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Something like 27 million people in Britain consider themselves gardeners.
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If you can harness those people, if you can get them thinking about their relationship with the natural world, with wildlife, with invertebrates, with bugs, with biodiversity, you're getting quite a l a big chunk of Britain heading in the right direction.
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Welcome to another episode of Rewilding the World, and I'm here with author and teacher and new friend James Canton.
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James, thank you so much for taking the time to join me.
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Very welcome.
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Lovely to be here, Ben.
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So, James, I what I really wanted to talk to you about in this conversation is your most recent book, Renaturing.
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I'm fascinated by this idea of our ability to restore nature even on very small plots of land, even a window box.
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And I was co-chair of the Rewilding London Task Force, and that was really what it was about.
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You know, how can we create streaks and patches of wild nature through the fabric of the City of London?
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But before we get there, I'd like to talk about kind of some of the earlier work you've done and kind of the central theme of your career.
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Now, I've I've got a copy of Ancient Wanderings, you know, travels in prehistoric Britain.
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You know, and you've more recently published a book called Grounded, A Journey into the Landscapes of Our Ancestors.
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And I'm just fascinated by this idea of the intense connection that people in this country, Britain, had through the ages with landscape, with nature, on a kind of spiritual level.
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And perhaps for a period at least, those bonds have been reduced or severed.
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And maybe now we're entering into an era where we're rediscovering the importance of nature to our individual and collective well-being.
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And I just wanted to read you, I took this off the wall last night from my bathroom.
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It's the funeral um uh brochure, if that's what you call it, for my late uncle Teddy, who I love very much.
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Because I lost my father at 15, and my uncle Teddy stepped in and was kind of a father figure to Zach and my brother and me.
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And we published a quote on the on the book that we handed out at his funeral, and this was what he said.
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The ecology we need is not the ecology that involves viewing the ecosphere on which we depend for our survival at a distance and with scientific detachment.
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We will not save our planet by means of a conscious, rational, and unemotional decision, a sort of ecological contract based on a cost-benefit analysis.
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A moral and emotional commitment is required.
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Indeed, one of the key tasks of ecology must be to redirect our emotions so that they may fulfill the role they were designed for, to commit us to what should be the overriding human enterprise of maintaining the critical order of the ecosphere.
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So he used to write lengthy books and everything.
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But but yeah, I've I sort of I know this in my belly that that cost-benefit analysis is a big part of it, but we've got to reconnect in a cultural, emotional, or spiritual way with nature.
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So um that this this I think is the most interesting theme of your work.
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It's been really the work of your life.
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Yeah, no, that's that's a beautiful quote, Ben.
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I mean, that really is, but but absolutely, I mean, in essence, it's about that that intimacy as as humans on a landscape with the natural world, that kind of central core thing that, you know, we are of nature, we're not separate from nature.
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Nature isn't outside that window, it's with us all the time.
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We are nature.
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And I think, you know, we can kind of say it in a kind of intellectual, academic way, but it has to be kind of physical, it has to be kind of earthy.
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It's nothing new.
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We we just need to remember it.
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We need to remind ourselves as humans of that, of that intimacy, that intimate connection with with the earth, with the natural world.
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Uh that's all it's about.
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So, so imagine you could step back, I don't know, 3,000 years, 4,000 years into Neolithic Essex.
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I presume you're sitting in Essex right now, James.
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I am, yeah.
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Yeah, so so day to day, in the lives of those people, our ancestors that lived there, you know, what what was the nature of their connection with nature beyond the obvious, beyond the the total and utter dependence, which we may have masked somewhat with the modern comforts that we enjoy, but but we obviously still depend what I love these quotes you sometimes get say uh economists reckon that 50% of global GDP is dependent upon nature.
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I don't know how they come up with 50%, you know, surely it's a hundred percent, but back then they were close to it, you know, minute to minute.
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So what but in a spiritual sense, how how would that have manifested?
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I think even even trying to break down the kind of the layers at which that takes place.
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If you go back far enough, if if I can budge you back a little bit further to kind of hunter-gathering, gardening humans, you know, pre-farming, then it we are entirely, we are 100%, we are out there all the time, we are just entirely reliant on our knowledge of the natural world.
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And that's so that's everything from augury, you know, like knowing about bird patterns and bird movements and what that means, that what that means seasonally, what that means is taking place in a wider, wider scale beyond our horizons.
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You know, and that carries right the way through.
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People talk about this divide between farming and pre-farming and farming.
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There is a lot of crossover in terms of the way that humans are operating within the landscape.
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Yes, okay, some some kind of core things have changed, but I think as humans, it takes quite a long period of time before we've really moved over, and we're, if you like, colonizing the land, if you want to talk about it like that.
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And even then, in Neolithic times, we're very much embedded in the in our local landscapes.
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I think that for me, that's one of the core things that takes place as we move to farming, is local becomes really much more important.
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Whereas when we're still hunter-gatherers, there's much more sort of seasonality.
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There's that requirement of you know, groups of people going off and collecting flints, there's groups of people that are going off and you know collecting salmon, if I can put it like that, you know, and others at other times, you know, you might have the like deer migrations through the landscape, you know.
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So it's all about this sense of humans recognizing themselves as another species within the natural world.
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And if you look at some of the iconography of, say, the early Middle Ages, you see that depiction of nature and existence as an infinitely complex clock, you know, those kind of clock drawings.
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You know, and and uh I think this recognition that nature is is intricate beyond our ability to understand and mysterious.
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I'm drawn to those images, but I'm I'm also drawn to the idea of nature as a kind of mirror that reflects some reality beyond a veil of some sort.
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A book that had a big impact on me was the the then Prince of Wales, you know, King Charles's book, Harmony, which was published, I guess, 15 or 18 years ago.
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And um, I remember reading that and the idea that there was a break from nature at around the time of the Enlightenment, you know, kind of Descartes and the kind of Enlightenment philosophers who said, no, nature is a machine, you know, but biological organisms are just machines.
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I think Descartes did he not dissect his dog alive to demonstrate to the audience that this is just a machine.
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Yeah, and um, therefore, um we can kind of raid the larder as we choose without any worry about empathy or or unkindness or or any kind of um moral or emotional connection with nature because it's it's just a machine.
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And anything mystical, no god, ghosts, they are elsewhere, they're kind of invisible in some other place, and this kind of separation uh occurred, which I think now King Charles identifies in his book as the root cause of our behaviour today, destroying nature.
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But if you look at early Christianity, it was all one, this this kind of invisible reality and a visible reality were indistinguishable from each other.
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Yeah, that's that's very interesting.
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That's a really nice point because if you look at the religion, if you like, of of the people that we were talking about sort of from the Neolithic and earlier, the common term is shamanism.
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But it's this it's this interwoven connectedness, the kind of uh the this myriad of of living that is the earth, if you like.
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And and again, humans, we're part of that.
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And our connection with particular animals is intimate, is is at certain times, in particular kind of shamanic practices, is almost more than intimate.
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It's a kind of it's a it's a this kind of fusion of existence.
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So again, as you say, like as you move, as you move through it's sort of two, three, four hundred years ago, we start to see this divide, particularly within Western Europe, of course.
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And of course, you know, a lot of people within the world, indigenous belief systems, they they still maintain this this this different way, this this way of not seeing a separation, but seeing a connection.
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And the and the practice of using psychedelic brews of various sorts was was ubiquitous in those shamanistic societies.
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But I I think we we we know this in our gut, right?
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I mean, I I um I in my life I had a disaster, which was I I lost my daughter Iris, um, age 15, here on our farm in Canwood.
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And you know, the the the unimaginable darkness that engulfs you when you lose a child.
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And and I knew from the earliest moments that there was solace to be found in nature.
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Now we have a pond that I swim in, and I would go down to that pond and I would swim five, eight times a day just because being in the water and then popping up into the into the sunlight and seeing the kind of this sort of benevolent indifference, you know, this kind of you know, the the little dragonflies scooting around above the water and the butterflies and the trees blowing above my head, and I just felt held in a way that nothing else did.
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And so we know it, you know, we know it that there's something there beyond what what perhaps science can articulate in terms of a need, a yearning.
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And I think that now that we're going through a period, a kind of cultural moment, not just in Britain but in the world, of rediscovering that yearning.
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I mean, how many friends do we have that have a mindfulness app?
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And I'm involved with the launch of a new app called Wildling, which is about connecting with nature and in your local area.
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And it's it's hugely in demand, all of this.
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Um, so I I think your book is really well-timed, um, the most recent one, which is Renaturing, which is about restoring nature today in the landscapes that we've inherited, um, in which we have become very disconnected with nature.
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And I've noticed that with with smaller spaces, we're often quite crap at making provision for wildlife.
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You know, when you think of kind of the landscape design industry or the horticultural industry, you know, it's often about buying exotic fancy plants from the garden center, nothing native, which you know, these exotic plants which provide nothing for invertebrates or for birds.
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It's often about tidiness and sweeping up and creating hard spaces of concrete and decking and so on.
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So, what is the answer, James, for the average person who's lucky enough to have influence over even a very small patch of land?
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How do we restore natural abundance to our lives in that way?
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Yeah.
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I mean, I heard the stat the other day, uh, something like 27 million people in Britain consider themselves gardeners.
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If you can harness those people, and as you say, in all kinds of ways, if you can get them thinking about their relationship with the natural world, with wildlife, with invertebrates, with bugs, with biodiversity, you're getting quite a big chunk of Britain heading in the right direction, if you like.
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So, yeah, my book, Renaturing, really was about that idea of small-scale nature restoration.
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Everything from what I call my mini meadow, a kind of tiny little window box that I've gone and created, right the way up, as far as I'm concerned, to say a thousand acres, because I don't, you know, one of the journeys that I went on in the book, uh in writing the book was discovering, you know, what rewilding really is.
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You know, we have we have so many like um ways.
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I I think if you did a survey and you asked people on the streets what rewilding was, you'd get a kind of myriad.
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There'd be a kind of generality, it was about bringing nature back, but you know, you have adverts now that talk about kind of rewilding your hair, you know, using particular shampoos that will kind of like you make you feel more natural again.
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You know, it's like I love Natalie Fee and her her band's song, which was called Bring Back the Beaver, which is a kind of you know, a brilliant kind of women's lib and rewilding song because of the Dublant, which made me laugh a lot.
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Exactly.
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You know, and you know, in a way, like don't get me in any way wrong.
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I want to keep the word rewilding, but we need more words, we need more language with this because you know, otherwise it just becomes very, very simple uh relationship with nature, doesn't it?
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You know, so and and one of the things that I think was key for me is I come from London, you know, I'm a kind of urban kid at heart, if you like, and I I was very fortunate about 25 years ago.
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I moved to the countryside and I moved to a very small village in rural North Essex, and that was kind of the journey, well, the starting point really of the of the journey of the book, Renaturing.
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So I want to just read you a stat that I um found this morning by chance relating to North America.
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So Americans spend more than$36 billion every year on lawn care, which is four and a half times more than the entire government budget for environmental protection.
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I mean, it's just staggering.
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And if half of American lawns were replaced with native plants, Americans would create the equivalent of a 20 million acre national park, which is nine times bigger than Yellowstone.
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I mean, the numbers are just staggering.
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And so, so, so it's not all necessarily about agriculture.
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It's about tidiness and it's about a need for control and order in the landscape that has simply expunged uh wildlife and nature from our lives.
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And I think that is the biggest cultural challenge we've got in in reconnecting people with nature is embracing self-willed natural processes and understanding that mess is beauty, you know, and that we've misconstrued what mess is.
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Mess is so important, yeah.
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But I think it I think as well, if I can add in, I think there's an urban context to this.
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You know, I think my journey of coming from from London, from a from a kind of urban centre and with and in a way, an urban mindset, you know, I'd lived around the world, I lived in Cairo, lived in big cities around the world, and I suddenly realized that I'd never lived in the countryside.
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So when I moved to the countryside 25 years ago, went to went to visit a small, you know, to went to have a little viewing of a small farm labourer's cottage that myself and my partner wanted to buy.
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Around the back, over a green lane, which was very enticing, there was a sign that said for sale on a field.
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And this this, you know, I was like, what?
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A field?
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I can't I'm not meant to buy a field.
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I come from London.
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We don't buy fields, that's farmers.
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Farmers have fields, and it was a small, it was two-acre plot, you know, X bit of farmland.
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And um, and it and that really sold it for me.
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So we bought the cottage, we bought the field, moved in, and then I was very much by the time we moved in, it was um it was May.
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I'd seen it in February, all the grass, funnily enough, had grown up to about my waist.
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And my partner said, What are you gonna do with this field then?
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And I was, you know, I'm again I was like, Well, good question.
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And all I could really think of was to have a cricket match, to have a yearly cricket match, get all my mates from London up, we'd have a cricket match in the field, we could all camp in the field, have a nice party, and so that's what I did.
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So again, as you say, it it almost like the idea of tiding up, of like, of kind of creating flat, kind of dead green concrete spaces, if you like, was still within my head, you know.
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That's that's what I thought I'd do.
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So I can't tell you the number of people among my kind of wider friends and colleagues and and beyond who who mentioned to me, oh, you know, we we've got a couple of acres, you know, we live in the country, we've got a big garden, or you know, we've got this field, but we don't really know what to do with it.
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And and and of course we can't really do rewilding, we'd have enough space for that.
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And and they don't know, people don't know what to do.
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And so the normal thing is, well, I'll just let the neighbor run their sheep there.
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Or I'll get a ride-on lawnmower.
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My friends who I visited in Bruton yesterday for tea, you know, they've got a ride-on lawnmower, and he absolutely loves zipping up and down and making sure it's all tidy.
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And and it's a big piece of land.
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He's got, you know, maybe maybe two acres, you know, which could be absolutely full of wildlife.
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I said he should put some trackers on his children and see where they're running around on the lawn and commit only to mowing the spaces that they're using to play their football or whatever, and leave all the rest.
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You know, if it's not walked on except for when it's mowed, then it ought not to be mowed.
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That's a really good stare.
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But there's a brilliant guy who lives near me who's been on this podcast called Jonathan Thompson.
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Oh, yeah.
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And with his wife Keggy Carew, who's an author, they sold up in London and they bought 22 acres near Tisbury.
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And he has pioneered rewilding small spaces.
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He's figured out how you recreate natural processes on a space anywhere from a quarter of an acre to 30 or 40 acres, you know, spaces that are too small to have a herd of cows or some pigs.
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And in effect, you have to be the keystone species.
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You know, he will get volunteers in and they will be bison with chainsaws or hacksaws for a day, or they will be beavers and they'll create analog beaver dams along the stream, or they'll be wild boar and they'll create disturbance in the earth.
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And it's a different kind of woodland gardening and it's much more hands-on than larger scale uh rewilding approaches.
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And the results are just miraculous.
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You go there and you could, at the right time of year, you can feel the bird song pulsating in your bones, and just the joy this has brought Jonathan Thompson and his message is if you can afford it, no, if you've got savings or if you've got um a house that you're willing to kind of trade and move out and get some land somewhere else and a cottage somewhere, get yourself a bit of land in one way or another.
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And if you can't, then volunteer with a local wildlife organization.
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I'm sitting right now half a mile from Heel Somerset, and they're rewilding 460 acres and it's absolutely teeming with volunteers and students and forest school and kids and everything.
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Not huge numbers of people are participating in this unbelievable reawakening of nature on a on a former dairy farm.
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So I I think this is this is the route to like one of the most important routes to well-being and happiness.
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Yeah, and without a doubt.
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We've got the stats to prove it as well, you know.
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If if you need statistical evidence, but I mean, I everything that that you've said, absolutely, I think I've rather sort of stumbled through this process over the last 25 years.
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So m my story, the book the story that I tell in Renaturing is is this movement away from the cricket pitch, if you like, the the sit-on mower every two weeks, cutting down the best part of two acres.
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And essentially about uh about 15 years ago, starting the process of moving to what I called rewilding uh at the time, and the which was essentially just leaving the edges, and and it's most of the time it's just letting nature do its thing.
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So letting the Jays plant the acorns and letting them turn into oak trees that became what are now my what I called the young oaks, and they took over the edges of this field.
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And we still continued for a little while having this cricket match, the pitch became worse and worse, and then I just said, right, you know, this is it.
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About 10 years ago, it's like no more, no more, and started to to just leave areas uh far more, started to cut back some bramble, started to to do my own little bits and pieces of what I thought was the right thing, and then what I did, which is which I'd really advise, if you do if you like as you say, if you have friends or people have sort of two acres up to say 20 acres, what you want is you want people coming in who are kind of ecologists, naturalists.
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So I I got in a really good friend of mine, Chris Gibson, who worked for Natural England for 30 years, is an absolute legend within my region.
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And I walked around with Chris and I said, Yeah, so Chris, look, what I'm doing here is I'm I'm rewilding this my my field.
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And he said, Oh, oh yeah, yeah, you know, that that is great.
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And I was sort of mansplaining rewilding to an ecologist.
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And he said, uh he said, James, this is great.
00:19:47.440 --> 00:19:48.960
I love what you're doing, I love what you're doing.
00:19:49.119 --> 00:19:50.640
It is not rewilding.
00:19:50.880 --> 00:19:56.640
For rewilding to take place, you need minimum thousand acres, ideally more, you know, this kind of thing.
00:19:56.799 --> 00:20:05.440
He said, What you're doing is renaturing and that that sort of opening up this terminology to allow someone like me with two acres.
00:20:05.599 --> 00:20:09.920
But I, you know, one of the things I immediately started to consider was what if I'd lived in London?
00:20:10.079 --> 00:20:12.559
So rewilding would be something that was impossible for me.
00:20:12.720 --> 00:20:13.759
What about renaturing?
00:20:13.839 --> 00:20:16.000
Can you renature if you're in an urban space?
00:20:16.240 --> 00:20:17.279
Of course you can.
00:20:17.440 --> 00:20:32.240
You know, so it opens up this concept, if you like, that all of us as humans, whatever little bit of land we have kind of like oversight in, we can be introducing more biodiversity.
00:20:32.640 --> 00:20:40.319
We can be connecting with that natural world, even on a balcony, you know, even on a window box level, you can be doing this.
00:20:40.400 --> 00:20:46.880
And obviously, certainly if you have a small garden, if you have a small suburban garden, you know, you're not sure what you're doing with it.
00:20:47.039 --> 00:20:50.640
It's quite simple on a lot of levels for what you can do.
00:20:50.880 --> 00:21:07.200
Leave some nettles, leave some bramble, let the ivy grow up over the fences, stick a small pond in, make sure you've got some hedgehog holes, and suddenly, you know, small scale, small scale nature restoration, what I call renaturing, you're starting to create.
00:21:07.359 --> 00:21:21.519
Then you start speaking to your neighbours, you get them doing it, you start creating these little green corridors within your urban space, and everyone's talking, suddenly you've got your Merlin app going on a Sunday morning, and everyone's listening and saying, Oh, was that black cap?
00:21:21.759 --> 00:21:22.960
I think that was a black cap.
00:21:23.279 --> 00:21:33.039
You know, and you're starting not only to actually physically be involved in this process, but you're starting personally to be intimately involved with the natural world.
00:23:11.500 --> 00:23:15.339
Yeah, it's really about opening up your heart and letting the natural world back in.
00:23:15.500 --> 00:23:21.980
And then what stems from that is opening up uh your space and whatever space that might be and renaturing it and letting nature back in.
00:23:22.059 --> 00:23:23.740
I love that term, it's it's a brilliant term.
00:23:23.819 --> 00:23:27.740
I'm not really fussy about terms, I'm happy with rewilding or or what have you.
00:23:27.980 --> 00:23:36.779
My young son, Frankie, when he was nine or ten, volunteered with a local organisation in Barnes in West London to create hedgehog highways along all those terraced gardens.
00:23:36.940 --> 00:23:37.980
And it was one of the recommendations.
00:23:38.620 --> 00:23:51.420
Of the Rewilding London Task Force, which was to encourage gardeners to do more, provide more native vegetation for wildlife, create these hedgehog highways, which are basically just holes in the fence or the wall running along terraced gardens.
00:23:51.660 --> 00:23:59.660
But as people become more open to nature and their understanding begins to grow, you know, then one realizes quite how much we've lost.
00:23:59.819 --> 00:24:04.059
You know, I love that quote from Aldo Leopold in A Sand Country Almanac.
00:24:04.140 --> 00:24:10.140
He said, one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
00:24:10.380 --> 00:24:13.180
And I wonder if you found that as your understanding has grown.
00:24:13.259 --> 00:24:13.819
Because I have.
00:24:14.140 --> 00:24:17.819
I used to think, you know, trees planted in rows, you know, that's good enough.
00:24:17.900 --> 00:24:18.380
That's nature.
00:24:18.460 --> 00:24:18.860
You know, I did.
00:24:19.019 --> 00:24:19.900
I didn't know.
00:24:20.059 --> 00:24:35.420
You know, even though I'd had this deep love of nature from childhood and it had stayed front and center through growing up, as my understanding grew, I began to realise the extent to which we've tamed and banished real nature from our lives everywhere.
00:24:35.579 --> 00:24:36.940
Do you do you feel the same?
00:24:37.339 --> 00:24:37.980
Yeah, very much.
00:24:38.059 --> 00:24:49.420
And as I say, so part of the journey of that I went on with the book Renaturing was my own journey in terms of physically changing the landscape of this two-acre plot as best as I could to increase biodiversity.
00:24:49.500 --> 00:24:55.740
But as you say, learning and kind of reminding myself and being much more involved in recognising that loss, if you like.
00:24:55.900 --> 00:25:16.460
And and you know, you you quote Leopold, who's mainly largely remembered for the work at Yellowstone National Park, 2.2 million acres, you know, proper scale rewilding, you know, where the reintroduction of the wolves in in the mid-90s has has created such ecological change for the good.
00:25:16.620 --> 00:25:21.819
And you know, that even the ecologists observing were were amazed at how quickly it took place.
00:25:21.980 --> 00:25:31.900
This is what I mean by keeping the term rewilding to the possibility of that scale of of rewilding, of of nature restoration, because that's what we want.
00:25:31.980 --> 00:25:36.059
And I think if you if you can keep that, then that's wonderful.
00:25:36.220 --> 00:25:41.980
Obviously, if in Yellowstone, if you've got 64 miles by 53 miles or whatever it is, fabulous.
00:25:42.220 --> 00:25:45.259
In Southeast England, that's a little trickier to do.
00:25:45.420 --> 00:25:56.299
And obviously, the notion of rewilding and bringing in carnivores is much harder in a British context, where you know in England 50% of the land, as we know, is owned by less than 1% of the people.
00:25:56.380 --> 00:25:57.420
So, how do we go about this?
00:25:58.059 --> 00:26:00.940
We have to use it in a different way, in a different model.
00:26:01.100 --> 00:26:16.059
But absolutely, as as much as we can, I think when we talk about rewilding projects, the best people are those that are trying as best they can to bring back the the beavers, hopefully the Urux or the equivalent, you know, the boars, etc.
00:26:16.299 --> 00:26:22.140
And then when you can't, as they do, in all the best places, you mimic the animals yourself.
00:26:22.299 --> 00:26:23.900
And so you're mimicking the action.
00:26:23.980 --> 00:26:38.539
So as humans, you're you're doing the replacement practice, and that can be fabulous in terms of you know bringing other people in, as we say, you know, like heel, for example, you know, Young Wilders was a lot that I spoke to for for renaturing again.
00:26:38.620 --> 00:26:45.980
So getting mainly people from urban environments that want to be involved in these kind of restoration projects, but how do you how do you go about it?
00:26:46.059 --> 00:26:47.900
You know, and getting them involved in this.
00:26:48.059 --> 00:26:49.660
So I think I think you're absolutely right.
00:26:49.740 --> 00:27:02.220
I think it's it's partly a process of of pressuring the the people who can do more and perhaps aren't doing more, um, but also individually, how can we all be involved?
00:27:02.460 --> 00:27:09.019
You know, no mo May, for example, has been a fabulous, fabulous movement within the small scale nature restoration.
00:27:09.339 --> 00:27:13.259
But also don't forget that if you want a meadow, you've got to mow it.
00:27:13.420 --> 00:27:15.579
So you need to mow it once a year, you know.
00:27:15.660 --> 00:27:22.299
So why not go and buy a scythe rather than buying an electric mower or a petrol mower?
00:27:22.460 --> 00:27:33.019
Just get yourself a scythe, you know, and then you start, you know, this is the process that I've really enjoyed as well because largely I started off, you know, using an old hedge trimmer trying to cut through Blackthorn.
00:27:33.420 --> 00:27:43.339
I found out in the end, one, you you can't hear any bird song, but two, it's much easier with a bowsaw and yourself and you're close up and you do the work.
00:27:43.579 --> 00:27:47.339
So now I just haven't used any mechanical equipment in the field.
00:27:47.579 --> 00:27:52.539
Yeah, I spend an enormous amount of time outdoors doing this kind of thing, especially in autumn and winter.
00:27:52.700 --> 00:27:56.779
I I've actually got myself a little electric chainsaw, which I use for small oaks.
00:27:56.860 --> 00:28:00.860
In there was a woodland plantation from 15 years ago, which needs thinning out.
00:28:00.940 --> 00:28:07.579
So we we we thin out some of these little oaks using a little chainsaw, cut them in pieces and make these big, kind of six, eight-foot-high wildlife piles.
00:28:07.660 --> 00:28:23.259
And then walking through it in the summer afterwards, where the light has come into this plantation, wildlife piles are now smothered with bramble and dog rows, it's very, very satisfying and rewarding work and really, really important to my sense of well-being and my physical health and so on, be it being outdoors.
00:28:23.420 --> 00:28:28.539
But I but there's this idea that the nature movement is somehow misanthropic, that it's about excluding people.
00:28:28.700 --> 00:28:42.620
And Rory Stewart once said in his podcast with Alistair Campbell that the problem with the likes of Ben Goldsmith and George Mombio is they want half of Britain to be like Alaska, so full of nature and no people, and the other half to be like Iowa.
00:28:42.940 --> 00:28:49.420
And I think that's a misrepresentation because I think that we we can make space for for for nature in the places where we live.
00:28:49.579 --> 00:28:59.019
I think this is a human movement, it's about opening our own hearts and our own space up to the natural world and weaving nature back through the fabric of our own lives and our own spaces.
00:28:59.420 --> 00:29:08.380
And I think I think actually in in many cases, restoring nature is the surest and probably the only pathway towards social and economic renewal in some of our more deprived landscapes, for example.
00:29:08.779 --> 00:29:09.259
Totally agree.
00:29:09.420 --> 00:29:10.140
Totally agree.
00:29:10.460 --> 00:29:20.140
Coming from London, one of the things that I really wanted to get across was, you know, okay, I'd escaped, if you like, I got out to rural North Essex, I had two acres.
00:29:20.220 --> 00:29:23.339
But I thought, well, what if I still lived in West London, you know, where I where I come from?
00:29:23.500 --> 00:29:35.339
And so I used the example of the iconic Trellick Tower with its brutalist architecture, 217 flats, all very well designed to be south facing.
00:29:35.579 --> 00:29:52.140
What happens if you get each of those occupants to put, say, five to ten window boxes on their balconies, put wildflowers in them, suddenly you've got the equivalent of four acres of wildflower meadow, but in a tower block.
00:29:52.299 --> 00:30:04.860
You know, we we've seen it beautifully in in Milan where they uh they have these two absolutely fabulous urban forests as they're called, these kind of green structures sticking out from the urban concrete.
00:30:05.019 --> 00:30:08.299
There's so much more we could do with kind of urban renaturing.
00:30:08.460 --> 00:30:14.140
And obviously, in in that example of Trelic Tower, as you say, it's a it's a community project.
00:30:14.299 --> 00:30:18.220
It's about coordinating people and getting everyone involved in this as well.
00:30:18.380 --> 00:30:24.299
And I I love that idea because obviously in urban areas, you've got more it's all about the people, isn't it?
00:30:24.460 --> 00:30:30.860
It's all about the people, and then it's like can those people be helping everyone else to be more nature-based?
00:30:31.019 --> 00:30:35.900
So London Wildlife Trust, for example, who I'm working with, they're fabulous at this.
00:30:35.980 --> 00:30:42.700
You know, they the wildlife trusts are uh are some, you know, I love the way that wildlife trusts operate on a kind of local scale.
00:30:42.940 --> 00:30:43.900
I think they're fabulous.
00:30:44.220 --> 00:30:51.259
Yeah, when when we did the Rewilding London task force, we found that there's approximately 650 hectares of flat roofs in London alone.
00:30:51.420 --> 00:31:04.059
Now, all of those could be rubble roofs, they called them, which is a scattering of rubble and some topsoil, and then a self-sustaining wildflower grass meadow, which is wonderful habitat for butterflies and other invertebrates, or black red starts.
00:31:04.140 --> 00:31:05.900
And London's got incredible bird life.
00:31:05.980 --> 00:31:18.380
And with the with the rewilding of the parks, you know, if you go to Regents Park or Hyde Park or pretty much any of London's larger green spaces, you'll find exclosures for scrub and more natural uh uh water edges now along the serpentine and reeds.
00:31:18.779 --> 00:31:25.900
And the species that are now flooding into London are really beyond the wildest dreams of a kind of 20-year-old me when I first moved into London.
00:31:26.140 --> 00:31:27.900
Yeah, no, that's so true.
00:31:28.059 --> 00:31:28.460
So true.
00:31:28.700 --> 00:31:34.779
So I have dear friends and neighbours in London who've just inadvertently come into three acres in the Cotswolds.
00:31:34.940 --> 00:31:35.100
Nice.
00:31:35.339 --> 00:31:41.019
And my neighbour said to me, Look, if I if I let you off the leash, you're gonna go on for an hour about what we need to do with this.
00:31:41.100 --> 00:31:43.819
All I really want to have is a single hole of golf.
00:31:44.140 --> 00:31:49.420
But my wife and the kids want to do some rewilding, so tell me in 60 seconds what I need to do.
00:31:49.579 --> 00:31:50.539
And so that was a challenge.
00:31:50.620 --> 00:31:54.460
I thought, how do I get my my hour-long uh discourse into 60 seconds?
00:31:54.539 --> 00:32:06.620
So I said, Well, get a mole plough in there and break up any field drains uh beneath the earth, but stop up the ditches or block them up, and then rip out any fencing, you know, it's only two, three acres, you don't need any barbed wire or anything like that.
00:32:06.700 --> 00:32:10.460
Just rip all of that out and then just let go and see what comes.
00:32:10.620 --> 00:32:15.339
And if it gets overwhelming, then you can get in there with a saw or with a strimer or what have you.
00:32:15.420 --> 00:32:18.059
Uh but otherwise you'll just sit back and enjoy the magic.
00:32:18.220 --> 00:32:21.660
And he said, What are the what are the main ingredients I'm trying to achieve here?
00:32:21.900 --> 00:32:26.220
And I said, Well, it's exactly the things that we've tried to get rid of in the English landscape.
00:32:26.380 --> 00:32:31.019
So you need scrub, so fat hedges around the edge and scrub popping up through the grass.
00:32:31.180 --> 00:32:48.380
You need dead wood, so you could ask some neighbour with some forest or something or some local uh wood cutting organization to come with a lorry and just dump some logs in a pile in the middle of your field, a dead wood, and third, water, and it would be wonderful if you could pay someone to come with a digger and dig out a few ponds.
00:32:48.539 --> 00:32:54.460
And um, I thought that might be an interesting idea of missing ingredients: scrub, deadwood, water.
00:32:54.539 --> 00:32:57.579
Um, obviously there's a load more, but is that a reasonable starting point?
00:32:57.660 --> 00:32:59.100
Would you have given a similar answer?
00:32:59.420 --> 00:33:15.660
The the first thing I would say is get a really good pond digger, local pond digger, get them to come in with like a big three-ton digger and um make yourself as big a pond as you can go for, uh, depending on the landscape, is what is all I mean.
00:33:15.819 --> 00:33:20.220
And hopefully get it obviously you want it puddled, you want it using the clay.
00:33:20.299 --> 00:33:22.460
Uh if it's clay, hopefully it's clay.
00:33:22.620 --> 00:33:24.220
Because that's that is number one.
00:33:24.299 --> 00:33:46.220
And then, as you say, the the thing I would do is then without doing anything else, I'd leave it for a year and watch what happens and get a naturalist in to kind of like guide your your senses so to notice that in fact that long bit of bramble, old bramble that you were looking at in one corner, they might say, actually, let's okay, we'll cut some of it back, but then just let it regrow.
00:33:46.460 --> 00:33:51.019
Young bramble is one of the best things that you can be growing in your in your two-acre plot.
00:33:51.180 --> 00:33:57.180
Nettles, bit of nettles, obviously, you know, biodiversity, that's essentially what your target is, isn't it?
00:33:57.259 --> 00:34:00.539
And as you say, scrub, scrub for the songbirds, etc., you know.
00:34:00.620 --> 00:34:03.339
So yeah, no, I'm sure I think you've steered him well.
00:34:03.660 --> 00:34:07.819
And as for as for ponds, I mean, if you're on clay, then they will just naturally hold water.
00:34:07.980 --> 00:34:19.179
But even if they don't, even if they're ephemeral and they dry out in the summer, I'm told that's good news because all the little predators will die off when the when the pond dries out, and that's great news for the newts that come back following spring to breed.
00:34:19.819 --> 00:34:26.059
I have my sister Jemima around my place here in Somerset, and I showed her some lovely bramble cushions popping up in the middle of my fields.
00:34:26.299 --> 00:34:27.500
I said, Lo, I'm so excited.
00:34:27.659 --> 00:34:29.980
And she said, Well done, Ben, you've got bramble.
00:34:31.339 --> 00:34:33.179
Um so so um I don't know.
00:34:33.339 --> 00:34:34.619
Yeah, it's a hard sell, isn't it?
00:34:34.779 --> 00:34:36.699
It's quite a hard sell, the bramble, yeah.
00:34:37.019 --> 00:34:39.339
James, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me.
00:34:39.420 --> 00:34:42.460
We've touched on some quite personal and some very lovely things.
00:34:42.619 --> 00:34:48.299
Um the love of nature is completely central to my life, even more so um than ever now.
00:34:48.460 --> 00:34:55.819
And um, your your work in making nature accessible, making renaturing accessible to everyone, I think is truly vital.
00:34:55.900 --> 00:34:59.579
And I'm really grateful to you for for spending this time with me now.
00:34:59.900 --> 00:35:05.179
It's been wonderful, Ben, and I'm very proud and privileged to be with you at this time as well.
00:35:05.339 --> 00:35:07.900
You know, my my thoughts to your family, especially.
00:35:08.059 --> 00:35:18.699
But it's been good, as you know, getting as many people as we can to remember our connection with nature, our intimacy with the natural world.
00:35:18.860 --> 00:35:20.699
That's what it's all about, isn't it?
00:35:33.980 --> 00:35:44.059
James Canton is one of the most important voices in this great cultural shift that we're undergoing here in Britain, this great reconnection, falling back in love with nature.
00:35:44.219 --> 00:35:48.459
I urge you to buy his book, Renaturing, and his other books are truly brilliant.
00:35:48.539 --> 00:35:51.739
And give us a like, a review, it all makes a huge difference.
00:35:51.899 --> 00:35:52.699
Thank you so much.
00:35:52.939 --> 00:36:07.419
Next time I'm going to be talking to Daniel Curry, who is a range rider, a speaker, and the founder of Griff, G-R-I-P-H, which is an organization dedicated to helping humans co-thrive with large carnivores in America's Wild West.
00:36:07.819 --> 00:36:18.219
Specifically, Daniel works with cowboys and ranchers, help them figure out how to live alongside such species as wolves and grizzly bears, wolverines, lynx, and so on.
00:36:18.379 --> 00:36:21.899
And persecution of these animals is rife in those landscapes.
00:36:22.059 --> 00:36:26.699
So it's all about building a new culture, and Daniel is at the forefront of that.
00:00:00.160 --> 00:00:04.719
Something like 27 million people in Britain consider themselves gardeners.
00:00:04.959 --> 00:00:20.079
If you can harness those people, if you can get them thinking about their relationship with the natural world, with wildlife, with invertebrates, with bugs, with biodiversity, you're getting quite a l a big chunk of Britain heading in the right direction.
00:00:25.760 --> 00:00:32.399
Welcome to another episode of Rewilding the World, and I'm here with author and teacher and new friend James Canton.
00:00:32.560 --> 00:00:34.880
James, thank you so much for taking the time to join me.
00:00:35.200 --> 00:00:35.679
Very welcome.
00:00:35.840 --> 00:00:36.880
Lovely to be here, Ben.
00:00:37.359 --> 00:00:43.039
So, James, I what I really wanted to talk to you about in this conversation is your most recent book, Renaturing.
00:00:43.280 --> 00:00:49.280
I'm fascinated by this idea of our ability to restore nature even on very small plots of land, even a window box.
00:00:49.359 --> 00:00:53.920
And I was co-chair of the Rewilding London Task Force, and that was really what it was about.
00:00:54.000 --> 00:01:00.240
You know, how can we create streaks and patches of wild nature through the fabric of the City of London?
00:01:00.560 --> 00:01:06.719
But before we get there, I'd like to talk about kind of some of the earlier work you've done and kind of the central theme of your career.
00:01:06.879 --> 00:01:11.280
Now, I've I've got a copy of Ancient Wanderings, you know, travels in prehistoric Britain.
00:01:11.439 --> 00:01:16.480
You know, and you've more recently published a book called Grounded, A Journey into the Landscapes of Our Ancestors.
00:01:16.640 --> 00:01:28.640
And I'm just fascinated by this idea of the intense connection that people in this country, Britain, had through the ages with landscape, with nature, on a kind of spiritual level.
00:01:28.719 --> 00:01:34.159
And perhaps for a period at least, those bonds have been reduced or severed.
00:01:34.239 --> 00:01:41.519
And maybe now we're entering into an era where we're rediscovering the importance of nature to our individual and collective well-being.
00:01:41.680 --> 00:01:45.760
And I just wanted to read you, I took this off the wall last night from my bathroom.
00:01:46.000 --> 00:01:51.760
It's the funeral um uh brochure, if that's what you call it, for my late uncle Teddy, who I love very much.
00:01:51.840 --> 00:01:57.920
Because I lost my father at 15, and my uncle Teddy stepped in and was kind of a father figure to Zach and my brother and me.
00:01:58.079 --> 00:02:04.079
And we published a quote on the on the book that we handed out at his funeral, and this was what he said.
00:02:04.319 --> 00:02:13.280
The ecology we need is not the ecology that involves viewing the ecosphere on which we depend for our survival at a distance and with scientific detachment.
00:02:13.439 --> 00:02:23.120
We will not save our planet by means of a conscious, rational, and unemotional decision, a sort of ecological contract based on a cost-benefit analysis.
00:02:23.280 --> 00:02:25.919
A moral and emotional commitment is required.
00:02:26.080 --> 00:02:40.319
Indeed, one of the key tasks of ecology must be to redirect our emotions so that they may fulfill the role they were designed for, to commit us to what should be the overriding human enterprise of maintaining the critical order of the ecosphere.
00:02:40.479 --> 00:02:42.719
So he used to write lengthy books and everything.
00:02:42.800 --> 00:02:54.319
But but yeah, I've I sort of I know this in my belly that that cost-benefit analysis is a big part of it, but we've got to reconnect in a cultural, emotional, or spiritual way with nature.
00:02:54.479 --> 00:02:57.919
So um that this this I think is the most interesting theme of your work.
00:02:58.000 --> 00:03:00.159
It's been really the work of your life.
00:03:00.479 --> 00:03:02.960
Yeah, no, that's that's a beautiful quote, Ben.
00:03:03.039 --> 00:03:16.719
I mean, that really is, but but absolutely, I mean, in essence, it's about that that intimacy as as humans on a landscape with the natural world, that kind of central core thing that, you know, we are of nature, we're not separate from nature.
00:03:16.879 --> 00:03:20.159
Nature isn't outside that window, it's with us all the time.
00:03:20.319 --> 00:03:21.120
We are nature.
00:03:21.280 --> 00:03:29.120
And I think, you know, we can kind of say it in a kind of intellectual, academic way, but it has to be kind of physical, it has to be kind of earthy.
00:03:29.439 --> 00:03:30.240
It's nothing new.
00:03:30.319 --> 00:03:32.000
We we just need to remember it.
00:03:32.240 --> 00:03:39.199
We need to remind ourselves as humans of that, of that intimacy, that intimate connection with with the earth, with the natural world.
00:03:39.280 --> 00:03:40.800
Uh that's all it's about.
00:03:41.199 --> 00:03:46.560
So, so imagine you could step back, I don't know, 3,000 years, 4,000 years into Neolithic Essex.
00:03:46.719 --> 00:03:48.560
I presume you're sitting in Essex right now, James.
00:03:48.879 --> 00:03:49.599
I am, yeah.
00:03:49.759 --> 00:04:14.879
Yeah, so so day to day, in the lives of those people, our ancestors that lived there, you know, what what was the nature of their connection with nature beyond the obvious, beyond the the total and utter dependence, which we may have masked somewhat with the modern comforts that we enjoy, but but we obviously still depend what I love these quotes you sometimes get say uh economists reckon that 50% of global GDP is dependent upon nature.
00:04:15.039 --> 00:04:21.759
I don't know how they come up with 50%, you know, surely it's a hundred percent, but back then they were close to it, you know, minute to minute.
00:04:21.839 --> 00:04:25.920
So what but in a spiritual sense, how how would that have manifested?
00:04:26.319 --> 00:04:31.519
I think even even trying to break down the kind of the layers at which that takes place.
00:04:31.680 --> 00:04:49.439
If you go back far enough, if if I can budge you back a little bit further to kind of hunter-gathering, gardening humans, you know, pre-farming, then it we are entirely, we are 100%, we are out there all the time, we are just entirely reliant on our knowledge of the natural world.
00:04:49.519 --> 00:05:03.279
And that's so that's everything from augury, you know, like knowing about bird patterns and bird movements and what that means, that what that means seasonally, what that means is taking place in a wider, wider scale beyond our horizons.
00:05:03.439 --> 00:05:05.199
You know, and that carries right the way through.
00:05:05.360 --> 00:05:09.040
People talk about this divide between farming and pre-farming and farming.
00:05:09.120 --> 00:05:13.759
There is a lot of crossover in terms of the way that humans are operating within the landscape.
00:05:14.000 --> 00:05:25.279
Yes, okay, some some kind of core things have changed, but I think as humans, it takes quite a long period of time before we've really moved over, and we're, if you like, colonizing the land, if you want to talk about it like that.
00:05:25.439 --> 00:05:32.000
And even then, in Neolithic times, we're very much embedded in the in our local landscapes.
00:05:32.240 --> 00:05:39.920
I think that for me, that's one of the core things that takes place as we move to farming, is local becomes really much more important.
00:05:40.240 --> 00:05:44.879
Whereas when we're still hunter-gatherers, there's much more sort of seasonality.
00:05:45.199 --> 00:06:00.560
There's that requirement of you know, groups of people going off and collecting flints, there's groups of people that are going off and you know collecting salmon, if I can put it like that, you know, and others at other times, you know, you might have the like deer migrations through the landscape, you know.
00:06:00.720 --> 00:06:08.639
So it's all about this sense of humans recognizing themselves as another species within the natural world.
00:06:08.959 --> 00:06:20.720
And if you look at some of the iconography of, say, the early Middle Ages, you see that depiction of nature and existence as an infinitely complex clock, you know, those kind of clock drawings.
00:06:21.120 --> 00:06:28.560
You know, and and uh I think this recognition that nature is is intricate beyond our ability to understand and mysterious.
00:06:28.800 --> 00:06:38.639
I'm drawn to those images, but I'm I'm also drawn to the idea of nature as a kind of mirror that reflects some reality beyond a veil of some sort.
00:06:38.879 --> 00:06:46.000
A book that had a big impact on me was the the then Prince of Wales, you know, King Charles's book, Harmony, which was published, I guess, 15 or 18 years ago.
00:06:46.160 --> 00:07:00.240
And um, I remember reading that and the idea that there was a break from nature at around the time of the Enlightenment, you know, kind of Descartes and the kind of Enlightenment philosophers who said, no, nature is a machine, you know, but biological organisms are just machines.
00:07:00.399 --> 00:07:06.639
I think Descartes did he not dissect his dog alive to demonstrate to the audience that this is just a machine.
00:07:07.040 --> 00:07:20.480
Yeah, and um, therefore, um we can kind of raid the larder as we choose without any worry about empathy or or unkindness or or any kind of um moral or emotional connection with nature because it's it's just a machine.
00:07:20.639 --> 00:07:35.920
And anything mystical, no god, ghosts, they are elsewhere, they're kind of invisible in some other place, and this kind of separation uh occurred, which I think now King Charles identifies in his book as the root cause of our behaviour today, destroying nature.
00:07:36.079 --> 00:07:44.000
But if you look at early Christianity, it was all one, this this kind of invisible reality and a visible reality were indistinguishable from each other.
00:07:44.399 --> 00:07:45.920
Yeah, that's that's very interesting.
00:07:46.000 --> 00:07:55.759
That's a really nice point because if you look at the religion, if you like, of of the people that we were talking about sort of from the Neolithic and earlier, the common term is shamanism.
00:07:56.000 --> 00:08:05.279
But it's this it's this interwoven connectedness, the kind of uh the this myriad of of living that is the earth, if you like.
00:08:05.439 --> 00:08:07.600
And and again, humans, we're part of that.
00:08:07.839 --> 00:08:17.279
And our connection with particular animals is intimate, is is at certain times, in particular kind of shamanic practices, is almost more than intimate.
00:08:17.360 --> 00:08:21.759
It's a kind of it's a it's a this kind of fusion of existence.
00:08:22.079 --> 00:08:30.399
So again, as you say, like as you move, as you move through it's sort of two, three, four hundred years ago, we start to see this divide, particularly within Western Europe, of course.
00:08:30.480 --> 00:08:42.320
And of course, you know, a lot of people within the world, indigenous belief systems, they they still maintain this this this different way, this this way of not seeing a separation, but seeing a connection.
00:08:42.720 --> 00:08:48.799
And the and the practice of using psychedelic brews of various sorts was was ubiquitous in those shamanistic societies.
00:08:48.960 --> 00:08:51.279
But I I think we we we know this in our gut, right?
00:08:51.360 --> 00:08:59.919
I mean, I I um I in my life I had a disaster, which was I I lost my daughter Iris, um, age 15, here on our farm in Canwood.
00:09:00.000 --> 00:09:04.960
And you know, the the the unimaginable darkness that engulfs you when you lose a child.
00:09:05.440 --> 00:09:10.960
And and I knew from the earliest moments that there was solace to be found in nature.
00:09:11.120 --> 00:09:34.559
Now we have a pond that I swim in, and I would go down to that pond and I would swim five, eight times a day just because being in the water and then popping up into the into the sunlight and seeing the kind of this sort of benevolent indifference, you know, this kind of you know, the the little dragonflies scooting around above the water and the butterflies and the trees blowing above my head, and I just felt held in a way that nothing else did.
00:09:34.720 --> 00:09:42.879
And so we know it, you know, we know it that there's something there beyond what what perhaps science can articulate in terms of a need, a yearning.
00:09:43.039 --> 00:09:49.679
And I think that now that we're going through a period, a kind of cultural moment, not just in Britain but in the world, of rediscovering that yearning.
00:09:49.919 --> 00:09:52.399
I mean, how many friends do we have that have a mindfulness app?
00:09:52.480 --> 00:09:58.399
And I'm involved with the launch of a new app called Wildling, which is about connecting with nature and in your local area.
00:09:58.559 --> 00:10:00.879
And it's it's hugely in demand, all of this.
00:10:00.960 --> 00:10:14.320
Um, so I I think your book is really well-timed, um, the most recent one, which is Renaturing, which is about restoring nature today in the landscapes that we've inherited, um, in which we have become very disconnected with nature.
00:10:14.480 --> 00:10:21.279
And I've noticed that with with smaller spaces, we're often quite crap at making provision for wildlife.
00:10:21.440 --> 00:10:35.360
You know, when you think of kind of the landscape design industry or the horticultural industry, you know, it's often about buying exotic fancy plants from the garden center, nothing native, which you know, these exotic plants which provide nothing for invertebrates or for birds.
00:10:35.519 --> 00:10:40.879
It's often about tidiness and sweeping up and creating hard spaces of concrete and decking and so on.
00:10:41.120 --> 00:10:49.120
So, what is the answer, James, for the average person who's lucky enough to have influence over even a very small patch of land?
00:10:49.440 --> 00:10:52.399
How do we restore natural abundance to our lives in that way?
00:10:52.720 --> 00:10:52.960
Yeah.
00:10:53.200 --> 00:11:00.080
I mean, I heard the stat the other day, uh, something like 27 million people in Britain consider themselves gardeners.
00:11:00.320 --> 00:11:17.519
If you can harness those people, and as you say, in all kinds of ways, if you can get them thinking about their relationship with the natural world, with wildlife, with invertebrates, with bugs, with biodiversity, you're getting quite a big chunk of Britain heading in the right direction, if you like.
00:11:17.679 --> 00:11:23.919
So, yeah, my book, Renaturing, really was about that idea of small-scale nature restoration.
00:11:24.320 --> 00:11:42.879
Everything from what I call my mini meadow, a kind of tiny little window box that I've gone and created, right the way up, as far as I'm concerned, to say a thousand acres, because I don't, you know, one of the journeys that I went on in the book, uh in writing the book was discovering, you know, what rewilding really is.
00:11:43.039 --> 00:11:46.000
You know, we have we have so many like um ways.
00:11:46.080 --> 00:11:50.960
I I think if you did a survey and you asked people on the streets what rewilding was, you'd get a kind of myriad.
00:11:51.039 --> 00:12:02.000
There'd be a kind of generality, it was about bringing nature back, but you know, you have adverts now that talk about kind of rewilding your hair, you know, using particular shampoos that will kind of like you make you feel more natural again.
00:12:02.080 --> 00:12:12.879
You know, it's like I love Natalie Fee and her her band's song, which was called Bring Back the Beaver, which is a kind of you know, a brilliant kind of women's lib and rewilding song because of the Dublant, which made me laugh a lot.
00:12:13.120 --> 00:12:13.759
Exactly.
00:12:14.000 --> 00:12:18.080
You know, and you know, in a way, like don't get me in any way wrong.
00:12:18.320 --> 00:12:27.600
I want to keep the word rewilding, but we need more words, we need more language with this because you know, otherwise it just becomes very, very simple uh relationship with nature, doesn't it?
00:12:27.679 --> 00:12:37.360
You know, so and and one of the things that I think was key for me is I come from London, you know, I'm a kind of urban kid at heart, if you like, and I I was very fortunate about 25 years ago.
00:12:37.600 --> 00:12:51.200
I moved to the countryside and I moved to a very small village in rural North Essex, and that was kind of the journey, well, the starting point really of the of the journey of the book, Renaturing.
00:12:51.600 --> 00:12:57.440
So I want to just read you a stat that I um found this morning by chance relating to North America.
00:12:57.600 --> 00:13:07.759
So Americans spend more than$36 billion every year on lawn care, which is four and a half times more than the entire government budget for environmental protection.
00:13:07.919 --> 00:13:09.039
I mean, it's just staggering.
00:13:09.120 --> 00:13:19.279
And if half of American lawns were replaced with native plants, Americans would create the equivalent of a 20 million acre national park, which is nine times bigger than Yellowstone.
00:13:19.519 --> 00:13:21.120
I mean, the numbers are just staggering.
00:13:21.279 --> 00:13:25.440
And so, so, so it's not all necessarily about agriculture.
00:13:25.519 --> 00:13:34.240
It's about tidiness and it's about a need for control and order in the landscape that has simply expunged uh wildlife and nature from our lives.
00:13:34.320 --> 00:13:47.440
And I think that is the biggest cultural challenge we've got in in reconnecting people with nature is embracing self-willed natural processes and understanding that mess is beauty, you know, and that we've misconstrued what mess is.
00:13:47.759 --> 00:13:49.279
Mess is so important, yeah.
00:13:49.360 --> 00:13:53.679
But I think it I think as well, if I can add in, I think there's an urban context to this.
00:13:53.759 --> 00:14:07.200
You know, I think my journey of coming from from London, from a from a kind of urban centre and with and in a way, an urban mindset, you know, I'd lived around the world, I lived in Cairo, lived in big cities around the world, and I suddenly realized that I'd never lived in the countryside.
00:14:07.360 --> 00:14:18.720
So when I moved to the countryside 25 years ago, went to went to visit a small, you know, to went to have a little viewing of a small farm labourer's cottage that myself and my partner wanted to buy.
00:14:18.879 --> 00:14:25.759
Around the back, over a green lane, which was very enticing, there was a sign that said for sale on a field.
00:14:25.919 --> 00:14:28.000
And this this, you know, I was like, what?
00:14:28.080 --> 00:14:28.639
A field?
00:14:28.799 --> 00:14:30.879
I can't I'm not meant to buy a field.
00:14:30.960 --> 00:14:31.840
I come from London.
00:14:31.919 --> 00:14:33.679
We don't buy fields, that's farmers.
00:14:33.840 --> 00:14:39.759
Farmers have fields, and it was a small, it was two-acre plot, you know, X bit of farmland.
00:14:40.159 --> 00:14:42.799
And um, and it and that really sold it for me.
00:14:42.879 --> 00:14:52.159
So we bought the cottage, we bought the field, moved in, and then I was very much by the time we moved in, it was um it was May.
00:14:52.320 --> 00:14:58.159
I'd seen it in February, all the grass, funnily enough, had grown up to about my waist.
00:14:58.320 --> 00:15:01.279
And my partner said, What are you gonna do with this field then?
00:15:01.519 --> 00:15:05.039
And I was, you know, I'm again I was like, Well, good question.
00:15:05.200 --> 00:15:19.039
And all I could really think of was to have a cricket match, to have a yearly cricket match, get all my mates from London up, we'd have a cricket match in the field, we could all camp in the field, have a nice party, and so that's what I did.
00:15:19.120 --> 00:15:31.360
So again, as you say, it it almost like the idea of tiding up, of like, of kind of creating flat, kind of dead green concrete spaces, if you like, was still within my head, you know.
00:15:31.440 --> 00:15:33.039
That's that's what I thought I'd do.
00:15:33.360 --> 00:15:48.480
So I can't tell you the number of people among my kind of wider friends and colleagues and and beyond who who mentioned to me, oh, you know, we we've got a couple of acres, you know, we live in the country, we've got a big garden, or you know, we've got this field, but we don't really know what to do with it.
00:15:48.720 --> 00:15:52.000
And and and of course we can't really do rewilding, we'd have enough space for that.
00:15:52.240 --> 00:15:54.879
And and they don't know, people don't know what to do.
00:15:54.960 --> 00:15:57.519
And so the normal thing is, well, I'll just let the neighbor run their sheep there.
00:15:57.600 --> 00:15:59.279
Or I'll get a ride-on lawnmower.
00:15:59.440 --> 00:16:06.080
My friends who I visited in Bruton yesterday for tea, you know, they've got a ride-on lawnmower, and he absolutely loves zipping up and down and making sure it's all tidy.
00:16:06.159 --> 00:16:07.600
And and it's a big piece of land.
00:16:07.679 --> 00:16:11.840
He's got, you know, maybe maybe two acres, you know, which could be absolutely full of wildlife.
00:16:12.000 --> 00:16:22.799
I said he should put some trackers on his children and see where they're running around on the lawn and commit only to mowing the spaces that they're using to play their football or whatever, and leave all the rest.
00:16:22.879 --> 00:16:27.120
You know, if it's not walked on except for when it's mowed, then it ought not to be mowed.
00:16:27.360 --> 00:16:28.720
That's a really good stare.
00:16:28.960 --> 00:16:32.960
But there's a brilliant guy who lives near me who's been on this podcast called Jonathan Thompson.
00:16:33.039 --> 00:16:33.279
Oh, yeah.
00:16:34.480 --> 00:16:40.080
And with his wife Keggy Carew, who's an author, they sold up in London and they bought 22 acres near Tisbury.
00:16:40.320 --> 00:16:43.279
And he has pioneered rewilding small spaces.
00:16:43.440 --> 00:16:53.279
He's figured out how you recreate natural processes on a space anywhere from a quarter of an acre to 30 or 40 acres, you know, spaces that are too small to have a herd of cows or some pigs.
00:16:53.440 --> 00:16:56.159
And in effect, you have to be the keystone species.
00:16:56.240 --> 00:17:07.599
You know, he will get volunteers in and they will be bison with chainsaws or hacksaws for a day, or they will be beavers and they'll create analog beaver dams along the stream, or they'll be wild boar and they'll create disturbance in the earth.
00:17:07.759 --> 00:17:13.440
And it's a different kind of woodland gardening and it's much more hands-on than larger scale uh rewilding approaches.
00:17:13.519 --> 00:17:15.119
And the results are just miraculous.
00:17:15.200 --> 00:17:35.920
You go there and you could, at the right time of year, you can feel the bird song pulsating in your bones, and just the joy this has brought Jonathan Thompson and his message is if you can afford it, no, if you've got savings or if you've got um a house that you're willing to kind of trade and move out and get some land somewhere else and a cottage somewhere, get yourself a bit of land in one way or another.
00:17:36.000 --> 00:17:39.279
And if you can't, then volunteer with a local wildlife organization.
00:17:39.839 --> 00:17:49.039
I'm sitting right now half a mile from Heel Somerset, and they're rewilding 460 acres and it's absolutely teeming with volunteers and students and forest school and kids and everything.
00:17:49.200 --> 00:17:56.079
Not huge numbers of people are participating in this unbelievable reawakening of nature on a on a former dairy farm.
00:17:56.240 --> 00:18:01.119
So I I think this is this is the route to like one of the most important routes to well-being and happiness.
00:18:01.440 --> 00:18:02.799
Yeah, and without a doubt.
00:18:02.960 --> 00:18:05.039
We've got the stats to prove it as well, you know.
00:18:05.119 --> 00:18:16.319
If if you need statistical evidence, but I mean, I everything that that you've said, absolutely, I think I've rather sort of stumbled through this process over the last 25 years.
00:18:16.480 --> 00:18:28.079
So m my story, the book the story that I tell in Renaturing is is this movement away from the cricket pitch, if you like, the the sit-on mower every two weeks, cutting down the best part of two acres.
00:18:28.240 --> 00:18:43.279
And essentially about uh about 15 years ago, starting the process of moving to what I called rewilding uh at the time, and the which was essentially just leaving the edges, and and it's most of the time it's just letting nature do its thing.
00:18:43.440 --> 00:18:54.559
So letting the Jays plant the acorns and letting them turn into oak trees that became what are now my what I called the young oaks, and they took over the edges of this field.
00:18:54.720 --> 00:19:00.640
And we still continued for a little while having this cricket match, the pitch became worse and worse, and then I just said, right, you know, this is it.
00:19:00.720 --> 00:19:26.240
About 10 years ago, it's like no more, no more, and started to to just leave areas uh far more, started to cut back some bramble, started to to do my own little bits and pieces of what I thought was the right thing, and then what I did, which is which I'd really advise, if you do if you like as you say, if you have friends or people have sort of two acres up to say 20 acres, what you want is you want people coming in who are kind of ecologists, naturalists.
00:19:26.319 --> 00:19:33.359
So I I got in a really good friend of mine, Chris Gibson, who worked for Natural England for 30 years, is an absolute legend within my region.
00:19:33.519 --> 00:19:39.920
And I walked around with Chris and I said, Yeah, so Chris, look, what I'm doing here is I'm I'm rewilding this my my field.
00:19:40.079 --> 00:19:42.400
And he said, Oh, oh yeah, yeah, you know, that that is great.
00:19:42.480 --> 00:19:45.200
And I was sort of mansplaining rewilding to an ecologist.
00:19:45.359 --> 00:19:47.359
And he said, uh he said, James, this is great.
00:19:47.440 --> 00:19:48.960
I love what you're doing, I love what you're doing.
00:19:49.119 --> 00:19:50.640
It is not rewilding.
00:19:50.880 --> 00:19:56.640
For rewilding to take place, you need minimum thousand acres, ideally more, you know, this kind of thing.
00:19:56.799 --> 00:20:05.440
He said, What you're doing is renaturing and that that sort of opening up this terminology to allow someone like me with two acres.
00:20:05.599 --> 00:20:09.920
But I, you know, one of the things I immediately started to consider was what if I'd lived in London?
00:20:10.079 --> 00:20:12.559
So rewilding would be something that was impossible for me.
00:20:12.720 --> 00:20:13.759
What about renaturing?
00:20:13.839 --> 00:20:16.000
Can you renature if you're in an urban space?
00:20:16.240 --> 00:20:17.279
Of course you can.
00:20:17.440 --> 00:20:32.240
You know, so it opens up this concept, if you like, that all of us as humans, whatever little bit of land we have kind of like oversight in, we can be introducing more biodiversity.
00:20:32.640 --> 00:20:40.319
We can be connecting with that natural world, even on a balcony, you know, even on a window box level, you can be doing this.
00:20:40.400 --> 00:20:46.880
And obviously, certainly if you have a small garden, if you have a small suburban garden, you know, you're not sure what you're doing with it.
00:20:47.039 --> 00:20:50.640
It's quite simple on a lot of levels for what you can do.
00:20:50.880 --> 00:21:07.200
Leave some nettles, leave some bramble, let the ivy grow up over the fences, stick a small pond in, make sure you've got some hedgehog holes, and suddenly, you know, small scale, small scale nature restoration, what I call renaturing, you're starting to create.
00:21:07.359 --> 00:21:21.519
Then you start speaking to your neighbours, you get them doing it, you start creating these little green corridors within your urban space, and everyone's talking, suddenly you've got your Merlin app going on a Sunday morning, and everyone's listening and saying, Oh, was that black cap?
00:21:21.759 --> 00:21:22.960
I think that was a black cap.
00:21:23.279 --> 00:21:33.039
You know, and you're starting not only to actually physically be involved in this process, but you're starting personally to be intimately involved with the natural world.
00:23:11.500 --> 00:23:15.339
Yeah, it's really about opening up your heart and letting the natural world back in.
00:23:15.500 --> 00:23:21.980
And then what stems from that is opening up uh your space and whatever space that might be and renaturing it and letting nature back in.
00:23:22.059 --> 00:23:23.740
I love that term, it's it's a brilliant term.
00:23:23.819 --> 00:23:27.740
I'm not really fussy about terms, I'm happy with rewilding or or what have you.
00:23:27.980 --> 00:23:36.779
My young son, Frankie, when he was nine or ten, volunteered with a local organisation in Barnes in West London to create hedgehog highways along all those terraced gardens.
00:23:36.940 --> 00:23:37.980
And it was one of the recommendations.
00:23:38.620 --> 00:23:51.420
Of the Rewilding London Task Force, which was to encourage gardeners to do more, provide more native vegetation for wildlife, create these hedgehog highways, which are basically just holes in the fence or the wall running along terraced gardens.
00:23:51.660 --> 00:23:59.660
But as people become more open to nature and their understanding begins to grow, you know, then one realizes quite how much we've lost.
00:23:59.819 --> 00:24:04.059
You know, I love that quote from Aldo Leopold in A Sand Country Almanac.
00:24:04.140 --> 00:24:10.140
He said, one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
00:24:10.380 --> 00:24:13.180
And I wonder if you found that as your understanding has grown.
00:24:13.259 --> 00:24:13.819
Because I have.
00:24:14.140 --> 00:24:17.819
I used to think, you know, trees planted in rows, you know, that's good enough.
00:24:17.900 --> 00:24:18.380
That's nature.
00:24:18.460 --> 00:24:18.860
You know, I did.
00:24:19.019 --> 00:24:19.900
I didn't know.
00:24:20.059 --> 00:24:35.420
You know, even though I'd had this deep love of nature from childhood and it had stayed front and center through growing up, as my understanding grew, I began to realise the extent to which we've tamed and banished real nature from our lives everywhere.
00:24:35.579 --> 00:24:36.940
Do you do you feel the same?
00:24:37.339 --> 00:24:37.980
Yeah, very much.
00:24:38.059 --> 00:24:49.420
And as I say, so part of the journey of that I went on with the book Renaturing was my own journey in terms of physically changing the landscape of this two-acre plot as best as I could to increase biodiversity.
00:24:49.500 --> 00:24:55.740
But as you say, learning and kind of reminding myself and being much more involved in recognising that loss, if you like.
00:24:55.900 --> 00:25:16.460
And and you know, you you quote Leopold, who's mainly largely remembered for the work at Yellowstone National Park, 2.2 million acres, you know, proper scale rewilding, you know, where the reintroduction of the wolves in in the mid-90s has has created such ecological change for the good.
00:25:16.620 --> 00:25:21.819
And you know, that even the ecologists observing were were amazed at how quickly it took place.
00:25:21.980 --> 00:25:31.900
This is what I mean by keeping the term rewilding to the possibility of that scale of of rewilding, of of nature restoration, because that's what we want.
00:25:31.980 --> 00:25:36.059
And I think if you if you can keep that, then that's wonderful.
00:25:36.220 --> 00:25:41.980
Obviously, if in Yellowstone, if you've got 64 miles by 53 miles or whatever it is, fabulous.
00:25:42.220 --> 00:25:45.259
In Southeast England, that's a little trickier to do.
00:25:45.420 --> 00:25:56.299
And obviously, the notion of rewilding and bringing in carnivores is much harder in a British context, where you know in England 50% of the land, as we know, is owned by less than 1% of the people.
00:25:56.380 --> 00:25:57.420
So, how do we go about this?
00:25:58.059 --> 00:26:00.940
We have to use it in a different way, in a different model.
00:26:01.100 --> 00:26:16.059
But absolutely, as as much as we can, I think when we talk about rewilding projects, the best people are those that are trying as best they can to bring back the the beavers, hopefully the Urux or the equivalent, you know, the boars, etc.
00:26:16.299 --> 00:26:22.140
And then when you can't, as they do, in all the best places, you mimic the animals yourself.
00:26:22.299 --> 00:26:23.900
And so you're mimicking the action.
00:26:23.980 --> 00:26:38.539
So as humans, you're you're doing the replacement practice, and that can be fabulous in terms of you know bringing other people in, as we say, you know, like heel, for example, you know, Young Wilders was a lot that I spoke to for for renaturing again.
00:26:38.620 --> 00:26:45.980
So getting mainly people from urban environments that want to be involved in these kind of restoration projects, but how do you how do you go about it?
00:26:46.059 --> 00:26:47.900
You know, and getting them involved in this.
00:26:48.059 --> 00:26:49.660
So I think I think you're absolutely right.
00:26:49.740 --> 00:27:02.220
I think it's it's partly a process of of pressuring the the people who can do more and perhaps aren't doing more, um, but also individually, how can we all be involved?
00:27:02.460 --> 00:27:09.019
You know, no mo May, for example, has been a fabulous, fabulous movement within the small scale nature restoration.
00:27:09.339 --> 00:27:13.259
But also don't forget that if you want a meadow, you've got to mow it.
00:27:13.420 --> 00:27:15.579
So you need to mow it once a year, you know.
00:27:15.660 --> 00:27:22.299
So why not go and buy a scythe rather than buying an electric mower or a petrol mower?
00:27:22.460 --> 00:27:33.019
Just get yourself a scythe, you know, and then you start, you know, this is the process that I've really enjoyed as well because largely I started off, you know, using an old hedge trimmer trying to cut through Blackthorn.
00:27:33.420 --> 00:27:43.339
I found out in the end, one, you you can't hear any bird song, but two, it's much easier with a bowsaw and yourself and you're close up and you do the work.
00:27:43.579 --> 00:27:47.339
So now I just haven't used any mechanical equipment in the field.
00:27:47.579 --> 00:27:52.539
Yeah, I spend an enormous amount of time outdoors doing this kind of thing, especially in autumn and winter.
00:27:52.700 --> 00:27:56.779
I I've actually got myself a little electric chainsaw, which I use for small oaks.
00:27:56.860 --> 00:28:00.860
In there was a woodland plantation from 15 years ago, which needs thinning out.
00:28:00.940 --> 00:28:07.579
So we we we thin out some of these little oaks using a little chainsaw, cut them in pieces and make these big, kind of six, eight-foot-high wildlife piles.
00:28:07.660 --> 00:28:23.259
And then walking through it in the summer afterwards, where the light has come into this plantation, wildlife piles are now smothered with bramble and dog rows, it's very, very satisfying and rewarding work and really, really important to my sense of well-being and my physical health and so on, be it being outdoors.
00:28:23.420 --> 00:28:28.539
But I but there's this idea that the nature movement is somehow misanthropic, that it's about excluding people.
00:28:28.700 --> 00:28:42.620
And Rory Stewart once said in his podcast with Alistair Campbell that the problem with the likes of Ben Goldsmith and George Mombio is they want half of Britain to be like Alaska, so full of nature and no people, and the other half to be like Iowa.
00:28:42.940 --> 00:28:49.420
And I think that's a misrepresentation because I think that we we can make space for for for nature in the places where we live.
00:28:49.579 --> 00:28:59.019
I think this is a human movement, it's about opening our own hearts and our own space up to the natural world and weaving nature back through the fabric of our own lives and our own spaces.
00:28:59.420 --> 00:29:08.380
And I think I think actually in in many cases, restoring nature is the surest and probably the only pathway towards social and economic renewal in some of our more deprived landscapes, for example.
00:29:08.779 --> 00:29:09.259
Totally agree.
00:29:09.420 --> 00:29:10.140
Totally agree.
00:29:10.460 --> 00:29:20.140
Coming from London, one of the things that I really wanted to get across was, you know, okay, I'd escaped, if you like, I got out to rural North Essex, I had two acres.
00:29:20.220 --> 00:29:23.339
But I thought, well, what if I still lived in West London, you know, where I where I come from?
00:29:23.500 --> 00:29:35.339
And so I used the example of the iconic Trellick Tower with its brutalist architecture, 217 flats, all very well designed to be south facing.
00:29:35.579 --> 00:29:52.140
What happens if you get each of those occupants to put, say, five to ten window boxes on their balconies, put wildflowers in them, suddenly you've got the equivalent of four acres of wildflower meadow, but in a tower block.
00:29:52.299 --> 00:30:04.860
You know, we we've seen it beautifully in in Milan where they uh they have these two absolutely fabulous urban forests as they're called, these kind of green structures sticking out from the urban concrete.
00:30:05.019 --> 00:30:08.299
There's so much more we could do with kind of urban renaturing.
00:30:08.460 --> 00:30:14.140
And obviously, in in that example of Trelic Tower, as you say, it's a it's a community project.
00:30:14.299 --> 00:30:18.220
It's about coordinating people and getting everyone involved in this as well.
00:30:18.380 --> 00:30:24.299
And I I love that idea because obviously in urban areas, you've got more it's all about the people, isn't it?
00:30:24.460 --> 00:30:30.860
It's all about the people, and then it's like can those people be helping everyone else to be more nature-based?
00:30:31.019 --> 00:30:35.900
So London Wildlife Trust, for example, who I'm working with, they're fabulous at this.
00:30:35.980 --> 00:30:42.700
You know, they the wildlife trusts are uh are some, you know, I love the way that wildlife trusts operate on a kind of local scale.
00:30:42.940 --> 00:30:43.900
I think they're fabulous.
00:30:44.220 --> 00:30:51.259
Yeah, when when we did the Rewilding London task force, we found that there's approximately 650 hectares of flat roofs in London alone.
00:30:51.420 --> 00:31:04.059
Now, all of those could be rubble roofs, they called them, which is a scattering of rubble and some topsoil, and then a self-sustaining wildflower grass meadow, which is wonderful habitat for butterflies and other invertebrates, or black red starts.
00:31:04.140 --> 00:31:05.900
And London's got incredible bird life.
00:31:05.980 --> 00:31:18.380
And with the with the rewilding of the parks, you know, if you go to Regents Park or Hyde Park or pretty much any of London's larger green spaces, you'll find exclosures for scrub and more natural uh uh water edges now along the serpentine and reeds.
00:31:18.779 --> 00:31:25.900
And the species that are now flooding into London are really beyond the wildest dreams of a kind of 20-year-old me when I first moved into London.
00:31:26.140 --> 00:31:27.900
Yeah, no, that's so true.
00:31:28.059 --> 00:31:28.460
So true.
00:31:28.700 --> 00:31:34.779
So I have dear friends and neighbours in London who've just inadvertently come into three acres in the Cotswolds.
00:31:34.940 --> 00:31:35.100
Nice.
00:31:35.339 --> 00:31:41.019
And my neighbour said to me, Look, if I if I let you off the leash, you're gonna go on for an hour about what we need to do with this.
00:31:41.100 --> 00:31:43.819
All I really want to have is a single hole of golf.
00:31:44.140 --> 00:31:49.420
But my wife and the kids want to do some rewilding, so tell me in 60 seconds what I need to do.
00:31:49.579 --> 00:31:50.539
And so that was a challenge.
00:31:50.620 --> 00:31:54.460
I thought, how do I get my my hour-long uh discourse into 60 seconds?
00:31:54.539 --> 00:32:06.620
So I said, Well, get a mole plough in there and break up any field drains uh beneath the earth, but stop up the ditches or block them up, and then rip out any fencing, you know, it's only two, three acres, you don't need any barbed wire or anything like that.
00:32:06.700 --> 00:32:10.460
Just rip all of that out and then just let go and see what comes.
00:32:10.620 --> 00:32:15.339
And if it gets overwhelming, then you can get in there with a saw or with a strimer or what have you.
00:32:15.420 --> 00:32:18.059
Uh but otherwise you'll just sit back and enjoy the magic.
00:32:18.220 --> 00:32:21.660
And he said, What are the what are the main ingredients I'm trying to achieve here?
00:32:21.900 --> 00:32:26.220
And I said, Well, it's exactly the things that we've tried to get rid of in the English landscape.
00:32:26.380 --> 00:32:31.019
So you need scrub, so fat hedges around the edge and scrub popping up through the grass.
00:32:31.180 --> 00:32:48.380
You need dead wood, so you could ask some neighbour with some forest or something or some local uh wood cutting organization to come with a lorry and just dump some logs in a pile in the middle of your field, a dead wood, and third, water, and it would be wonderful if you could pay someone to come with a digger and dig out a few ponds.
00:32:48.539 --> 00:32:54.460
And um, I thought that might be an interesting idea of missing ingredients: scrub, deadwood, water.
00:32:54.539 --> 00:32:57.579
Um, obviously there's a load more, but is that a reasonable starting point?
00:32:57.660 --> 00:32:59.100
Would you have given a similar answer?
00:32:59.420 --> 00:33:15.660
The the first thing I would say is get a really good pond digger, local pond digger, get them to come in with like a big three-ton digger and um make yourself as big a pond as you can go for, uh, depending on the landscape, is what is all I mean.
00:33:15.819 --> 00:33:20.220
And hopefully get it obviously you want it puddled, you want it using the clay.
00:33:20.299 --> 00:33:22.460
Uh if it's clay, hopefully it's clay.
00:33:22.620 --> 00:33:24.220
Because that's that is number one.
00:33:24.299 --> 00:33:46.220
And then, as you say, the the thing I would do is then without doing anything else, I'd leave it for a year and watch what happens and get a naturalist in to kind of like guide your your senses so to notice that in fact that long bit of bramble, old bramble that you were looking at in one corner, they might say, actually, let's okay, we'll cut some of it back, but then just let it regrow.
00:33:46.460 --> 00:33:51.019
Young bramble is one of the best things that you can be growing in your in your two-acre plot.
00:33:51.180 --> 00:33:57.180
Nettles, bit of nettles, obviously, you know, biodiversity, that's essentially what your target is, isn't it?
00:33:57.259 --> 00:34:00.539
And as you say, scrub, scrub for the songbirds, etc., you know.
00:34:00.620 --> 00:34:03.339
So yeah, no, I'm sure I think you've steered him well.
00:34:03.660 --> 00:34:07.819
And as for as for ponds, I mean, if you're on clay, then they will just naturally hold water.
00:34:07.980 --> 00:34:19.179
But even if they don't, even if they're ephemeral and they dry out in the summer, I'm told that's good news because all the little predators will die off when the when the pond dries out, and that's great news for the newts that come back following spring to breed.
00:34:19.819 --> 00:34:26.059
I have my sister Jemima around my place here in Somerset, and I showed her some lovely bramble cushions popping up in the middle of my fields.
00:34:26.299 --> 00:34:27.500
I said, Lo, I'm so excited.
00:34:27.659 --> 00:34:29.980
And she said, Well done, Ben, you've got bramble.
00:34:31.339 --> 00:34:33.179
Um so so um I don't know.
00:34:33.339 --> 00:34:34.619
Yeah, it's a hard sell, isn't it?
00:34:34.779 --> 00:34:36.699
It's quite a hard sell, the bramble, yeah.
00:34:37.019 --> 00:34:39.339
James, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me.
00:34:39.420 --> 00:34:42.460
We've touched on some quite personal and some very lovely things.
00:34:42.619 --> 00:34:48.299
Um the love of nature is completely central to my life, even more so um than ever now.
00:34:48.460 --> 00:34:55.819
And um, your your work in making nature accessible, making renaturing accessible to everyone, I think is truly vital.
00:34:55.900 --> 00:34:59.579
And I'm really grateful to you for for spending this time with me now.
00:34:59.900 --> 00:35:05.179
It's been wonderful, Ben, and I'm very proud and privileged to be with you at this time as well.
00:35:05.339 --> 00:35:07.900
You know, my my thoughts to your family, especially.
00:35:08.059 --> 00:35:18.699
But it's been good, as you know, getting as many people as we can to remember our connection with nature, our intimacy with the natural world.
00:35:18.860 --> 00:35:20.699
That's what it's all about, isn't it?
00:35:33.980 --> 00:35:44.059
James Canton is one of the most important voices in this great cultural shift that we're undergoing here in Britain, this great reconnection, falling back in love with nature.
00:35:44.219 --> 00:35:48.459
I urge you to buy his book, Renaturing, and his other books are truly brilliant.
00:35:48.539 --> 00:35:51.739
And give us a like, a review, it all makes a huge difference.
00:35:51.899 --> 00:35:52.699
Thank you so much.
00:35:52.939 --> 00:36:07.419
Next time I'm going to be talking to Daniel Curry, who is a range rider, a speaker, and the founder of Griff, G-R-I-P-H, which is an organization dedicated to helping humans co-thrive with large carnivores in America's Wild West.
00:36:07.819 --> 00:36:18.219
Specifically, Daniel works with cowboys and ranchers, help them figure out how to live alongside such species as wolves and grizzly bears, wolverines, lynx, and so on.
00:36:18.379 --> 00:36:21.899
And persecution of these animals is rife in those landscapes.
00:36:22.059 --> 00:36:26.699
So it's all about building a new culture, and Daniel is at the forefront of that.
