11 Nicky Saunter on making masks and how people really love beavers

In her Somerset home in Wiveliscombe, Nicky Saunter chats about her life as author, poet, mask maker and activist. On the table is a large mask of Frog, and in the kitchen are masks of Octopus, Beaver and Ant. She says, “You wear a mask at an outdoor event, and it frees you up. You become a more extreme version of yourself.” People also instantly smile, put on a mask, become a frog. Everyone’s immediately laughing. 

What can go wrong? Nothing. They’re bomb proof. 

Such street art closes gaps between humans and animals. Masks and tricksters are closely related. They cause agency. She tells of filming new river rituals with masks, becoming animals, and changing the world. “After all, transgressions are now needed.”

Nicky talks of beavers, having helped form the Beaver Trust: “People love beavers.”

Here hero is Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan pioneer of tree planting. And Peter Gabriel, for championing world music through WOMAD. 

She recommends any book by Margaret Attwood.

And says, “Become a magpie. Choose things that are already working, and copy them.”

Especially, go for the joy!

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery." 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:09

Beautiful blustery day, bit chilly for spring here. And uh welcome to the pub. Thanks, Nikki. So um artist, photographer, author, poet, activist, lots of descriptions, lots of different masks that you might wear. We'll come to the masks in a moment. So perhaps you'd start by saying a little bit about yourself and your art and craft, the sorts of things that you're engaged with at the moment, and then we'll cut we'll pick up on a couple of those.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Well, I suppose the funny thing is that we had that conversation a bit earlier about what are you, you know, who who are you at different and at different times of your life, you're probably different things. And there are definitely people who think of me as so I've I've set up a lot of organisations in my life, and there've been uh businesses and what's now called social enterprises. Um, in the early days, there sort of wasn't a word for trying to set up an ethical business, it was just kind of trying to run a business decently, and charities and community groups and and and also not formally constituted groups where you just gather and do crazy stuff in the woods, which is what we do with the masks or whatever. Um, so and then along the way you pick up skills and you try. I think I think as I've got older, I've tried, tried, not necessarily successfully, but I've tried to do more of the stuff I like. So, you know, where my heart is is in the creative stuff, is in writing and poems, and I I really enjoy singing. I'm not particularly good at it, I sing in a choir, so I'm I'm don't I can sing in a big group of people, but I love it. Um, painting and mixing all those things up as well, you know, in the way that you do with the with the ch with the what Chinese work you do. I like I quite like paintings with words in. And and and probably and it's funny because people often say it's the other way around that my poems are quite filmic. So my poems are descriptions of little scenes and things that happen rather than um ideas-based.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

I think.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

So yeah, the visual stuff is is coming back into my life. And I and I sort of remember when it when it was officially made to leave. So during school, when you're at primary school, which I loved, you could it was all flowing into each other. No, every project was to do with drawing and singing and write a poem, write a play, all the rest of it. And when you went to secondary school, it just stopped. So there was a point, I think, about second or third year when you go into in those days into GCSEs, and they said, Well, we're not going to do drawings anymore in our books. And I remember just thinking, well, life has got bleak. Yes, miserable. Yes. But why would you say that even?

SPEAKER_02 2:43

Amazing, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, it's it it we're going to need um in an instrumental way, creativity and imagination to address the big challenges that we face and the small ones as well. I mean, we need them through life, and it it sort of gets beaten out of us early on, or kind of mid mid-childhood, adolescence or whatever, just at the time when actually that would be a really important time.

SPEAKER_00 3:10

Um, and there are people who are good at it, so you can officially be, you know, we spoke about being, am I an artist and a poet because I make paintings and because I write poems, or do I feel uncomfortable with that because society says you're not that until you're successful, you know, you you've got to self-basically it's to do with money, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Unless you're selling them, and you're not, that means you're not professional. That means you're somehow not good.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 3:32

And then, you know, those boundaries are very weird, aren't they? And that's what we're telling children and young people is that unless you're making money at doing what you're doing, then you're not successful at it. Yes. Which is very sad because lots of people have huge successes in their lives that are sort of separate from their or hidden away almost.

SPEAKER_02 3:49

Yeah. It's kind of tied into these sorts of ideas about fame. Some people now saying, many, many young people amongst others, saying, What I want to do is to become famous. So that's sort of an interesting twist, is now actually you want to become a thing which is not a thing. You know, it's almost to be a footballer or a ballerina. Yeah, you just want to be famous. Um, but but that clearly fits into the kind of model that the the legitimacy of doing the thing comes from making money from it. Yes. Um, and you could be famous in your in your kind of village where you live, you know, by doing good stuff. You don't need to be on a worldwide stage. That could be fine. That could be plenty enough, and lots of people are already that because they do good stuff locally. So you've spanned um the these kind of different ways of of being active. I mean, would you call yourself an activist?

SPEAKER_00 4:46

Yes, I think so. I think I am. I think I am a doer in life, and I'm quite impatient sometimes to get from I love talking about ideas, but it's almost like at the end of the conversation I want to go, so now what are we going to do about it? So I'm not the person that can keep talking all the time. I want to say, and what is the action that comes out of this point, which is um, you know, in it makes you good at uh I have discovered at start-up and at at making m movements happen because you're always the person going, This is great and really interesting, and now what?

SPEAKER_02 5:19

Now what? Very good. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 5:21

Yeah, I mean, sometimes it is also annoying at some time. Sure. Being the person that's trying to do things.

SPEAKER_02 5:26

Well, yeah, well, maybe, but I mean kind of maybe part of a team. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 5:30

And that also for me is so important in my life. W thinking about the teams I've been part of and I'm still part of, you know, people who go from being colleagues to being friends, and people who you you you meet at some kind of you know random event and you have lots in common with in that area, and you keep meeting them when you do that thing. But outside of that, doing that thing, you perhaps don't have any contact with them. So you have all these lovely different threads in your life that weave together.

SPEAKER_02 6:00

Lovely. So one of those threads is the Rapid Transition Alliance and the New Weather Institute. So tell us a bit about the work that you've done there, and then I think we come on to hope, don't we? We come to hope and hope tale. So we should just uh just uh riff uh riff on that a little bit, I think, as well. So so tell us a so transition is an activist thing, as it's it's acting to have some deliberate idea of change, going from not so good to better, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:29

And I think it's the I think the reason I like it is because it's quite practical on one level. On one level it's saying, what are you going to do? Where are you going to shop? What are you going to eat? How are you going to travel? Um, so you've got this big idea of change, but what does that mean in a daily life? And I still think that that is the weakness in all the visions of the future. There are either sort of weird utopian visions of everyone riding around on a lovely bike with a woven basket on the front with fresh vegetables all the time. You think, how are you going to do that in February? You know, so that there's a lot of the practical side of delivering a dream that I think is really important. And it doesn't have to be drear and miserable, it's mostly about getting together and having fun. And that's what the transition town groups are really, really good at. I'm sort of straight, I was going to say I'm not part of that only because I'm not physically helping them out with things all the time, but I've been part of it with helping the organization locally and and helping them to do that and to thrive.

SPEAKER_02 7:32

Tell us a bit about the chat box then, obviously. Yeah. Something we worked on together, but um t tell us a bit about Hope Tales and how that all came about and the sorts of things that that were done in that little project.

SPEAKER_00 7:44

So Hope Tales was sort of came out of the pandemic, COVID. Sorry, those noises you can hear in the back down, and my two dogs have been wandering around and now um drinking water. So um, yeah, so during COVID, we part of the Rapid Transition Alliance work was to try and take the positive things that had happened as a result of this very bizarre situation that we were in, and to to make the most of them. And part of that was about hope, and part of it was about looking at human creativity, resilience, all those sorts of things. And one of them was to take was the idea of actually working actively on hope, to say what is hopeful and how what does it look like, and how can we talk about it and generate more of it. And and Hope Tales came about as as being a small project between um you working then in in um in Essex, University of Essex, and um and Andrew and me working sort of together with University of Sussex loosely, but mostly through with New Weather Institute, which is our sort of organisation where we gather lots of people together to do different projects under the a single banner. And um we had uh uh really a quite a small amount of funding that went a long way, didn't it? The idea was to produce these little, to produce events that were focused on a different area of hope each time. And we chose to look at the elements, so we did air, water, land, fire, love. Yeah. Is that it? Yes, five of them we did. And we did them in different places around the country. So we had an event, we invited people to come and contribute creatively, but they weren't necessarily people who thought of themselves as artists, they were just people we knew who we thought might take part, and they did amazingly, didn't they? And they came together at a certain place and we chose we did two in London, but the others were in places that weren't big fancy names. So we did one in Margate, we did one in Colchester and one in Somerset, in Wellington in Somerset. And um the events were like a convivial evening of readings, music, images, poems, talking, ideas, and then after the evening, we put together a small booklet that was a sort of beautifully designed thing, uh, about with all the all the things that we produced in that evening, all came together in these lovely little booklets and that called Hope Tales, and they were sort of resonant of the chap books, which were the the sort of ra cheap rags that were taken around the countryside across from the 1600s, 1500s. Yeah, late 1600s is probably when they started. When printing became cheap enough, yeah, and they would have things like stories and songs and you know ribe old tales and uh political manifestos, some of the political manifestos and temperance movements also movement gathering and also probably quite a lot of gossip and storytelling. Exactly. And uh and and the idea was that you would, you know, we would be sort of replicating that in some way. And funnily enough, I heard something about that the other day on the radio, somebody talking about the idea about chat books. They didn't describe them as such, but that's what they were talking about. Yeah, street literature, I think, is another way of thinking about it. And about how a lot of the way we work now is reverting to that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_02 11:00

Yes, so tying back, I hadn't thought of this till just now, but we just talked about the internet and library and so forth. And actually, they were the old internet, the chat books, because they were so I think Dickens the ones with his individual chapters were called Penny Dreadfalls. That there was a kind of that sneery way of kind of describing um what was in them. Um but they were widely available um uh in a way that that literature or writing hadn't been beforehand, it'd have been controlled.

SPEAKER_00 11:31

Of course, one person could read it to other people, so you'd have someone who would read in your community, and they might read it in a room or in a square or in the pub to other people, and so you could spread the information way wider than the the single like passing a comic round at school.

SPEAKER_02 11:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, exactly. Um, and therefore it gets its own life at that point, doesn't it? So though those are still available, they're available on the Rapid Transition Alliance website, aren't they? So people can download the Hope tablet from there.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

It's beautifully designed um by um a a guy who's who worked with us for a long time and and it was and it makes a difference. And I think that was lovely. The event itself was was a was a really beautiful thing and very informal, us sitting in a circle doing stuff together, um, and amazing things came out of all of them, didn't they, in different ways. But the the booklets as well, they make a little set, but also they themselves are things of beauty, um, which is which is rather rather lovely.

SPEAKER_02 12:30

And deliberately rough around the edges. I mean, again, there's this I think I I I like the idea of not setting up the things that we have to that we want to do that relate to creativity and ideas and imagination that we bring to the challenges of the of the world. Yeah, I like the idea of not letting kind of perfection stop us doing those things.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

And the transferring of knowledge. So I think the um the mask making, for instance, so came about through wanting to uh being a a local group of extinction rebellion forming in this small town of Wivelliscombe in Somerset, where people go famously, um was it um Churchill who said, Where in the world is Wivelliscombe? Because Wivelliscombe Church was one of the places used to store artworks in because it had a big basement that you could almost drive into. So apparently, famously he was told that these artworks were being brought to Wivelliscom and went, Where in the world is Wivelliscom? I think that's our local logo.

SPEAKER_02 13:29

You're right, cheeky, yes, exactly. Sneary kind of city view. Exactly. Well, look, tell us about the Mars. So this the project was all the creatures of the night, yes, it starts with.

SPEAKER_00 13:39

Um and um And it started very much as a way of one of our members of the group of Wivelliscom Extinction Rebellion, um Jenny Dutton, is a very fine artist, and we were uh wanting to join in with drumming, and so we have somebody teaching a small group of drummers, and we were literally started in the woods with like four of us with old parts of old drum kits um bashing away and learning learning rhythms. And then we realized that when we went up to some of these big events in London, there wasn't really any discussion about biodiversity. So, although it very much from the beginning was talking about the ecological crisis, it didn't translate into the actual days events, you didn't see representation of other than human things. And so we thought we should become animals and take something from the countryside into the city when we went and make a noise. So we were drummers with animal masks on. And Jenny, who is is a fine mask maker, sort of taught us the principle. So you can see in this one, it's very basic. You've got a basic um circle that goes around your head, and then you extend off it to make it bigger. It's all made just with um either PVA or you can do it with flower paste, um, you know, papier mache and old cardboard. So it's completely even all the paints we would say, has anyone got any green paint? We'd have like a big, you know, conflab of old bits of it's not fancy paint at all. I think this one in the end I did varnish because it's seen some miles in drumming in the rain and things like that and survived to tell the tale.

SPEAKER_02 15:10

Okay. So we've got a frog here, you've got an ant here. So um bringing insects into the into the story as well. Yeah, and that's really important. So that sits a bit higher on the head. Yeah, it does.

SPEAKER_00 15:23

I can I can stick it on.

SPEAKER_02 15:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:26

Um so this one sits like this, so you're very much looking right through in the middle between the ant pieces.

SPEAKER_02 15:32

So you're wearing that. Um, and are you when you're wearing the masks, are you going through a sort of transformation yourself? You're acting. I mean, obviously, it's a kind of actory type of thing, but you'll you're literally wearing a mask. Yes. You know, and we all have masks, different identities that we play into sometimes many times a day, but certainly at many times at any point in our lives. Um, but now you're physically wearing a mask. What happens when that when you think it frees you up enormously wearing a mask?

SPEAKER_00 16:03

It may allows you to play, it allows you to be, I think, a more sometimes a more extreme version of yourself. You don't have to worry because you particularly I find with well, with all of them in different ways, but if you put that on other people, they become a frog. Yeah, and other people respond to them. You see, people instantly smile. Um, quite often people squat down straight away when they have it on, they go into the position that they know a frog sits in and they make noises, they'll go rib it, rib it. And and you don't say be a frog, they just become a frog. And you know, that's magical. And these masks have been used in um borrowed by other groups, so their life goes on. Um started maybe this one's probably six years old now, made in 2020, and it's been in local groups in uh doing street gathering of um petition signatures. People sometimes in Britain people are quite nervous about going up to people. If they wear a mask, they've they feel they can walk up and interact with people, and the people they're interacting with are already well disposed, they're already laughing or smiling, and the children are wanting to touch it and all sorts of things like that. And they're kind of bomb-proof. I say to people, don't worry about it, we can mend them. You know, they're just made of paper. And and it closes a space, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_02 17:17

Isn't that interesting? Because actually And opens a conversation. Well, quite, yeah, exactly. So it um if we think of the formalities of acting, a stage uh and an audience, and there's definitely a gap between them, you know, that's the that's the acting class, as it were, and this is the watching class. So formalities of that. But but in in kind of street art of this sort, street or woodland or whatever, it's closing the gaps between humans and animals, and it's closing the gaps between humans and humans. It's making the engagement easier. But I quite like the idea that people smile automatically. Yes, they do.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

There's a there's a change in the there's definitely a change in the vibe. I mean, the we have done some, we've done so we've done um work with the surfers against sewage people demonstrating about water pollution, which in the octopus behind us, yes. Yeah, and the um, and and that's again quite funny. And there's something about the, you know, we know that people respond to big eyes and a puppy face and whatever. So I think I probably do use that in the in the design of the masks to make them you know reflect. It's hard to do some more harder to do some creatures, but particularly with the insects. I wanted to my next one, I want to do a scarab beetle or to do something with or a stag beetle, something like you know, something really to show the sort of grandeur of that creature that is normally only seen small. And when you see it big, it's quite shocking to see the structure of the animal. And you have conversations about the creatures, of course, would that come up. But yes, they we've used them in different places, we use them in the towns, by the rivers. Recently we did um uh we've made a series of short films for um this week was International Water Day on Monday, I think it was Sunday or Monday, and we made a series of films down by a local river here with all the creatures, and we also had humans without masks on uh speaking directly to the river and honouring the river and um bringing that closer. And in a way, there's something quite funny about humans dressed up in animal heads sitting by a river. You're always aware of that.

SPEAKER_02 19:25

You know, we're not too precious about it. Yes, yeah, exactly. I mean, you've just got to allow yourself to settle into this different identity a little bit. Yes, exactly. And the laughing is, yeah, I mean, we kind of worry about people laughing at us, but they're laughing with you in this case, aren't they? That's something kind of slightly, yeah, slightly interesting.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

And when we danced along as part of this band with all these headgear on, it people generally the response was laughing, as you say. Laughing joy, that response where you see someone's eyes open and their eyebrows go up and they go, Oh, they're pointing at you, and you could wave at them and things. And and there was something, yeah, joy, something very joyful about that.

SPEAKER_02 20:03

Well, that's I if we kind of let back a long way. I mean, all all all early cave art, as so-called, um uh the oldest surviving depictions of that we know have been created by humans are the ones in Sulawesi, which are fifty 54,000 years old. I think now has been the earliest dating in them. And they all have human-animal mixtures. I mean, kind of call therianthropes, where you know, there are there are um animals with human heads, or there are humans with animal heads, or legs, birds, animals, tails, um, all sorts of mixtures. Um and um the analysis quite often takes them sort of quite seriously. It's like, uh you know, we wonder why they're doing this. Is it is it something by the flickering light that brings them to to movement? Well, yeah, for sure. That's what it looks like. Um but also maybe people are having a bit of fun. Yes, you know, there may be some element of that.

SPEAKER_00 21:07

I mean I mean I th I still think if you basically I think you take any group of people and you put them, make a fire and give them some masks, at some point in that evening they will be dancing around the fire like an animal wearing a mask. So I I just think that's an ancient thing in us that we like to to transform ourselves and pretend to be other things. I mean, if you you know, who hasn't been an elephant, you know, at some point in their life, and and you sort of think, Oh, I wish I had a great big elephant head to put on. And if somebody gave you a great big elephant, you would know what to do with it.

SPEAKER_02 21:42

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 21:43

You know, you wouldn't go, what do I do with this thing?

SPEAKER_02 21:45

Yes. I have no idea. Yes, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 21:48

Every child, probably around the world, if you if if they recognized what the animal was, they would transform themselves instantly into it.

SPEAKER_02 21:56

So there's a kind of lovely blurring of these boundaries. Which is quite nice, isn't it? I mean, if we're going to um uh we talk quite a lot about the need for more connections to create understanding and care and empathy. Um uh uh but we're never quite sure what we mean by that connection thing. I mean it's a sort of abstract term. What what's what is it actually? Well it's trying on different clothes, it's trying on masks, it's trying on identities which from which come things like hope and care and understanding and maybe more creativity on the back of that.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

Well, I think isn't that you know, in in in any life, you have moments in your life where you suddenly realise that a thing is so and um I mean I couldn't so I probably came to, although I had a very sort of rural, feral childhood, and I used to love going in the woods with my iSpy books and pretending I was you know communing with the animals. I think actually my awareness of sort of it human impact on the world came from working in Hong Kong where everything you're on a rock with a lot of people, and everything that literally gets flushed down the loo is going to bob up in the harbour just outside. So you you're the impact of pollution and the impact of someone throwing something, there is no away. Yeah, it's very close to you. It's very close to you. So you see all that stuff, and I think I I think that's I think that's important.

SPEAKER_02 23:19

Yeah, yes, exactly. Um lots of traditional stories, perhaps pretty well all kinds of cultures have within them trickster characters, um, which are very often animals, but they're also plants. They can be trees and plants, they might be rivers actually, as well. Um certainly insects and Nancy the spider, but also all sorts of other ones. Um uh and and I wonder whether the masks also opens up that kind of space as well, that the trickster is a character that that um uh behaves in certain kind of ways that are outside the norms.

SPEAKER_00 23:56

Yes, I think you can be naughty, yeah. You know, you can say things and do things in a mask, not just the movements, but you might, if you're in a protest where you might feel like you're you're happier standing at the back with a mask on, you might be right at the front.

SPEAKER_02 24:10

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 24:11

And uh and you might say something that you might not say otherwise. Yeah. So I think and we sort of think of that in a negative way, don't we? Like people hiding behind the masks of anonymity on the internet, for example, how uh savile things that they wouldn't say otherwise. But I think it also can work in a positive way. Yeah, you know, people can say loving things that they would feel embarrassed about saying. Yes, yes, they might say things about their love for the planet or their love for nature, yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 24:38

They would feel silly in our culture saying or or behave like a frog, as you said, you know, kind of immediately go into a different sort of space. Yes, and that's what those characters do is that they they lead us into a different place. Yeah, they you know they kind of encourage change by leading us in in that way, don't they?

SPEAKER_00 24:54

Absolutely, and and they lead into more detailed knowledge. So you can, you know, you might start with this and then you might have a conversation about a frog, and then someone might talk about a frog where they see frogs or where they used to see frogs and they don't see them anymore.

SPEAKER_02 25:06

Exactly. All sorts of yes things come from that. And from that change, that that recognition of things have changed, both both got worse, but also got better. I mean, the two stories run side by side very often. The beaver behind you there. Yes. Um uh you know, the the beavers on the top of the head one. Beavers in the UK were were gone for I mean, popularly people talk about 400 years. I'm not sure where that number came from, because I think it's nearer a thousand.

SPEAKER_00 25:36

The last beaver was hunted in si the 1500s. I think that's where the figure comes from. But why they weren't widespread by then.

SPEAKER_02 25:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:47

It's hard to be serious and talk about um change when there's a beaver on your head. Yeah. But that's part of the joy. Exactly. And it is funny actually, because sometimes when you're doing this approach, of course, you forget after a while that you were, and then people are looking at you and laughing. You think everyone's so nice today, aren't they? Really smiling. That's because you've got a beaver on your head.

SPEAKER_02 26:04

I know amazing orange teeth. And um uh and now we find that there are in pretty well every county, and there are beavers, and they have been their kind of legal status has been changed, they don't have to be within controlled fencing now, they can be more widespread.

SPEAKER_00 26:22

Yeah, and that's been a hell of a battle, and that's probably um so I started an organization with together with four other three other people called um Beaver Trust, which is the national beaver charity now thought of. Yeah, there were people who'd been working in that field, scientists and people on the ground looking after beavers that were already here, and also sometimes I think possibly letting beavers out into the environment, which without them having done that, we wouldn't be where we are today, to be honest. You need those transgressors in order to kick start something. If you all sit around waiting till it's perfect, till the rules are all there, until you know it's part of our problem with wanting to control nature because everyone's saying, well, if we bring beavers back, what will happen? You're like, well, I don't know, probably cleaner water, more biodiversity, fewer floods, fewer floods, um some areas might get a bit more flooded. We can put it in more wetlands, more insects, yes.

SPEAKER_02 27:21

And then they're quite big beavers, so they're easy to find. I mean, if you did need to get rid of them, yes, they can't really hide in the landscape.

SPEAKER_00 27:29

They're slow moving and they're in water, and yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 27:33

So the beaver trust, oh that uh that has done great work. You've done great work with that. Yeah, really good. Some something interesting has happened, isn't it? That that that has changed um people's understanding of well, it's another tech, it's another sort of technocratic term, but ecosystem services, the services that come from beavers who create wetlands, who do all of these other things for us for free, um, provide us with actual financial benefits.

SPEAKER_00 28:02

Yes, human benefits, which is really um what it's all about, isn't it? Any issue has got to at some level come back to a human improvement, otherwise, mostly humans won't consider it. A tiny group of humans in any area might consider it otherwise, but most people aren't interested. And I think the big difference that what Beaver Trust was able to do, that the academics and the scientists on their own weren't able to do, was to take it to the public because we were able to be, and it was a battle, and at the beginning, lots of people thought we were doing something quite crass, that we weren't well informed enough or knowledgeable enough, it must be perfect and income and exactly right before anything is said about anything. And I do, while I understand that drive, I disagree with it because I think you've got to get down and dirty sometimes and get out there and let the world people aren't as stupid as see what emerges from that in my own. What emerged was people love beavers and they respond simply to the animal. You could be you could be reciting the phone book over a picture of a beaver plopping into the water or munching on a bit of willow or putting mud in the putting mud on the way they do on the and it's and people are captivated by it. And and so I think that that was I think we all probably the science side underestimated the the impact, the emotional impact. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 29:23

That's the core of it, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 29:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:24

Um so let's come to a few kind of uh quickfire, quick firish questions towards the end. So proud. So um against all the odds, as it were. I mean, I think maybe the Beaver Trust is a good example. It was actually, that was my example. Right, okay.

SPEAKER_00 29:39

Yeah, it was actually that that it was difficult because I'm not a scientist, and there is a uh a feeling you can feel quite swamped, sort of overcome by other people's knowledge sometimes, and go think, do I have a right to say this in this space? But I think most of the big changes in the world haven't always been experts in their area. They've been people who've come in and gone, I think maybe we could do this differently.

SPEAKER_02 30:01

Yeah, so there's a kind of there's a translational element. I mean, the the the people duck when they see data coming, you know, then and and yet that's the that's the kind of correspondence of science is to do analysis and graphs and data and so forth. Okay, so we need that to know what's going on. Yeah, but when we're in the space of engaging directly with the public and saying, as you mentioned a couple of times, if there's not an emotional core to this thing, it's not gonna work. And these things create the emotional core, yeah. Um and the and the masks do, but the the Beaver Trust does the same thing by saying, well, actually, we we think we understand what people how they're gonna respond in a different way, uh, which actually has these wider ramifications.

SPEAKER_00 30:44

And underneath you have this huge body of science that other people have put together and that the Beaver Trust now contributes to itself now that it's got funding and it's got scientists in it and whatever. But the but the the connection with people is still, you know, you can tell what gets the big hits when you put out a video of a release and an animal being put into the water. It's just it's such a cathartic thing. You can and I still watch them, I watch every single one. I'm like, it's the same thing.

SPEAKER_02 31:10

Exactly. It could be the same, but it's actually different, and that's wonderful. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 31:14

At each moment, there's that moment of joy where the animal goes, is sort of looking around, and some of them go straight from the cave, straight into the water and disappear. And and some of them spend a lot of time being a bit careful, looking around. And you're all that time, you're with the animal, aren't you? Yes, exactly. You're willing it to find the water and to get in the water and swim away from the humans.

SPEAKER_02 31:34

Being in a hole, getting out of a hole, uh, an example of that. There's this there's a common thing, it's a theme of the pod, but it's also we're in a big hole nationally, globally, um, and we haven't ever got out of this hole because we haven't ever done it before. We've never created quite such a difficult set of circumstances. Um but you've got to believe it's possible in the first place, and the only way you can believe that is by looking at other examples. And we do that in our lives over and over again, for in the hole, get out of a hole.

SPEAKER_00 32:03

It's probably, for me, it's probably the hardest one. I think it's because I feel that life is is very bumpy. It's like a slalom course, and I feel like you're doing that every day. You're you know, you you're trying to find ways around things that seem to work best for people that don't make an impact, that that don't make, don't generate harm. And um for me, I'm I'm definitely always in that hole. I'm in that hole every day. Um I'm I mean, at the moment it's funny, as a hole I haven't gotten out of yet, or sort of I do occasionally, is that when I'm looking for work, I'm looking for work that doesn't, that uses my the skills I have, but that doesn't create harm in the world. Yeah, and that is extremely hard.

unknown 32:48

Yeah, yes.

SPEAKER_00 32:49

You know, I'm quite good at selling stuff. You know, I as a kid I worked on the markets and I've run businesses, but I don't want to sell anything that is creating any harm. I don't want to generate harm in a in a place where it's made, I don't want to generate harm when somebody's finished using it. So the number of people you can work with is minuscule. That's exactly what it is. And and when you go to invest in, you know, you look at your pension or you look at where you're going to put any of your savings, you're facing the same thing. Same dilemma. This great big lumpy dilemma. So I sort of think, in a way, uh it sounds like a cop-out, but I don't know. No, no, I think that that's a good way of framing it actually. I genuinely feel like that. It's constant. If someone said, Where was a big hole you got out? I was like, that's like every day. It feels like that.

SPEAKER_02 33:32

So vulnerability is in there as well. I mean, stories, story talks about or creates the space for vulnerability to be accepted and to be pointed towards. And um and we do have a problem with that.

SPEAKER_00 33:44

Yeah, because I notice it myself if I say to people, I'm out of work, or I'm a bit low on cash, or I'm so oh the things there's there's things you're not supposed to say about your vulnerability. You're supposed to be, once you're a successful person, you're supposed to remain a successful person in all ways and all times. And it's very confusing for people if you don't. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 34:06

Um but creativity is also going into spaces where it's vulnerable, where you haven't done something before. I mean, tell us about the poem. The poem. I mean, that wasn't about vulnerability, but that was about doing something new, as writing poems.

SPEAKER_00 34:18

Well, a poem is about me, and that's something I've never done. I've never, I'm not someone who puts my personal stuff. I use social media for campaigning. I don't put pictures of myself anywhere. And partly that's just out of maybe just my own privacy feeling, but partly I sort of think, well, it's I don't know, it's of limited interest to people. You know, it's of interest to me and my mates, but it's of limited interest to people. So, but the poetry is something like many people, I've written poems since I was a child, and it's a kind of natural medium for me to express myself. And it's one of those things where I over the years I think probably I've got quite good at it just by doing it. And so eventually you start thinking, well, um maybe I'm a poet. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 35:00

And you put these on the scrolls, yeah, and then people engage with them in a different way. If if they're reading something or it's being read to them.

SPEAKER_00 35:08

So I think putting them in books is is great. I love reading poems, but I also love hearing poems read out. And the first time I read one of my own poems out was very recently, in the last three years, maybe somebody asked me to read a poem, and I read it, and seeing the response in people's faces immediately, people coming up afterwards to tell them something impacted them or made them cry or made them reminded them of somebody is is extremely rewarding and also sort of surprising still. Yes, and then these particular ones that are done on scrolls, they were done in a very near my home, right out the back here is a little tin tabernacle, and it's a beautiful place for exhibitions. And with a couple of other friends, we had a joint exhibition of all our creativity. And I was thinking, how do I bring words and my poetry into this space? I I did do some readings, but also I decided that lots of people like to read them in their own personal time, and perhaps books are great, but you've got to put your glasses on, you're you're in your own space. Whereas if you put them on a scroll, two people can stand in a read the same position.

SPEAKER_02 36:08

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? And I and I very much, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:11

I was struck by how that was, and I will definitely do more of it.

SPEAKER_02 36:15

Lovely. Um, someone you look up to. We might call them a heroine or a hero. Um that that that perhaps individualises collective action unfairly, so it might be an organization, but it so I I so I've chosen sort of three really different people, actually, or organizations.

SPEAKER_00 36:32

And one of them is Culture Declares, which is the UK-based organisation that that um declared a climate emergency quite early on and brought together people from all the cultural sector. And and I think they do a brilliant job, both with having sort of, you know, top artists do amazing installations that bring bring the environmental issue right into people's front of people's minds, you know, outside the Houses of Parliament. And also just bringing together all those artists all over the country and all over the other countries working in their own way to realise that we're all part of a movement. It gives, you know, some art and creativity can be very lonely. And it's it's interesting. Movement building within culture is, I think, is a really good thing.

SPEAKER_01 37:17

Very good.

SPEAKER_00 37:17

Um, the other person I thought of immediately, I had to go and I couldn't never, I'm very poor with names, as you know, Jules, and um, is Wanga Rai Matai, who started the Green Belt Movement. And I remember the first time I heard about that, I didn't know the full extent of so I heard about her through her work in Kenya, um, planting trees, fighting for spaces to be kept um open and not built on and to be natural and for people to have access to those spaces. Um, but I didn't realise that she was such an amazing worker in democracy and advocacy and women's rights and all the rest of it. So, you know, an absolutely amazing woman, really worthwhile looking up the green belt movement. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 38:02

Begins with a tree and ends up with democracy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:05

And also I love I think the thing about the way she works is really resonates strongly with me, is the complexity side of it. So sustainability, the true meaning of that word, not the word of a sustainability report on somebody's website, is is to me, you know, our viability on our planet. And so it encompasses everything. It it's the natural world, it's the human world, it's how we operate together, and it's it it's our only hope. That that is our hope for the future. And she, to me, embodies that because she's about women's empowerment, bringing unheard voices into the room without whom the situation is not going to change for the better. No, exactly. And also bringing nature and people together. And and I suppose I came, you know, my first uh advocacy work was with uh Amnesty International, not with the environmental movement. So I I have huge respect for people who battle for human rights all around the world and never take that for granted.

SPEAKER_02 39:05

Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 39:06

There was a third one, Peter Gabriel.

SPEAKER_02 39:08

Oh, right, okay, very good. A musical one, good.

SPEAKER_00 39:11

I've always been a big Peter Gabriel fan, and um particularly seeing the work that he's done with his studios, which are uh sort of in the West Country in Bath, and the work he's done to champion other music from other places. And I went to the first WOMAD, the World of Music and Dance Festival, which I was about 15, and me and a mate we borrowed her mum's housekeeping, and we got on a bus from Essex, and we ended up eventually in in several buses. We ended up in in um Shepton Mallet on some in the middle of nowhere. Neither of our families knew where we were.

SPEAKER_02 39:45

So that was that was your pilgrimage from East Country to West.

SPEAKER_00 39:49

Exactly, yeah. And we ended up watching this incredible range of music, you know, Korean orchestras, African dancers, Middle Eastern singers. Yeah, it's a brilliant thing, it was just brilliant, and it opened massively blew my mind open, and I think must have done the same for the people there, maybe for the people participating as well. I'm sure. And such respect for other cultures, just musicians are musicians all over the world. It doesn't matter what you play, where you are, if you're interested in music and you love it, it joins you together. Exactly. It's one of those things like family to me.

SPEAKER_02 40:21

Exactly. It's a universal truth. Yeah, it is a book.

SPEAKER_00 40:25

Recommend a book. Yes. Um anything by Margaret Atwood.

SPEAKER_02 40:30

Yeah, okay. Good, great. Simple one, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yes, good.

SPEAKER_00 40:35

You know, a lovely mixture of intelligence, um, humanity, wisdom, humour, cynicism, um, science, art, you know, all together. But yes, I love it.

SPEAKER_02 40:47

That was a great choice. Um a top action. What should what should people do? Is there something we've talked about there being this great range of things that are very you can begin very locally on doing stuff. But you know, each day there's a whole range of stuff, as you're saying, with a rapid transition alliance focusing on those little bits that we can act on. But what what what would you say?

SPEAKER_00 41:09

What I would sort of say be be a magpie. Yeah you know, be a magpie, cho choose the good things, the bright, shiny things that other people are doing that are working and looking good. Don't feel like you've got to come up with some great philosophy yourself. Just look at what works and elsewhere. Don't just look in your own area. Nowadays we can use the internet, right? We can look at ideas of how to do things and find out how to do them and do them. Also, I do really strongly feel do what you love. Don't feel, don't be too worthy. I think there've definitely been l lots of times in my life when I look back that I have not done things that I wanted to do and I've done things that I should do.

SPEAKER_02 41:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:44

And I think actually life is too short. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 41:47

I think it's it's kind of circles round, doesn't it? As you get older, you realise you should be choosed, choose the things you like to do.

SPEAKER_00 41:53

Go for the joy. And I don't sort of mean that, you know, I don't have a bucket list that involves bungee jumping. Um, but I do have a day-to-day thing that involves build more community because the most laughs, the most fun I've had is with groups of random people doing random things, as well as with your own, with your closer friends and family. You know, so building those opportunities is for me, you know, go go do some of that mad stuff.

SPEAKER_02 42:17

Make a mask. Yeah, I was about to say, well, yes, exactly, make a mask. Uh Nikki Saunter, thank you very much indeed. It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you to the masks for coming along as well, um, and all the animals um here in your kitchen in Somerset. So thanks very much indeed.

SPEAKER_00 42:33

Well, thank you, it's been a pleasure.