British rivers was met with fury and outrage among the land owning and land management community. And that has slowly waned and now we have this, this great acceptance that beavers are back. And in terms of the cultural shift, if you stop a random person on the street now in the city or in the countryside, they know that beavers are back, that they are native species, that they play a vital role in managing our rivers. People know, and so the beaver has, has kind of rewild the spirit of the country. So its this cultural shift a kind of railing against tidiness and too much management. And a yearning for more nature and more connection. Everyone has a mindfulness app. People go out looking for wild swimming opportunities. It’s like zeitgeist. You pick up any magazine, any newspaper, go into Waterstones Booksellers and see what books are there at the front of the shop. It’s all nature and nature connection.

Mike DiGirolamo: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your co-host, Mike DiGirolamo, bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal Land. Today on the Newscast, we speak with Ben Goldsmith, a financier, philanthropist, and host of the popular podcast, Rewilding the World. He shares success stories of rewilding projects around the globe and the people driving them. We wanted to speak with Goldsmith about his environmental work, which is highly regarded in the United Kingdom. He details the changing political and environmental landscape in the nation. The UK has long been one of the most ecologically denuded and has been averse to reintroducing charismatic predators and megafauna such as wolves, lynx, bears, and bison. But the tide is beginning to turn. Goldsmith tells me he shares how the changing economic conditions of the UK regarding farm subsidies have catalyzed a cultural shift. And attitudes towards animals like beavers are changing. Previously seen as a nuisance, they are now embraced by many farmers. Goldsmith paints a picture of an ideal world where more people would learn to live with animals that many believe are difficult to coexist with. He tells me many of the worries people have about species reintroduction often never come to pass. Goldsmith is an adept communicator, and he covers a lot of ground in this conversation. He also discusses a new nature investment firm he has started called Nattergal. This venture aims to raise funds for rewilding nature, or as Goldsmith likes to put it, “the mother of all infrastructure.”

Ben, welcome to the Mongabay Newscast.

Ben: I’m so excited to be here. I’ve been reading Mongabay for so many years. I’m such a fan and I feel very honored to be invited on the podcast.

Mike: Well, the feeling is mutual. I’ve been listening to your podcast, and I have to say I’m really enjoying it. So, I’m delighted to talk with you. The first thing I want to say to you, Ben, is that I find your story incredibly moving. You have a really compelling voice and a clarity on nature and humans’ relationship with ecosystems. And your podcast really goes into this subject confidently, into these detailed conversations on those working in rewilding. And I feel a kinship with the work that you’re doing, so thank you. But rather than me recounting what you do. I would like you to take us back to the beginning. In your own words, can you tell us where your strong bond with nature comes from?

Ben: Yeah. I mean, I think like all children, I was born with a love of wildlife, fascination with wild places, wild creatures. I mean, I think that’s anyone who spent time with any child, you know, a toddler, will know the fascination that they experience when you show them a frog or a bird’s nest with blue eggs in it. You know, I think that that EO Wilson was right when he coined the term biophilia to describe the innate love that all humans have for the non-human world. You know, we love our dogs. You know, you look at a London park when the sun comes out for five minutes, like everyone is out there lying in the grass and having picnics and so on. The price of an apartment overlooking a London Park is kind of twice the price of one that doesn’t, you know, we, we yearn for some kind of connection with nature, but when I was young, this was front and center in my life. It was everything to me. And it stayed that way.

Mike: Wow. I share your sentiment on that. And when did you, I’m curious, like when did it kind of click in your mind that the nature you were seeing where you were growing up wasn’t how it always was, and that there were larger carnivores or other creatures there before. When did that sort of click in your brain?

Ben: I grew up in West London in a place called Richmond, which has a lot of nature, I mean more than the surrounding countryside. There’s Richmond Park, I think King Henry III or King Henry VI simply drew a line around 3000 acres on the edge of London and said, “nobody may touch this.” And now it has this incredible concentration of like ancient oaks with this incredible acid grassland. And then surrounding Richmond Park is a bunch of common land with woods and my brother and I were out, you know, four in the morning looking for little baby badges and looking for fox cubs. In the daytime, we were trying to build ponds and put up bird boxes, and I used to occasionally visit an aunt with my family who lived out in Dorset in the real countryside. And I remember being pretty disappointed when I got there that there, there wasn’t much to see. You know, she just had some fields with some sheep in the fields and the odd crow and the hedges were all cropped to the quick, you know, flailed and tidy little boxes. And there just wasn’t much of a rough edge to the place and there wasn’t much wildlife as far as I could make out. And so I knew already that the countryside was not necessarily all it was cracked up to be in this country, but I refused to accept this idea that Britain is not a place that can have wildlife. You know, that was kind of the consensus view is if you want wildlife, you go on safari, even just go to Europe. You can find wildlife in northern Spain or in the Apennines in Italy, but Britain, no, no, no. We we’re about serious business of farming. We don’t have wildlife here. So, I have a letter and a drawer in my house that was sent to me when I was 11 years old by the guy in charge of Richmond Park, explaining very patiently in reply to my letter why we couldn’t have wild boar back in Richmond Park. Because they would scare the horses and the acid grassland doesn’t need rootling. So I was always excited by the idea of rewilding, even though there was no term that I knew of that was rewilding. And then as I grew older, I became a teenager. And in my early twenties I became sort of an activist and a philanthropist focused on the idea of rebuilding nature in Britain and in Europe. My older brother’s been a huge inspiration for me. He’s six years older than me, was editor of the Ecologist Magazine for 10 years and then became the kind of green guru within David Cameron’s coalition government with the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives in 2010. Got a certain amount done and ended up being in UK International Climate and Environment minister, and he has this kind of, and now works with the Bezos Earth Fund and has this kind of international outlook, you know, how do we stop tens of millions of acres of, you know, peatland rainforest in Indonesia getting destroyed. How do we protect the Congo Basin? He’s got this kind of big international outlook and I’ve been much more focused on what’s happening here at home. For a long time, it was kind of piecemeal progress towards nature recovery in Britain. Now people have slowly come to understand that this country is among the most nature depleted countries on Earth. You know, beneath us aren’t many, Iceland, which was destroyed by the Vikings and had thin soils and lots of wind, and lost all its forests and drained all its wetlands or Ireland. You know, Ireland is an extraordinary story, and it, it’s an island the same size as Sri Lanka with quarter the number of people. Those people have 10 times the GDP per capita, and yet there’s 0% intact ecosystems remaining and all of the charismatic species are gone. Meanwhile, 20 plus million Sri Lankans live with 6,000 elephants, a thousand leopards. What is the difference? Why is it that some of these countries have destroyed their nature and others in spite of all the odds, in spite of all the pressures of making a living, have managed to protect wild places and wild creatures and live in some kind of harmony? How have they managed to rub along? And I think that’s a fascinating question for our time, but in this country, the progress was slow and then it was quick. So, years of people slowly waking up to the idea that we’ve lost a lot and that it can be put back and along the way, valiant organizations like the Wildlife Trust and the Wild Fallon Wetlands Trust, you know, storing lit little bits and pieces and creating these brilliant little nature reserves and pockets of restoration. And then suddenly everything kind of changed in the last 10 years. And we are now witnessing in this country the unleashing of rewilding a nature recovery beyond my wildest 11-year-old dreams.

Mike: We’re going to talk all about that. I’m curious because you mentioned Ireland and we’ve actually done a deep dive on a rewilding effort in Ireland from a man named Eoghan Dalton in County Cork. I’m curious if you’ve heard of him and what you think of his work. Have you looked at what he’s doing?

Ben: Yes. Eoghan’s a friend I’ve long admired his work, ‘An Irish Atlantic Rainforest’ is one of the most important books to come out on the subject of Irish Nature, and he’s become probably the most important voice for nature recovery in Ireland. And there are these tiny pockets and sort of streaks and patches of rainforest remaining on the Irish West Coast, but it would’ve once been maybe a third Atlantic Rainforest, and the same is true of the West of Britain. Now the seven Celtic kingdoms coincide perfectly with the range of the Atlantic temperate rainforest, and those are Scotland, the Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, Brittany, and Galicia. But in all of those places, the rainforest has been wrecked. You know, in Galicia it’s been replaced with non-native monocultures of eucalyptus or radiata pine and in Britain, it’s been cleared. And in the British Isles it was mostly cleared by distant landowners to make way for sheep. Now, I’ve always found the obsession with sheep and the British Isles to be somewhat perverse on the basis that the oppression of people in our remote landscapes, especially in Ireland and in Wales and in Scotland, came about at the hands of the English to clear people and nature from the land to make way for enormous numbers of sheep. And today in those landscapes, the sheep is somehow the kind of symbol of culture and identity. But the sheep is what brought ruin to those landscapes and to the people that lived in them. So, I think that a lot of what Eoghan talks about can be traced back to the arrival of very large numbers of sheep, and then in more recent decades, the intensification of dairy.

Mike: And so, let’s go ahead and get into the rewilding that has happened over the past decade in England. Go ahead and start with what are some of the most miraculous or successful examples you can think of?

Ben: I think we are going through a kind of twin shift and we’re going through a cultural shift and an economic shift, and they’re working in parallel. So, the cultural shift is one of a greater yearning for connection with nature. A kind of falling back in love with nature that’s happening across society. Old, young, rural, urban, rich, poor. Stories around the return of white storks, which are now breeding in Sussex. You know, the first time in Britain since the 1480s, you know, the catling in huge numbers following a successful reintroduction project. These are enormously appealing to people. That was the in the top five most viewed stories on the B BBC website last year. The return of beavers is iconic. You know, the, the, the beaver is the keystone of all keystone species in the northern hemisphere. You know, by building little dams along the creeks and streams of a river system. They hold water back in the landscape and water is life. Beavers breathe life back into landscapes that have been terribly depleted, and at the same time, they help mitigate flooding and drought and help protect us as humans, from volatility in the hydrological cycles. So, they’re just essential animals. But this idea that that nature is chaos and that we bring order has been flipped on its head by the return of beavers to Britain. You see what beavers do on a catchment scale, and you start to realize, no nature is order. No, it’s us that has brought chaos and the beavers are here to help us. And that is an extraordinary mindset shift in a place like Britain, where control of every square inch of the land has been central for so long. You know, the Englishman and his castle and the neat straight hedges and every sprig exactly where it’s meant to be. And spraying and flailing and mowing and chopping and tidying. Suddenly there’s this other species, a labrador sized rodent that comes in with its family and changes the whole dynamic along the bottom of the valley, and you have no choice but to step back and grant another species autonomy over that part of the landscape. That is an enormous mindset shift, which is why the reaction to beavers making an illegal reappearance after 6-700 years on British rivers was met with fury and outrage among the land owning and land management community and that has slowly waned. And now we have this great acceptance that beavers are back. And in terms of the cultural shift, if you stop a random person on the street now in the city or in the countryside, they know that beavers are back. That they are a native species, that they play a vital role in managing our rivers. People know, and so the beaver has, has kind of rewild the spirit of the country. So its this cultural shift a kind of railing against tidiness and too much management. And a yearning for more nature and more connection. Everyone has a mindfulness app. People go out looking for wild swimming opportunities. It’s like zeitgeist. You pick up any magazine, any newspaper, go into Waterstones booksellers and see what books are there at the front of the shop. It’s all nature and nature connection and in parallel we have an economic shift and that’s equally important.

Mike: That’s incredible to hear you mention that cultural shift that occurred because it sounds like it was a bit of growing pains there. And I’m kind of curious to delve more into that because a very large majority of the land in England, I believe, is privately owned. I think by one per percent of the population, about 70% of it, if I have that correctly. So it sounds like it would take a really big lift to make that cultural shift happen. What do you think caused that? How did that, how did that play out exactly?

Ben: The, the, the economic shift that we’re going to talk about has enabled among landowners the cultural shift, because the responsible thing to do in the eyes of a British landowner is to earn a buck and create jobs using the land that, that is in your stewardship. That’s kind of understandable. You know, you don’t want to be losing money and you want to make sure that people have worked there for generations, continue to have livelihoods and homes and so on. And, and of course many of those landowners that you described don’t have much income. You know, the average take home income of a sheep farmer in the British uplands is somewhere in the region of 6 to 8,000 pounds. You know, it’s way below the minimum wage. And they do it for love. They do it because they’ve been there for generations. And so, whilst on paper they might be worth, you know, a few million, you know, one, two, three million because they have a piece of land that’s been in their family for 300 years, in practice they’re some of the most marginalized communities in the country. But they’re not giving up. They’ll operate on vapors if they have to. And so, they are the last to be reached by this cultural shift because they’re so busy just trying to make a living and they’re so frightened of the changes that are beyond their control now. And you can understand why, you know, these are often quite insular, quite remote, conservative communities, and they don’t want to be told by distant, what they would see as kind of metropolitan elites, what they should do with their land. And as a result, there has been a backlash and we’ve had farmer protests and so on in response to some of the economic changes taking place. But that being said, in parallel with that, the overwhelming majority of people in the country have begun to view landscape differently and that has percolated through even these hard to reach communities and the young in these communities that you have multi-generational farming families where the younger members of the family, you know, are going off on the train down to Hartford Children once a year to the groundswell conference and gathering in their thousands to see Gabe Brown come and talk about regenerative farming. You have the kind of Prince of Wales wandering about and this idea of farming in tune with nature and in being part of a great restoration of soil and nature is very appealing, especially to the younger generations of farmers. But what’s enabled that has been a shift in the economics because previously you had 40 years of agricultural subsidies, which were by and large, unconditional. Under the European Union’s Common Agriculture Policy, it’s very similar to the American Farm Bill, and by the way, it’s immense. We’re talking 50 to 60 billion euros a year. Somewhere in the region of 40% of the total EU budget just shoveled out to landowners just for owning the land. In the UK, prior to Brexit, 50% of the money was going to the 10% richest landowners. But more relevant to this conversation is you had all of these hopelessly unproductive business models propped up with lavish subsidies. It was like an opioid drip, so no one was interested in innovation, and no one was interested in changing anything. You just sit there and do what you’ve always done, and you get the subsidy. So, the result is millions of acres of utterly ecologically degraded sheep ranching throughout our national parks, throughout our upland landscapes, wetlands drained for uneconomic dairy farming. And now, you know, as Warren Buffet famously said, you know, it’s only when the tide goes out, you can see who’s been swimming naked. Well, those subsidies following Brexit were withdrawn and the budget was maintained, but it was made conditional upon stewardship and restoration of nature. Soil, watercourses, pollinating insects, you know, fundamentally the natural capital on which all farming and all of society depends. So, it makes perfect sense. I mean, it’s said on the Agriculture Act signed by the Queen in October, 2020. It’s said: Public money for public good. That is the goal of this bill. So, we’re the first major economy to shift our agricultural subsidies into a scheme where you have to earn it by proving that you are being a good steward of the landscape. Now, if you are in highly productive landscapes, you know, if you’re in the east of Britain, if you’re in kind of Cambridgeshire, you know, Lincolnshire, these flat arable landscapes, now you’re probably running a profitable food business. You know, 85% of the food comes from just 20% of the land. In those places, they’re going to get less public money now. It’s gonna be less relevant to their income because fundamentally they wanna grow food. But they’ll get rewarded round the edges for looking after the water courses and creating buffers and maybe experimenting with no-till or, or drones and soil sensors and using less chemical inputs and so on. There are rewards for all of that stuff. but in the remoter landscapes where it gets really interesting for nature, ’cause in these places, the margins are hopelessly negative, but the losses have been masked with subsidies, those subsidies are gone. So if you are a multi-generational sheep farmer who wants to stay in that farm and wants to stay farming, you need public money to stay in business and the public money’s only available if you can show that you’re restoring nature on your land. So they are now all piling into these schemes. A 70 or 80% of farmers are already in these schemes and in the uplands in our national parks say, which represent about 25% of the land in England. That 25% of the land produces less than 1% of the food, by the way, we’re always told that the shift is gonna cause, cause us food security issues. Well, 1% of the food comes from the national Park, so we have tremendous leeway to do interesting things in those places. You stop with the sheep ranching most likely, and you switch back to the kind of farming that was prevalent in our upland landscapes 2-300 years ago, which is native cattle. We always had native cattle in Britain and before that we had wild aurochs, the ancestor of all modern day cattle or domestic cattle, and you had wild bison even earlier still. And those large herbivores were browsing and grazing and trampling and through their dung, creating these tremendously vibrant ecosystems. Now the work of Professor Franz Vera, in the Netherlands shows that Northwestern Europe wasn’t like Brazil. We weren’t trees upon trees and closed canopy forest. Great stretches of the landscape would’ve been these amazing dynamic semi-open woodland pastures where you have open grown trees and pockets of scrub and wild flat areas. And those dynamic ecosystems were governed by natural processes, which included principle among them, the grazing and browsing of native cattle. So, if you want dramatic nature recovery in some of these marginal remote landscapes, you persuade farmers to get rid of the 3000 sheep and have instead a hundred old English longhorn cattle or belted galloways or native Welsh cattle, or if they’re in Scotland, highland cattle. We have a whole plethora of hardy native breed cattle, and those will engineer a nature recovery that is beyond magic. Now, there are places that are just teaming with life, and all they did was that. And if you add pigs into the mix and that that was across Europe, always been a very important way of farming, was turning pigs out, especially in autumn when all the acorns and the beach masters on the ground, it’s a system known as panige. If you, if you do a little bit of free range pigs as well, and in some parts of Britain now we have their wild cousins. The wild boar back then, the rootling of the Earth and the turning over of the grasses creates an additional layer of dynamism. And then the return of beavers and the restoration of those ribbon wetlands through the land is a third vital layer of dynamism. Then proper control of all these ungulates and other herbivores through the restoration of carnivores feels a long way off. But at least we have a reasonable hunting culture and you do need hunting in the absence of carnivores. So, these natural processes are falling back into place in swathes of Britain. But the main reason it’s not just been a cultural shift, it’s been that the subsidies have been withdrawn and now there is just this public money for public good scheme, which is very generous if you care to engage with it, which most farmers are. So, I think this is the thing, this is the thing that I say England, not Britain, because in the United Kingdom is divided into devolved administrations and Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are some way behind England in rolling out this kind of a new scheme. England with this new scheme, offers the world something very exciting. It’s a template for how you use farm subsidies to keep farmers in business, to keep producing food for your population whilst rebuilding soil and nature. I think it’s potentially one of the most exciting nature policies that any country’s put in place in the last generation. So I just finish with, if you imagine this scheme, this environmental land management scheme in England, to be like a great icebreaker ship. In its wake, you have a series of smaller schemes. Some of them privately funded, some of them publicly funded, some of them modeled on examples from Australia or the United States, which are additional ways for farmers in these remote landscapes to access revenue streams through the restoration of nature. For example, integrated flood management and restoring to health the upper part of a river catchment, restoring the sponge effect of those landscapes that have wetlands and ponds and naturally meandering streams, that they become like sponges and they hold water and they store it, they purify it and they release that water for communities to use later in the year. So that is extremely useful in terms of flood defense, but also water provision and for the water companies, for example. So, there are markets now in which local authorities or the government environment agency or water companies are now clubbing together and paying landowners in particular parts of the landscape to rewild because of the benefits in terms of water. And then you have a global market in voluntary nature-based carbon. And we now have a regulated market for biodiversity credits in the UK. And everyone is getting very smart very quickly. You know, farmers are entrepreneurs at heart and a lot of them are getting very smart on how they can generate the best revenue from their land and the most exciting options in areas of the landscape that are not highly agriculturally productive, all stem from nature recovery. And they don’t have to stop farming. They can still have their cows, they can still have their pigs.

Mike: Thank you very much for detailing that new scheme. This may be related to what you said, and I would love to hear your thoughts. So there was a recent parliamentary report that described the UK’s food system as quote unquote, broken, and the UK Think Tank Green Alliance outlined an agroecological approach to farming focused on a green protein transition that is more environmentally sustainable. So, are you familiar with this? Do you feel like this is something that could work with rewilding? Would you support something like that?

Ben: So I work as a green investor, so I’ve kind of got, had two lives since my first years working as an adult 20 years ago. I’ve been passionate about nature, nature policy, environment, wildlife, and I’ve always found time to do that in various ways. And I’ve also worked as a green investor doing more mainstream kind of investing in renewables and water and waste infrastructure and kind of, all that kind of stuff. So, I kind of had two lives and as an aside, those two lives may now be coalescing. I think there are now opportunities to harness private capital to help restore nature at scale. So this is an exciting time for me in that sense. Because my love is nature and my sort of skill and experiences in investing. And if I can find a way to, to marry the two, then, then that will be great. and, and one of the things I did, in parallel with my green investing life was to join the board of the government environment department, DEFRA Department for environment, food and rural Affairs. I was on the board from 2018 to 2022, and so I was heavily involved during that time, a day or two a week, in the agricultural subsidy transition, the Environment Act 2021, which is an amazing piece of environmental legislation that that was passed by the last conservative government, fisheries act. It could have been better, but it was a big step in the right direction. A lot of these things made possible by the United Kingdom leaving the European Union. And there are many diverse opinions on that and, and many reasons to hate it, many reasons to like it and we won’t go there, but one thing a lot of people agree on is that the environmental law of the European Union was restrictive. So, for example, since we left the EU, we’ve been able to ban the industrial hoovering up of sand eels at the base of the food chain. In British waters. And so, we’re seeing a resurgence in seabird populations, puffins, and so on. We’ve been able to ban the practice of bottom t trawling in our marine protected areas. So, there’s been some good news around, and I’ve been on the board of death during that time, and it was a huge privilege. One of the things we looked at was green protein and kind of alternatives to animal protein. So, for example, cell cultures, precision fermentation, plant-based alternatives and so on. Of course the response you get from people is, my God, that’s disgusting. And what I say to them is, you know, you think a cell cultured burger is disgusting. Have you been to an American style feedlot cattle unit now? Have you been to a factory pig farm? You know, 99% of the pigs in the world never see the light of day. You know, they live confined in the most appalling conditions imaginable. You know, almost the kind of greatest expression of human dominion, or, you know, I sort of loath to use the word evil, but these factory farms are evil. You know, these animals live the most appalling lives and they’re loaded with antibiotics. And in many places they’re loaded with growth hormones and they’re a horror show, you know, the way we produce most meats. And so I am for those kind of ethical reasons, you know, I’m wildly excited about the idea of finding ways to pull the rug out from underneath that market. You know, I think the people who still want a steak on the barbecue that has come from an animal that lived outdoors and had a good life and raised its own young and, and, and possibly in a British context or European context, contributed ecologically to its environment as well. They will still find that there will still be artisanal butchers. My wife likes her biolife yogurt in the morning of kids have it, you know, that, you know that, that that’s all kind of high, high welfare standards. People who want quality will still get quality, but most of the meat produced in the world is not quality. It’s stack it high, sell it cheap from animals that led a life that was not worth living and it has to end. So I’m, I’m really excited about that side of the agricultural revolution. I want to see precision fermentation, and we do it already with insulin. They used to get insulin from horses. You know, now we use precision fermentation to produce insulin. So, if insulin, then why not burger patties? You know, why not milk powders, you know, these kind of things? So whilst I haven’t worked in it directly, I’m an enthusiast, not a skeptic.

Mike: Hello listeners and thank you for tuning into the Mongabay Newscast. We hope you’re enjoying this conversation. If you’re really liking our work, you can support us by donating to Mongabay on the homepage in the upper right corner of the screen. But a great way to support our podcasts like the one that you’re listening to now, is to subscribe to our show and leave us a review. Just doing these two things is one of the best ways you can help us grow our audience. And if you want to reach out to us directly to share your thoughts, we welcome it. Reach us at podcast[at]mongabay.com. Thanks so much for listening. Back to the conversation with Ben Goldsmith

And since, you know, since you were on that board, you might have an opinion on this. There was a report that I want to draw your attention to. It was a study that was in the Guardian that shows that nitrogen use halves the number of pollinators, and even average usage of nitrogen. And it cuts flower numbers fivefold. It seems like a really big problem. I would like to know if you have any thoughts about nitrogen usage or fertilizer in the UK context.

Ben: Yeah. I, I live in South Somerset. I have a little farm here. It was my childhood dream was to have a piece of land in which I could restore nature in my, my, my father died when I was young. I was 15, so I inherited some money. I got married very young. My first wife Kate, my with whom I’m incredibly close, we have three children together. She lives about 20 minutes away. We bought a farm young, you know, in our twenties and, we have set about rewilding this land here, and I am continuing to do so. It’s grown a little bit. We bought a bit more land and now we have several neighbors also. Rewilding, you know, we are in the least productive landscape, arguably in the whole southwest of England. A landscape called Sellwood Forest. Now, this was on the maps from the 1830s, 1840s. It’s described as manorial wastes. The lords of the manor would let the local people turn their cattle out, turn their pigs out, go and cut turf and gather things. It just wasn’t worth farming. The farming of this landscape followed a series of enclosures acts, which were violently protested in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and then steam machinery, and then agricultural subsidies perpetuated a system that simply doesn’t work. So when I got here, we ripped out fences and filled in ditches and pulled up field drains and took all the intensification off the land and just, we’ve let it rest and now we farm it very lightly, just to the extent that we want to restore natural processes. So, we have a handful of Longhorn cattle on electronic, no fence collar. We’ve got some Tamworth pigs. And the resurgence of life is just completely extraordinary. But one end of the farm was heavily fertilized for at least four decades with nitrogen and with phosphates. And you are absolutely right. It’s much harder to restore nature where it’s been so overloaded with fertilizers. You get a huge abundance of certain species and not much else. So, a lot of docks and thistles and nettles and bramble coming up. And that in itself is wonderful habitat for lots of species. And I’m enjoying watching that recovery unfold in its own way. And those nitrogens and phosphates over time will find their way out of the system. In terms of floral diversity, it doesn’t compare with the other end of the farm that was run for a long time by two sisters who lived into their nineties and never used chemicals. Its just flowers everywhere. It’s like a kaleidoscope in every direction. Like the beauty at this time of year, you would not imagine, you know, the wildflowers that are here. And so nitrates and phosphates are a massive problem because they don’t stay in the soil and then they go into the rivers. The rivers are in a terrible state in this country. So I think we’re hugely over-reliant on chemical inputs. We’re basically farming fossil fuels. And I’m excited about the regenerative farming, surge that is happening here. You know, Gabe Brown, as I mentioned earlier, arrived with the Prince of Wales at the Groundswell Farming Festival, and the massive marquee was just mobbed with farmers, especially younger farmers. I mean, thousands and thousands. It was like Glastonbury Festival for farming. I mean, the actual farming conference, which is known as the Oxford Farming Conference, the most prestigious farming conference in the world, is really a sideshow now in this country because everyone is moving towards these regenerative ways of farming, which involve, I guess, you know, as a non-farmer, I would describe it crudely as combining the best of ancient wisdom, you know, things like rotational practices and looking after your soil. With the best of modern technology, you know, drills enable you not to plow, and drones and soil sensors that enable you to use applications of fertilizers or pesticides with tremendous precision. If I get some kind of eczema, I’m not going to soak my entire body in steroid cream. You know, I’m going to apply it where I need it in a tiny place. As infrequently as I can. And I think that’s the direction of travel and you’ve got very interesting innovations in robotics and AI and things where in really productive landscapes, I think we can reduce our use of things such as nitrates and phosphates. And in the meantime, the overloading of the landscape here with these things, which causes a huge problem for water companies and other organizations is now being addressed through a market called Nutrient Neutrality, which the government established during my time at DEFRA. It’s a bit like the wetlands banking schemes that the federally mandated in the United States where farmers, a market is set up and farmers within that market are rewarded for restoring their landscapes such that they can eat up nitrates and phosphates. So, if you restore wetlands on your farm, which are very effective at eating up these chemicals or if you restore the natural meanders of a river or you rewild, generally you can lock in 20, 30 year revenues from the local water company or other local businesses for this who are under an obligation to reduce nitrate and phosphate load, and you do it for them. And the calculation’s really simple. You measure the water as it enters your land, and you measure the water as it leaves your land. And the difference in phosphates and nitrates load is what you get paid. And they’re very lucrative, these schemes, and they’re resulting in even more rewilding. So about 10 miles from me in Dorsett. The Dorsett Wildlife Trust have bought nearly 900 acres of utterly knackered livestock farming land, and they’re restoring it fully to nature. They’ll have a light smattering of livestock at the carrying capacity in order to deliver ecological goals, and they’ve managed to pay for the entire purchase price of the land through a 30 year nutrient neutrality deal. So they’ve just back to back the nutrient neutrality credits with a bank loan. And so, the Dorsett Wildlife Trust has just made one of maybe their largest acquisition ever. And so we are living in an exciting time in this country where the economic tailwinds behind rewilding have become very, very strong and they’re completely rational. Because society needs more from the land than just food. Yes, we need food, but we also need water. We need clean air, we need pollinators, we need to deal with pollution and all these different, we need amenity and connection with nature. All of these things are worth paying for, and now they can be. So we have this very exciting economic shift happening in Britain that I think is replicated in bits and pieces elsewhere, and it’s combined with a great cultural shift, a great kind of awakening around nature depletion and connection with nature. A great yearning. And those two things are a kind of magic combination. So we must. You know, those of us that are active politically in the environment movement here in the UK are really striving hard to keep this show on the road for as long as possible so that it becomes a foregone conclusion. And we’re not far off that, I think, where it can’t be overturned.

Mike: This is something that you’ve said on a couple of interviews I’ve heard you on now, and I agree with you on it by the way. You’ve mentioned that you think it’s absolutely critical that we as humans get comfortable living with more animals, but especially the ones that are difficult to live with. And obviously that’s going to have some differences depending on the location and the animal. But can you tell us why?

Ben: Yeah. George Monbiot is a writer I admire once said that in Britain, all wildlife falls into two categories. There’s game. Which is what you pay to kill. And there’s vermin, which is what you pay someone else to kill. And you talk about wildlife in this country, certainly when I was growing up and the adults in the room would talk about the ways in which those animals are a nuisance. And if you think about it, everything is kind of a nuisance. You know, hedgehogs will, you know, will eat the eggs of your game birds. And you know, moles will make a mess of your lawn and foxes will kill your chickens and pine Martins will borrow in your roof and. Badges arguably, spread TB among cattle, although there’s very little evidence of that, they get blamed just like the bison of the West get blamed for spreading bristles to cattle. Even though there’s not one documented case of transmission, the seals will break into the salmon farms and also eat the wild. The list goes on and on and, and you wonder what wildlife, you know, more charismatic than say a blue tit, are British people prepared to coexist with, you know, listening to the discourse around these different creatures and the havoc that they wreak? We are very good at presenting to the world in Britain, an image of ourselves as being great wildlife lovers. You know, we’ll lecture the rest of the world on wildlife protection and coexistence and kindness to animals. And our great national hero is David Attenborough and the documentaries that he’s been making for decades. You know, the WWF was founded here. And yet at home behind closed doors, we’re a zoophobic nation more than most. You know, we are afraid of wildlife and we don’t like rubbing along with wildlife. Most people, certainly those in charge of the land, have not been wildlife friendly. And that’s why the return of beavers was just a moment of pandemonium among the kind of land owning and land management farming communities. They, a lot of them, went bananas over it and it’s now simmered down and everyone’s just accepted that beavers are back. Maybe they’re not the nuisance that we thought. In most places they’re not, they’re a help. And my neighboring farmer here has cattle, and during the particularly dry summer of August 2022, he got permission to run a pipe into the beaver wetland and managed to keep his cattle going through the driest summer we’ve had in years because the beavers have stored up all the water for him for free. So, he’s now a big beaver aficionado. So, I think that the times are changing. But not fast enough. Because I think that still, when it comes to carnivores, the attitude is so backwards. You know, it’s kind of the days of kind of the wolf as the embodiment of the devil must be killed and ritualistically killed at that, you know, they’re not behind us. And the wolf has made a tremendous recovery in Europe, along with European brown bears, European lynx. Now in the far north European wolverines, you’ve had a tremendous recovery of wildlife in Europe, the 27,000 wolves in Europe now outside of Russia. Now the 22 or 23000 brown bears, you’ve got 10,000 European bison. That was an animal that was on the verge of extinction, and there might’ve been a dozen or two at most, I forget, in the 1920s and 30s, and now they’re large herds of them in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria. So, we have had this enormous recovery of wildlife in Europe. Attitudes are turning against them, and especially against wolves. And in this country, you know, where a lot of these species were not able to return because we have water all around us and they weren’t able to cross English Channel wasn’t there. We’d have wolves back already. The idea of reintroducing them is considered madness. Even though there are news reports of swelling populations of deer and a growing incidents of Lyme disease and road traffic collisions and a disequilibrium in our forests, and if you go to Scotland, there are no forests at all left because we got rid of the wolves. The loss of the guardian of the mountainside as it’s been described, has meant the loss of almost all nature in much of Scotland. So, it’s not rational. It’s, a kind of zoophobia that is very, very deep seated. And I think that that is our greatest cultural challenge. If we can’t find a way harmoniously to coexist with the most difficult wildlife. You know, the wolves, the brown bears, the lynx, the secretive lynx. Ultimately pretty easy to live with. Then I don’t think we’re going to find harmony with nature as a whole. I think it’s emblematic of a warped relationship with our surroundings.

You know, I have a podcast, Rewilding the World that you kindly mentioned at the start. I’ve just interviewed a guy called Daniel Curry in eastern Washington state. And, Daniel is a range rider, as he calls himself, and he works with ranchers and cowboys on coexistence with large carnivores. The challenges are not real. You know, most of the time it’s a perception thing. You know, it’s a zoophobia thing. And therefore if you can overcome that and show that really the things they’re afraid of are not real and that actually this animal plays an important part in the ecosystem and is of help in many ways to those that care for the landscapes and also that in American context, I mean, the wolf is more American than apple pie. You can shift attitudes and through kind of love and friendship, you know, and you can reconcile some of these cultural differences, I think better than by fighting. And my instinct is always to criticize. You know, initially you kind of, how can, what sort of idiot doesn’t want lynx back? I mean, how can you not want, they don’t kill sheep, they don’t kill people. You know, how can you be so backward when the, you know, I’ve sometimes quoted Max Plank who said that science advances one funeral at a time. They do our attitudes to wildlife in rural Europe advance one funeral at a time.

You know, when people kill wolves in Northern Spain. Sever off their heads and nail the heads to the newly minted National Park billboard sign. You know, when they get arrested, they’re always angry older men with guns and poison, you know, are things gonna change culturally just with a generational transition?

And there might be an element of truth in that, but, but I think it’s defeatist and what Daniel convinced me of very effectively is. There is a reconciliation process and a kind of cultural, and a kind of sensitive messaging that can be engaged in that is more effective than being combative. You know, kind of us, you know, environmentalists and conservationists saying, no, you’re wrong.

You will live with wolves. You know that that doesn’t work so well. And I feel like in, in Britain, at least I can speak, you know, most confident now. I think we are winning that argument and we want, the next challenge is to bring links back and part of the missing links. Project. I nearly wore the t-shirt for this podcast.

And, and we will reintroduce European links to Europe. It’s gonna, to Britain, it’s gonna happen in the next, 2, 3, 4 years. And, and one of the strategies is to talk relentlessly about wolves, to bring links back. And I think ultimately when, when, you know, ultimately when the links is back and the sky doesn’t fall in and, you know, I, I think that we will end up with wolves back here. I don’t know when, but I feel it’ll happen.

Mike: I think so too. I mean, because you’ve already reintroduced bison to England I believe, which is something I never even conceived of before. It’s miraculous if I may say, and I feel like that provides some hope, doesn’t it?

Ben: Yes. It’s incredibly exciting. But the be the bison are fenced in as if it’s kind of Fort Knox, you know, they’re classified, even though they’re a native species, they’re alongside wild boar and Lynx and wolves, they’re categorized in the dangerous wild animals act, which means you need great enclosure to keep them in, which is nuts. Especially given that there are several thousand wild boar on the loose now in Britain and the population is reestablished for the first time since Tudor times. You know, we have wild boar out in the landscape. And those laws are now under review and environmental activists and so on are pushing very hard for a change in those categories. And there are a number of landowners that want to have bison as well. They’re pretty docile animals. European bison, you know, they’re no more aggressive or difficult than ordinary cattle. They’re a woodland animal, whereas North Americans bison are a plains animal, and they’re essential because they eat young trees like grass. You know, you get like little birch trees that may have a trunk as thick as your thigh, and the bison will knock it down. Or they’re like someone called them woolly chainsaws. And you need that. You know, we don’t want closed canopy forest. We want a dynamic semi-open woodlands, which are shape shifting as a result of the activities of wildlife and bison are essential wildlife in the European woodland ecosystem. So yeah, they also at the sharp edge like wolves are at the sharp edge of how far we can go rewilding landscapes in this country. It’s a density populated country, heavily farmed, heavily intent managed and developed, you know, but there is space, you know, we do have space to have some of these species back and I think we often find with species like bison or wolves, that we think they live in very remote landscapes because they don’t want to be near humans and that we can’t coexist with them. And then their populations recover in other countries and find that there are wolves living at Fontainebleau, you know, or in the outskirts of Rome or Luxembourg or Madrid. No one notices or particularly cares for bison in Poland. You know, running around the arable landscapes and crossing roads and things, you know, not far from Biala visa, you know, and suddenly it becomes normal to have what could be considered quite problematic, wildlife, living cheek by jowl with us. So, then this idea that Britain is too densely populated and too developed and farmed to have wildlife, it falls flats and I think that’s where we’re headed. Because everyone said you can’t have beavers in a place like Britain. And we do, they’re everywhere.

Mike: I would be remiss if I didn’t give you an opportunity to talk about Rewilding the world. I know you mentioned it a little bit, but I think it’s an amazing podcast. You do a fantastic job. What have been some of the most memorable conversations you’ve had on that show?

Ben: I mean, I set up the podcast really from my desk with a little support team who do this. They help, The Podcast Coach, help you do podcasts. I had no experience of that kind of thing because I wanted to highlight some of the amazing rewilding stories in Britain and around the world that nobody knows about. Who knew that there’s a rewilding project the size of Germany in Kazakhstan. You know, the, the Altyn Dala, the Golden Steppe. They recently won the Prince William Earth Shot prize. And the saiga antelope there have recovered from 30,000 to nearly 4 million. They’ve brought back wild ass. You know, their goal is to bring back one day cheetahs, which were the dominant grassland predator of Central Asia a hundred, 150 years ago.

Mike: I’ve spoken with Vera Voronova from the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative in Kazakhstan in an earlier episode. I’ve put the link in the show notes.

Ben: Tt’s extraordinary restoration on a mind boggling scale, or the American Prairie Reserve in Northern Montana. Seeking to piece back together 3.5 million acres of short grass prairie ecosystem, and partly through public land grazing and partly through purchase of private ranches. And, they’re alongside the Charles M. Russell National Preserve and the Native American Reserves and so on. And they’ve got a plan for restoring a massive grassland. And then there’s smaller initiatives that are just so impactful. You know, I co-chaired the Rewilding London Task Force. Which is about drawing together all these little rewilding projects across the city. You know, creating kind of streaks and patches and threads of nature throughout the fabric of the capital city in which I live, from kind of large flat roofs that have been restored to meadows to kind of wiggling and resurfacing of rivers and beavers being reintroduced to eeling. The pair of beavers there were called Sigourney Beaver and Justin Beaver. And the mayor himself showed up for the release. There’s so much happening all over the world, large and small, that is just wildly exciting and people don’t know about it unless you read Mongabay, you know, unless you are in the right places or looking online in regional newspapers and so on for these stories, you wouldn’t know about them. And so, I decided to set up a podcast in which we interview someone inspirational, doing something amazing somewhere in the world once a fortnight. It’s kinda like a dose of optimism and it’s really fun. It’s not hard work and I really, really enjoy it. And it’s working. Like we’ve got loads and loads of listeners now.

Mike: Yeah, you’ve been doing extremely well, and I have to say I really enjoyed your conversation with Stephen Fry. I love how he talked about his journey of how he perceived insects, which are, I think, are an underrated creature in the world, like the way that he perceived insects when he was younger, to how he looks at them now. For some reason that just resonated with me. I really enjoyed that conversation.

Ben: Yeah, he’s a lovely man. And I had a shared passion for nature and a shared passion for cricket we discovered. Yeah, and also one of my kind of childhood icons.

Mike: So, Ben, obviously people can find your podcast on Apple or Spotify or wherever they get their podcasts, but where else can they go to learn more about you and the work that you do?

Ben: So I’ve recently set up a business, called Nattergal, which is the Danish for Nightingale. And we drew inspiration from the work of Hans Christian Anderson and the Nightingale is the symbol of renewal. And I’ve set this business up with a guy called Charlie Burrell, who’s kinda like the king of rewilding in England. He set up the first serious rewilding project, 3000 acres. And it was industrial arable farm that was in his family for generations with a kind of castle at the center. And he was pulling his hair out, trying to make it work. It wasn’t good farmland. Fast forward 25 years and the theories of Franz Vera have been proven correct there at Knepp Castle. Now he has the greatest concentration of breeding songbirds of any place anywhere in Britain. The only place in Britain where turtle doves and nightingales and other really threatened species are on the rise dramatically. He’s hosted the white stork reintroduction. You go there and you feel like you’re in the plains of Africa. You know these savannas with incredible giant, London taxi sized nests all around you. So, Charlie Burrell, and I wanted to create more Knepps and we wondered how could we do this? Are there enough philanthropists out there to raise money from charitable sources to buy land and rewild? And we concluded that, no, it’s not easy. That is the government going to fund land purchase and rewilding in this way? Not in the way that we envisaged. So that was the idea, was to go and tap up private capital markets, go to investors and say, we will raise money from you and we’ll provide you with a yield as if you are solving some other societal problem, like student accommodation. You know, its institutional investors will invest in student accommodation, not just because it’s needed, but because they’ll get a 5% or a 4% financial yield. If you’re a pension fund. You need to produce a yield in order to pay those pensioners out their income each year. So that’s how investors work. So, how could we get a yield from nature such that we could persuade investors to invest in rewilding in the same way that they would solar or wind or student accommodation or bridges or toll roads. And the answer is, in this country at least, there are now a bunch of market mechanisms that we talked about earlier that provide such an income. So, we raised some money from the city of London, from a series of investors, insurance companies, and pension funds, and we are now rewilding four very large sites, all in the thousands of acres, all within about two hours of London. We’re restoring a great wetland in Norfolk. We’re restoring a mosaic wood pasture with wetland in Lincolnshire. We are selling nature-based carbon and biodiversity credits and natural flood management in the ways that I described in the hope of producing a long-term infrastructure like yield for investors. So, this Nattergal venture, I’m very, very excited about, because that’s what I’ve done in my life is raise money from investors to do needed things, but in such a way that those investors receive a return from it. And I think that nature as infrastructure, crude as it sounds philosophically, you know, how do you value something that is beyond valuing, it’s beyond price, you know, I get that. But nature is the mother all infrastructure. You know, you hear sometimes people say, well, 50% of global GDP is dependent upon nature. Well, I dunno how they come up with 50%. I mean, surely it’s a hundred percent of everything, and so nature is kind of the mother of all infrastructure. And then once we recognize it as infrastructure and we start quantifying the value that it provides. And if I’ve got a fruit farm and I’m growing apricots, rewilding the land around that farm makes sense because I’m gonna get pollinating insects all over my apricot trees at the right time of year there. There’s money in that or protecting communities from flooding. So, we’re creating a kind of nature as infrastructure strategy where we we’re trying to do it better than anyone else, look after local communities and make sure they’re properly involved and they benefit. So Nattergal I think is an interesting story. And then I’ve got this podcast, Rewilding the World, and I wrote a book as well in 2021. By 2022, it was published called ;God Is An Octopus,’ but it’s not a theological book, but it’s a very personal one. And I guess that tells my story a bit.

Mike: Well, Ben, you have been very generous with your time, and I’ve enjoyed speaking with you, and I’ll be sure to link your book and your podcast in the show notes of this episode. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.

Ben: Well, thank you so much, Mike. I’m sort of starstruck to have been on Mongabay’s podcast. I love Mongabay. It’s my favorite publication. It’s full of stories that I love and I’m really grateful to have been asked. Thank you.

Mike: You can find links to the Rewilding the World Podcast and Nattergal in the show notes of this episode. As always, if you’re enjoying the Mongabay Newscast or any of our podcast content and you want to help us out, we encourage you to spread the word about the work we’re doing by telling a friend and leaving us review. Word of mouth is the best way to help expand our reach. But you can also support us by becoming a monthly sponsor via our Patreon page at patreon.com/Mongabay. Mongabay is a non-profit news outlet, so even pledging a dollar per month makes a big difference and it helps us offset production costs. So, if you’re a fan of our audio reports from Nature’s Frontline, go to patreon.com/mongabay to learn more and support the Mongabay Newscast. But you can also read our news and inspiration from Nature’s frontline at mongabay.com. Or you can follow us on social media, find Mongabay on LinkedIn at Mongabay News, and on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook and TikTok, where our handle is @Mongabay or on YouTube at @MongabayTV. Thanks as always for listening.