268: Rewilding the World

Christiana: [00:01:43] What a treat.

Tom: [00:01:44] To Outrage + optimism.

Christiana: [00:01:45] What a treat.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:01:45] Oh, thank you both so much for having me on again. I was actually on in, two years ago or so talking about Tory environmental policies. And I said.

Tom: [00:01:55] Well this is going to be even more exciting. Sorry, carry on.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:01:57] It sure is. I said at the time that I felt that the reform of agriculture subsidies would unleash a rewilding revolution, at least in England. And from where I'm sitting, that's kind of happening.

Tom: [00:02:08] Nice, okay.

Christiana: [00:02:09] Yay.

Tom: [00:02:10] So, Ben, let's start, I mean, your podcast, which I have loved since you kicked it off a while ago, and the episodes are getting better and better. Rewilding The World with Ben Goldsmith. This is one of your real passions. So just listeners may or may not be aware of the concept of rewilding. Just kind of set it out for us at a high level.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:02:25] Yeah, I think what we, generally has become understood in recent years is that, landscapes without wildlife and the natural processes that they make is really just scenery, conservation used to be about protecting a picture, you know, this is meant to be a woodland. There are the trees. Maybe there are the flowers. It's a kind of static picture. And the big realisation.

Christiana: [00:02:47] Ring fence, ring fence around it.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:02:48] And with a ring fence around it and intense management by people. And I think the major realization of of conservation science in recent years is that, in fact, nature is anything but static. It's actually it's an innumerable set of, of of processes, you know, intertwining processes that are way beyond, in aggregate, our ability to understand them. But what we do know is that there are certain keystone processes that are essential for the rebuilding and functioning of an ecosystem. You know, for example, the role of predators in controlling the the numbers and behaviour of prey, sharks on the reef, for example, take away the sharks and the reef dies. And so rewilding is about doing your best to restore these important natural processes and then letting nature find its own path. You know that that is, a kind of loose definition, in my opinion. And, and the results can often be unpredictable, but they're always staggering. There are rewilding projects happening all over the world that people have never heard of. You know, that that are just staggering in their successes. I recently interviewed a guy called Mark Day who's employed by the RSPB, but he runs a project in Kazakhstan which is the size of Germany. It's called the Altyn Dala. Now Altyn Dala, [00:04:05] which is an Earthshot Prize runner up, [00:04:07] and this is a grassland restoration, the Golden Steppe and the success of of the wildlife restoration there has just been phenomenal. 50,000 saiga antelope have multiplied to nearly 3 million in the space of ten years, and their ultimate goal is to bring back bison, and wild horses and wild ass are now being reintroduced, the wild donkeys, Kulans and even one day leopards and cheetahs and so on back in Kazakhstan, in Central Europe. So these projects, people don't know about them, but the scale is just monumental. And the basic premise is, is let nature find its own path.

Tom: [00:04:38] Love that. I want to ask you a little bit about how people respond to the concept of rewilding. But, Christiana, I don't know if you want to hop in with anything first?

Christiana: [00:04:46] Yeah. Ben, you know what I love about this, is that at a different level, but completely coherent and consistent. What is being done with rewilding is restoring the original natural resilience of nature, resilience because, as you say, nature continues to evolve and have different conditions. And what we have done with the pressure that we have put on nature is we have zapped nature of her resilience to those changes, because we decided that that landscape had to be x, y, z, and so restoring the resilience is so critical for nature, but also at the other level is such a good lesson for us as individuals and for us as a society, because what we have done to ourselves is also zapping ourselves of our resilience. And so the link between our personal resilience that we restore, if we choose to, via the restoration of the resilience of nature. There's such a beautiful deep link there and and so important and so critical, especially in times in which it's very difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:06:23] Yeah. I think that, rewilding has caught the public's attention not just in Britain, but everywhere. I think for two fundamental reasons. The first is a growing understanding of the importance of that natural resilience to us as humans. You know, we now know that if you strip nature from a hillside, the communities at the bottom are going to flood in the winter, and they're going to run out of water in the summer. We know that rewilding and rewetting the sensitive parts of a river catchment are the key to reducing the volatility of the hydrology cycle and making sure that people aren't inundated as frequently as they are being today, and to make sure that they have a steady supply of clean water. So people are starting to understand these links. We know that that that nature does stuff for us that has tangible, quantifiable value. And slowly, slowly, that value is starting to get reflected in decision making. If such things as natural flood management are now a thing, nutrient neutrality or its equivalent in the US, which is called wetlands banking or wetlands mitigation, these are markets whereby both private sector and the public sector can pay for the maintenance of healthy ecosystems, because there is a value to what those ecosystems do for us.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:07:34] So that I think, is one major change. We, and I and I get the philosophical argument how do you put a value on something which is priceless, you know, nature is beyond value, you know. Everything we have, everything we do, everything we love is, is absolutely and utterly dependent on the natural world. How do you value that? Well, I get that argument. But the truth is, we have been valuing nature in every decision that we take. We've just been putting the value at zero. And so I think that thing of valuing nature is one major shift. The other major shift is cultural. You know, people have started to understand that a monoculture plantation of Sitka spruce is not nature. You know, they started to understand that if if they're if they're up on a hillside in the Highlands of Scotland, overlooking, you know, miles and miles of landscape, stripped of trees and nature, and just because they're mobile reception is poor and they can see a long way, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a wild landscape. There's a growing understanding everywhere as to what nature is, and there's a growing yearning for connection with nature. It's parallel with the growth in mindfulness and all these other things that we're seeing. And people people are demanding.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:08:38] They're clamoring for cleaner air, cleaner water, greater access to the natural world because there is something missing, something visceral, missing in our individual and collective lives, and people are alighting on the idea of nature and restoring it as the answer to that, quite rightly. And the knowledge of the world's First Nations is, is, is reaching us from the forests of the Amazon, from the islands of the South Pacific, from the Arctic Ring. You know, these voices carry greater resonance than ever before in Western society. So there is there is this clamor, and it's being reflected now in not just the media coverage. I mean, look at the media coverage around white storks reintroduced in Sussex, England, after a 500 year absence, or Colorado's epic Democratic decision to reintroduce wolves. That was a huge story in America. And now there are wolves back in the east of the continental divide in America as a result of a of a ballot initiative. The public wants this and politicians are starting to answer so, and that's why we're seeing this plethora of stories. And I set up the podcast Rewilding The World to tell these stories, short 30 minute episodes, each one focused on a great rewilding story from somewhere.

Tom: [00:09:47] Yeah. So, Ben, I was going to ask you about why or how people respond to the rewilding concept, but you've done that already, and we're going to go to your episode in a minute with Stephen Fry, which is a beautiful episode. But maybe before we do, give us just a couple of and you've done one already, just a couple of flavour of some of the stories you've been drawing out on these episodes. What are some of the examples that have really gotten you excited throughout the course of all the episodes you've done?

Ben Goldsmith: [00:10:08] So I've always been a mega kind of nature geek nature lover since I was a kid. Like I have, I lost my father when I was 15. I used to exchange letters with him, and he was kind of old fashioned, and he wasn't at home that much. And the letters we used to exchange were all about rewilding, even though I didn't use that term. Could we bring wild boar from France, dad, where, you know, and release them in Richmond Park. You know, what about these ocelots that you're supporting in Mexico. And he spent a lot of time in Mexico and so on. So I've been obsessed all my life, and I spend my downtime looking for interesting stories online. And I found myself the other evening reading a publication called global cement. And the reason why I'd stumbled across global cement.

Tom: [00:10:48] Know it well.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:10:49] Was it, because it was the only publication writing about 160,000 hectare. That's nearly half a million acres. Rewilding project on the Mexican border with the US up on the Rio Grande, a project entirely funded by Cemex with $50 million of their own money. After a chief executive who had an interest in bird watching 23 years ago decided this should happen. And they've removed fences and other human infrastructure and invasive species and restored this enormous mosaic of savanna and grassland and forest and wetland into which they've restored bighorn sheep and desert pronghorn antelope and and even now, bison. Mexico lost its bison before the United States of America. And so after almost a 200 year absence, there are now bison at the southern end of their range in in the northern part of Mexico, near, near, near Monterrey. So I reached out to the guy, Alejandro Espinosa, who's running that project for Cemex, and I got him on the podcast, and it's an extraordinary story.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:11:44] The scale of this rewilding that he's doing and neighbours on both the US side of the border and the Mexican side of the border are also pulling down their fences and expanding the conservation area. And species such as wolves and and cougars and hopefully jaguars are returning. And the only place you could read about this was in global cement. So I thought, we need a podcast that can tell these stories. So I thought that was epic. And there's a story from from here in the UK that I love. I interviewed a guy called Elliot Newton who's building a charity called Citizen Zoo, and they're all about mass community participation in rewilding efforts in the city. And they've started in London and they've done amazing things, getting hundreds of volunteers together to clean up watercourses, to haul out kind of shopping trolleys and rip out invasive species and restore the health of these riparian environments and release water voles. And they've done reintroductions of various species, including beavers. The mayor himself, Sadiq Khan, turned up to a to a beaver reintroduction in Ealing and released two beavers, a pair which they called Sigourney Beaver and Justin Beaver. And and those beavers are now are now thriving in an environment that was created for them by the community in Ealing. So this idea that anyone can participate in rewilding the world, I think is particularly optimistic. And and that's happening everywhere. So those are two. But I try to find people who are doing inspirational things or influential voices who are championing rewilding people like Stephen Fry, and bring them on the podcast for 30 minute interviews. And that's the idea of it. 

Tom: [00:13:13] Love that.

Christiana: [00:13:14] So I can volunteer one other person you might want to have on your podcast, Ben, and that is Jochen Zeitz, who has this amazing reserve in Kenya and is reintroducing rhinos, one of the very, very difficult species to to reintroduce. And it is an absolutely beautiful story. So that is just to add to your amazing collection of stories.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:13:41] Well, I know Jochen well, he's a neighbour of my mother's where I grew up, and he's he's an inspirational guy, and I should definitely get him on to talk about Segera and the work they're doing in Africa. And while I have you, Christiana, I introduced Andy Whitworth from Osa conservation, who's working in the Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica, the country that has been the most successful rewilding nation on the planet, having increased their wild native forest cover from 20% to nearly 60% in one human generation. And Andy Whitworth is now repopulating that restored forest on the Osa Peninsula with giant anteaters and harpy eagles and scarlet macaws and all kinds of other things. So he's particularly focused on species reintroductions. So I urge you to listen to that episode with Andy Whitworth.

Tom: [00:14:24] We're actually.

Christiana: [00:14:26] Well and I have to immediately say to our listeners that I did not prompt Ben to say anything about that because, Ben, I am accused of using this podcast as the most effective PR machine for Costa Rica and you have just.

Tom: [00:14:38] We're constantly trying to get sponsorship from the Costa Rican tourist board, but it hasn't worked so far. But yeah, very well done.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:14:44] It's not a bad idea, it's not a bad idea.

Christiana: [00:14:46] But yes, Osa Osa is quite, quite an inspirational, actually. I mean, it's a beautiful place today, but, but what they're doing for for future, flora and fauna diversity there is absolutely gorgeous. So yes, thank you.

Tom: [00:15:03] So, Ben, thank you very much for sharing a bit of the podcast, we've been friends for a number of years, and I've always been very inspired by everything you've done. And to just pay you a compliment before we let you go, I have to say, one of the things I've always been so inspired about your work is not only your passion, but also your pragmatism. I mean, you're prepared to work with anyone that can get you to move forward. You find the right partnerships, you make things happen. You're motivated by outcomes rather than anything else. It's very inspiring and thank you for all the work you do. So, Ben, let's hand over to you to introduce this episode with Stephen Fry.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:15:33] The whole point of my Rewilding The World podcast series is to highlight both people who are building projects, people from around the world who are doing inspirational things to restore ecosystems or reintroduce species, and also to elevate the voices of rewilding, people who've championed these projects. So, you know, Stephen Fry was very complimentary about the podcast series, says he listens to it while he's in the bath and and derives great optimism from it. And I couldn't help but grab the opportunity and say, please, please, please, will you come on my podcast and have a chat about the projects that you've supported during your lifetime. And thankfully, he said yes. And so we had Stephen Fry on the on the podcast.

Tom: [00:16:11] Amazing. Well, thank you for letting us put it out in our feed. And listeners, please enjoy this remarkably brilliant episode of Rewilding The World and please subscribe to the podcast.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:16:19] I love you guys so much. Thank you so much for doing this. It's beyond my wildest dreams that you've done this, thank you.

Christiana: [00:16:25] Thank you Ben, this is very exciting. Super.

Tom: [00:16:29] Here is Rewilding The World with Ben Goldsmith.

Stephen Fry: [00:16:43] So I would sometimes let in the moths and they would crash around in the lampshades and I'd be scared of them. And I'd stand on the bed and scream, and then I'd throw books at them when they were against the wall. And I remember thinking, genuinely thinking, we don't need insects. What's the point of them. We could do without them. Little did I know.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:17:10] Welcome to another episode of Rewilding The World with me, Ben Goldsmith, and I'm incredibly excited to be here with my friend and hero, Stephen Fry.

Stephen Fry: [00:17:19] You are too kind, Ben.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:17:21] Stephen, normally these episodes are about highlighting individual projects. I've interviewed some people from different parts of the world who are putting together landscape rewilding projects, or putting back species or saving species. And this is kind of a sort of departure because you're the first kind of close friend of mine to join and the first person who's involved in a whole panoply of different projects. The first time I really thought of you as a big kind of nature lover and supporter was when I saw that you were president of the Great Fen, the Wicken Fen restoration project in East Anglia. How did that come about?

Stephen Fry: [00:17:54] Well, I come from East Anglia. I was raised in Norfolk and Universitied at Cambridge, so the whole area between Cambridge and the Fens means a lot to me. It's not everybody's cup of tea. Noel Coward has destroyed it forever. When you say you come from Norfolk, people quote him from private lives, very flat Norfolk. And we always say it's pathetic. It's like people who live in Richmond or something. And you say to them, oh God, I've got to go all the way out there. They go, oh, it takes me 15 minutes to get into the West End. Lies. Absolute lies. And Norfolk people say actually Norfolk is quite hilly. It's Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire that are flat. Well, Norfolk is quite flat, but it's beautiful and I grew up deep in the country and I'm old enough to remember hedgerows as they were. Fortunately they're coming back. But there was a time in the early 70s, late 60s, when I was a boy, when there were suddenly, suddenly got rid of. And I remember my, my mother, she now regrets it, saying, well, I'm quite pleased because it's so much safer to drive in the lanes now you can see cars coming from, she had a point because with the thick lanes, you never knew you had to hoot at every, every bend. But Norfolk then, was pure countryside. And there are things I regret. I hated insects, particularly moths and junebugs, as we called them. These big things that flew in through the window at night.

Stephen Fry: [00:19:29] And because I was addicted to reading at night and it would be hot, I had to decide if I open the window in will come the moths, and if I close the window I will suffer from overheating. So I would sometimes let in the moths, and they would crash around in the lampshades, and I'd be scared of them, and I'd stand on the bed and scream. And then I'd throw books at them when they were against the wall. And I remember thinking, genuinely thinking, we don't need insects. What's the point of them. You know, wasps, beetles. We could do without them. Little did I know, it took me a long time to learn. Eventually, when I sort of started to fall in love with natural history, Darwinism and all those sort of things a lot through the influence of my friend Douglas Adams, the writer of Hitchhiker, he was obsessed with species depredation and things. Anyway, I sort of looked back then when I got to my 30s and 40s and I remembered corncrakes and skylarks and some of the birds that began to disappear from the Norfolk landscape simply because of the hedgerow depredation and various other things, organophosphates and the terrible kinds of chemicals that were being used. And I became more aware, and I got to know people on the north Norfolk coast who were doing work for birds and so on, and understood that actually insects were rather important.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:20:56] So but Norfolk and East Anglia are sort of a tale of, of two landscapes, because on the one hand, you've got some of the most agriculturally productive soil in the whole of Britain. I think I read in Henry Dimbleby's National Food Strategy report that 85% of the food that we produce in this country comes from just 20% of the land, and nearly all of that is in the east of Britain, and a lot of it centered around where you grew up. But at the same time, you've also got some of the last real wildernesses in Britain in the vestiges of the great wetlands that were found down the the East coast. So it's a funny dichotomy in a way. And and there's a strange struggle emerging now between those that want every square inch to be farmed and those that think, well, actually, some of these wetlands serve a different purpose, and we ought to have them back.

Stephen Fry: [00:21:43] Yes absolutely right. I can remember my brother and I used to get invited to, you know, young farmer barn dances, dreadful events, as you can imagine. But, and the snobbery there was a fantastic inverted snobbery. If you had a smart car, you were nobody. But if you had a terrible old thing that was held together with baler twine, then you were a god. And they had, my brother and I used to laugh, because if ever you gave the slightest critical remark about farming, about the huge sort of syndication of of farmland, the, the slow turning of it into a kind of Iowan plains without stands of wood and copses and spinneys and so on. They would always say the same thing you want to eat, don't you. And that was it. That was the end of argument. And yes, there's a genuine sympathy one can have for farmers. They are providing food for the nation. And we used to tease them that all the wheat that was grown in Norfolk went for biscuits, and the proper, proper wheat was grown in Canada and Russia.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:22:49] But I think this food security argument, I think, is, it's overused because in that same report by Henry Dimbleby, he points out that the least productive 20% of our country produces less than 2% of the food. So the idea that we can't consider nature also to be critical infrastructure with its place, for example, in our national parks, I think is an absurdity. And we and we needn't choose, of course, because there are lots of places where highly productive farming goes on, surrounded by nature and corncrakes and all those kind of things, you know, in among the fields where the food is grown. But I think that what's fascinating about Norfolk and the Wicken Fen project and so on, is the change that East Anglia has undergone over the last 1500, 100 and even 50 years. Now there was a whole culture. The Fenlanders would have lived a life that was sort of almost hunter gatherer, you know, gathering enormous amounts of of waterfowl for sending down to London for those huge feasts and enormous volumes of eels and salmon and other migratory fish. And they probably would have lived a life much closer to hunting and gathering than farming. So when we think of the Fens as being a place where growing carrots runs in the blood and has done for ever, it's not actually really accurate, is it, in a sense?

Stephen Fry: [00:23:58] No, that's a very good point indeed. And the variety and diversity of the Wicken Fen is, is an absolute eye opener as to what that land can be like. Because we're so, as you say, trained into thinking of the fen tigers with their potatoes and carrots and all the rest of it and and nothing else, just black alluvial soil stretching as far as the eye can see. But actually, it's a place now that with the hen harriers and these extraordinary sedge warblers and amazing species of bird, that you can go and see. The marvellous Miriam Rothschild had her own little lodge there where she would, you know, look at not just those wonderful birds, but the tiniest little wildflowers that grew there as well. And that's what we need to see co-existing with farmland. And I think the good thing is farmers do appreciate that now and that they see the value of the set aside and the various other strategies to increase the diversity of wildlife around them. And they don't see it necessarily as being either make a profit, a full profit, or, you know, encourage biodiversity. The two are compatible and give them more pleasure. Most farmers, I mean, farmers, you know, are human beings. They like to see beautiful countryside, too. And also the shooting in Norfolk, of course, has a lot of shooting. And I used to, although I don't do it myself, I'm a complete wuss. I sort of defended it because that's the only reason there were any woodlands in Norfolk at all was for for raising the birds. But at the same time, I would be upset because there would be a lot of shooting of birds of prey.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:25:33] I love that you mentioned Miriam Rothschild. I married her great niece, Kate, with whom I remain very close. I think you were at the wedding and I used to go and visit her, and she was in her late 90s and I was in my early 20s. And she said, you must keep coming because you remind me not of your father, but of your grandfather, Frank. And she had had this not a romance, but a great crush on my grandfather, who was older than her. She remembered walking arm in arm with him down the promenade at Cannes in 1919, the end of the First World War, where he was putting back together his Carlton Hotel. And I used to go and sit by her bedside, and I think one of the last times she was able to leave her house, aged 98 or 99, we went in a vehicle and looked at the roughs, which was an area of land she'd given over to the American Air Force in the Second World War to create an airfield, and it had been inadvertently rewilded since the end of the Second World War. And you had these wonderful, gnarly, stunted willows and oaks growing in this kind of semi-open ground that was just heaving with little reptiles, little lizards and grass snakes and adders and butterflies. It was a paradise, but it was sort of the first rewilding project I came across, because you could just make out the vestiges of this Second World War airfield on her her roughs.

Stephen Fry: [00:26:46] Oh that's brilliant. And the proof of the great phrase of Horace, the Latin poet. I can't quite it's something like naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret something. But it basically means no matter how much you push it back with a pitchfork, nature will come roaring back.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:27:03] I know, and if you go to the tropics, I spent two weeks in Mumbai for one of my daughters had a medical treatment there. I had two weeks there, and there are these extraordinary Art deco buildings that haven't been looked after. And you have these enormous fig trees growing out of the second floor, and nature reclaims incredibly quickly. And but on this subject of wetlands, we're in a better position, I think, for nature recovery on the other side of the country, here in Somerset, the summer settlement. Now I'm on the edge of what's known as the Vale of Avalon or the Somerset Levels, and that's a landscape which is not agriculturally productive, unlike the Fens and East Anglia. It's a it's a landscape. It's very hard to farm. And so you only need to tweak the incentives very slightly in favour of carbon sequestration, flood mitigation. 

Stephen Fry: [00:27:48] I was going to say the flood mitigation has to be sensitively done so that it does. It is human friendly, but it doesn't do to the levels what the Duke of Bedford did to the Fens.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:27:58] Stephen, did you, as a child, spend enormous amounts of time in nature? I remember as a child looking for frogs and toads and putting up boxes, and it was sort of my special interest. The thing I cared about most from a very early age. Were you the same?

Stephen Fry: [00:28:13] A bit. I mean, I loved Gerald Durrell, and I used to think, oh, I wish I lived in a place like Corfu so I could. I sort of overlooked Norfolk as a young boy, but I went to prep school in Gloucestershire, 200 miles away. That was amazing. That was sort of just off the Slad Valley. In fact, we had Laurie Lee used to come and visit the school and give us talks and read from Cider With Rosie and things like that, and the headmaster had four daughters, so it was a really friendly, it wasn't one of those sadistic, horrible prep schools. It was these four girls sort of ran it and they were mad about horses and nature, and there was a big lake and we would all fish and riding was not even an extra. You all had to do it. And, and there were these big woods, and we would go and look at the woods and we were taught wildflowers. I remember Herb Robert and Campion and all these different things, and the smell of wild garlic around the lake and the mallows. And, and I did get very, very interested. And I would do something that sounds so fey, but was a very popular Victorian and Edwardian pastime amongst men and women. And that is I'd press wild flowers. Fine wild flowers. And I suppose it was wicked to pick them, but we never thought they were rare in those days. And, you know, if I think, oh, I haven't got that one, and I would take it.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:29:29] I certainly noticed as a child that if I was deprived of spending time in nature and if I was cooped up indoors for whatever reason, or I definitely felt that my attention would turn to being outside and I would start to feel a sense of needing it or yearning for it, and I wouldn't have used anything like that language back then. But I somewhere deep down, I knew that I longed to get back from holiday sometimes because I had all kinds of projects in this large garden I grew up in in Richmond that you know very well. I used to spend time digging out ponds and putting up bird boxes and things that were projects, and I wanted to know what was happening with them. So I wanted to get home from holiday. And when I grew older, you know, I found at the most difficult times in my life that being outside in nature, in almost whatever form has been the most powerful tonic, you know, whether it's a warm cup of tea in my hands and the sun coming up early in the morning, and the birdsong or swimming in a very large pond at the bottom of my garden here in Somerset, you know, sometimes 6 or 8 times a day during difficult times in my life. And I felt held at certain moments by this love of nature that I had.

Stephen Fry: [00:30:31] Well, you've written about this quite beautifully and very touchingly and and made me feel envious not of your splendid spread of land. I mean, we can all be envious of that, but that's not really not the point. As you also make in your book, it's it's, you know, the fact that you you do that and I, I'm sort of guilty because if I want to put it in a grand way, the Romans had a phrase, Rus in urbe just means country and city. Rus, as in rustic and urbs as in urban, obviously. And they sort of noticed the difference because they were the first literally civilization in terms of civ the civics of Roman things, civics, you know, the city. And they kind of noticed that they had become something else by being city dwellers, that it had changed them. So the great poets, Virgil and Horace in particular, who were pretty much contemporaries, wrote about the countryside, the Georgics and the Eclogues, in the case of Virgil and and Horace, all kinds of odes about it in which they meditated. And I remember reading that and thinking, yes, there is a part of me, and I think a lot of humans that needs a pavement beneath my feet and people around me, even if I don't know them, just the buzz of humanity, I need it. It's part of not feeling alone.

Stephen Fry: [00:31:52] It's part of being the tribe that we are, the tribes and clans and groups that we we sort ourselves out into. But another part of me yearns for the countryside to stand alone, as you say, with a cup of tea, looking at a field or the sky or hills or whatever it might be. And the extraordinary thing about the human brain, because we we can almost overdo, in a sense, the need for the countryside, as if any lack of it will make us unwell, and that is that you can stand in a field. I've done it in Norfolk, where you're completely alone, and there might be a stand of trees somewhere on the horizon. And if a leaf is turned over by the wind and you see the silvery other side, your head turns to it and you're 100 yards away from it. But your senses are so attuned because, you know, we evolved either to look for lunch or to run away from being lunch. But then two hours later, after a train journey, you're standing in Oxford Street on the phone talking to someone while a thousand voices are talking around you, and you're skipping traffic and avoiding people on the pavement. And your brain can cope with that too. So we mustn't underestimate the power of our brain to live in a city as well as to live in the country.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:33:06] I mean, the author E.O. Wilson coined the term biophilia to describe the innate love that all humans have for the non-human world.

Stephen Fry: [00:33:13] Yes, he was the great expert on colonization and socialization, wasn't he?

Ben Goldsmith: [00:33:18] Exactly. And he I mean, he describes the love we feel for our dog as being integral to our lives and ubiquitous. All people feel this sense of love for the non-human. That's why we pay twice for an apartment which overlooks the park versus one that doesn't, you know, or for for a hotel room on holiday that can see the ocean versus one that doesn't. And another writer I like is Richard Louv, who coined the term nature deficit disorder. And he describes he wrote a book called Last Child In The Woods and described how incredibly important it is developmentally and emotionally, particularly for children to spend a certain amount of time in contact with with the natural world. And he says it's akin to meditation in the sense that all five of your senses are occupied at the same time, thereby somehow opening a sort of sixth sense. You know, some different sense, which brings us a sense of well-being, and I don't think it needs to be just available to those who live in, in the countryside or who are privileged in one way or another. I set up with Sadiq Khan in 2021, the Rewilding London Taskforce, and we've already spent several million pounds on rewilding projects within London. If you go walking in Regent's Park or Primrose Hill or any of them, you'll see little pockets of scrub with fenced exclosures and wilder reed beds along the watercourses. And all of the green spaces in London now have a target of about a third, unmanaged or less managed, and there are seven knepp style rewilding projects now around the periphery of London Enfield, Hainault Forest, the Dagenham Marshes and one in Croydon. And these are big with natural processes. Native cattle, beavers at Ealing, beavers at Enfield.

Stephen Fry: [00:34:53] Yes, the beavers is so exciting aren't they, just fantastic.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:34:57] And of course, we did our beaver dinner in 2022 and raised a lot of money for the Beaver Trust.

Stephen Fry: [00:35:02] And it was one of the interesting things because it's still a fight to persuade, you know, owners of grouse moors and and shoots not to do terrible things to the red kites and the other raptor birds, because it's so easy to forget the necessity of having a class of raptors. It's horrible when you see a falcon tearing apart a nest or something and you think, oh you beasts. But one of the most remarkable things, which I'm sure you're aware of, is what they discovered in Yellowstone when they reintroduced wolves, that it increased the population of beavers. It was a most  no one expected it. It was the oddest thing. Wolves were coming in. Local farmers were furious. Some of them were trying to shoot the wolves. I remember going to Wyoming and hearing this unbelievable sound of wolves howling at night. It's just the most chillingly, thrillingly fantastic noise you've ever heard and wondering about this, what they were doing. And and then they were surviving on elk, amongst other things. And this altered the Elks patterns of migration and movement during the winter. There were fewer of them, and they went in different places to avoid the wolves. And so they weren't destroying the shoots, the young shoots and of trees that they had been regularly eating and eating and eating. And this created more of exactly the right wood and saplings and things that the beavers used for their dams.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:36:25] And more berries, and therefore more bears.

Stephen Fry: [00:36:26] And more bears yeah.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:36:28] And the most interesting of all, in a way, was that then the return of beavers and the the new vegetation on the river brought stability to the rivers themselves, which meant more salmon.

Stephen Fry: [00:36:37] Exactly. It's a cascade of fantastic outcomes.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:36:42] Exactly. And I think that we're told, you know, in the case of wolves, we're told wolf farmers hate wolves. And you'd understand your first instinct would be to understand why they might take livestock. And and they do take livestock. But not all farmers hate wolves in the sense that in Europe, anyone growing crops, anyone growing vines or vegetables, anyone with pigs is absolutely delighted by the return of wolves. Foresters are delighted by the return of wolves, because the only places in Europe where deer and wild boar, which do huge crop damage, are under control and managed, is where there are wolves, and even some livestock farmers now are starting to come round to wolves, on the basis that coexistence has been shown to be possible through electric fencing, guard dogs, guard donkeys or llamas. All kinds of things are being tried and it's working in a number of different places and it's generously supported. Places like Belgium are really highly effective now at coexisting with livestock and wolves. The issue of wolves is sort of totemic for rewilding as a movement, because it's so easy for it to be dragged into a kind of culture war discussion. You know that wolves, people who want wolves are anti farmers, anti-food and all that sort of misanthropic in a way. And I think it's the exact opposite. We need to live in vibrant ecosystems that have equilibrium and where all the important component parts are there.

Stephen Fry: [00:37:56] Yeah, I so agree. And my house in Norfolk. I do have a house in Norfolk still, and it's my only, as it were, place in the country. It's not a huge garden, but I did this year. I asked the fellow who looks after the garden for me. Look, I said, I've been watching Monty Don. I've been listening to Chris Packham, and I've come to the conclusion along with them that these lawns are not a good thing. And anyway, you've been fighting molehills for the last, you know, 20 years with no success. They just come back and back and drive us all crazy, and they stop us from having, you know, croquet or something ridiculous. So let's give them over to wildflowers. Let's dig them up, rotavate them, you know, just do that. And he was kind of really I said, well, we'll you go and look it up and see how it works, and I'll do it and we'll get seeds. And and it has been fantastic. People who come and look at it go, Oh my God, it's so beautiful. So happy making. And then to watch the insects buzzing around. It's a tiny little pocket handkerchief in the middle of sort of west ish Norfolk. And it's, you know, the idea that it's going to save the world is ridiculous but. 

Ben Goldsmith: [00:39:12] I don't think it is, I don't think it is.

Stephen Fry: [00:39:14] No, it makes me happy and it does its bit.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:39:16] Yeah. I don't think the idea that that kind of thing will save the world is ridiculous at all. This idea of think global and act local. I think we need to weave nature back into our lives. I think if someone lives on the 34th floor of a tower block in Roehampton and they decide to put native wildflowers in a window box in order to attract in butterflies and so on, you know, I think that is absolutely central to the whole idea. And I don't know if you sense it as well as, you know, you know, someone who's cared about nature and cared about these issues for decades, somewhat ahead of your time. You know, I feel a culture shift taking place in the world around our relationship with nature. I think if you told us ten years ago that we'd be having this conversation now about beavers back in Kent and Dorset and wolves in Yellowstone, and 100 million people watching a video about it on YouTube. You know, I think we'd have thought you were mad. And I think something big is happening.

Stephen Fry: [00:40:08] You're absolutely right. I'm an ambassador and have been for decades actually, the for Fauna and Flora International, which is a terrific charity. It works with others like the Durrell and various things, but it's one of the most crucial things is with people, all people who live around and earn their living from the land or the sea in which these habitats, these threatened habitats, are. And it's fantastic when you see that actually it does help. And the problem partly has been in Britain, because of the fragile and sensitive nature of what I believe is called the discourse, is that it can seem very top down. It so happens literally top down, because the king is one of the first people to have done this, to have had wildflower gardens, to have talked about these kinds of move towards rewilding and to have led by example with his own land and so on. And it can seem like a kind of grand or almost virtue signalling hobby that people have, which others feel they don't have time for, or the land for, or that it's for other people. And I think that's what's changing, thank goodness, is that it is now part of a more general conversation, not the elite, as people insist on saying.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:41:27] Yeah, absolutely. I think you've hit the nail absolutely on the head. I think nature has been considered some kind of luxury for the privileged. And I think the conversation has of recent years has flipped that on its head, and it's now considered more of a birthright, it's a question of social equity, you know, why should a child growing up in Tower Hamlets not have the right to look up and see a peregrine falcon above his or her head on their way to school, you know, or to see flocks of migrating birds in the autumn, flying overhead, wildflowers in the ground beneath their feet. This idea that nature is a birthright, and that we all must have access to nature for our physical health, mental health, emotional well-being, and a sense of spiritual connection. I mean, I know you don't use that kind of language, but I wonder if you do.

Stephen Fry: [00:42:11] No, it's fair, yeah.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:42:12] Is nature perhaps a place where you come closest to finding what others might describe to be spiritual connection or even God?

Stephen Fry: [00:42:21] Absolutely. I mean, I shiver a bit at what I think is woo woo and and especially when it tries to adduce fake science and things like that. I mean, if it's I'm a great lover of the ideas behind animism, which is the world's biggest religion, really all over the world, the third world or developing world, there are people who see spirits in trees and in rivers and so on. And the ancient Greeks, whom I love and reverence, called them nymphs. But there's, you know, we could call them fairies, sprites, you know, perries, whatever. There are all kinds of words from our culture and from all the cultures of the world that imbue nature with a kind of spirit. And that's what the word spiritual comes from. So I'm very open to that. And I love thinking that I, you know, like His Majesty, I talk to trees and flowers, you know. Hello. You're a bit yellow and whatever it might be, because it's totally natural thing to do because you are one living entity communing with another living entity. It may be a different sort of living entity.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:43:28] Or two twigs of the same tree, perhaps.

Stephen Fry: [00:43:31] Yes, absolutely.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:43:32] But the, but the king got on the stage at an elephant, asian elephant conservation dinner I was at last year. And he said very simply that that the knowledge of the world's remaining First Nations people or the world's remaining animists, I suppose you meant, represents humanity's best last hope, you know, in the sense that that 80% of the world's remaining intact ecosystems are in places where, you know, those with animist religious tendencies are in charge, you know, the Amazon basin, the.

Stephen Fry: [00:44:01] It's a knowledge seed bank, as it were.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:44:03] Exactly. And maybe to save nature, we do need to re-enchant it.

Stephen Fry: [00:44:07] Yes, yes, I think that's beautiful. I'm completely happy with those with that language and with those thoughts. I think you would have to be coldly and almost pathologically disconnected from your own self if you were totally disconnected from nature, in feeling, in having a connection. You know, even if you are brought up in the city, the experience and some people, it's only when they go to a music festival that they actually the first time they've been in a country lane or walked, you know, through fields and things. But if they if they didn't respond, it would be a sign of some terrible dysfunction, I think. And in a wider sense, that is perhaps what we've been suffering from.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:44:52] It's such an interesting idea of the music festival. It's true. So many young people have their first connection with nature at these festivals. I completely agree with you. That's an opportunity. I've become friendly with the team that operate Glastonbury, which is the biggest and the most iconic of all the festivals, and I long for Glastonbury Festival to become a centre of knowledge dissemination around the rewilding of the Somerset Levels. It sits there on its hillside, looking out over Glastonbury Tor, looking out towards the great levels which have been desecrated. And I love the idea of however many two 300,000 people calling for the restoration of the Somerset of Avalon at every Glastonbury Festival. Stephen which which of all the projects overseas that you've been associated with through Fauna and Flora or any other organisation, fills you with the most sense of joy and excitement?

Stephen Fry: [00:45:41] Well, I would have said that it was translocating the last male white northern rhinoceros in the world, from a zoo in Prague, of all places. You may know the Conservancy Ol Pejeta in Kenya, very well known and an extraordinary place. Quite a large footprint of land in which rare and threatened species are looked after on this conservancy end. And the northern white rhino is a subspecies of rhinoceros that is now sort of functionally extinct. There was this one male whose name was Sudan because he'd been collected by a zookeeper in the 60s or 70s whenever it was in the country of Sudan. And he was ended up in this zoo next to a female in Prague. But they didn't mate. It's one of the most important things you have to understand about mammals is, is their ethology. Their behavior is what dictates their their mating and their breeding. You can't just put a male next to a female and expect results. They have to have the right amount of land for the male to have. He has to be, in some ways kind of juiced up for it by the threat of other males, as well as the presence of a female in season.

Stephen Fry: [00:47:02] And so it's not surprising it hadn't worked in captivity. And we took this, you know, we tranquilized this enormous beast, put him on an airplane and flew him to Kenya, and then took him on a truck all the way to the Conservancy, where we popped him down and and slowly got him accustomed to his new or indeed old from his memory, I suppose, environment. And he died a year or so ago, sadly. Obviously his seed has been kept. He didn't successfully mate with any of the females there, so there are only females now. Some form of artificial insemination is possible, but the experience of being close to these animals and there were babies of black rhinos and white rhinos who were not northern whites, and I suckled them with milk and and fed them and petted them, they're, you know, people are afraid of them, and rightly in the wild they might if they see you, they've got very bad eyesight. But if they sort of catch a glimpse of you or smell you, they will lower their heads and charge to get you out of there. But they are grazing animals. They are the sweetest, gentlest creatures and so beautiful.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:48:13] I long to interview Peter Fearnhead of African Parks, who's recently rescued 2000 rhinos out of a the world's largest rhino farm. Because the farmer has, I think, gone out of business and they've realised that they're not going to be able to sell this rhino horn, thankfully. And so 2000 rhinos are now being placed back in different African parks restoration projects from from Malawi to Mozambique, which I think is quite extraordinary.

Stephen Fry: [00:48:36] Yeah. One of the sad things is that you have to saw off the horns so that they don't attract the poachers. So the rhinos are hornless, but they'll even kill a rhino to dig out the root of the horn that is underneath. That's how valuable the damn stuff is. And yet it's keratin. As you know, it's fingernails are the same chemical compound.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:48:57] And they kill the rhinos without horns also, to save themselves the trouble of inadvertently tracking the same one again. I mean, Kevin Pietersen, the former England cricketer, is doing a brilliant job on combating poaching of rhinos. But back to England, you know, what do you think General Melchett would say about all these bloody beavers and wolves and other things that we're talking about?

Stephen Fry: [00:49:18] He would, would definitely be allowed there, ah beavers yes. Ah, that reminds me. I must go to Locke and Company in Saint James's and get myself a new hat, because I suspect he had no no trouble in wearing beaver hats or beaver fur was used for hats a lot, wasn't it. And for various other things. Yes. I don't think he would be likely to be a conservationist.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:49:45] He loved his pigeon, though. Was it speckled, Bob?

Stephen Fry: [00:49:48] Very true. He could be, he could be fond of animals. Yes. Speckled Jim. I remember someone, it wasn't that long ago shouting at me across the street. You bastard pigging murderer! I thought they shouted at me and I was, I didn't know what they were talking about, I thought was it because I was wearing leather shoes. Which, actually I wasn't, so it couldn't be that I sort of rounded the corner with quickened step. And then I heard someone hurrying after me, going, Mr Fry, Mr Fry and I thought, oh my God, it's this person who calls me a bastard pigging murderer. And I thought, oh, there's still some people around, so I'll risk it. So I turned round and said, yes. And he said, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I said, well, you called me a bastard pigging murderer. He said, no, I was quoting your Blackadder line. You you blasted pigeon murderer. Oh that's right. In the court case, I accused Blackadder of being a pigeon murderer and that he was just quoting the line back to me. But yes, I did like Speckled Jim, my beloved Speckled Jim. The very thought of him makes me cry. I think of him every time I go along Park Lane, where they have that memorial to the animals that gave their lives in the service of their country in the first war. Probably not knowing that that's what they were doing, but.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:51:03] I'm rather moved by that statue as well. I like it, I think it's part of London's eccentricity, I love it. Stephen, I'm so grateful to you for taking the time to chat to me on this podcast. I really I want to get these rewilding stories out to as many people as possible. I mean, I've interviewed recently a guy called Alejandro Espinosa in Monterrey, Mexico, who works for the world's largest cement company, Cemex, and I discovered through a completely random publication called Global Cement, which I happened to be looking at because I was googling bison reintroduction.

Stephen Fry: [00:51:34] Are you sure you weren't doing have I Got News for you?

Ben Goldsmith: [00:51:36] No, I wasn't, and I was looking for stories about bison reintroduction and found that Cemex are rewilding several hundred thousand acres at a place called El Carmen on the Mexican US border, where they've removed thousands of kilometres of fencing and restored this extraordinary mosaic of wetlands and savanna and forest. And they now have the first wild, free roaming herd of bison for nearly 200 years in Mexico, alongside pronghorn antelope and bighorn sheep and cougars and jaguars and all these things coming back. And no one knows about these extraordinary projects happening all over the world. So I thought, I'll set up a podcast series, and I'll bring it to the attention of as many people as possible, that there are some really exciting things happening in a whole range of different places. So I'm really grateful for you coming on to this.

Stephen Fry: [00:52:22] You're doing an amazing job, and your passion and your knowledge and your enthusiasm is clear for all to hear. And I will only end on saying, you do don't you know the difference between a buffalo and a bison? You can't wash your hands in a buffalo.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:52:38] I was I was about to. I was about to give a serious answer.

Stephen Fry: [00:52:42] About to give a very taxonomical answer.

Ben Goldsmith: [00:52:43] Yes. I've got a Mexican one for you. How do you titillate an ocelot? By oscillating its tits a lot. I'm feeling a little bit starstruck, having spent the last three quarters of an hour chatting with Stephen Fry, one of my heroes. As someone I've spent almost my whole life watching on TV and listening to and laughing to, and it's just so important that people like Stephen Fry, who are enormously popular, who have big platforms, do raise the profile of nature and rewilding in the way that he has in so many different ways. It's just very, very important to the whole movement. I'm really grateful to Stephen, and if you enjoyed listening to that conversation as much as I enjoyed making it, please do give us a like on whatever platform you use. Maybe a review, share the podcast around. We're really growing fast now. Lots of people all over the world are listening to these podcasts and, I really want it to get big and I want lots of people to hear these stories. So I'm truly grateful to you. Next time I'm going to be talking to a truly fascinating guy from America named Brett Jenks. Brett runs an organization called Rare. What Rare does is harness the innate pride that people have in their own wildlife and the nature around where they live, the love that they feel for their natural surroundings, and the unique wildlife that they've known all their lives in order to build societal movements. Bottom up movements for saving nature. The first of Rare's big successes was on the island of Saint Lucia, where the island's unique parrot was saved by a whole of society effort on the back of work, pulled together by Rare. It really works, and these kinds of behavioural and psychic insights seem to be absolutely essential to the cause of restoring nature. I do hope you'll join us.