12 Ben Goldsmith on rewilding in cities and country, and personal journeys of loss and discovery

We’re talking online about rewilding, Ben Goldsmith at his London home. Ben is activist, rewilding advocate, financier, farm owner and host of the podcast Rewilding the World. Ben talks about rewilding cities, and the work for the Mayor of London’s taskforce, and how access to open spaces brought him close to nature as a child. Less tidiness is needed, he says. He describes the rewilding of his Somerset farm, and how the tragic and traumatic loss of his daughter Iris led to a whole new approach. He and other farmers/landowners have hopes for a rewilded corridor from Stonehenge to Avalon. He most magical moment, a July night two years ago, walking on a path by beaver ponds at the bottom of the farm, and seeing glow worms for the first time. I expect there to be lynx in the UK soon, he says. Maybe wolves too. 

Ben recommends “Feral” by George Monbiot, and Jonathan Thomson’s rewilding handbook called “How to Rewild Manual.” He also recommends reading any of the works of Richard Jeffries from the late 1800s to understand what nature abundance used to look like.

Ben’s book is called “God is an Octopus: Loss, Love and a Calling to Nature” (2023). 

His top recommended action: spend time in nature, and appreciate it. From there, all else flows. Also, apply pressure on your political candidates: make sure they care. 

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_00 0:04

Well, a gorgeous day here in the valley to talk about wildness. Birds are on the wing, building nests already, cuckoo and nightingale in the value. A perfect day for talking to Ben Goldsmith, author, financier, advocate for rewilding, host of the superb podcast Rewilding the World. You can see it from the mic cover on the scene here if you're watching. We're online, so uh tell us where you are, Ben, at the moment.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Oh, hi Jules. Thank you so much for having me on. It's such a privilege and a pleasure to be with you. And yes, this mic cover was a gift from the podcast coach team. Uh, they're the team that make my podcast, and um they spent a lot of time with me and me with them. And when we did um, I think it might have been 50th or 75th episode, they send me a um uh a podcast uh recording mic cover. Um so I'm actually in London, I'm in Primrose Hill. Uh my wife was born and raised here, um, overlooking the park. We rent a house here, my kids go to school here. They're even taught by some of the same teachers that taught my wife. Uh her family live around the corner, she knows everyone on the high street. So we spend our lives really divided, dividing our time between Primrose Hill and Somerset, um, which works quite well. Um and it's a lot greener perhaps than it was when my wife Jemima grew up, not least because of the rewilding London task force and the work of City Hall under Sadiq Khan in persuading the managers of green spaces like Primrose Hill and Regents Park and a whole bunch of squares and spaces all around here to create more habitat for wildlife. And there's some really rough corners of the park near me, and I find myself gravitating towards them whenever stress levels rise or whenever I've got to head south into London proper for meetings.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

Lovely. Well, though we were going to come to uh rewilding in cities, but let's let's take that take that straight on at the moment. You um, because most people would think of this as being a rural countryside big landscape thing. So we'll we'll come to that. But you did a report for the mayor of London uh investigating what more could be done for nature in cities, um, how will it improve people's lives? So so what have you seen? Perhaps a little bit of kind of messiness at the corners is a is a kind of starting point, but it's much more than that, I think, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 2:20

Yeah, well, I I kind of grew up in the city. It didn't feel like it to me. I was in Richmond, West London, and um on the edge of Richmond Park. So that in itself is almost 3,000 acres, I think, of lovely habitat, some lovely woodland and scrub and acid grassland, and and then on the on the western side of Richmond Park, you've got 120 odd acres of lovely sort of secondary woodland, oak and birch. And I was right on the edge of that woodland on Ham Common where I grew up. So it was full of birds and wildlife. I you know, I spent my entire childhood, every waking moment, fascinated by the turning of the seasons and looking for birds' nests and trying to dig out ponds, mostly unsuccessfully in that sandy soil in in West London. And when we did go to the English countryside, mostly to visit an aunt I had in Dorset uh near Shaftesbury, I was always quite disappointed. You know, I found far fewer birds' nests in her hedges than I did in the scrub around the edges of Richmond Park in what was, geographically speaking, London. Um, and I and I I I um I guess to this day I've always thought we shouldn't really differentiate between what is city, what is town, what is village, what is countryside when it comes to thinking about nature and habitat. Birds and wildlife don't need to mind. We can easily create space for them and weave streaks and patches of wild habitat through the very centre of our cities. And I was lucky enough to meet Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, at the Glasgow Climate Conference, which I guess was 2021, um, and we already knew each other a bit, and he had a relationship with my sister Jemima and and um and and and also knew my brother Zach, who unsuccessfully ran against him for mayor of London in 2016. And we talked about the social injustice inherent in the fact that if you are rural or if you're economically privileged in this country, you probably have much better access to nature and wildlife than if you live in the middle of a city. And why should that be? Why should a child growing up in Camden, here where I am right at this moment, or in Tower Hamlets or any of our other big cities not have the opportunity to look up and see a peregrine falcon or to see birds migrating in the autumn or the spring? You know, why shouldn't they be aware of toads and frogs uh producing spawn in February? You know, these things can perfectly easily unfold right in the very centre of our cities if we choose it. And so my suggestion to him was let's create a task force for London and lay down a template for cities not just in Britain but all over the world for restoring habitat and making space for wildlife right in the most urban environments in our country. And of course, London has an advantage because it's got so much green space, but but he was up for the idea. In fact, I remember him being excited enough about the idea during our second meeting that he swivelled around 360 degrees on his swivel chair. Um, and uh at the at the idea, and this particular idea that he loved most was the idea of reintroducing white stalks to central London with the idea that they might one day even breed on the top of St. Paul's Cathedral. Well, here we are now, a few years later in 2026, and there is a white stalk reintroduction project taking place amid one of the rewilding projects that's been supported by City Hall in Dagenham Marshes. So, yeah, there are lots more rough edges. The managers of green spaces throughout the city have pledged uh at least 30% of their space for nature, and we've got various interesting species reintroductions taking place, watervoles and beavers in Ealing and Enfield, and in even cattle at Wild Tollworth, where I'm going tomorrow, and and and and and just some very exciting things happening that you wouldn't necessarily have expected in the middle of London.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Exactly. Well, I think that's really interesting. You raised a couple of points there about access. So in in cities where you have parks, you've automatically got access. So if things can happen in parks, uh everybody or anybody can go there. And that's a kind of interesting point about engaging directly with nature. But then also symbolic things that that like the stork or the beaver, which people can um follow with interest, but they're also going to be bringing on along a lot else with them. You know, if you can get storks working and living and nesting in Dagoner marshes, then we know that's because a lot of things are happening, not just the storks, and it's a it's an indicator of something much greater happening. And I suppose in cities, we're we're still we're we're still addressing this idea that environment and economy can't work together, that they're going to be in opposition. So when people think of a city and all the economic activity, they think, well, if you're gonna have the environment, maybe that'll be bad for the economy. But actually, we know that the two can run on rails side by side in the same direction. And I guess that's what we're seeing, really, is that sort of change of mindset as well as change of actual species.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

Yeah, I I think you've in some sense got less potential for conflict in urban and suburban areas than you do in the countryside. Um species like beavers and and and um and all kinds of species are perceived as a threat to various economic and other activities in the countryside where perhaps they wouldn't be in the city where you haven't got agriculture and you haven't necessarily got game shooting and other things that um have a problem with with a bunch of different species. Um I I think in in lots of ways, people who live in urban and suburban environments are more tolerant of wildlife. But you have a different set of conflicts. I think tidiness, for example, is an important one. Psychologically, people in Britain, more than almost anywhere else that I can think of, are very caught up on the idea of tidiness. And by the way, I'm a bit of a tidy freak myself. My desk is pretty tidy, my email inbox is tidy, my bedroom and my cupboard is tidy, and I expected of my children that they tidy up after themselves. So I'm a bit of a tidy freak as well. Um, but nevertheless, um I don't apply that to my appreciation of the natural world and outdoors because mess is um, well, chaos even is in the eye of the beholder, and we're led to believe that nature is chaos and that we bring order. But as soon as you understand, for example, beavers, which is where this point started, you start to realize that they really know what they're doing. And in fact, it's us that brought chaos with all our tidiness. And we brought chaos to the hydrological system. By dredging and draining and tidying, we create conditions in which the water just gushes off the landscape and into people's living rooms and creates seasonal flash flooding, only to be followed by droughts and hose pipe bands shortly afterwards. And when beavers move into the landscape, whether it's urban or rural, they create these little lovely dams along the creeks and streams and they hold all that water back, allowing it to settle and get purified and filtered and then to be released slowly through the through the through the system during the course of the year. So actually, we've brought chaos and beavers bring order. But I think psychologically and aesthetically, people everywhere, especially in towns and cities, are interested in this idea that roundabouts and road verges and railway sidings and everything should be all tidy and the parks should be tidy. And that, of course, is a disaster for wildlife. And that is what's changing in our culture everywhere, is we're starting to embrace the idea of benign untidiness, you know, of scrubby, scruffy, flowery road verges that only get cut once a year instead of every week. Um, and the number of letters being sent to local councils and to Highways England and to local newspapers demanding to know where our taxes are being spent given the bloody mess everywhere, I think are starting to reduce, and less and less people think that way. And more and more people appreciate that tidiness equals bird song and butterflies. And and that's what we're experiencing here in London, where I spend a good chunk of my time, not quite half, but a lot, is is parks that are rougher-edged, you know, the edges of the serpentine in Hyde Park, and lovely wild natural reed beds around the water in Regents Park, and corners that aren't mown and and and scrub that is tolerated. And and at least to my mind, there's a lot more wildlife and birds song than there used to be.

SPEAKER_00 10:44

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 10:45

Oh my god. I hope you're editing this because my wife has so sweetly brought me a cup of tea. That's Jemima, Jemima, that's Jules. Hi Jules. Jules is recording the podcast, and we're talking about untidiness. Very nice. Thank you. I love that. And I love you for bringing me a cup of tea. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

Lovely. What a service. They had a fantastic service.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

I know. Well, we reciprocate. I bring her a cup of tea every morning, first thing.

SPEAKER_00 11:07

Very good, excellent. Um, so tell us a bit how you came into uh the thing called rewilding then, Ben. So um uh partly the farm, you wrote a wonderful book called Um God is an octopus, um uh, which kind of set out the the kind of relationship between you, your family, and nature, um, and um what you then came to kind of appreciate about about the kind of wider values of nature. Um you tell us uh tell us a little bit about that that kind of beginning of the journey. Of course, the beginning of the journey is right back, it's when you were discovering um uh birds' nests as a as a young boy. Often it's the little things like that that begin us, aren't they? Um and then that kind of blossoms a little bit later in life. But uh just just paint a little picture on that for us.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

Well, the the the first time I really came to be aware of and to understand this word rewilding was reading George Mombiot's book, Feral, um, which I guess must have been about 2015 or 16. Um, and he articulated something that I'd always felt, which is that our landscapes and especially our rural landscapes are tremendously diminished in terms of natural vibrancy and the abundance of wildlife. And I and that we we don't need to accept that we can have it back. And in fact, there's a tremendously effective and cost-effective way to get it back, which is rewilding, which is to allow natural processes to play out in ways that are often unpredictable, which is scary for all of us, scary for the conservation movement, of course, which has outcomes in mind and can be quite meddly and prescriptive. Thank goodness, by the way, because if they hadn't been, we might have lost a whole bunch of different species in earlier decades. And so the conservation movement has done brilliant work. But this idea that actually nature knows what it's doing, and if you do what we we can do to put natural processes back in place and allow them to unfold freely, wonderful things will happen. So I'd say that book, Feral, was a was a life-changing moment for me. But but I've always felt that we ought to have wildlife back in greater abundance and that we shouldn't accept the idea that Britain isn't a place for wildlife. Because when I was growing up, that was kind of the view. If you want to see wildlife, go abroad, you know, go to the continent, go or go go to another continent, go to Africa, go to India. Uh, but here in Britain, we've got serious business, you know, producing food, and we are civilized people, we don't have mess and and we don't have troublesome wildlife. And I've still got a letter somewhere um written in in reply to mine by a very patient manager of Richmond Park when I was about 11 years old, in response to the question, why can't we have wild boar in Richmond Park? And he had some very good reasons around protecting that lovely acid grassland and horse riders and it's an urban environment and so on. But but I I remember at the time refusing to accept this idea that we can't have our own wildlife back here and that we can't find a way to rub along with with tricky wildlife and with natural processes that follow them. Um, so I guess the book was was seminal for me. But my my dream growing up was to have a piece of land on which I could invite as much wildlife as possible. You know, that's all I used to fantasize about as a six-year-old, an eight-year-old, a ten-year-old, digging out more ponds, planting more trees, and I had a limited understanding of how we bring wildlife back into a space. And um I I I lost my father quite young. I was, I think, 15 or yeah, I think I'd just turned 16 when my father died. And I inherited some money, and I got married very young. My first wife, with whom I'm very close, who Kate, who's rewilding a patch of uh fen, a patch of lowland peat at Glastonbury. Um, she and I got married when we were barely, I think we were, she was still a teenager and I was 21, and we bought ourselves a little farm in South Somerset, and it was nature-friendly, but it was still that very traditional lattice work of green fields and reasonably neat hedges. It was better than the neighbour's land in the sense that it the hedges were a bit unkempt and there were plenty of birds, and it had never been managed very intensively. And it didn't really occur to me to apply NEP style rewilding ideas there. I sort of thought it's not big enough. We had 130 acres, we have a bit more now. Um, none of the neighbors were doing this, and there's also a certain amount of pressure. If you're if you're an outsider, which I think I think unless we've been there for certainly two generations, maybe three, we'll always be outsiders in in our part of rural England. Um, there's a pressure to farm. You know, that the neighbors expect you to farm. There's a kind of moral expectation that land is for food production. Yeah, exactly. And then there's and then there's the agent and the kind of tall gentleman with red trousers who turns up and tells you how you should farm. And and understanding that I wanted a bit of nature, and I felt granted 20 or 30 acres at one end of the farm on which to plant some trees and dig some ponds, and that's where we spent all of our time. And it, of course, it immediately was just absolutely teeming with with warblers and birdsong and frogs and toads, just that area where we planted the trees. Of course, now we're thinning out those trees in an ad hoc way and creating space and letting light through, because in England we plant woodland far too close together. And with hindsight, I might not even have planted trees because as we've started rewilding the rest of the farm, we found that trees germinate and recolonize very readily in the way that they want to, and the tree planting itself may have been a bit unnecessary. But nevertheless, that's where we spent all of our time. And then in 2019, as you mentioned, um, we suffered a family tragedy. I lost my daughter Iris in an accident, age 15 and a half, which was my worst nightmare come true. And the darkness into which we were plunged, and I was plunged, is like nothing I can adequately describe in words, but I'm sure lots of people listening to this podcast will know what that darkness feels like of losing someone you love very much, especially a brilliant young girl at the start of her life, who just sparkled in in her brilliance and in her love for nature, in her awe for nature. And my my treasure on my phone is a video she sent me when she was about 13, and here she had her first smartphone, and she'd hopped off her pony and filmed a uh a small flock of starlings rising up from the ground in front of her and forming a kind of small murmuration. And she said, Look at that, dad, look how close I was, look how giant that was. Look, and there they go. And I and I I watched that video to myself, I must have watched it a million times in the last six or seven years. But after we lost Iris, I thought, why the hell not? You know, why won't we just tear out the fences and block up the ditches and break up the field drains and and let natural processes run riot here on this land, which is what she would have wanted more than anything. And um, and it gave me and my other children something to really get our teeth into. And within moments, I mean within days, magic started to unfold and the water that spring started to move and pool and and and and and gather in unpredictable ways, and pockets of dog rose and blackthorn and and bramble started to appear in different places on the farm. And and and and it's just been the most joyful, extraordinary uh few years watching this, watching this happen all around us. It's been the most extraordinary privilege to have a place in which to do this. And of course, other neighbours have now joined us, and we have a growing inkblot of wildness in our part of South Somerset, stretching to in the in the low thousands of acres, with with our sights on as much as 12 or 14,000 acres. My dream, my dream, because we sit in Selwood Forest, which is a what used to be a great royal hunting chase, and sort of on the map it says manorial wastes, you know, land that was not deemed fit for farming, quite rightly, because it's heavy clay. And it sits sandwiched between the chalk downland to our east of Stalsbury Plain and the lowland peat and the desecrated, drained but still magical uh um uh Somerset levels and moors. And so my dream is a wild corridor from Stonehenge to Avalon with us in the middle. And um, and and it felt like a pipe dream, and it's starting to feel like something that might actually happen.

SPEAKER_00 19:32

Wow, isn't that amazing? What a lovely story to go from the very small to uh to expand into landscape. I mean, you've got to have that thought, that intent before something can happen on the ground. I mean, you're that's a gorgeous description also of the uh creativity of nature. Life, life brings life. You you let it happen, um, and all sorts of creative, unusual things emerge. Um and uh what's not to like from just looking at that and just and just celebrating it in in some sort of way. And uh maybe that's maybe there's a a a kind of key thing there for people to realise that uh that that this isn't kind of it isn't a kind of wholly managed way of thinking about nature, it's giving nature its choices, if we can put it in that kind of personified way, um, and letting things emerge, and there will be surprises. You you you bring a pond back into a landscape and within minutes it almost seems, there are insects flying above it, and then kind of water life and all sorts of plants appearing, and and you think, My goodness, that wasn't there before, and now there it is.

SPEAKER_01 20:49

Um one of the one of the great moments for me, one of really the the most truly astounding uh evenings was on a on a July night two years ago, and I I tend to walk after dinner um sometimes quite late, sometimes with my usually with my dogs, often not. And um I walk along a path quite often um that runs beside what used to be a pretty straight ditch running along the bottom of our valley, but which is now um something rather like a string of Japanese rice terraces, because we've got a family of beavers, one of three families of beavers in our valley, um, in our farm, and they've built 12, 14 dams, some of them quite big, you know, one of them's 20 meters long. I measured recently, and those dams hold water back, and and they've opened up the canopy and the light floods in. And and I was walking in the in the pretty dark night one July, it was a moonless night, and uh and I saw glow worms for the first time in my life, you know, sparkling above this this beaver wetland, and I'd never seen them before. Uh I wasn't even sure that they were native. Like, how did I I didn't know we had glow worms? And a lot of this is new to me, and uh and I stood there in complete awe, you know. The beavers have re-wetted the bottom of this valley and created this extraordinary environment. It was like Fantasia. I don't know if you remember the Disney film Fantasia, where the wizards they wave the wand, and behind the wand, you've got all the sparkling colour and light and magic. And the beavers have quite literally waved that wand along the valley. And there I was standing amid the flickering of glow worms. So it's um it's absolutely right what you say. You don't really know what's going to come. And um, and and then of course the abundance comes in ways that are completely unexpected. I think that's what we've lost touch with more than anything is the abundance that earlier generations would have known. For example, in in my place, the abundance of winter birds. Now I always think of winter as a time of real quiet and not much wildlife, but we have big flocks of mixed finches coming in to feed on the seeds of the docks and the thistles and other plants that are tidied away everywhere else. And um get a hundred goldfinches in one place. You know, this you know that these kinds of things are um are just monumental. You know, the the abundance, I think, is is so important as well as obviously the diversity of things that that's you sometimes get that when there's there was a book written in the 1930s by D.W.

SPEAKER_00 23:13

Gillingham in Essex called Unto the Fields, and he describes walking around uh actually the edge of London, like we were talking about earlier on, the roadings in in Essex. Um and uh just described extraordinary abundance, huge numbers of of tits in the forest making so much noise on the floor, um, uh birds in their hundreds and maybe high hundreds, where we would be kind of quite often happy to see a couple.

SPEAKER_01 23:43

Um, I have um I have a quote actually by Richard Jeffries, um, and um I actually have it in front of me, writing on the astonishing abundance of bird life close to Surbiton in 1883. And he said, Sparrows crowd every hedge and field. Their numbers are incredible. Chaffinches are not to be counted. Of greenfinches there must be thousands. The bevies of chifchaffs and willow wrens which come to the thickets in the firs, the chorus of thrushes and blackbirds, the chaffinches in the elms, the greenfinches in the hedges, wood pigeons and turtle doves in the copses, tree pipets about the oaks in the cornfields, every bush, every tree, almost every clod, for the larks are so many, seems to have its song stir. As for nightingales, I never knew so many in the most secluded country. Now that's Serbiton, that's not far from where I where I am, where I grew up.

SPEAKER_00 24:36

Yeah, isn't that amazing? So that kind of shifting baseline of kind of norms that you the that you forget because it's a previous generation or two. We at least we have people's writing to go back to. But the idea that that could be recreated is quite um enticing. I mean, I think it's magical, as you said, like with the glow worms. So that leads to a big change. And to a certain extent, we need to tell that story so people kind of know what is possible and what's coming, um, and that we're not trying to just uh create, I say we in the broadest sense here, trying to create a little bit of change so there are a few more birds or or a few more moths at night for the for the bats. You're trying to remember those days of the moth snowstorm that Mike McCarthy wrote about, the huge numbers whenever you drove at night. Um, I guess that kind of stopped in about the 80s, um, but certainly it was something in the 70s that the abundance does seem to be a really nice uh um phrase and concept to say this could go in ways that you probably just don't know about yet. So keep your eyes open because it's happening.

SPEAKER_01 25:46

That's and and and it and and it's happening in a growing number of places. This is why rewilding is such an optimistic movement because it happens incredibly quickly. Now, I was in Mumbai um for something uh a couple of years ago. Mumbai is an extraordinary place, it's a a city that is that is really really worth visiting. They have a lot of nature there. The Sanjay Gandhi National Park is like a huge wedge of magical jungle book forest that stretches right into almost the centre of the city, and the leopards creep out at night and feast on stray dogs in the streets of Mumbai. They've got these extraordinary um Art Deco buildings that run along the waterfront. And quite occasionally those buildings pass to the next generation, and there's a huge stink and a fight over who actually owns that building. And as a result, it gets neglected, and it only needs to be neglected for two, three, four years before you've got fig trees growing through the upper windows and through the roof, and the forest literally claiming the house as its own. So nature recovers incredibly quickly. It's this unrelenting force, you know, this life force. And and quite often all we need to do is just take our foot off its throat and it will bounce back. And the process can be accelerated even further by allowing natural processes to play out. So in my place in Somerset, I've I've let we come to understand that the four most important natural processes are those created by cattle or a small number of native hardy cattle by whose grazing and browsing and trampling and dung the kind of shape-shifting, dynamic, semi-open woodland will emerge. Without that cattle, we probably end up with a closed canopy woodland, which is much poorer in terms of biodiversity and bioabundance than one which is broken apart by cattle and in which the sunlight floods to the ground in many places. And secondly, um the process of rootling by pigs. We have a smattering of wild boar through the southwest, and we're lucky enough occasionally to be visited by one, but we also have some Tamworth pigs who augment that process and they they turn the they they they paint colour into the landscape, it seems to me, because they turn the soil and break apart the grasses and then come back three months later, and you've got lovely ephemeral annual wildflowers growing through those areas that they've been rootling. Uh and trees like willow and black poplar and other species that have become quite rare in Britain are very dependent upon the rootling of pigs. And not to mention, of course, providing access to the earth for species like robins and various songbirds that love to follow us in our gardens, but they learnt it from the wild boar. Um, and then thirdly, um the work of beavers that we've discussed, the just the pure magic of beaver-made wetlands. I it's almost as if the term keystone species was invented to describe beavers. And then fourthly, some kind of predation. And whilst we don't yet have lynx or wolves back in South Somerset, although I very much hope that one day we will, um, we have a very thoughtful um and professional and humane stalker called Derek Seely, who wears camo and has a magnificent moustache. And that is the red meat option in my wife's restaurant in London, is the venison from deer culled off our place in Somerset. And and that's a necessary process as well, not just to um to provide an influence on the number of deer, but also on the behavior of those deer. Um, and with those four natural processes, I think we've accelerated this process of natural uh regeneration, and it's explosive, it's truly explosive.

SPEAKER_00 29:15

That's interesting about the behavior because that's what people didn't know would happen with the bringing back of wolves into Yellowstone, is that they knew that they would prey on the uh predate on the on the deer and the elk, uh, but it changed their behaviors and forced them away from the lowland rivers and allowed regeneration and brought back birds and whole habitats changed because of that behavior shaping. So we often think of kind of keystone species as being predators, but actually in this country they are just going to be uh large herbivores, probably um at the moment, um, including adding your your large person who does the um the culling of the deer, which we need to do, otherwise um, you know, wood woodlands are going to be eaten out by the large numbers that I think we I think we can expect to have links back in Britain much sooner than than anyone expects.

SPEAKER_01 30:10

The the Missing Links project uh for England is a coalition led by the Lifescape project, but it has the Wildlife Trust and others in it, and they're very close now to submitting an application to the Secretary of State at DEFRA for a license to reintroduce links to England. And then there's a similar project under the auspices, I think, of the Scottish Rewilding Alliance um in Scotland, which is a very obvious place for Eurasian links. And so I I think that'll happen. I remember saying to um a bunch of rewilders when I was still on the board of DEFRA that the way we'll get links back to Britain is to talk incessantly about wolves and uh and and and um and and we might just get there. So I think it'll happen. And I'm of the view, crazy as it sounds, I'm of the view that we will in our lifetimes have wolves back in in Britain. They're back in every single European mainland country, every single one. You can go wolf watching in Luxembourg. There are wolves in the in the in the municipalities of Madrid, Amsterdam, Paris. No, they're they're they're back, and people are living alongside them. There are more wolves in the Netherlands than there are in Norway, for goodness sake. Netherlands is the most densely populated, intensively farmed, and heavily developed country in Europe, and they've got significant numbers of wolves. And and and the sky hasn't fallen in. People are absolutely fine. And and we have a big, big problem with with um with the rapid growth in deer numbers in Britain. And I've I've speculated publicly as as to as to when the reintroduction of wolves does eventually happen, will it be in the Highlands of Scotland, or will it be in East Anglia to keep our crops safe from deer? You sometimes see herds of hundreds strong fallow deer decimating crops in East Anglia, and hunters are not getting on top of it. So maybe the place to bring back wolves is actually the breadbasket landscapes of East Anglia. Um I was almost, I think I was almost sacked from the board of DEFRA for saying that publicly on one stage, but I really believe it'll happen. But we've there's a whole bunch of stuff first that we need to come to terms with as a society, not least, you know, beavers and pine martens and European wildcats and wild boar, which now number in the probably mid-thousands in the west and south of Scotland, in the borders of Scotland, they're in the forest of Dean and spreading out into Gloucestershire and South Wales. You know, there are wild boar in the southwest of England. Um, all of these species are quite tricky to live with, but learning to live with them, I think, is the pathway to ultimately getting back wolves. And it's only when we have wolves back that I think we'll find true harmony with the wild world, with nature, because I think it's um, I think it's totemic. It's not just totemic in a scientific sense, as we've already discussed, you've got to have the predators back in the landscape, but I think in a psychological sense, you know, what's our place in the world? What's our place on this island? What's our place in nature? Is it is it to dominate and exclude those species that we feel we can't tolerate? Or is it to to rub along, you know, and find a way to coexist? Because if we if if we we have we have a problem in this society um with almost everything, you know, anything more charismatic than a blue tit seems to be a problem. You know, if you've got a lawn, then a mole is a damn nuisance. If you're a gamekeeper, even hedgehogs will take the eggs of partridges and pheasants and so on. Um if you're you know got pine martens, they're gonna take your chickens, they might nest in the roof of your house. You know, foxes, if foxes had gone extinct as wildcats did in England and Wales in the 19th century, would we get permission to reintroduce foxes today? I'm not sure we would because they're a nuisance. But it's all a nuisance. We just have to learn to rub along and find our place among it all. You know, the wild boar, I think, gets such a hard rap. You know, these are probably, by terms of the size of their frontal cortex, the second cleverest um uh terrestrial mammal in Britain after humans. They really know where they're going and what they're doing. They live in these amazing matrilineal groups with knowledge passed down from grandmother to daughter to granddaughter, and these female-led groups or sounders treat each young as if it's their own and they and their movements are not random. They know where the food is and where the water is, and they're curious and social and loving, and they've got every bit as much right to be here as as we do. And this idea that they are just vermin to be exterminated is godless. It's it's immoral. Yes, they're a bloody nuisance if you've got a cricket pitch to look after, but find a way, we'll build a fence, we'll look after so I I think this is the challenge that that at the heart of it all, and we talked a little bit about untidiness earlier and tolerating scrub and wildflowers in London parks and on road verges and so on. That's stage one. You know, I think the subsequent stages are learning to live with all of these nuisances and all of these irregularities and untidinesses, and learning to find our place within the beautiful and magical and resilient chaos that nature is. And I think we are um, I think we're a hell of a lot further down that road in 2026 than I might have expected if we'd had this conversation in 2016 when I joined the Board of DEFRA.

SPEAKER_00 35:11

Oh, definitely, absolutely. And have you seen that sort of change with the podcast as well? I mean, rewilding the world has been telling stories of all sorts of things, liberating rivers, uh, curlews, finding solutions in nature, as you've mentioned, coexistence with wolves, which is it's sort of such a uh an important question, and yet kind of avoided. Those sorts of things are avoided for exactly the totemic reasons that you've mentioned, and yet there's no examples of the wolf actually coming down upon people and causing mayhem. Um actually, humans have been pretty good at living alongside them for a long time, and uh it that we need that idea to take root um in a kind of meaningful way, at the same time as people realize perhaps look at the joy. Think of the magic, as you've just mentioned earlier on. Let's not forget that. This is not about being instrumental and measuring stuff and and um calculating benefits and costs, it's about something kind of much grander than that. Um strange entangled life. This is what we have in front of us when these sorts of things start to happen.

SPEAKER_01 36:21

Yeah, I I agree with everything you said. Uh I I think we really need a kind of twin or or parallel shift, and both are underway. I think the first is cultural, which is the one you've just described, and I think we are well on the way in terms of yearning for greater connection with the natural world, you know, as part of a yearning for greater understanding of what our place in it is, and and and a desire to have it back in all of its riotous cacophony and all the noise and the colour and everything that our ancestors once knew. And I think that's happening. I mean, you speak to uh you speak to your friends, and you know, that people are wild swimming, people are hiking, people are spending their money on experiences, and people are downloading mindfulness apps onto their phone and they're doing meditation and they're going into nature. So I feel like that is happening, and politicians are starting to respond to that. And that's why we we're the gone are the days where um the the Chancellor of the Exchequer would toss a little bone to us nature lovers by saying, and after all that, we're also going to give one million pounds for tree planting in the north of England, and we were expected to be delighted with that. Well, now we are way beyond that in terms of political attention and ambition. Uh, but in parallel with that cultural shift, that greater individual and collective yearning for nature, we need also an economic shift. And the economic shift revolves around how we value nature. And it's it's difficult because a cold cost-benefit analysis, as you say, is it feels odd to put a price on nature. But the fact is, we've been putting a price on nature in all of our decision making forever, and that price has been zero. We value it only in as much as we can cut it down, box it up, and sell it, and take the space over for something else. But we're now starting to realize that re-wetted, re-wilded uplands are tremendously powerful at protecting us from flooding and also insulating us from summer drought, whilst creating tremendous habitat for the wildlife that we want back and offering a space in which to exercise amenity and recreation and to heal our mental and spiritual and physical well-being, um, whilst also sequestering vast amounts of carbon. So there's a lot we want from our landscapes, and that has economic value. And finally, now we're starting to recognize that value in our economic decision making. And I'd say that England is ahead of the curve among the nations of the world on this. Now, we were the first industrialized nation to expunge nature almost completely from our landscapes as part of the agricultural and then industrial revolutions. And we may end up being the first to show how you put it back, because we are developing a series of incentive schemes that really work and that are grounded in economic rationalism, starting, of course, with the main one, which is the environmental land management scheme, which is the only agricultural subsidy regime in the world, except perhaps Costa Rica, which has something similar, which directly links public money to the provision of public good in land management. If you want the public money, it's there, but you've got to earn it by delivering things that society needs, which is clean water, regenerating soil, looking after biodiversity nature, sequestering carbon and so on. And then in the wake of that great kind of icebreakership, you know, the environmental land management scheme, which is nearly 2 billion a year, should be more in my opinion, you've got a string of publicly funded and privately funded mechanisms now, natural flood management markets, nutrient neutrality and other pollution mitigation markets, um, carbon sequestration markets, both voluntary and regulated. The biodiversity net gain scheme, of course, which went through its turbulence last year as ministers debated and deliberated on whether to can it or gut it, and ultimately it survived. And it's a great mechanism for rewarding landowners and other land managers for restoring nature on pieces of land that are not particularly suited to farming. So I I think those twin shifts are taking place in Britain now and elsewhere. And I'm therefore very optimistic because we know, you and I, and many people listening to this, that if you give nature a chance, boy, does it recover quickly and dramatically. You know, we don't need to wait. You know, people often ask me, well, how long gotta wait until Canwood, which is my place? How long got to wait until it's ready? Like a cake going in the oven, you know, or yeah, and and that's the mindset of tree planting. You know, plant the trees, come back in 30 years, and you'll have the timber. But it's not like that. Nature isn't an event, it's a process which unfolds, or in fact, it's innumerable interrelated processes which unfold from very from the very get-go. Um, and um and therefore day two is as interesting as day 222. And uh and uh I'm tremendously optimistic about all of this right now.

SPEAKER_00 41:06

Brilliant. Well, let's come uh thanks very much, Ben. That's superbly put. Yeah, I'm keep a watch on those policies, folks, because that is the way that some of these things are going to happen at speed, and also engage larger numbers of people in the landscape, and and they will tell their stories and the public will understand how their money is being spent. And those beavers, after all, are doing it for nothing when we get them in the landscape where they are engineers who are doing the job, and that's what nature does when we when we let it work, it does it for nothing. And let's do a wrap then. Um, is there a uh hero or a heroine um in this field that you would like to point to? Might be a community, sometimes a slightly troubling concept because it implies one person, but we're all on on our own journeys. Is there someone you would point to for this?

SPEAKER_01 41:57

So I have so many heroes. You know, you're one of them, Jules. You know, you're so articulate and brilliant in the way you present these ideas to people and enliven um a room talking about these things. And I've been lucky enough to sit on panels and things with you. And there's so many like you that that I really love and admire. I mean, so, so many locally to me in Somerset and all over the place. If I have to pick one right now, it has to be Derek Gao, because Derek Gao um was the person who made me understand that we don't really need to take no for an answer. We can just make it happen, and nature will recover. And he he was the person who made me understand that that the abundance that earlier generations would have known is way beyond what we see today. He made me realize that the landscapes that our ancestors lived in simply teemed with small mammals of different kinds and bank voles and field voles and wood mice and harvest mice and door mice, and then you had all the amphibians and all the birds and all the things that fed on those and the mesopredors and the large predators, and he just made my mind swim with longing for what could be. And he not only articulates that so well, but he's just such a lovely, loving, upbeat guy who gets on and does it. So, Derek Gow, I think, is um someone who's been very, very important to me in my life, and I love him to bits, and he's my hero.

SPEAKER_00 43:15

Great choice. Uh well, we talked about your book, God is an octopus. So, is there a key book of of someone else's that you'd like to recommend? What I mean, you know, you're gonna have 10 or 20 straight on your on your shelf there, perhaps, but um uh what would you point towards uh recommendation for uh listeners and viewers? You mentioned um Feral by George Monbeau earlier on, so that was another another thing that people might like to go back to.

SPEAKER_01 43:44

Um there's a small book that I just happen to be reading at the moment, written by a friend of mine, a guy called Jonathan Thompson. Um, and um he is from Underhill Wood Nature Reserve, um, and which is a which is a 23 acre nature reserve near Tisbury. In Wiltshire, and he has figured out how to maximize the diversity and abundance of wildlife in small spaces, as defined by him, half an acre to 50 acres. And he does all sorts of wonderful things that people can do in their own gardens and in their own space. And I've taken lots of ideas from him. And he has a small-scale rewilding handbook, Jonathan Thompson, that I really love. And I'm furiously looking up the exact title. Just so I can. It's called The How to Rewild Manual by Jonathan Thompson of Underhill Wood Nature Reserve. And I think that's a book that people will really enjoy because it's like a cookbook of great ideas if you have any space under your influence. And I think that is the greatest privilege of all, is to be able to participate in the restoration of nature as a volunteer or as a friend or as a landowner or as a land manager to be able to participate in it yourself is for me the absolute pinnacle of connection with nature. It gives you the most wonderful sense of joy and fulfillment to be in service to it. And that's what Jonathan does and it's what he teaches the whole time. So that's my suggestion.

SPEAKER_00 45:08

Wonderful. A top action for people. So that book, the the manual, contains lots of actions. But is there what what one thing would you recommend to help people on this journey towards doing their little bit um wherever they are for rewilding, whether in cities, whether in rural areas, whether with land or whether without land? What would you say?

SPEAKER_01 45:32

I think number one has to be spending time in nature and appreciating it. Because from that everything else flows. Now, I I've found that um just a few moments in nature, even if it's just a cup of tea appreciating the bird song in the morning, it just makes everything feel better, especially during difficult times, if you're feeling unwell or sad or angry or stressed, depressed, whatever it might be. But just spending time in nature is the most wonderful balm. And I think if you really allow your mind to settle upon what's around you, such that your five senses become really occupied in noticing those processes and all those innumerable interactions unfolding around you, I think a kind of sixth sense becomes apparent. And I don't know what that necessarily means. I'm not not a strenuously religious person, but I think if if there is access to the divine, which I believe there is, I think spending time in nature is a pretty good example of it. And once you you are regularly spending time in nature, then you will have a desire to participate in in restoring it in whatever way you can. And I'm yet to meet someone who doesn't have that capability in the place that they live, in the job that they're in, in the space that they have. It's possible in all kinds of different ways to do that. Uh, but it would be remiss not to mention politics briefly, and that is apply pressure on the candidates in your neighborhood. Nature is not a left-right thing. There are examples throughout history of left and right-wing politicians doing the right things by nature, and it just it happens to be the ones who love it and the ones who happen to care who do good things about it. So I think it's really beholden upon all of us in a democracy to make sure our candidates really know that we do care about nature and we want them to be ambitious in its restoration.

SPEAKER_00 47:20

Fantastic. Beautifully put, Ben. Thank you very much indeed. Um, it's got to start with that kind of care and joy and the and the listening. If you if you work in a city and it's a gorgeous day, go and sit outside in a square for 10 minutes at lunchtime and just listen for a little bit. I mean, that may be all the time you've got, but that could just change your day. Um, and if you've got more time, well, then you're going to see more things and come to appreciate them as well. So that's that's where it all starts, isn't it? So fantastic. Uh Ben Goldsmith, thank you so much indeed. It's been well, it's been a great pleasure to have you on today. Um, thanks so much. And uh uh let's let's keep our eyes open for further re rewilding. I think we need a great celebratory moment when you've got the the rewilded landscape from Stonehenge to Avalon connected up. I mean, that's that's a lovely idea. I mean, we've got to start with ideas and tell stories about what's possible, that's where it all flows from. So um uh good luck with the podcast as well, Rewilding the World. Um, great work. Thank you so much indeed.

SPEAKER_01 48:27

Thank you so much for having me on, Jules. It's an honour and a privilege and a joy to be with you. Thank you.