Conservation and Science 2024 Recap

This is Conservation and Science podcast, where we take a deep dive into topics of ecology, conservation and human wildlife interactions. And this is the recap of all the episodes from 2024. Enjoy!

Quite a big number. Wolves will be called this year, but this is where the agreement comes together. Of course, the Nature Conservancy, conservationists and yeah, the wolf lover me is not. I'm not happy about the wolves that are hunted, but but I see that this is the price. Everybody must get something. Otherwise it goes poaching goes on the ground. And people get will be very hateful. And, you know, you have to give everybody something because the hatred really is born in the moment.

You lose your sheep or animals, and you don't know if you're going to get the compensation. And if it's like Estonia, then you get it in one year. Let's say you lose your sheep in January. So the payment is next January. And if you are Latvian then you get nothing. They have no compensation. So and we see that that there also the hatred is building up.

And of course sometimes you get the compensation, very generous compensation, but still you have hatred because it's rooted deep, three layers deep because, you know, you don't want to deal with it and why it's so deep. It's because, the benefits of having a apex predator, we all love it, but the cost goes on very little, group of people. So they, like, feel they pay for our, wolf, love. And that's true. So you can't, really achieve what you want to achieve.

Namely, that everybody respects the wolf. No, they will hate the wolf in their heart. And if you don't allow to hunt the wolf, then it goes into poaching and and then you lose maybe the whole pack. But if you give you all some of the. Yeah. Permissions to, Yeah, hunt some of the wolves, then you perhaps. Yeah. Keep the pack but lose some of the wolves.

There is some really, really interesting stuff happening in Sweden at the moment where they've got the dogs to tell them what order the dog is actually tracking. So they're doing, lynx, wolf and bear. And whenever the dog is on the track, the dog, they make the dog wait and get the dog to show them which, order they're actually tracking at that time and say what predator is in the area type thing. So it is possible for the dog to specifically tell you, oh, darn, that burrow is puffin down.

This burrow is like shearwater, but, we haven't done it. But here it sounds like it might take a crack. So if you have the dog in the cage, like one bark, two barks like I was it. No. So we treat it a passive indication. So for my dogs, I like, a sit down and stare. So they'll ask, for example, at the burrows. They will sit and stare down the burrow. And then for the pointer, she naturally points out whatever it is that she's found.

So she just throws a freeze and the nose is pointing at the odor. Which will be good for the quarter. Next, I as soon as she hits the the odor of cartoonist. I don't want her to move so that she is a she is a statue as she comes across it. So it's type of like dog sits, dog lies down or whatever. And you know, it can it can tell like, wow, this is this is really this is really fascinating. It was a little cuckoo.

So okay, so other question is like you mentioned that people in Sweden doing something like that is, is that it's using dogs for conservation, like, discipline. Let's say that this growing in the conservation world or is it like super niche or is it's popular like where where is it? It's it's definitely growing. So some countries it's like mainstream. They've been using dogs almost for centuries. Like New Zealand for example. They were using dogs in like 1890 to like find to like.

This is not a new thing for them at all. And in America they've been using dogs will also even and actually in the UK we were using dogs to help count rice setting and pointing dogs for a long time. It's just that they weren't, you know, we didn't really class them as conservation detection dogs who weren't trained in that kind of detection element. But in the past ten years, I think it has grown massively here, and it is continuing to grow.

And the number of projects now that are coming to us and asking are, as a dog, useful has grown absolutely massively. Yeah.

And the title of the paper is Anthropogenic Food Subsidies Hinder the Ecological Role of Wolves. Insights from conservation of apex predators in human modified landscapes. And essentially, what that paper describes is that the region of Italy called Abruzzo, more than half of diet of wolves is livestock, arguably solid livestock, not like the predation.

But the point is that if we think we bringing back wolves, and so for them to keep the wild ungulates herd healthy and regulate the numbers, then this is their intended ecological functions. And if they have this anthropogenic subsidies, then obviously they're not fulfilling that function. So that is another very important consideration. Before answering a question whether I'm for reintroductions or against reintroduction, clearly restoration would be a better term.

Some preferred term reestablishment. I read the book by great conservationist Roy Dennis, who was part of a incredible number of, reintroductions, and he he described them all in the book. And the title of that book is Restoring the Wild. You see what I mean? It's not reintroducing the wild. It's restoring the wild. But. Well, the reintroduction is, term that is most often used. So I guess we stuck with it. Yeah, I think that's a fair point.

Predation is often, underestimated, in terms of impact on, on a lot of, in particular ground nesting birds. And I think that the the point is that with increasing agricultural intensification, for example, on, on grasslands, the hay making has largely been replaced by silage. So the nutrient cycling is much faster. There is more food, there is more earthworms, there is more rodents. Think about the vole densities in grasslands.

So there is simply a much bigger carrying capacity for these, small predators than what used to be the case historically. And all these foxes and stoats and weasels, and it is spread through the countryside, and it's just the sheer number of predators that seems to be, in some cases, at least, the main driver for declines. And if I may give a few examples, the black got which, despite all the conservation efforts, you see that predator predation is still one of the main causes of decline.

Our species has disappeared over large parts of Europe. Curlew in Ireland. It's probably also, predation related. Some countries might have bigger areas that are either suitable or should be protected, and therefore they have, you know, a larger burden which we like, even, you know, considering nature restoration or protection in the, in the category of and it's like, oh man, that's not good.

But that, that is the real problem, right. Like how you how are you going to share, share this, burden, you know, say. Yeah. Which, which makes me think maybe we should replace the word burden by something more positive. You're right. Yes. Yes, absolutely. I'll take that idea. Okay. Thank you, thank you. I'll take a credit if it's changed. I'll take good credit. I think you deserve it.

All the definitions really mean the same thing. And that I. You know, I like to pare down to giving nature the space and the time, crucially, to dictate its own, ecological trajectories. And that means ecological succession, without interfering too much. And, yes, there is this, this problem of a definition, you know, a globally unifying, generally accepted definition.

And, you know, that's why, in Cumbria at, University of Cumbria myself and, you know, a group colleagues were asked by the IUCN, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, to try to bottom this out and, come up with a unifying definition, which, you know, exactly what we've done. We started work in 2017, big survey of, of, people.

We identified, through a soft snowball exercise as being key informants, early adopters, innovators in the field, and then, subsequent surveys of, rewilding, organizations to, to to identify a set of guiding principles and definition. And then that's what we've done, you know, so, yeah, we're hoping that's useful. And it has been picked up by various organizations and individuals as being, you know, as near as dumb, that fall definition.

I think that the part of that was like you said, that even the hunting can mean different things to different people. Absolutely. But then the term is around for so long that most people intuitively know what that is. While rewilding is fairly new, right? It's like when it was first like in the 80s, I think that was that. Yeah, people started talking about in the 80s.

It first appeared in print in 1990 and Newsweek magazine article by Genesis. But, and since then, you know, it's it's it's been it's, you know, it, it sort of started, been used mainly in the USA and North, you know, North America, USA, Canada, it's crossed the Atlantic. It's become something different on this side of the Atlantic, I would say in a sort of the how, how what was the difference? I'm curious. This is very interesting because that never come up right?

Because originally it was like a wilderness recovery. Exactly. It's my head is is way less contentious. If you like, then rewild. And then so what was the change when it crossed the Atlantic? You know, the, the in North America, the impetus was really about connecting up remaining wilderness areas.

In my, my mid 20s, I got connected with Tom Brown, the tracker out and in his work, and I got to spend time with him in some places. And, and, you know, he's one of the living treasures that we still have as far as a direct connection to the living, a patchy beard of the southwest, the United States and, and their traditional techniques and tactics and lifestyle.

So not only is he tracker and survivalist and able to, you know, teach people these things, but they he also talked about their, philosophy and spiritual habits and the importance of meditation and, and so from there, that that's what triggered me into being interested in structuring some, meditation into my life, in my lifestyle. And I just wanted one, like, one thing that I want to say for, for people who are listening to this, that meditation is not,

you know, there's a lot of people who will say, like, oh, some kind of woowoo meditation. What are you doing? And there is a lot of like a huge body of peer reviewed neuroscience about the benefits of meditation.

There are very similar use studies done at at Princeton, at Berkeley, at all the top universities who are just it's just undeniably pointing to benefits of meditation, various types of meditations for your mental health, for the focus, for how your hormonal system works, how your endocrine system works, how.

And, I've been on a lot of grouse moors and non grouse moors. If you want to see almost like a zoo of wildlife, go to a good managed grouse moor. You will not only see the grouse, but you will see songbirds. You will see all these non-game birds and you'll see all these red listed waders, you know, oystercatchers, curlews, all that stuff and large numbers there.

And it makes sense because the habitat's been manipulated or enhanced in order to in a way that propagates their ability to survive on the land. And they're not stupid, you know, I mean, if you got a little quarter or half acre section that's been burned and you got new growth coming up there from the heather, all of a sudden you're in a scenario where there's food for them and there's an open area there where they can kind of keep an eye out for predators. But predators guess what?

Wherever you have lots of game animals or lots of food, in this case, walking McDonald's all over the place, you're going to have lots of, predators, in this case, the avian predators, which are protected by law, just like you're in the United States.

You know, you've got the golden eagles and kites and and buzzards and I mean, there's just there's a I mean, you go out on a grouse moor and you might see half a dozen species, different species, of avian raptors, and you're going to see them in pretty good numbers. Whereas if you go to other places that don't have that type of management on land.

Yeah, you might see some here and there, but it's it's the difference between going to a proverbial zoo, and just being out someplace, you know, next to town, somewhere in a, in a in a cow field, which the other thing is, is a lot of people talk about biodiversity and this, this whole concept of biodiversity loss and that there's a crises going on in the Highlands because these grouse moors are, are, that are diverse. They don't have the diversity that some people think they should have.

You go up to one of those, go up there with a gamekeeper and a good ecologist, a good scientist or a biologist with a pair of binoculars, and they will show you things that you never see, because I don't think humans take the time to really sit there and watch this stuff. And, there's a great number of, of, of animals, like I said, up in that area and that area has evolved to be like that. It's not a product.

You know, on the outside, it looks like we've kind of package it by human hands, by the, the muirburn, which is, the low intensity burning in small areas. And so you get this patchwork mosaic of, of different growth and, and, and it's and, you know, it's it's different to me. When I first saw it, I was like, wow, this is kind of cool. Look. And of course, when the in an August when the heather all turns and blooms and purple

and you get all this stuff out there, I don't mean the place is is absolutely off the hook. Gorgeous. But this land has evolved over thousands and thousands of years. So again, using science as our main common denominator, if we go back 9000 years ago, Scotland in the Highlands was covered under glacial ice. There wasn't any trees, there wasn't any heather, there wasn't any deer, there wasn't any humans.

When the seasons started, I was at the sea every weekend, and that lasted for 3 or 4 years. As soon as the season started, late July early August, running till the late October early November. As soon as the reports showed up that, sharks are around. Hell, some of those reports were from the boats I was on. I was out that was doing it, and every shark that we caught was measured, was, measured the full length till the tip of the tail, fork length to the fork of the tail and girth.

These measurements meant were meant to facilitate establishing the weight of a shark, because you cannot wave shark on the boats that it's rocking. And the sharks were tagged with a tag number and released. And this tagging program is run by, fishery board in Ireland, and it's called charts. We have a podcast, about this program. And this is gold standard program for tagging sharks and rays and plasma breeding species. Okay. It is the fed.

The data is available to scientists. A lot of research was done based on that data. Great program. You know I would never claim shark conservation. I would never say that I'm a shark conservationist or that I'm doing shark conservation work. I just did, I didn't, I was just doing whatever I was doing. I was shark fishing. You see the you see the similarities. No shark was better off by being caught, handled and tagged similarly. Like no bird is better off, but being caught, handled and ringed.

Maybe the thing over here is that we don't, had that much sort of offshore. We are not opposite sides. In general, we have a common of course, we have, different angles to do things. And, and of course, we have, different perspectives, to, bird questions. But for example, in water falling, we have a perfect similar way that that we work together can work together for the waterfall.

And since Finland is an important area for bird production, it is vital that in in a small country with, with many, many, many lakes, we combine our it's a lot and and work for the waterfall. And what comes to the Sitka project itself. It's a we are only a small part of a much larger project. And, of course there are parts in the bigger project. There are some for the wildlife agency and, parks and forests working on that, on that, state owned land.

And so there's a little, little piece for everyone working in the sector. And also we got it was kind of an we were honored that we we were given this small, small project of ours to run. And since we're talking about voluntary things to, to work with it, I suppose it was very natural only to ask for the, for the kind of third sector associations to do that work.

During the study, they had, I colleagues in this project, some of the coauthors had G.P.S. colors that to lions in its properties. Is that all of a conservancy in Kenya and, I think we had six collared animals, each in a different pride. So that's about 66 lions. And you can tell when lions are either very inactive or if they've killed something based on the pattern in those GPS locations and how they show up on your computer.

So then people would go out and investigate what we call a, GPS cluster, a cluster of points from the GPS collar and see what you see, what the lion was doing in that area. And that's where we discovered what they were feeding on and the type of habitat that they're feeding on in these in the study. So we noticed that, yeah, they definitely like to kill zebra. That's their preferred prey. So lie about 60% of the things lions kill in the system were zebra. And most zebra were killed by lions.

That's how you die if you're a zebra 90% of the time. So we got a sense of what lions were eating and then where. So when? Whenever they made a kill site, we measured visibility in that area and we discovered that, yeah, we. Which is pretty common knowledge that lions use cover to, to conceal themselves as they attack and kill prey. Like most cats. Right. Their ambush. Absolutely. Yeah. So then we have this observation that lions like cover to kill things, but covers declining.

So what does that mean? And that's where this long term data come in. And we've noticed that over time lions are the proportion of zebra in the lions diet has been declining. And it's being made up by buffalo by buffalo which is a huge animal to attack. Right. These are big scary beasts. And yeah. So lions have made a switch and there's some reason for that. And we don't see a relationship between cover or visibility and, and buffalo kills.

So whatever makes a buffalo vulnerable to being killed by a lion doesn't depend on what do you cover in the same way that it does for a zebra?

I think the cap is not fit for purpose. Especially, you know, especially now and especially, with all the talk of all the future accessions into the EU, like even Ukraine alone would mean an entire rewrite of the cap. It would be completely unsustainable to just, like, have them in and continue as it was. So I suppose what I would really like to push for would be a common food policy. I was interested to read there that the eye they were seeing.

I can't remember the exact wording, but it's basically what the cap should be for agricultural production and not any sort of social intervention and stuff on the left. What do you think? I'd. Bicultural production is like? That's a social intervention. It's food for people. And what I would like to see what I like. I think agricultural production, first of all, has become so much more efficient than when the cap started.

Like, you can produce vast, vast quantities, of grain with not that much labor. Like, obviously grain things like vegetables and fruits are different. But in terms of calories produced, we can now more than ever produce more calories per human worker than we ever could at any, any time in history. And I don't think that's a policy that is solely built around decreasing agricultural production is sufficient in this day and age.

I think anything around environmental impact, because these aren't these aren't separate. Like, that's often things like, oh, the environment is separate agriculture. It's the same thing, but they're always just tweaks. And they famously have not had that much success over the last few decades in terms of birds, in terms of insects, in terms of soil, water quality. Famously, the Cap environmental projects, we're still kind of we're still going the wrong way in a lot of ways.

And so I would like to see a kind of policy brought in as well that would so a food policy and that was, myself and another group from Mayo were part of a group that kind of went a, a workshop. This proposal, must be seven years ago that, for a common food policy for the EU, which would, which would basically incorporate all of these things, incorporate not just, the agricultural production sector section of it, but all the way to that, getting on to people's plates.

What we need to do, particularly in the in the more populated part of the world, is very much a landscape approach, a negotiated approach where you look at, you don't say, we're going to rewild the whole wild, which isn't going to happen. You really negotiate how, how and where and when. There's very good reasons for doing that is good reasons. Not just biodiversity, ecosystem services. No, things are not. But if you go in with too heavy a heavier hand, it probably won't work.

And we're sort of seeing this with the Europe, the EU restoration law at the moment where there's been such huge kickback for farmers. There's lots of reasons for that. And it's not just about restoration, but if you go into heavily it, it won't work. So really need, really need long term negotiation. And in terms of bigger things like tigers and, and human wildlife conflict, there's a lot we can do. There's a lot we can do in terms of reducing risk and so on.

We can model communication systems, modern ways of, of of fencing, modern ways of alerting people. But but you're right. It is going to be it is going to be a human cost. We spend quite a lot of my partner. So we spent a lot of the last ten years working on Thai conservation, on improving management standards for tiger reserves around the world. And tiger numbers are going up, but more people will be killed.

And, you know, in the countries where tigers exist, there's often a fair amount of philosophical acceptance of that, but there's going to be a limit of that as well. That must be on the occasions, I presume, weighing heavily on on people doing that on various conservation where it occurs, like, you know, my work, it will be direct or semi direct reason some people will get killed. Yeah, but it's true of lots of things. It's true of if you build a road, it's true if you build up.

We don't tend not to think about that generally, the way I explain it to students is an invasive species.

Is a species, plant or animal microbe, whatever that's come from one by a geographical realm to another, generally through human transport. Let's take something like the Chinese mitten crab from China is now in UK. It's no, in Ireland, it's in Europe. So it's coming from a very different bay geographical area with different, environment, different evolutionary pressures, different, other species around it.

And quite often those species then have impact and new locations such as predation, competition, disease, transmission. And because they're very new to the area in an evolutionary sense, we can bring novel weapons such as, illegal chemicals and plants like chameleon balsam, for example. They can be, the native species can be naive to the introduced species, so don't recognize them as compared to the ocean predators. And therefore there can be a distinct ecological and environmental impact.

The EU tends to think of invasive alien species as encompassing all of that transport coming from a different place, becoming established and having impact. We tend to separate out the two elements of invasiveness being the ability to arrive and become established in a new location. Such as many species travel on boats across the Atlantic, end up in, North American Great Lakes and establishing colonies. But not all have impact. Impact can be something that is almost, neutral or indeed positive.

Many species actually add to our environment. So there are islands and continental areas, but many, many have distinct, impacts such as zebra mussels such as peacock bar, such as crayfish species that are moved around. So we invasiveness Olympics aren't necessarily correlated. So you can be very invasive with impact. You can be very few individuals but have huge impact.

The the story I told this morning to my students was an 1894, a lighthouse was built on a small island, Colson Stevens, near New Zealand, and the lighthouse keeper brought a cat to the island. And the cat killed the entire population. And every last individual of a species of rain that lived on the island.

Another big one that showed up in the responses is talking about poachers and how you distinguish hunters and poachers, and you might think they may think that this is very easy. But it is not easy. Some would say that. Okay, who is a poacher? Poacher is an unethical person who kills wildlife illegally, right. And often poachers and hunters are purposefully, kind of conflated. You sometimes see the article that says, like illegal hunters or illegal hunting.

Well, illegal hunting is poaching by definition. However, it is never that simple. For example, in South America there are a lot of tribes who are traditionally hunting animals for subsistence or otherwise. And then government decides that now hunting a specific species is illegal because a species is endangered, threatened, or something along these lines, except that nobody bothered inform those people.

Nobody bothered to even send someone to their village deep into the forest to tell them that now they can't run these animals, just inform them, never mind to get their opinion or get them on board, or get them to try to understand. So they wake up in the morning and they do what they always do, except now they're poachers. Therefore they making immoral decisions like they not they not making any decisions.

And whether they are poachers or not, it depends on which angle you're going to look at it. And even in, in the England I think, or in Great Britain, term poacher where like, you know, Robin Hood or people who are exercising their rights to game animals, to wildlife that were taken away from them by, you know, kings and dukes and, you know, all these,

the loss of dung beetles trying to feed on wood here, which is from an animal which has been wormed. It's a problem. And you could know, you could throw in pets as well in there. So, you know, when it comes to the the changes, yes. Agriculture has played a massive part. The the loss of hedgerows, increasing field size, the demand for lower cost food economics. But I'll throw an interesting example on this one. I'm from was born and raised in Suffolk.

So East Anglia, you know, the, the prairies, of eastern England. And you know, I've, you know, I walked to school when I was three or 4 or 5 years old. So, you know, I couldn't remember what the hedgerows were like, what the verges were like, the flowers, you know, we were we were taught to go out there and identify them and recognize and looking through the next 50 years and thinking, well, yes, fields have got bigger with a great deal of that was post 1940, we have more monocultures.

We have more, use of pesticides. We well, we probably have less use of pesticides. It's now that we used to. But one thing that's disappeared from the is the mixed farming systems. We used to have. We used to run probably 400 beef cattle. All of the farms we had, we had my grandfather had about seven different farming units were surrounded by meadows. And none of these are reseed had all of them had incredible. But diversity.

And what's gone is these islands of biodiversity and the grazing animals that went with it. And I think large parts of the world, we've lost the grazing animals from the landscapes. And I look at Suffolk now, it's like, crikey, the only meadows I can think of. I've got horses. Horses are almost certainly regularly worked, which is not helping. So we've actually progressed from expanding the the monoculture of arable and, old seed rape.

We've then removed all, systematically removed all of the islands and the ones that left the pony paddocks.

Feed and stream the American Journal, from I think 1894 or something. And they really in detail describe how, there were so many dead ducks in this pond in the US that you could fill barrels of them and exactly how they have died and how that is explained as being poisoned from feeding. So just ingesting, that shot that they would then take instead of grit from the bottom, to have in there. And I guess it. So that's a second one, the primary poisoning of ducks.

And then the fourth one would be, secondary poisoning of predators and scavengers. So this is not them actively feeding on the, bullets or shot, which is what the ducks doing. But scavengers and predators accidentally basically feeding on this. So say you shoot the ptarmigan without killing it. Then he could have a guy fork, then taking it just it's, of course, easy to take a ptarmigan that has been shot at and maybe crippled slightly, but it's still it flew off, but it's still not flying.

Well, the guy Falcon will of course be more likely to take that as compared to a completely unimpeded, ptarmigan. And you could also have, effects from leaving gut piles. There are many cases where this has been studied and showing elevated lead levels in everything from cougars, Pumas to ravens to white tailed eagles, things like that. And the more of a scavenger, a species like the white lingual, the more of a problem there might be.

So in Sweden and Finland, we're talking something like 5,020% of the Sea Eagles that die have such an elevated lead level that, they died from it or would have died from it unless they flew into a power line or something. And that's something they are more likely to do when they are affected by the that, the, the water legal is doing fine for a population perspective, but the individuals are, of course, suffering while dying from this. So it's still an ethical, problem.

But I would argue I that productive.

I'd love to put in a pond there to cost me, you know, a few thousand euros to do a cheap job. It'd be tough. I would spend it more if you wanted to fence it properly and maybe plant a few trees, do a bit of landscaping around it and have it a nice amenity feature on the farm as well as just a biodiversity feature. Maybe we don't need that. Maybe we just put in a, you know, dig a hole and let it filled with water, which it will in that area. But there's a cost involved in that.

Am I supposed to do that? It does. No monetary gain for me from a farming point of view. Or does the likes of the government help which supports to do that? If we want biodiversity gain on the farmland and in the countryside? So I can't see how people that want to improve biodiversity and want to improve nature, it don't seem to want to engage with farmers and we need to improve and not enjoy affairs well.

And we're very well aware that now that as we move towards nature restoration, as there is a biodiversity climate Fund, we need to engage properly with that process and with the nature restoration process to make sure that we look for the right things and we try and get the right things, and we try and get the right supports in place to make those happen.

But alongside productive farming, rather than instead of productive farming, and some of the messages coming from nature restoration on the beginning would have said that there will be no more roads built in certain areas, no more houses built in certain areas. And if you have a farm family, there might be some going to farm. There might be a daughter going to farm, that might be an older sibling that wants to build a house on the farm to feel an attachment to the area.

It could be at the edge of the village, but they have ground and they have a site and they might have. My sister has a house on the farm. My brother's up the road from the farm, and we were hearing that that was going to be outlawed, that there wasn't going to be any more development in certain areas. So obviously alarm bells go off. You're talking about resetting ground, resetting farmland as well as government ground or board more on the ground or semi-state ground.

So it is a lot of misinformation out there. There was a lot of people given a false story of what was going to happen. There was no economic, impact assessment donor for Rhode Island or for farmers. There was no budget in place for us to make it happen. So yeah, farmers got very nervous then, because there has been other schemes that haven't worked out for farmers financially where, ground has been made less productive in some areas.

I think you have to apply to the government to reseed to ground, and it could take two years to get a reply from them. Obviously they just don't want to do it. I said of just put your file to the back and if you want to make. I think it was two different measures that if you wanted to do any of those measures on your block of ground in areas of, conservation that you'd have to apply to be allowed to do any of those measures where I can work in receipt of farm, but received a field here now.

So the control of the ground and the rights and the property rights of the farmer are taken away in certain circumstances. And we'd, like farmers would in reason would in planning guidelines. So and, you know, to be able to decide what they want to do with their own ground rather than having everything dictated to them from Europe or from government.

Being a little bit of a devil's advocate. But ask this question are humans natural humans part of nature? We couldn't be more part of nature. If it what we are, we are incredibly. We are part of nature. Nature's part of us. But for quite literally thousands of years, and there's been writers that go back as beyond Aristotle, who talk about how humans separate themselves from nature. We go to nature. It is, it is outside. It's a view we have. It's like a window or a screen that we look at.

We see it's out there. We're inside in our in our created, holes in our created securities behind the force field. And, but in reality, we are driven by nature. We evolved as, as a result of of nature. Not an that it's a it's a process that had given rise to us. And we are very much part of nature. However, one of the biggest problems we have as, as a, as a creature is we don't know that we are a creature.

And it's it has given rise to so much of the problems, including the type of behavior that we, we, we use that has destroyed a great deal of the other parts of our planet and, and our climate and so on. And it is that disconnect the, the, the, the removal of of ourselves from nature that we could put our finger on and say, we know if we could at least fix that, if we could reconnect. There is a very, very big chance that we could, maybe alter our behavior to be more sustainable.

Not all human, so that there are quite a lot of humans, for example, in from indigenous communities and different parts of the world up until relatively recently, and in some cases still, that are still quite part of nature, but still indigenous peoples and ancient peoples also caused a lot of extinctions and problems. Nothing like the global effects that we might have now, with possibly some major extinctions, and you might like mammoth and so on.

But then we're not 100% sure whether it's climate talks, environment or hunting or so on. So we we still even even in our in our earliest days and the days we hadn't really developed, a society as such, you know, we currently know and we still had technology, very rudimentary technology. We still had technology that impacted nature. So yes, it is.

Unfortunately, we do tend to see ourselves as separate, but we are in fact, we couldn't be more like nature even if we tried emerging evidence of links in early modern literature right through to about 1700,

which would add a thousand years on to their the present in in Scotland, which is really interesting. So there's issues that need to be debated and discussed there for sure. I think what limited ecologic evidence we have in Ireland at the moment would suggest, and I'm thinking of Colin Guilfoyle as work, that we just don't have the forest cover and the habitat for, for lynx and that probably means for worlds as well. So right now I think it is extremely challenging.

But the in terms of that crystal ball and it should trajectory of the coming decades is that we're likely to see systematic change in larger upland areas where partly for climate change reasons and partly for nature restoration, we will see large scale reforestation and also renewable energy and recreation out competing marginal upland sheep farming. And what that is doing is creating the habitat.

And as deer populations expand to fill those forested upland areas, the prey base for both lynx and wolves. So in I'm where it's putting a time frame on it. But in in 2040, 2050 things may be very different. Add to that is the growing support for rewilding, particularly amongst urban and younger individuals who are going to be the voters and the policymakers in 20 years as well. And the Overton window, the Overton window is what is politically acceptable to given population at a certain time.

And right now I, I would suggest in both eyes the Overton window is here, and above the Overton window is links reintroductions. And above that is worth reintroductions. But the Overton window is going to start moving up in this coming decades. And it may so happen that links reintroductions fall within that Overton window. At the same time as habitat and prey have increased in upland areas. So this is a debate that will be having for many years, many decades.

And lastly, what that gives us is time to really think through. Could this work? How do we manage deterrence and force and enterprise and compensation? How do we solve these issues? What mechanisms do we put in place so that farmers are listened to and the concerns are met? While acknowledging that you can never please everyone all of the time, the outcome has very negligible risk

to people, to animals, and and the might be certain risk to the other plants. But with the today's methods and knowhow and expertise and technology, that that risk is really dwindled down to almost zero. That is why we're seeing in many countries in the world, full GMO plants being grown. Even the Europe is now being more open to that US, Brazil, Canada, Argentina, wherever.

Taking full GMO plants and planting them, there's almost very negligible regulatory required because they've understood the risk. What you do have is the public perception based upon about three decades ago, when this technology was really early on and very in its early stages, and there were risks associated, and it was very hard to have a foolproof product and to swallow it. There were certain risks that were associated.

There were very small incidents that arose and they're still with us today. But for in modern times, today and scientifically, there's no risk whatsoever. Now, what we do is not considered GMO. We use Crispr technology. We do gene editing. We are genetically engineering the plants. But Jim O is the means a plant with a foreign genetic material in it. What we do using Crispr, we silence existing genes. We don't introduce foreign genetic material.

So if you look at the plants that we sell and you look for foreign genetic material, whereas with a GMO you will immediately recognize the GMO plant with ours, you will not tell apart my plant from a conventional plant is a difficult balance.

I would say, you know, livestock farming in the UK and worldwide is under continuous pressure and so ever scrutiny is and is something that we are trying to really champion on the farm. As you know, we can produce really good quality food but also conserve nature. We can keep these biodiverse grasslands and their flora and fauna and everything else associated with it. We can find that balance. And, you know, the farm was a was a traditional mixed farm back in the 30s.

You know, there was a lot of chemicals used in organic nitrogen used. And now we've sort of made this poster really aligned with Natural England objectives and say, okay, let's let's think about it. What are we doing? And yeah, it's now a lot more nature friendly. Farming is is really orientated around, the, the biodiverse grasslands that we've got and producing what we like to call biodiverse beef from it. So, it's, it's been a real challenge.

And it's still on an evolving journey, but I really start at the end, and I'm very excited to see where the farm is heading. And has made some really good big steps already in that totally positive direction, for sure. Paints a picture. How does a farm look like? What is the biodiversity on a farm? So it's, a 650 acre farm on the southern edge of Salisbury Plain. So, our neighbors are the Ministry of Defense, and also Stonehenge. So it's, really a landscape is full of culture. Really.

You know, it it's really big rolling hills, big open landscapes, not many trees. We've got small areas of scrub that predominantly these big, wide open areas of, of chalk grassland. So the total, area of the farm is dominated by, the triple A size, a site of Special Scientific Interest, which is passing it down. So it's designated back in, 1984. It, biodiverse diversity in its flora. So we've got some very rare plant species like the early gentian.

We are home to the burnt orchid, which we are one of the largest strongholds in Oxfordshire, actually, for it. So, yeah, we've got all the different make up. A plant species that only can survive through the grazing using a lot of fiberboard. So sheep and cattle and the landscape typically was grazed by sheep. It was very sheep dominate the landscape and those sheep would move on quite regularly like kind of a as they would in the wild. Moving on.

As of rotation. So but now the landscape is moved towards cattle. Cattle are more profitable. There's more money in them. So, the herd of longhorns is it had always been there. They'd been there since 1939. We are the very privileged to manage the oldest, herd of longhorns are still registering females every year. So there's a lot of history in the landscape, a lot of history about the farm and the herd. So the Longhorns have always worked on the landscape.

And we sort of treat it as one, one big area.

So we're missing out on a lot of information. And so it's external, you know, we don't put a weight on this flashiness of a research finding. We want people to be able to publish all of their results, including negative results or pilot studies. Because that is all really important. And when we think about, you know, you're when you're doing research, you're trying to do right, and oftentimes it doesn't work out or you're inventing a new method or something like that.

And that finding might not fit in it to into a like a traditional journal format, and might not be worth the thousands and thousands of dollars to publish. And so it's external. We're really trying to decrease these barriers for sharing all of these important findings. And it's like, you know, that's that's one angle of it.

Another reason why why so much of this research is not getting published is because, you know, the processes of peer review haven't been designed to keep up with the pace of science. And so, you know, I mentioned earlier, it can take years to publish an article. And so if you have a small finding, it might not be worth it to go through that process, that that burdensome process.

And you know, I so I started SACs Journal, a few years ago because I had one of these experiences, as I had just wrapped up some some research on, you know, the effects of wildfires on carnivores in the Pacific Northwest. And I really worked hard to get that research out to, to the people who would be making those land management decisions. And it took about two years to get that research published.

And, you know, during that process, there were lots of important decisions that were actually being made without that research, without that up to date information. And by the time it was published, you know, some people thought it was actually outdated. And so I, I thought it was just an issue in ecology. Right. Like that is my background. I'm an ecologist by training. I've been doing ecology research for, you know, 15 years.

And I started talking to other researchers, and I heard that this was just a pervasive problem, that people's research was not getting published. It was not making it out there. And yet, you know, I've been in the science world for a while, and I know that scientists are smart, we're really capable, we're really talented. And it's like, there has to be a better way.

And so through that research process, I, you know, we developed this new model of peer review that can be efficient and streamlined and also very trustworthy.

I think these are good people who are doing it, out of despair and a sense of what will wake people up, what will make a difference, what will change the action. Extinction rebellion never set out to be disruptive or violent. Factions of it had got a different view. You know, I was up at the big London, event when the, tube strike and people, the tube, some people were complaining about it.

So I can understand that you always get a more radical faction, but most people that I meet on marches, peaceful, loving care people who are at their wit's end as to what will wake people up and what will make a difference. And I can understand, wouldn't do it myself, but I can understand. I mean, you've got little old ladies who look like Quakers, you know, going into museums and tapping things. You know, they're my favorite two, actually.

They would not do that unless they genuinely believed the world is in true peril. And what were your your feelings when you heard about the, the the lengthy prisons sentences for the activists? And, horrified? I'm really horrified. I think the fact that we're criminalizing in the UK and England in particular, peaceful protest that the government has made it almost impossible to give civil disobedience in a manner that is respected and kind of responded to.

We've gone to a place that is criminalizing, I think, good people who have an important message.

Do you think that the the, you know, U.S., through their military personnel or some other ways, are pressurizing NGOs who are, fighting against the resumption of, of of whaling because surely they are not stoked having those organizations, around. Right? Because those NGOs then are going head on against the national interests. And that's a serious stuff. Oh, yeah. And in fact, I know someone who's been going to meetings for, decades.

And she told me when she started going, some guy from the State Department came up and was prodding her in the chest saying, you know, get it, girly, this is about national security. Well, you know, I. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's, you know, it's a bit like another thing I've got to commondreams.

It's a piece about elephants, because, you know, there was that belief that, you know, ivory was the white gold of jihad, and, it turned out it wasn't true at all, but it got the US military and security community interested in this stuff, and and. Yeah, and then they just engage.

And I found that that was really interesting because, you know, I used to work at Noa and at the time we had, when I was there, at one point, we had someone from the State Department who happened to be around there talking about some stuff, and they talking about how when, at the time was Secretary of State, Clinton came back from a meeting and said, what's this about Ivory being involved in and, supporting terrorism? And apparently she went to the national security community.

And now, just like that, we don't know where the because the bottom line is, is that if it's not geopolitical, these folks aren't interested. I mean, animals don't matter to them. You know, these interactions by countries that matter to them. And I like Damascus Glass, the NGO community. So there's always been this pushback. And and we've seen that play out and the kind of bunch of guys over wailing, it's just the way the media,

used the word almost as, almost as a tactic to, to, to create a reaction that they want. Often people use it. I see it on the news a lot. The word is used and see on all these different TV programs here on the radio, and you can tell they don't really understand, you know, the context they're using the word in. So they just use it to label everything. And I mean it's a difficult one. It's a new word.

It, you know, they say in the introduction to the book, if there's 14 of us that write in the book, if you put us all in a room together and wouldn't let us out until we came up with an agreed definition, we'd still be there, because it is one of those words that's very hard to define. I mean, I say that we're, you know, we're singing from the same hymn sheet, but we're kind of singing different words.

Perhaps even though we're all in harmony together, in our general feeling, it's, you know, they're all there is an official definition of rewilding, which I find quite interesting, quite ironic, because at the end of the day, rewilding is about, humans stepping back and in nature take control. And yet we still want to keep it within the strict parameters of what that word means.

I don't think there's one overall misconception that's problematic because everybody in the, you know, everyone in the book writes about their own specific, misconception or myth or misunderstanding. So, I don't know. I mean, for me, I guess it's it's that feeling that humans still have to be in control and decide the outcomes of what they're doing. And we have a we have a very, very strong need to always be in control no matter what it is.

And you do see some great examples of supposed rewilding projects where they actually want the outcome to look like this, rather than allowing nature to, to, to decide, it will not decide just to let it happen. You know, there's still oh, actually, we want our woodland. We want to not woodland. Have bluebells and oak trees, you know, and they try and control it and not. That isn't really what rewilding should be about.

It should be about giving, natural processes the range to, to do what they do, as I've said, you know, I mean, where my,

my strongest expertise is, is, is on agriculture. And, maybe I can take that as an example because, I think that, you know, this is where, obviously, we do see, I mean, it's it's it's a sector, an activity that does impact a lot. Oh, no, I'm not sure I resources at the moment, in general, in biodiversity, in particular. Why is it so difficult? I mean, we have been, farming and let's say consuming also agriculture projects in a certain way for, for decades.

And, while it is clear from science that if we continue as we do, we won't be able to stay within planetary boundaries. And, eventually, we will hit the wall. I mean, to put it bluntly and simply, and it's not just, you know, something that will have impacts people outside of the, of the sector, but the sector itself, you know, farming will be among the first victims.

I mean, we see that already with climate change and, and, the loss of what nature is, etc.. So why, despite not just the knowledge that what is happening in front of our very eyes, things are not changing. And and why? Because we do have policies in place. And I think this is also important to, to stress.

You know, there are several environmental policy that have been adopted, you know, in the past decades that are out there on, on water, the Water Directive on Biodiversity and Habitats Directive. And the problem does not lie with the policies themselves. It lies with the implementation and the fact that Member States are not implementing them as they should. So why are we there? The problem is it is systemic. This is why it's so difficult to tackle it.

And I take the example of agriculture because it is quite obvious we're not going to manage to change our agricultural practices if we are not changing the food system as a whole.