Rewild Land

Izzy: Hello and welcome to the Carbon Copy Podcast with me, Isabelle Sparrow. 

Brad: And me, Bradley Ingham.  

Izzy: We’re back with another episode in our series, Do Something Bigger, where we’re exploring 25 actions you can take to help tackle climate change and restore nature, close to home. Whether you’re a seasoned eco-champion or just getting started, we hope there’s something in this series for everyone. 

Brad: Today’s episode is called Rewild Land. We’re going to be talking about how we support nature to return right across the UK. In Scottish glens, Welsh hillsides, the Yorkshire dales, or even just a roadside verge in your town. Because rewilding isn’t just about bringing back wolves or untouched wilderness, it’s about restoring native species to all habitats: from wildflower meadows to temperate rainforests, to urban green spaces. 

Izzy: And we really do need that shift. The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. According to the State of Nature report, we’ve lost nearly half of our biodiversity since the industrial revolution. Rewilding is one way to start reversing that trend, by focusing on whole ecosystems, from the nutrients in the soil right up to the apex predators. 

Brad: I don’t know about you Izzy, but I’m pretty excited for this episode, I am a bit of rewilding geek at heart, we’ve both seen what this kind of big action can do for UK wildlife!  

Izzy: Yep I’ve absolutely loved our previous forays into this topic! If you’re a fan of nature restoration, there’s a whole series of the Carbon Copy Podcast available where we explore this further. So finish listening to this one and then go and check out All Nature, wherever you normally listen. 

Brad: Well without further ado, our first guest is someone who’s at the heart of this movement in the UK—Steve Micklewright, CEO of Trees for Life in the Scottish Highlands and co-convener of the Scottish Rewilding Alliance. Steve spoke to us about what rewilding really means and why it’s urgently needed. 

Steve: So for me rewilding is working with nature instead of against it and as humans we are particularly good at working against nature. We in Scotland are one of the most depleted countries in the world for nature and that’s because we kind of seek to kind of override it to dominate nature and rewilding is looking at how nature works and working with nature to both give us and nature a kind of better future because all of the things that we depend on are dependent upon nature. So if nature thrives we thrive as well. 

We’re called Trees for Life so obviously the recovery of forest is really important to us. If you’ve ever visited the Scottish Highlands I’m sure you’d be blown away by how beautiful the landscape is but that beauty is only skin deep because that landscape should be covered in a kind of mosaic of forest and grasslands and mountain tops and peatlands and nearly all the forest has gone apart from plantations so one of the big things we’re working on is bringing back the woodland that should be there that so much wildlife depends upon and it’s so good for the climate as well. So that’s our biggest thing and one of the things we particularly try to do is let trees grow themselves. Everybody loves planting a tree and I do too. It’s a great thing to do but sometimes you can just leave nature to grow the trees for you and of course they are the right trees because they’re the ones that nature wants to grow. That’s the first thing and then the second thing we particularly focus on these days is completing the web of life that’s missing in those forests. So if humans weren’t around we’d have wolves and bears and lynx and wild cattle and a huge range of wildlife that we have lost from Scotland so one of the things we’re working on are a number of different projects to bring back some of those creatures that have a big impact on the landscape. So we’re looking at trying to reintroduce lynx to Scotland, beavers we’re trying to get out into as many parts of the landscape as we can and the other thing we’re also looking at on our estate that we own at a place called Dundregan is something called Tauros and these are cattle that have been bred backwards to be like the original wild cattle, the aurouchs of Europe. So what we would like to do in the next year or so is release a semi-wild herd at Dundregan and just have cattle living as wild a life as possible and by that we mean they’re free to do what they want to do as cattle but they also live in a social group. Cattle don’t naturally live in sexually segregated herds like we have in farming. They lived in in mixed aged herds with males and females together and we want to see that wildness come back to Scotland as well. 

Izzy: Yeah, it wasn’t really until I spoke to Steve that I had this sort of penny-drop moment where I was like, “Oh, yeah, of course. Cows only live with other cows and bulls only live with other bulls in the sort of farmed states that we have our cattle in in this country.” But that clearly isn’t a natural way of doing things. And you never think about it until someone actually says it to you like that. It isn’t natural at all. So it’s really exciting to think of reinstating the order that things are supposed to have and allowing those animals to breed with one another and to be in natural herds and to just live the lives that they are supposed to live. It’s a really exciting thought. 

Brad: Yeah, it’s a really exciting image of what the Highlands could be. I do remember driving back from when we did some recording up in Edinburgh last year. I remember seeing these beautiful landscapes. And like Steve mentioned, there’s lots of these plantations dotted about. And when I was younger, I remember I’d like walk-through plantations and I would think, “Oh, what a beautiful space to be in.” But it’s only really after getting into this subject of rewilding and reading Isabella Tree’s book “Wilding” and reading about the work that they do at Knepp that I realised that I couldn’t really have been further from the truth. These man-made plantations are actually just quiet monocultures. 

Izzy: Yeah, I definitely know where you’re coming from. Like all trees are beautiful, but what we need is a diversity of trees and plants and wildlife in order to create a really thriving wild space. I mean, the word is literally biodiversity. 

Brad: Yeah. 

Izzy: So it’s fascinating to know how even reintroducing just one species can have such a big ripple effect, but it isn’t just about doing nothing. It’s about working and finding that perfect mix and integrating everything together. 

Brad: Yeah, I think on the subject of rewilding, I think it’s easy for people to assume that it’s something for out in the great countryside, but there’s a lot of things that people can do even in cities to get involved. And Steve told us about this. 

Steve: So many people want to get involved in rewilding. We do need to do that work at scale and that is a massive priority but that doesn’t mean that you can’t work together in towns and cities to bring nature back in a natural way. So the Scottish Rewilding Alliance has published this Community Guide to Rewilding which gives lots of ideas about how communities can do something to help with rewilding. One of the really obvious ones in towns and cities is actually beavers. I used to live in Bristol so we saw the return of otters to Bristol just as I was moving away actually a few years ago and that was an amazing thing to know that otters were in the river really close to my house in Bristol. Well there could be beavers in places like Bristol and there are even beavers in the Ealing right now. So those sorts of natural processes that bringing back the wild can happen in cities and if you went to say Vienna in Austria and walked along the Danube there you would see evidence of beavers even if you didn’t see them for yourself. So we know that these animals can thrive in urban environments and also it’s about thinking about how nature works. So one of the big things that we face at the minute is the loss of pollinators well creating natural grasslands which are like wildflower meadows that are full of flowers full of plants for bees is how you bring the pollinators back. So again work with nature and if that means you can’t go completely wild like we can in the Scottish Highlands because there’s the space you can make steps to go on that journey to make nature come back because rewilding is part of this whole spectrum of trying to return nature because we’ve lost so much. 

Izzy: Do you know someone who loves the great outdoors, or maybe someone who’s got a bit of a wild side? Why not share this episode with them, or send them over to Carbon Copy’s website where we’ve got loads of practical tips and inspiring examples to help you rewild your local patch, whether it’s a back garden, a village green or a bit of urban wasteland. Check out the show notes at the end of the episode for all the links you need. 

Brad: Now, while Steve has talked about the ecological side of rewilding, our next guest, Lottie, has brought a bit of a different perspective about how to make our current economic system work for large-scale nature recovery. 

Izzy: Lottie is a Research Analyst for Nattergal, a company working to make nature restoration financially sustainable. The inspiration for Nattergal actually began at Knepp Estate in West Sussex, which we mentioned before, one of the UK’s best-known rewilding sites. And now Lottie and the team are building on that legacy across England. They currently have 3 large Rewilding sites and have an ambition to expand further, even overseas. She explained how natural capital helps make the case for restoration in terms that businesses and investors understand, bringing nature into the boardroom, so to speak. 

Lottie: Natural capital is basically looking at nature and seeing it for its financial value. So, as humans, we have benefited from the ecosystem services that nature provides. So, examples of these are clean water, air quality pollination is another ecosystem service, and healthy environments provide us with those ecosystem services for free. And business, capitalism, the economic kind of model that we live in as a society has benefited from these ecosystem services for free as well. But our kind of economic system is using these resources at a faster rate than they’re being replenished. And this is being made worse by nature loss as well. 

So, natural capital is the idea of if we put a financial value on nature and ensure that businesses that are having a negative impact on nature or benefit from nature in some way, if they can give that value back and help to restore nature or improve the nature that’s already there, could we find a way of rebalancing this unbalanced system? 

It definitely can be a bit of a difficult concept to get your head around because like for me personally, I’ve always loved nature and therefore nature has a naturally intrinsic value for me. But actually being able to put a financial value on nature helps us to see it in a way that businesses understand and can therefore bring benefit to nature instead of just using those resources. 

Brad: I suppose it is quite a strange concept, to tie the world of cold hard cash to the beauty and power of the natural world, but there is another reason why this connection is important too. In order to reach our nature restoration targets for 2030 globally there seems to be a bit of a funding gap, would you like to have a guess, Izzy, at how much that is? 

Izzy: Mmm, I dunno, $100 Million? 

Brad: Well, it’s actually 700 billion dollars according to the United Nations Environment Program. 

Izzy: That is an unthinkable amount of money! And particularly when we live in such a challenging time for funding and with government funding pulled in so many different directions. We talked to Lottie about how Nattergal are using tools like Biodiversity Net Gain and carbon credits to leverage private finance to help close this huge funding gap. 

Lottie: Biodiversity Net Gain, also called BNG, is a statutory requirement as of February of 2024. And basically what it means is that any development being either commercial or residential, any new development needs to achieve a 10% increase in biodiversity compared to the baseline of that site before the development was built. And this can be achieved either through on-site improvement, so either creation or enhancement on habitats on the site of the development. Or the developers can purchase off-site units, which is what we provide at Nattergal, to achieve that 10% Biodiversity Net Gain. 

And the idea behind BNG is that previously, where developments will have occurred on sites where nature may have been lost, now we’re hoping we’re going to see a gain in biodiversity and nature, alongside development. So it’s a mechanism for basically private funding to be leveraged for nature restoration. And where it’s statutory, it means it’s a legal requirement. 

We have kind of other voluntary markets, so carbon, nature-based carbon, and the purchase of carbon credits is what we would call a voluntary market. And this is another area of natural capital that we harness to be able to fund our nature restoration.  

So the sale of carbon credits through nature-based carbon sequestration, so things like habitat creation, especially high carbon habitats like woodland. We’ve leveraged that on our site in Lincolnshire, Boothby Wildland. Only a couple of months ago, we made a partnership with engineering firm Arup they purchased carbon credits from us as part of their net zero strategy. And the funding from that has gone towards the creation of a woodland habitat in part of that site. So it’s about this kind of whole idea of BNG and carbon credits. This is what we group as natural capital. And us at Nattergal, we’re looking at leveraging those natural capital markets to fund nature restoration. 

There’s no way public funding sources from government or philanthropy are going to be able to fill that gap. So it’s how can we leverage private finance in order to do that? And using natural capital markets is the way we’re trying to help fill a small part of that big funding gap. 

Brad: This is a very different angle that I’ve not really heard about before around funding. We did ask Lottie what exactly did they do with that funding to make a difference on their rewilding sites. 

Lottie: We have our first site, which is known as Boothby Wildland, and that’s based in Lincolnshire, not far from Grantham. Boothby Wildland is an arable reversion. So the site is what we call low grade arable land and had been quite difficult to farm over the years due to the heavy clay soils. The farm was put up for sale and it was seen as a great opportunity to be Nattergal’s first site, given its size over 600 hectares. In say 20 years time, hopefully, Boothby is going to look quite similar to Knepp. There’s already patches of woodland on the site and surrounding the site and these provide an amazing seed source. So over time, we will see woodland encroachment out into these ex-arable fields. We’re also hoping to see meadow being restored as well. And we’re helping to kickstart this by spreading green hay over parts of the site. We’re also carrying out a river restoration at the moment. The river that goes through Boothby, over decades had been kind of canalised and turned more into what you would think of as a ditch than a river. So we’re hoping to restore that natural floodplain and bring more dynamism to the river, which will have not only benefits for nature, but will hopefully mean we’ll be able to store more water as well.  

We’re also thinking about the site in terms of the wider community as well. So we have already put in some more permissive footpaths, but these will be increasing over the coming years. The second site that we took on is called High Fen Wildland. And this is a Fenland restoration project in Norfolk. It was previously a daffodil farm and also had some sheep there. And it came out of daffodil farming about 20 years ago and moved to an equestrian business as well as having sheep grazing on the site before we took it over. And now we’re looking at doing a full-scale Fenland restoration. For anyone who doesn’t kind of know about the history of the Fens, they have been drained historically over hundreds of years. And we’re hoping on our patch of the Fens, we can reverse that and instead hold more water on the site. We’re gonna be bringing a greater mosaic of habitats to the site and therefore provide more niches and more homes for different species. But this site is also home to a large amount of peat. So we’re hoping that by rewetting the peat, we can slow and prevent further drying out and further loss of peat. We’re hoping the work at High Fen is not only gonna have a benefit on nature, but also be a nature-based climate solution as well.  

And then our latest site at Harold’s Park is based in Essex and the location is brilliant because it’s only about 40 minutes outside of the centre of London. It’s a great spot for being able to encourage people to come out of those urban areas and visit a rewilding project. It was once Harold Godwinson’s hunting ground for deer. So the history of the site is amazing, but it’s also got these incredible hotspots of nature and that’s something we look for when taking on sites is we’re looking for sites that are degraded in terms of the nature that’s there, but has these hotspots which can act as kind of like life rafts where nature can spread out of those hotspots. 

Izzy: Wow, I mean, even with just the three sites so far it sounds like Nattergal is really doing big things! They are all so different and inspiring, but I’m particularly interested in Harold’s Park; because like we were talking about earlier, it’s in a very different kind of location to perhaps the “classic” idea of rewilding. It’s wonderful to think of the opportunity it presents for people living in urban areas, to access nature in a new and exciting way. 

Engagement is a really important piece of the puzzle for any big local action, but particularly when there are so many different definitions of what rewilding is and how it works, it is vital to bring local people along with you. We asked Steve about this and about how sometimes misperceptions about rewilding can create barriers to change. 

Steve: Fear of change is the biggest barrier to be honest with you. So it depends on how you think about life. So I kind of like adventures I quite like unpredictability so that doesn’t bother me particularly but a lot of people don’t like change and if you are used perhaps as a farmer to a certain way of operating and we’re asking you as a farmer to accept beavers on your land or to know that Lynx might be in the forest next to your sheep that is a change that for some people is just unacceptable.  

So it is that idea that we are as rewilders pushing for change, this idea that we work with nature and not against it. That in itself is a big challenge I think and that then manifests itself into controversies around well I don’t want beavers here because beavers will damage my farmland, I don’t want Lynx because they might take my sheep. Well we need a better agricultural subsidy system that embraces the wild that’s the root of the problem because farmers are very used to agricultural subsidy system that supports growing food which is great but we can support farmers to grow food and have nature and to live in harmony with nature as well. So it’s the subsidy infrastructure of our country which directs farmers to act in a certain way but change is difficult. Change is a difficult thing so if certain things I wouldn’t like to see changed as well so I’m not saying I’m completely wanting to see everything changed but we have to embrace change now because the nature of the problems that we face with climate change and nature disappearing all around us is so great we just can’t carry on as we are because otherwise humans will be one of the endangered species very soon as well. 

Brad: This is all sounding a little bit intense, isn’t it? And it does sound like time is definitely of the essence. Both Steve and Lottie agree that we do need to scale up fast. Steve mentioned that at the current pace, it would take 70 years to get 30% of Scotland actively rewilded, which of course is far too long. We asked Lottie what she thinks success looks like and how we get there. 

Lottie: I think a big part of it is kind of without nature, us as a society don’t have an economy. Nature is the backbone of our economy and and if businesses want to keep growing and and keep going basically for the next decades, nature needs to be involved in that and nature needs to be a partner. And it sounds really cliche to say it, but I think it is really good term that nature needs a seat in the boardroom. 

And what is good for nature needs to be in the back of the minds of decision makers in business, because there is this opportunity in the future where us as a society are working with nature. And I think that’s a really, really exciting prospect of what that future could look like. And we’re edging towards it very slowly. But it’s that’s what keeps me motivated and motivated to keep helping the natural capital market and nature market grow. Is this this opportunity of seeing what the world will look like when we have nature in our boardrooms or nature in the forefront of businesses minds. 

Izzy: So what can we do as individuals or communities to help to rewild the UK and restore ecosystems to their full glory.  Steve told us more about this and what resources he would recommend you check out if rewilding has planted a seed of interest in you. 

Steve: I think a really good place to start is with your local council and your local authority because local councils normally own quite a lot of land and you know even a road verge allow that has allowed to grow longer grass and have more flowers when it is good for nature it provides a wildlife corridor so I always think the local authority is a good place to start but also you know if you’re in a community that’s quite active is bring people together and start your own nature recovery rewinding project if you can find a patch of ground so again when I used to live in Bristol we really focused where I lived in a place called Snuff Mills on actually restoring nature in that wonderful valley that I was really lucky to live on the edge of it’s a beautiful place and we were focused on how do we make sure that this valley continues to be good for nature and can get better so there are things that you can do as a group or you can particularly pressure your local authority to do more for nature more for nature recovery because they’ve got ground they can do something for it and sometimes it will save them money as well which is a big thing for local authorities these days. 

Brad: Lottie also told us about what she thinks we can all do locally to help rewild nature. 

Lottie: I think just thinking about what you can do in your local community to make a difference. And it can be small things like petitioning your local council to have a wild meadow or it could be looking for volunteering opportunities with a Wildlife Trust site in your area or a National Trust site nearby. From or you can take things into your own hands and set up your own rewilding group and get local people that are like minded together and think about what you can do as a group as a community. 

And the benefit of doing something with the community as well as is being able to share kind of your worries because there is a lot of negative news and the news I think is naturally quite negative anyway. So being able to kind of share your worries around the state of nature around us and then working with a group to do something about that I think is really empowering and finding kind of that sense of community has personally really helped me along kind of outside of just the work I do in rewilding. But seeing a difference in my local community is something really special. 

It doesn’t even have to be kind of physical outdoor activities. It could be any skills that you have. Go to your local Wildlife Trust or go to your local wildlife charity and say can I offer you an hour a week and that one hour a week can be really empowering and make you feel like you’re making change and change is coming. And that’s where I think we want to be as a society is that not everyone has to work in the rewilding sector. It can be really small things like just emailing your MP if there’s going to be a vote that could have a negative impact on nature or making yourself a little bee friendly like wildlife garden if you have the space. If everyone can make some little friendly like nature friendly changes in their lives. That’s where we’re going to see a really big difference. 

Brad: I think there’s so much potential in these different avenues we can go down, and the results as we’ve seen from various rewilding sites in the UK can be magnificent! If we want to see rewilding happen at scale, we need action at all levels from communities and councils to government and business. Lets have a look over what we’ve learned and what things we can all do to help in this effort. 

Izzy: We’ve learned that rewilding isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, it’s a spectrum. From letting the grass grow wild at the end of your road, to restoring whole woodlands, wetlands, or peatlands, every action counts no matter its size. 

Brad: We also learned that nature recovery isn’t just a nice to have, it’s an economic and ecological necessity. Whether through the change of policy, embracing keystone species, or leveraging new financial tools like Biodiversity Net Gain, it’s going to take all of us—businesses, communities and individuals to help restore the balance. 

Izzy: We’ve also learnt how important it is to engage local people, farmers and even visitors to help more people to understand what rewilding is about and how we can all benefit from allowing nature to thrive. 

Brad: So that’s it for today’s episode, Rewild Land. If you are feeling inspired to take action, there’s loads of information on the Carbon Copy website about rewilding initiatives around the UK. And as always, we’d love to hear your feedback, leave a review or rating wherever you’re listening or email us at hello at carboncopy.eco. That’s E C O.  

Izzy: You’ve been listening to Do Something Bigger from the Carbon Copy Podcast.  

Brad: It was written and presented by me, Bradley Ingham.  

Izzy: And me, Isabelle Sparrow. Brad also produced and edited this episode. Huge thanks to our guests, Steve Micklewright, CEO of Trees for Life and Lottie Trewick from Nattergal. Our next episode is Take Community Ownership, where we’ll be exploring how people are creating amazing positive change in the places where they live through buying up community assets. If you want a piece of the action, subscribe now! Until then, thanks for listening, and goodbye.