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Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of.
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The most influential international figures in the social sciences.
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Good evening everyone. I'm Professor Jonathan Birch, professor of Philosophy at the lse. It's a pleasure to welcome you to this event on Saving Britain's wildlife, part of the Philosophy Live series co sponsored by LSE center for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science and Global School of Sustainability. Think of those huge animals that used to live here. Woolly mammoths, giant elk, wolves, lynx. We've not seen that kind of wildlife in this country for a very long time, but we were for hundreds of years doing pretty well at the small things, particularly wildlife such as insects. More recently, even very small kinds of wildlife have been under serious threat. I read recently about survey of Britain's insect populations. To estimate the insect population, they used the so called splat count, which is the number of insects that hit a car's windscreen per mile of driving. And they do surveys across the country of this flat count and estimated that insect populations have fallen by about 75% in 20 years. So something very bad and worrying has been happening to Britain's wildlife. But that doesn't mean all hope is lost. What I wanted to do is bring together a panel of people who can give us hope because they're on the front line of, of ways to try and combat these forces that have been destroying wild nature, threatening biodiversity, often working in very different ways in different contexts, with different lessons for what we might be able to do going forward. Be a pleasure to talk to them this evening and then to take some questions from you as well in the latter part of the event. They are. So from the end, Iris Berger from the University of Cambridge, Karen Kovanka from University of California, San Diego, Matt Phelps from the NEP estate in Sussex, and Luke Hecht from the Wild Animal Initiative. And to start, I want to bring you in, Matt, because NEP is in a way quite local to here, just outside London in Sussex, and is a very high profile example of an approach that's come to be called rewilding. Tell us what you're doing at nep.
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B
Yeah, so I'm the chief ecologist at NEP and my role is to oversee all of the research that goes on in house and try and understand more about what is happening in this amazing project. Those of you who don't know the story of NEP, it is a 25 year almost rewilding experiment if you like. So this was an area of Sussex farmland In the, in the low wheels, very heavy clay soil, about 300 meters deep, really unfarmable, very bad farmland. That is what it had been historically. Pretty intensively farmed, mostly arable, but a bit of dairy farming and the farming just hit a dead end, basically. It's a common story, it's not unique to nep, but there is a lot of farmland now that is ceasing to be profitable, financially viable, and a lot of farmers who are faced with this quandary of what to do basically, and the owners of NEP made a very brave decision to experiment with this new at the time concept of rewilding. So sort of letting nature lead the way, removing all aspects of the farming, selling off the machinery, ceasing the arable crop growing and letting nature sort of take hold, if you like. And the crucial part of that puzzle was putting back animals. So like Jonathan was saying, you kind of need to, when you're dealing with a situation where a lot of things are absent. And I often use a metaphor of like a jigsaw puzzle or a Jenga tower, sounds a bit childish, but it's more stable, it's more complete when all of the pieces are there. So one of the kind of integral points of what we've done, the ideas of what's happened at NEP and in similar projects, is you put back bits of the jigsaw and you allow that puzzle to sort of unfold before your eyes. So that's free roaming animals, cattle, pigs, ponies and deer. And they change the biodiversity, they impact and improve the biodiversity.
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Yeah, I've been there myself. And the cattle are very prominent. You sort of walk around, you see these huge cattle everywhere, roaming completely freely.
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It's kind of amazing to see when we take people out on tours is seeing like a domesticated sort of farm animal, if you like, in a kind of wild context. And people get suddenly really excited seeing a pig or a cow when it's in that kind of wild environment and doing all of the things it naturally ought to be giving.
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C
It's incongruous because you expect fences, you expect walls, and there's just none of that. So I'm interested in how far you want to push this. So are you actively looking to reintroduce predators, for example, and what sort of controversies have you faced with local communities?
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Yeah, not yet. I should sort of stress that when I give talks about nep, I have a slide with the links on it just to kind of, you know, get people excited and think about the fact that predators ought to be in these landscapes. But we're certainly not talking about predators in lowland England anytime soon. There are people working on those sorts of projects elsewhere in the UK and I do think things like lynx should and will happen in the next decade or so. But at the moment, what we're working on at net particularly is things like beavers, getting wild beavers back into Sussex. We're the only county between Cornwall and Kent that doesn't have wild beavers. And just trying to communicate the importance of these, what we call keystone species, these ecosystem engineers which transform landscapes. You don't have to do as much of a kind of hands on intervention as a conservationist if you have these pieces back in place, basically. So, yeah, we're always trying to push, you know, push the conversation to sort of what's next. We're certainly not resting on our laurels at net.
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C
And I mean, what have you experienced? Pushback, I suppose. I mean, I can imagine various possible kinds of pushback. There's the kind that says, well, this should be farmland, you're not feeding people. There's that kind of pushback. And then there's the, well, are these animals going to escape? Are they going to threaten my neighboring farms? It might be different kinds of resistance.
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B
Yeah, there's been a lot of controversy right from the start. And you can imagine anything that is sort of seen as abandoning farming, which is essentially what the estate chose to do, you know, in itself was seen as controversial. It was kind of described as unpatriotic and sort of disloyal to like the farming community, if you like, all sorts of controversies less so people thinking the animals will escape. I don't think that's necessarily one that's come up much, but it is seen as sort of, you know, what's going to come next. Basically, people are particularly with the farming, the food versus farming. But the important thing to stress there is that productivity is very high. We're getting more yields from land that is productive now than we ever have.
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C
What are the products?
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What are the products of nep? Well, ecotourism is the biggest one arguably now. So about a third of the income comes from eco tourism, people camping and going on tours. We still produce a lot of really good meat. So about 10 or 15% of the income a year comes from the meat from the animals which we cull because we don't have the predators, of course. So we are having to act as that predator to reduce numbers and balance the numbers. So we have really organic venison and beef and pork.
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So humans Are in effect, the predator here.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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Wolves.
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Yeah.
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You're the predator.
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Yeah, that's right. But the human element as well is that sort of messaging of explaining the positives around why these things are important and the benefits for well being. Human health, physical health, mental health, the landscape itself is healthier. Now, we know that from all of the research that has gone on. In so many ways, it's healthier because it is sort of finding its own way. And as soon as you bring things like beavers back into the mix, it then becomes even more rich and biodiverse. So it's all about trying to sort of reinforce that positive messaging to people.
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C
So in your role as chief ecologist, do you see yourself as creating here a model that others can emulate? Because I suppose there's also that criticism that this is a very sort of special and lovely place, but it couldn't be widely emulated because if it's relying on eco tourism, that inherently you couldn't have the whole country run in that way, you couldn't rewild a large percentage of Britain.
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Yeah. It's an interesting angle on the sort of. Would we kind of dilute the market if we had too many nets? I suppose, but at the moment there's no. There doesn't seem to be any slowing down in the sort of growth of this particular market. You know, ecotourism now is worth, I think, something like 10 billion a year in the UK. A big chunk of that now is rewilding. There's rewilding projects of a sort in basically every county in England. It's really kind of definitely formed a bit of a mold which others have found that they would like to do for themselves. There's a lot of these sort of country estates and areas of farmland that are not financially viable any longer. And NEPA sort of set a bit of an example of how you can do things in a different way.
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C
So from your point of view, the market is currently very undersaturated. There's room for a lot more of it. Do you have any views on what the ideal for Britain is? Should we be rewilding 30% of the country, 10%, or is it always going to be small?
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Well, I mean, as a minimum, it should be sort of one and a half to 2%. That's what rewilding Britain have talked about, that sort of number as a minimum, that's still less than the amount that's covered by golf courses in the uk. As an example of the kind of amount of land we're talking about, you know, we are committed to 30% of land made better for nature by 2030. That is written into law, you know. So I think we need to be looking at the examples of projects like nep, seeing how it works on that scale. This is the crucial thing, is when we think about nature recovery in sort of small pockets, it works much better when it's done at scale. And what we're really concentrating on at NEP is now how we sort of create the corridors between what we've done and sort of neighbouring landscapes in Sussex, because, you know, biodiversity needs big swathes of rich habitat, essentially, in order to flourish. Yeah.
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I like the idea of golf courses as the benchmark.
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Exactly.
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If we're not giving back to the wild as much as we're using to play golf, you know, we've got a problem.
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And no one's talking about plowing up golf courses to grow food.
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Right? Yeah. No one makes that argument.
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No one makes that argument about golf courses.
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Yeah. So it'd be wonderful if any of the other panelists have any questions for Matt about what's going on in there.
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I have a question. I'm interested in the idea that you could almost work yourself out of a job with rewilding. You could complete enough, you could bring in enough predators that even though now what you do involves a lot of hands on intervention, ultimately that doesn't always have to be the case. Oh, yeah. Even though what you do now involves a lot of hands on intervention, that doesn't always have to be the case. Maybe talk a little bit more about that vision of getting away from always tinkering, always being involved, always, or whether that's always going to be part of the conservation vision.
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Yeah, it's a good point. I don't know which microphone's close to that microphone.
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Didn't sound quite right.
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No, it's a really good point. And what I would say for that is currently, again, the trajectory has been increasing. I mean, NEP now employs four times as many people as it did when it was a working farm. I suppose, selfishly, from my benefit, what I work in is monitoring and research, so that will kind of always need to be there with any rewilding project. You've got to start with a kind of baseline monitoring, so you know what you're beginning with, and then what you sort of get and build, hopefully, is increasing as you go along. You need to find that out. But we don't actually have many people working the land, so to speak. That is not a part of what we're doing any longer. And you're right that a successful rewilding project, arguably, is one in which you can actually step away quite significantly and actually you don't have to do very much at all. The main interventions now, really at NEP are sort of controlling the animal numbers through deer stalking and that sort of thing.
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Yeah.
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You mentioned using culling to control the populations. I'm curious how you decide which animals to cull, how you do it and how you think it compares to what they'd experience through natural predation.
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Good question. So there's two separate sort of answers to that. One is the deer culling. The deer are the only animal that we can actually control on site, as in, they don't have to be taken away slaughter, so they are shot in the field. And we have a trained team of stalkers who go out and do that. They're out literally tonight doing that. And they are incredibly experienced in terms of which animals they're choosing. They're generally going to be favouring the younger, healthier animals to sort of boost the genetics of the herd. With the cattle and the pigs, that decision will be made by a livestock manager. So we have a team of two guys working on the livestock team. They will be looking at the age of the animals. Longhorn, you tend to colour around three years for the. For the beef. So those animals will sort of be, you know, will know when they're coming to that time. And then sometimes, obviously, animals will have just reached a point in their life where they're no longer healthy, they're no longer, you know, it's no longer sort of seen fit for them to continue. And they will be. They will be euthanased. Yeah.
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I mean, in some ways it's hard to. Hard to hear about the culling, but as you explained, in a way it's trying to adopt the role of the predator that the predators would be playing if you had reintroduced them. I mean, how do you think about welfare here? Because I find very interesting the tensions between animal welfare and rewilding that often we don't always treat farmed animals as well as we should. But the idea that the farmer has a duty of care is widely accepted. Whereas this rewilding projects get bigger and bigger. There comes a point where inevitably you start to argue, I can't be under a duty of care to provide veterinary care to all these animals anymore. How do you manage that tension?
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Yeah, it's a really good point. And something we always stress at NEP is that the welfare of the animal is paramount the kind of scale we're dealing with, we don't have the apex predators and we have our stockman who lives on site. Those animals are given, you know, a very high level of care. We have a vet who's kind of on speed dial and he's out all the time checking these animals. They get TB testing and all that sort of things. In terms of the cattle.
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Yeah.
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When you're talking about bigger rewilding projects, if you use the example of the Osvaldersplassen near Amsterdam, that caused a tremendous amount of controversy, you probably remember in the last sort of eight, seven or eight years. Yeah. So it's been running for a long time. It actually started sort of 40, 45 years ago or so, but it really sort of hit a peak a few years ago when the kind of numbers of animals that were dying was. Was kind of really catching people's attention. We had a number of bad winters and the herds had reached, you know, massively high levels, and people were sort of going past on the train and seeing carcasses of animals and things like that, and people ripping down fences and trying to throw hay bales in. That is a crucial point about human coexistence, wildlife and how all of this works in a modern. Yeah, absolutely. From a PR perspective, what we're trying to do here is to sort of rewild landscapes, rewild ecosystems, but also we want people to come on that journey. You know, we don't want to exclude people. We don't want people to be so appalled by what they're seeing, that this is just completely abandoned as a concept, because rewilding is proving in the UK and abroad that it can recover biodiversity on a massive scale really quite quickly. So we need to also make sure that we're doing that in as ethical a way as possible.
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C
It sounds as though there's internal debate within the rewilding.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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About how to balance that.
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Yeah. I mean, o Sparta's Platinum now has kind of, you know, backtracked on that particular policy where they were doing zero intervention. That's no longer the case, you know, and they now do control their animal numbers, so they're kind of doing more of like a net model. And this is the interesting thing about how we all talk to one another. You know, Charlie, one of the owners of nep, he's very involved with rewilding Europe. We, as nep, are very involved with rewilding Britain. This is all feeding into a wider conversation, so we're all kind of learning from one another, but yeah, if there are no apex predators, I don't believe it's ethical to let animals just die in the field. Absolutely not. We would never consider doing that.
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It's a very protracted death.
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Absolutely. Yeah.
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C
Yeah. So, Iris, I'd like to bring in you here because we've been talking about rewilding. One of the other big hot topics at the moment in terms of what we can do for wild nature is regenerative farming. And I'm really interested in the idea that we can learn from what other countries are doing. And I mean, I first came across your work because it's featured in the Science Museum. There's an exhibition on the future of food in the Science Museum with equipment from people like Gregor Mendel and Louis Pasteur and Haber of the Haber process. And you, your bird recording equipment is in the exhibition featured. As you know, this is what cutting edge research into agroecology is showing us. So tell us about the study and what it showed.
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Yes, I do feel a bit like a. Because all my research has been in the tropics and for my PhD I looked into farming practice.
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C
I don't understand how that could possibly make you a fraud.
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Well, an apparent discussion about saving Britain's.
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Wildlife maybe, but we have a lot.
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To learn from what's going on potentially.
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A
And there is a question about how it transfers to other countries as well, for sure. So I looked into a farming practice called zero budget natural farming, said bnf. I know it's a bit of a mouthful, but this state in the south of India called Andhra Pradesh, which is a state of 80 million people and 6 million farming households, the state is currently aiming to convert all the farmers in that state to this zero budget natural farming practice. And so I looked into the food production, economic profit and biodiversity outcomes of that.
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C
Well, I mean, the study to me was remarkable because a lot of people, they hear about this. So zero budget natural farming is supposed to be no synthetic fertilizers, no synthetic pesticides, and people say, well, yields are going to go down. And that's not what you found?
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B
No.
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A
So I found basically it has the same yield as conventional agrochemical based farming in the region, but the profits drastically increased because ultimately, you know, the input costs were a lot lower. I mean, the whole movement really started as a, an attempt to do something about the high agrarian stress in the area. You know, farmer suicide rates are really high and really went ahead of this massive policy decision, not as a sort of love for biodiversity or nature per se, but really sort of As a. Yeah. To do something about this precarious living conditions of the farmers. And sort of now people are starting to do research how that actually impacts biodiversity as well. For sure.
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C
I mean in your case it was the bird populations you were studying. Do you want to tell us how you were studying them?
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A
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, like you said, I had these acoustic recorders because the challenge is. So we wanted to know obviously how the SEPNF program impacts birds. But to do that you don't just want to compare ideally to the conventional farming system but you also want to work in sort of natural habitat baseline to really better understand the sort of potential but also limitations of these, of agroecology programs to improve biodiversity, in this case bird biodiversity outcomes. So we were working in forests. Yeah. Set BNF systems as well as agrochemical systems and identifying birds from visual cues, you know, just seeing them, which is quite easy in the farmland but also in the forest and there, you know, the visibility is very low. So there was mainly identifying birds from.
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C
The calls and the, you know, the yields did not drop significantly but the bird populations did go up significantly.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Suggesting also, you know, the rest of nature is probably thriving as well. Those birds feeding on insect populations that are also rebounding.
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Yeah, yeah. I mean there is obviously a question how good birds are indicators of biodiversity at large. And obviously birds are relatively easy to study compared to other taxa. So you could then probably go into a discussion about you know, like how equitable and like how representative they are of biodiversity respondent large. But we did find for example groups of birds that do feed on insects did increase. So suggesting it would increase your insect population as well.
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B
For sure.
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C
To me what I hope is that it's a success story. It's the world's largest agroecology program as far as I know. Sounds like in Andhra Pradesh. They want to roll it out across the entire province now which as you say has a population the size of Germany. So it's almost unimaginable that Germany sized area of this entirely natural farming approach. And if I understand it correctly it really shows the benefits of not just having tiny little islands because we have organic farming here, but it's about 2 or 3%. It's these tiny little islands surrounded by conventional agriculture. Whereas here in Andhra it's starting to be the other way around. You're actually getting seas of the zero budget. Natural farming.
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A
Yeah, yeah. So I guess it is really quite unique in that sense having this sort of top down structure in place where you have, you know, A district level coordinator to even just a head farmer in every village, you know, demonstrating how this is practiced, encouraging to farmer to adopted, starting potentially only in parts of the land because there is no, it is a high risk to transition to this form of transition in general to a new form of farming. So they're trying to take some of that risk away initially. But having this sort of quite top down approach, having this training in place, really allows of whole villages, you know, farmers to learn from each other and sort of learn together to adopt this new approach. And like I said, especially for birds, these are species that respond to quite larger scales. So to actually see a response, you do really need whole villages, you know, to transition at the same time because, yeah, especially because these farming households are very, very small, you know, these are very small fields. So it wouldn't really do much having just individual farmer transition to that. And which is the challenge with like loads of the sustainable certification schemes, for example Rainforest alliance, which is like the little frog you have and the bananas for example you buy. Often they have the challenges, they have quite strict criteria you need to meet to be part of that scheme. But it's not the same a single farmer in big sea of chemical based farming transitioning to whole villages or whole regions adopting these principles.
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C
So do you think the Science Museum has this contention that this could be the future of food? Which is quite provocative because as you say, it started out as trying to reduce the costs of Indian farmers to help lift them out of poverty, increase their profits. It's this very human centered movement in that way. But the benefits for nature are surprisingly good. So the Science Museum has it up there is, could this be the future of food? What do you think? Is this a model that you want to see being rolled out more widely?
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A
I don't think there's a silver bullet to this. So yes, we should definitely test it. And there has been huge interest by other countries in the global South. They're currently field trials happening in Sri Lanka and Zambia. And I think there is potential, but I think all these solutions, the performance is so dependent on the local socio ecological context. You know, the crops are growing, the wild species you have in the area, the culture of, you know, the society, like social cohesion of the farming community. There's so many factors in place that dictate how sort of successful in a way how a given farming practice is. So be hesitant to say let's roll out BNF everywhere, including in the uk. I think it's very much like we do need to test it and especially so the government affiliated organization that's in charge of rolling out the program. They do encourage farmers to sort of test DSEPIN of practices and adapt them to their particular field the farmers are working with as well. So farmers are encouraged to sort of giving them more agency as well. And also I think definitely agroecology has a place especially in this sort of marginalized smallholder agricultural systems in the tropics. But in other systems it would be very hard to match the yield of conventional high tech, high, you know, high input systems. So I think yeah, it probably won't be suitable in loads of other situations and they're potentially more something like precision agriculture where you sort of use drones to target, where you're applying chemical inputs but trying to lower them through using these technologies. So yeah, I think we should step away from trying to find one single solution that's going to work everywhere but just work out what's going to be suitable in different contexts.
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C
Enormous amounts we can do to reduce the use of pesticides even if we're not eliminating them completely. Even the zero budget natural farming doesn't eliminate them completely. There's still some use of neem oil.
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A
Yes, it's trying to because it started as a social movement. The idea is to really reduce the cost to farmers and so maximize profit. And so farmers are encouraged to use basically locally available ingredients not bought from big agribusinesses and so ending the dependence on them. But that also then can include of neem and chili oil and sort of working that way but not preemptively using it more as a response, you know, how are your pet populations, you know, what's their size, do we need to apply it and in what quantity? So it's a lot more knowledge intensive in that sense.
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C
So the benefits to nature probably partly coming from this shift to organic pesticides that are less harmful but also from the targeted applications where I've seen studies where you can suggesting you can reduce pesticide application by 98% just by targeting it where there's an actual pest problem rather than spraying preemptively, indiscriminately, totally.
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A
And that was the case in Andhra. Like the amount of the agrochemical use beforehand was extremely high because there was a recommended guideline, you know, from the government how much you should be applying. But farmers wouldn't quite know. They would just add a bit more justice in case and just adding way more than is needed which we see.
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C
All over the world.
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A
Yes, definitely.
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C
Tragically, questions from the rest of the panel for Iris.
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E
Yeah. So do you have any. Were you able to study or do you have any hypotheses about why there were these positive effects for bird biodiversity? Like, for example, did it attract birds from the surrounding area or increase their survival, reproduction?
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A
Yeah, I mean, I think it is sort of working out of that trophic escape, you know, the lack, well, of synthetic, you know, pesticide use, increasing the population of insects I think we talked about earlier. And potentially there is also. They're also trying to sort of diversify the cropping system in general, just making, you know.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Having different crops growing at the same time, creating more different habitats, that could be a potential benefit as well. Whether it was more sort of longer survival or longer, I'm not sure. But it was just the activity in general, how you guys. We saw that increase.
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C
So, Karen, I'd like to bring you in here that. I mean, you're a philosopher. You do philosophy of conservation, conservation ethics and that, you know, people might imagine that that means you sit in an armchair reflecting on thought experiments about conservation or something like that. In reality, you know, you work closely with scientists, you've done quite a lot of fieldwork in the Galapagos Islands. Tell us about that and tell us what we can learn from what's been going on in the Galapagos.
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D
Yeah, well, the Galapagos are an exciting place because globally they're billed as one of the biggest conservation successes that exists anywhere. Since the Galapagos national park was formed, there haven't been any extinctions of endemic species. And counting insects and plants and all the other kinds of biodiversity there, it's about 1500 different endemic species across this very small set of islands. So lots to learn thinking about how that kind of success has been achieved and if that kind of success is still possible going forward. A couple. So yes, a couple things that you notice when you start looking at how conservation has been achieved in the Galapagos is one, as was already mentioned by Matt, it involves. Are we swapping?
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A
Yeah, very good.
- [29:57]
D
It involves a lot of killing animals. It just does. And that's a hard truth that has to be reckoned with in pursuing any conservation projects. So, really famously, using guns, Australian snipers from helicopters, using poisons, using all kinds of methods. There's been a lot of attempts to eradicate invasive goats and invasive rats and other invasive mammals from the Galapagos, and that's. It's impossible to imagine that there wouldn't have been species extinctions in the absence of that kind of action over the past several decades, even when it doesn't involve killing. There is also just a lot of hands on, intensive interference in nature. And that is also, it's impossible to imagine these kinds of conservation successes in the absence of that. So there's captive breeding of tortoises, there's hand raising and hand rearing finch chicks in captivity as well in order to save them from fly parasites. The list goes on and on and on. So in some ways that goes against our most intuitive model of conservation, which involves being hands off and leaving nature alone. There really isn't so much leaving nature alone these days, maybe eventually, but only through a pretty high intervention, high intensive pathway, which has a lot of lessons for kind of new technological interventions that people are developing for conservation, things like genetic editing. A lot of us maybe have a quick impulse to think that the more high tech and interventiony something sounds, the more suspicious it is. The evidence from conservation successes doesn't bear that out. Now there are many conservation failures. Conservation hopefully could succeed more than it does. But as a heuristic or a guideline to what does and doesn't work, the fact that involves intervention or a lot of intervention isn't a very good guide. And we should definitely be hesitant of using some intuitive metric of how much interference is involved as a way to assess how likely some kind of intervention is to succeed. So that's one set of interesting lessons from the Galapagos that I think have been kind of raised in various ways by the other speakers here. Another set of lessons I think has to do with thinking about the human population of the Galapagos. Many of us don't even know that there is a permanent human population. 97% of the land area in the Galapagos is a national park where you're not allowed to go without a guide. But even so, there's a permanent population of well over 40,000 people whose livelihoods are almost all based on ecotourism. And the future success of conservation in the Galapagos largely depends on the buy in and the ownership and the activity of the permanent population, as well as people who visit for tourism. And so I really appreciated Iris's points about human centered conservation interventions, or even interventions that start out as being about helping people improve their livelihoods, which also have conservation benefits, as opposed to a more top down imposition of a policy that may or may not be good for people who live up close with the wildlife in their lives and in their communities. So yeah, continuing to think of it as human centered, that's what a lot of the work I have done There has involved working with high school students to do scientific research, training them about natural history and about the scientific research process, and just raising their level of ecological sensitivity while also trying to make sure that the scientific work that's done there gives back to them and to their community, as opposed to just being like yet another resource that's extracted for the interest of people who live far away.
- [33:32]
C
So we will try and make use of the three microphones that do work. I would even suggest probably pushing further away the one that doesn't because it's causing some problems, I think. But yes. So lesson one is about open mindedness, about the effectiveness or otherwise of interventions that we shouldn't think. Our intuitions about what will or will not be effective get us to the truth and we should be ready to perhaps intervene a bit more than we intuitively thought might be needed. And then lesson two is about getting the buy in of local communities being absolutely central. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure these seem like lessons that are cutting across the examples we've heard. I mean, what are the challenges you faced in trying to get that buy in from the local communities?
- [34:21]
D
Part of it has to do with. Well, every, every part of the world has its own special politics. Right. So in the Galapagos there's a special set of politics too. It's a very lucrative money maker for the larger country of Ecuador. And a lot of decisions are made at a level that is maybe a little bit far removed from the on the ground level. So that sort of dynamic, even though the details are different everywhere, still exists in some form or some sense. Everywhere. Yeah, so. So what to do about that kind of a problem? Education, but not in the sense of telling people how things are and how they should do things. Things and how they should change. But education in the sense of making scientific research and monitoring something that is for them as well as for everybody else. So I can imagine with the Net project, for example, Matt, that sort of monitoring, one, it can create jobs for people, which is really, really exciting. But it's also the sort of thing that even when people aren't employed doing it can be really, really rewarding sort of experience. So citizen science is a growing kind of movement in many parts of the world these days because people get a lot out of participating in it, but can also participate. It can produce scientific data that really matters for conservation efforts. Yeah. So growing the opportunities for people to participate because of what it gives to them and also what it gives to the conservation efforts looks like a really promising avenue.
- [35:51]
C
Yeah, I'M pretty sure interested in that question of whether to get the buy in from the local communities. You have to make economic arguments, I suppose, because we heard from Iris about how what gets farmers to sign up to zero budget natural farming is the zero budget bit more than the natural bit. You know, the idea that you can slash your costs, everything you're spending on the synthetic fertilizers can just go. And similarly, this idea that conservation projects great jobs, they bring tourists to the area. But it seems like, Karen, you're also thinking that, well, sometimes it's too reductionist to think that the only way to get those coalitions is through economic arguments that we can appeal to the fact that the local communities also care about knowledge. They care about ethics and value. They care about preserving the intrinsic value of the world around them.
- [36:43]
D
Yeah, and the Galapagos people love the animals that everyone else who comes to visit also love. The sea lions at island of San Cristobal, where I've done a lot of work, are sort of the mascot of the island. People are really excited about these endemic Galapagos sea lions. At the same time, there are conflicts. Sometimes fishermen and sea lions are competing for the same catch. Sometimes sea lions will want to haul out on small fishing boats that are in the harbor and it's difficult to get them to move. So. So, you know, people love sea lions, but sometimes they end up killed or injured because of bits of conflict. So there are often solutions that aren't really about the economic issue. We, for example, spent not even that much money just to create a lot of like floating haul out rafts in the harbor just to create more spots for sea lions to be. So that's a whole class of solutions where the conflict is about resources. But there are ways to just change the configuration of the resources that are available. But beyond that, there is a place, I think, for researchers, for philosophers, for environmentalists to make the case for the value of wildlife that is a bit farther removed from the economic aspect. I'm from the United States. In the United States, a lot of these human wildlife coexistence issues are politicized. People who live in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado have very strong opinions about wolves and bears, especially if they're ranchers. But if as a rancher, a wolf or a bear takes one of your cattle or one of your sheep, you get compensated well above its market value for that take. That doesn't really do much about the deep seated opinions that people have about wolves and bears. It looked like it's much more about a cultural narrative from the 1800s or even earlier about what it is to civilize a wild place. And so there's a place for making the argument about having a different cultural narrative about what are the good things that having bears or wolves or coyotes or badgers around do for you? Helping people see value where they might not have otherwise seen value. And that way, yeah, it goes far beyond the economic, I think.
- [38:48]
C
Is that part of what you're doing at NET as well, Matt? Are you trying to not just make purely economic arguments, but in some way change the narrative around rewilding?
- [38:58]
B
Absolutely, yeah. And I've scribbled down loads of points. I won't go everything that Karen said, but I thoroughly agree with a lot of what she said in that it is about getting people on board with what you're doing in so many different ways, basically. So we have a really thriving education program at NEP bringing in young people. We have Operation Wallacea, which is part of the. Is a global research program program that works in all parts of the world. And they've got. Their only sort of UK base is at NEP in the summer. So we're getting young people involved in that way. Even things like the reintroduction of white storks that we have at nep, that's about inspiring, you know, maybe some child who's never thought about birds in their life, but then they see sort of 80 white storks kettling over the. Over the wildland and suddenly that isn't. That is the key, that's unlocked a lovable nature.
- [39:46]
C
That might be what children must be a crucial part.
- [39:48]
B
It's so important. And Ryan, our Wild Futures manager, he does. That's his. His entire remit is to connect young people, local school groups and all that sort of thing. We have a really great volunteer team now, about 150 to 200 volunteers, and we have a sort of stipulation that they have to be pretty local within a few miles of nep and they. They become ambassadors. They absolutely love what. What we're doing. They get really excited about the stalks or the beavers or whatever it is, and then they will tell people, they communicate all of these messages. They're explaining, as you say, why this is important and why it is actually. It's not just a bit of fun. We're not doing this just because we can. We actually are showing that you can restore nature on a really significant scale and as you say, all of the benefits that that can bring. And a huge part of that is people. It's about people well, being people come to NEP and tell me that it's a sort of transformative experience. You know, people haven't experienced. I haven't experienced that kind of wildness in the south of England until I discovered nep. It is like being in somewhere far wilder, somewhere you imagine you have to go abroad to experience, basically. And that is really special to understand that we can get that back and that actually we're spreading that positive message.
- [41:03]
C
It's a good philosophical way of putting it as well. Transformative experience. I like that. So we've, we've heard some grounds for hope. You know, we've heard about rewilding and regenerative farming, building coalitions with local communities to recognize the value of what is around them. Soon it will be time to turn to your questions. First turn to you, Luke, and the Wild Animal Initiative. Well, this is interesting in, in lots of ways, right? I mean, tell us what the, what the initiative is doing and how it's trying to change the way people think about the way we relate to wild nature.
- [41:37]
E
Sure, yeah. So Wild Animal Initiative is an organization that's all about accelerating science to understand what wild animals lives are like and what we might be able to do to improve their lives. I probably represent a few. A fairly different approach to all of this, although I think we come to similar conclusions because I don't believe that biodiversity is valuable in it for its own sake at all. But I do value biodiversity to the extent that it benefits wild animals. And I think that's an empirical question that requires a lot more science than. Than we currently have. So Jonathan has mentioned hope a couple times and we're talking about biodiversity crisis. Where I see hope in that is an opportunity to do better for wild animals and not just better than what we have done, which has long before the 21st century or even industrialization has not been good for them, certainly has not been compassionate towards them. But to actually do better than nature even, and others have talked about the need to potentially intervene, you know, even setting up rafts for sea lions to rest on. So I'm actually quite enthusiastic about the potential of rewilding with that in mind. Thinking about what wild animals need out of their environment and how they navigate it and everything. And trying to, you know, not only build cities better, but build the landscapes better. But before we get to that stage, we have to, yeah, do a lot more research, basically. And that's a lot of what Wild down wanted to is working on.
- [43:39]
C
Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of ideas we should unpack There. I mean, obviously, if you say you don't think biodiversity matters, that sounds. Yeah. What you mean is you don't think it matters intrinsically.
- [43:50]
E
Yes.
- [43:50]
C
You think what matters is the experiences of animals as they live their lives. Right. So we can talk about the biodiversity of the plaque on our teeth. You know, we can talk about biodiversity of bacteria, but we normally think there's something quite small special about the biodiversity we have. We see in populations of larger animals roaming across the plains and, you know, the mammoths and the elephants and so on. And there's an behind that. There's this intuition about, I think, sentience, you know, the fact that those larger animals have subjective experiences. They can feel pleasure, they can feel pain, they can enjoy their lives. This is what creates a strong sense. Sense that that is really something that matters and needs conserving much more than the bacteria on our teeth. And I think that's. I probably even agree with that because it does mean certain kinds of biodiversity do matter.
- [44:49]
B
Right, right.
- [44:50]
E
Yeah. So, as you said, I'm speaking intrinsically. So I value the welfare of wild animals intrinsically because they, you know, because. And to the extent that they value their lives, like I value my life, I value biodiversity to the extent that it brings benefits to wild animals and also to humans as fellow animals.
- [45:14]
C
Does it give you. We're talking about how that perspective, which, as I say, you know, I like as a perspective, leads you to take different views on specific interventions. So one of the ideas there was that we don't have to see nature as our baseline. Sometimes we can actually do better because we can give the animals less suffering in their lives than they would have otherwise experienced in the wild. And you mentioned the sea lion platforms. What are your favorite examples of interventions that you think might actually improve on the sort of wild baseline?
- [45:48]
E
Yeah, I mean, I have extremely low confidence in all this because as I said, there needs to be a lot more research into even how to measure wild animal welfare.
- [45:56]
C
Speculations.
- [45:57]
E
Yeah, yeah. So I'm generally. So wildlife fertility control is something I'm very interested in, you know, in the first place. Maybe using that to help manage populations of animals that we currently consider pests mainstream.
- [46:17]
C
With stray dogs. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Iris probably in India, you probably noticed significant numbers of stray dogs and there's these big moves to sterilize the dogs to try and control the population. And it's an intervention. It's clearly an intervention that has all kinds of benefits.
- [46:35]
E
Yeah, yeah. I guess one other thing to say about interventions and how that fits the biodiversity Crisis is the fact that what it means to be a wild animal is constantly kind of like, eroding.
- [46:51]
C
Maybe you could make the argument that no animal is truly wild anymore because every, every part of nature is in reality, under human control. Even, even the national parks, Even the bits we call wilderness.
- [47:04]
E
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
- [47:07]
A
Yeah.
- [47:07]
E
I mean, at Wild Animal Initiative, kind of operationally, we think of wild animals as any animal who is beyond, like, direct human care. And I think the care part is important because we are affecting wild animals on such a large scale, but we aren't generally doing it with any concern for their welfare. And so that that means that it's not just exotic animals, but it can also be. Well, certainly all of the feral animals, like feral pigeons, foxes. Yeah. But it generally, with other interventions I'm excited about, it's kind of more from principles of wanting to identify what the major threats to wild animals welfare are.
- [48:03]
C
Some of them are very much the same as the threats of our debate. Yes, things that make animals miserable and make them suffer. Same kind of things that are wiping.
- [48:12]
E
Away for the most part. But one area where that might come apart, for example, is sometimes in conservation modeling, do these demographic sensitivity analyses to determine, like, what life stage of an animal it's best to intervene in where you have the most leverage to increase their population size. That might be, like, adult or juvenile or, like, their reproduction or their survival. And you can do that for population size. But in principle, if we have an idea of what their welfare is like through their life or in different contexts, because the challenges and opportunities they face will change through their life, there might be parts of their life history that are especially high leverage where we can act there to kind of meet their needs, and that. That might lead to a larger population. I think it probably would, though it might not be the same stage that you would target if you're just focused on biodiversity. Yeah.
- [49:28]
C
I mean, do you want to give an example of that? Are you sort of thinking that, well, you know, a lot of the suffering might be in very young, young animals? Yeah, yeah.
- [49:36]
E
So I have a big soft spot for bears. And if you, you know, typically, if you imagine what it's like to be a bear in the wild, you picture an adult, like, going about the life they've evolved to live. But if you were to be born as a bear, even in a species as formidable and with such famous parental care, you still have, like a 50, 50 chance of surviving your first year of life. And if you're purely taking a biodiversity approach, you would look at that. Again, a bear is a generous example. If you're thinking about many fish or insects or lots of other animals, it would be a trivial percentage that make it through their first year. Taking a pure biodiversity or conservation perspective in this modeling framework, you would look at that and say, okay, there's not much point in improving survival or welfare of those individuals because they will die for all of these reasons anyway. So we should instead improve the survival rate of ones who make it to adulthood. But because the, the odds of making it to adulthood in the first place are so low, I think if, if you were to imagine yourself being born, born into this species, you would probably wish that those conservationists were thinking about, like, early life challenges. And so that's one of the things we try to pay attention to.
- [51:05]
C
Pretty fascinating. Yeah. So it leads you to think that mainstream conservation science might have an adult bias. Yeah, but far more visible. They're often the examples that come to mind when we think about these animals. But often the biggest survival challenges, the highest mortality rates and the younger animals, I mean, presumably these issues must come up at net. Probably a lot of calves don't make it to that.
- [51:30]
B
Yeah, I mean, there's loads of points, again, that Luke made that I was going to pick up on, and one being the idea of what is wild and what is not wild. And as I said at the beginning, it's really interesting how when people come on a tour at net, they're kind of just as excited to see their first turtle dove as they are to see a pig roaming wild. You know, and then there's that interesting conversation around why we don't have wild boar, you know, why we won't tolerate wild boar in the uk. And one of the arguments that is used against it is there are no proper wild boar because they're all so sort of semi domesticated and we have sort of feral pigs. You know, it's funny that we use that as a kind of argument against it, when in fact, the animal, whether it's a Tamworth pig or a true wild boar or somewhere in between, it's still functioning, doing the same thing. So just from the animal's point of view, and it's living a fantastic life, let's be honest, the animals that we have at net, the pigs and everything else, they are, I, I said to a colleague the other day, I wonder if they realize how lucky they are. You know, you see these Tamworth pigs roaming around and foraging, and they've got hundreds and hundreds of acres and there's a pig farm down the road from me, where there's hundreds and hundreds, you know, within a relatively small pigs, I mean, in a relatively small area. And I sort of think I want if those animals know, because they have never had experience of anything else. But it is really interesting how people, when you get people in that landscape, they're just as excited by all of it and it doesn't matter to them that, oh, that's actually just like a farm animal, essentially, because it's living in a wild setting and it's doing what it would naturally do. But yeah, absolutely, from a welfare perspective, all of these things come up all the time. As I said at the beginning, the welfare of the animals, be it something we've reintroduced, like a beaver or a stork or the cattle and everything else, the sort of driving elements, the welfare is always paramount and we're always thinking of that. And actually, in fact, with reintroduction project more broadly, you know, there is a set of guidelines now that you adhere to. The IUCN has a sort of rule book, if you like, of what you must do in terms of, you know, we're looking at things like black vein, white butterfly at the moment, and even when we're looking at butterfly, there are huge long lists of what we can and can't do and what is the best outcome for transporting those insects to bring them to the uk. So it's very much on our minds all the time in all aspects of what we do.
- [53:43]
C
It would be good to bring in Karen on these issues because in the Galapagos you see some of these tensions, I'm sure, where if you adopt the point of view Luke was advocating that the animals pointed is what is what really matters here. Things like whether a species is invasive or indigenous from the animals point of view, they're not sensitive to that. You could argue that shouldn't really matter that much, whereas in mainstream conservation science, of course, it matters enormously. We don't want these islands to be full of finches having good lives. We specifically want these finches. We want the species that exist now to continue to exist in the future and not be displaced by invasive species. So that's a big ethical issue, isn't it?
- [54:27]
D
It is. And I think there is room to question two pretty central ideas in conservation on the grounds of the kinds of concerns that Luke has raised. One is the extent to which invasive species are really always so bad in the first place, and then the second one is some of the ways that we decide how to differentiate one species from another. Because an incredible amount of Time and money and other animals lives are expended on the determination that these 14 or 18 species of finch really are different species. And depending on how you want to slice and dice the genetics or which species concept you want to use, you really could come to different conclusions about how many different finch species there really are. It comes back to the question of the value of biodiversity. Biodiversity is a very convenient catch all for talking about what we value in nature. But in fact there are many different aspects of biodiversity, many different proxies and depending on which one you choose, it will lead you to want to take different sorts of conservation actions. So there is a real. Yeah. Debate that has to be had head on. About what, what we value, how we decide which things are different enough from one another and why we value things as opposed to it's a different species, it must be conserved at all costs. No more questions to be asked. Similar with the invasive species. Lots of invasive species cause harms to humans or to other animals, but not all of them do. And rather than have it be sort of a knee jerk reaction that we always try to control invasive species, whether or not that's even possible, there's a lot of room to rethink under what conditions we would want to try to eradicate or control an invasive or a non native population.
- [56:11]
C
Huge in Australia and New Zealand as well, isn't it? You get these debates about predator free New Zealand, whether everything invasive can realistically be removed. Yeah. So yeah, huge issues. And if you're like the LSE and you're trying to establish a global school of sustainability, these are exactly the kinds of defense debates. We need to be having different viewpoints, we need to be being represented. It would be great at this point to turn to questions from the audience, be questions about anything. We've been discussing, we've been discussing rewilding, regenerative farming, building coalitions with local communities, how to handle trade offs between welfare and other conservation goals like keeping out invasive species. I think there will be a roving microphone. Please wait for the microphone microphone to come to you so that the online audience can hear your question. Questions from the online audience are also really welcome too and we will, we will take some of those later. Let's go, let's go over here with the microphone. I think there's two microphones.
- [57:09]
B
Yes.
- [57:09]
C
Okay, thank you.
- [57:12]
D
Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE iq Ask social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question like why do People believe in conspiracy theories or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for lseiq wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the event.
- [57:40]
B
Hi.
- [57:41]
D
Thank you. So, I have a question for the.
- [57:44]
B
Panel and I would like you to.
- [57:45]
D
To kind of like bring us back to the reason why we're here tonight.
- [57:49]
B
So I would like you to consider.
- [57:50]
D
What you know and what you're passionate about.
- [57:53]
B
And I was wondering if you can.
- [57:54]
D
Share with us, the audience, maybe not.
- [57:56]
B
A prescriptive recipe, but a reflection of.
- [57:59]
D
Actions that could be an invitation for.
- [58:02]
B
Thought or maybe palpable things that we.
- [58:04]
D
Can do for wildlife and that we can impact Britain today. So can you give us that inside?
- [58:13]
A
From all the things that you have.
- [58:14]
B
Done and learned and been exposed to.
- [58:16]
D
What can we do today to improve wildlife?
- [58:20]
C
Concrete actions today? I mean, let's allow tomorrow as well. It's quite late today. Come on, what can we do right now, Harris?
- [58:27]
A
Go vegan. Maybe a bit controversial. No, but drastically reduce the amount of animal products you consume because the amount of land that's used to produce food that's then used, that's then consumed by animals is huge. I mean, we could free up so much land that could be rewilded, obviously. Yeah. In the cockroach room. So I think considering how much animal products you eat, you could have a potentially huge impact on how much land we have for conservation and especially considering also where your products are coming from. So a bit controversial, but I think we should also consider. Well, I think you said earlier that there are some people that bit critical of thinking about what are the trade offs with other land uses and obviously food production is a huge thing and there's a potential that we're just focusing restoring biodiversity here. Are we offshoring food production somewhere else and areas that are far more biodiverse. Obviously that's not happening at a scale right now. But just something to bear in mind that trade offs are very common and yeah, we should consider these in actions in daily lives.
- [59:36]
D
Shall we go down the line?
- [59:37]
E
Yeah.
- [59:38]
D
Well, some of you will have land or gardens, others of you will live in communities that have parks. But there's always opportunities to learn how to make whatever land you have some influence over be better habitat for wild animals. So unless and until there's 30% of the the UK and other places that really look like we rewilded spaces. There's so many gradients along the way, so what that looks like in a particular place will always be different. But it's an exciting project to Learn about how any of the land that you have any influence over could be made more friendly to animals that aren't humans.
- [60:10]
C
You can rewild your garden.
- [60:12]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [60:12]
C
Just not mow the grass.
- [60:15]
B
Yeah. There's two points, two great points, which I probably was going to make myself. I would say, thinking at it from a more of like an engagement point of view. If you love nature, which I guess most of you in this room do, and you have a passion for conserving wildlife, give that passion to someone else and kind of communicate that to someone else because you double the impact, basically, if you're, you know, as I do with my friends, always banging on about birds and other wildlife and all these messages that we've been talking about some night you're increasing the, you know, the outreach, basically by telling someone about it.
- [60:51]
C
You're not a sort of pro vegan business. There must be some disagreement there with Iris on that one.
- [60:57]
B
Yes and no. I mean, yeah, obviously we do produce meat. But it's a really interesting point what you make about, you know, the just slight reduction. I mean, even when we look at the Ukraine invasion a few years ago, you've probably all heard this statistic of about 8% of the global wheat production was what was reduced at that point of the invasion, Russian invasion. And that sort of would be balanced out in Europe if everyone just sort of went meat free one day a week, you know, that deficit. So, yeah, and that's 8%, you know, and you think, what could we do with that land that then is being used to produce essentially food for livestock? So I. Yeah, we're not, because we produce meat, we're not saying everyone needs to go vegan, but absolutely. Reducing meat intake, reduce cataria, as people say. Absolutely. Yeah.
- [61:43]
E
Well, first I'd agree with Iris and going vegan, but yeah, since they haven't gotten mentioned yet, watch where you step. Also looking out for small animals like insects and snails in your path and I think generally, especially if you have a garden, something thinking about head how animals navigate the landscape you create. Like if you have a feeder out, maybe even having it near bushes so that they feel maybe safer from predators, have some sort of COVID help improve their lives.
- [62:16]
C
Wonderful question. Yeah, let's take another one. Let's go to the front row here.
- [62:20]
E
Next.
- [62:22]
B
Andrew Ross from Global Garden. It's arguable that the lack of any financial value for biodiversity has caused its catastrophic decline.
- [62:38]
C
We can see here in the UK.
- [62:42]
B
An attempt with biodiversity net gain to bring some kind of value. But look, the first, the Finance market knows this immediately. The global insurance industry is committing between 8 and 10 trillion dollars to find nature based solutions which underpins the whole economy of the world. The question is, and I directly to ufo, are you producing natural capital accounts that are tangible and readable by pension funds, asset managers and insurers? Yes, is the short answer. Yeah, we just launching a biodiversity net gain project at the moment as we speak. The wild land as we call it, the actual existing rewilding project isn't, doesn't qualify because it's been going for 25 years, but we have an area of the estate which is the tenancy on that has recently ended. It was actually a polo ground and we've got some areas of woodland as well which are now going into biodiversity net gain. So yes, and what we're using that as an opportunity for as well is kind of almost stretching the metric, the BNG metric, which is, you know, pretty formulaic and limited to, to what you can do in more of a kind of rewilding context. So myself and my colleague, the other ecologist, we've been working with our head of natural capital, so we actually have someone in post at NEP who works specifically on these things to try and shape that project into something that is more akin to rewilding, albeit with the biodiversity metric. Using that framework. We've also recently had a wildland carbon report produced last year which was based on research done looking at the carbon storage in the wildland. So Nancy Burrell, who's the daughter of the owners of nep, she did a load of this research doing core sampling of the roots of scrubland plants to understand what that sort of root to shoot ratio is. Because a lot of the models, things like the eye tree model, which is sort of modeling the root to shoot ratio of carbon storage, massively undervalues what is actually being stored in scrub. And what Nancy and her team found is that actually we've got significantly more sort of four times more carbon storage going on in the scrubland and that is massive in itself because then we're not, you know, we're changing the messaging on not planting trees, not bringing in lorry loads of trees that you're planting and in, in the process you're releasing carbon. In doing that, you can actually let landscapes naturally regenerate, which is better for the biodiversity, better for the wildlife, but it's also storing a lot of carbon as well. So that can then feed into things like the voluntary carbon market as well.
- [65:39]
C
That question of how you change investor behavior is so crucial, isn't it? It's great that you're already thinking about that. Let's take a question from the second row this time. Middle of the second row. And here comes the microphone.
- [65:52]
B
Thank you very much. Fascinating presentations. Thank you so much. I'd like to bring us back to specifically saving Britain's wildlife, and we are at London School of Economics and Political Science. My question relates to the current government's policies and changing of the planning landscape, where organisations like the RSP running big campaigns, lobbying to try and prevent some of these changes and the impact on Britain's wildlife. I don't know the answer to that.
- [66:29]
C
But the need for housing, which is.
- [66:32]
B
A human intervention and human need against other land uses and wildlife, I think is a very topical current issue and I just wonder if at least some of the panel might have a view on that.
- [66:45]
C
Yeah, it's a great question. I'm sure this is very personal to you.
- [66:50]
B
Yeah, absolutely. We were chatting about this in the green room beforehand, of this constant threat of development, particularly in Sussex, where we are. And actually, one of the examples Rachel Reeves, I think, gave in a recent speech was very much relevant to the NEP area and the Arun Valley, which is nearby, which is heavily designated for all sorts of reasons, but particularly a tiny snail, which is only present at about four sites in Britain. And Rachel Reeves rather sort of dismissively said, oh, why are we not building 10,000 houses here because of some little snail that no one's seen? But again, it's all about that messaging of saying, well, these corridors, these areas, even if we're not talking about one individual species, we've got to try and protect these corridors. That is very much relevant to NEP. We've had a threat of recently of 4,000 houses right on the edge of NEP. You know, we're not. Obviously, we understand that we need to have houses, people need to have places to live. It's about making sure we're influencing where these things are going in a sensible place, not putting them right next to a massive rewilding project which is cutting off that possibility of connecting NEP with our neighbouring sites. You know, because NEP is, for all its sort of biodiversity brilliance, it is hemmed in by Georgia Carriageway. We've got pretty big town of Horsham nearby. You know, it's closing in. So what we're trying to do is try and say we need to keep those corridors open for wildlife to be able to move through the landscape.
- [68:12]
C
It's infuriating, isn't it, because it's one thing to acknowledge that there's a serious, difficult trade off. We might sometimes end up thinking that development takes priority. We heard about in India, so many people live in poverty, there's obviously a need to lift them out of poverty. But then to just mock the seriousness of protecting snails as if it was a kind of joke issue, that's exasperating.
- [68:39]
B
Yeah, massively, yeah. I mean, with the kind of work I do, it's why I do what I do is literally protecting and preserving wildlife and trying to make it better and try and turn around the declines and the damage that's been done. And as you say, when you've got a government minister sort of saying, oh, I don't care about bats, we just want more roads and houses. It's. It's frustrating. It's a battle.
- [69:00]
E
Just on the topic of connectivity, I think there definitely needs to be a lot more research, as I keep saying, about wild animal welfare, but I think habitat fragmentation and the problem with that is one area where, again, concern for wild animal welfare and concern might overlap, because if you are basically fragmentation is really hard to adapt to. Like, it's hard to adapt to avoid getting hit by a car or something that's totally alien to the evolutionary history of an animal. And it seems there's some evidence that what this ends up selecting for is a strategy of just producing more, less fit offspring that are probably living worse lives. And so, you know, if we're going to build more houses and things like that, being strategic about it to ensure habitat connectivity might also be valuable for wild animal welfare in the long term.
- [70:02]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [70:04]
B
I'm just going to make a quick point on that, actually. One of the questions I get at NEP all the time is about hares. For some reason, people expect to see hares because they are in Sussex. And I always say the nearest population is up on the South Downs. So it's about five miles south of nep. I was actually driving through a nearby village the other week and I saw a squashed hare on the road. I mean, the amount of collateral, the amount of dead animals on the roads encircling NEP is absolutely horrific. And I wonder if it's sort of increased, actually, because we are such a hot spot in the middle of it and stuff's trying to get in and out and it's is just being squashed. In fact, we had some of our team did a sort of sponsored walk last year where they crossed. They did this corridor across Sussex, what we call the Wheel to Waves corridor, which is this Vision for a sort of connected landscape. And some of our team actually walked it to sort of raise funds for the project and they said one of the most terrifying moments of that entire walk was crossing the dual carriageway next to Neb. And that's, you know, as a human with all of the sort of intellect that we have to understand traffic. If you can imagine that, as you say as a wild animal, there's just huge numbers of them being not making it in and out.
- [71:10]
C
Basically. There's a lot of solutions out there. I've seen in Canada these green bridges across motorways and tunnels. Yeah, we could do this here.
- [71:22]
B
Yeah. There are projects looking at that that is quite expensive.
- [71:28]
C
So the question from. Three rows from the back there. Thank you. Brilliant talk. I've got a question about the Uttar Pradesh project and you talked about the opposition you have to rewilding in the UK from industrial agriculture and conventional farming and I wonder how it is in India and sometimes in the UK that's also linked to the media and obviously it's very political And I wonder how much pushback you get from global industrial agriculture for agroecology generally.
- [72:03]
A
So wait, sorry, that was against pushback by big agrib businesses? There is some, but I think it's more about. From the government. I think they're more concerned. Concerned that agri, while this said BNF program is not grounded enough in science or like because it originated by basically someone who was more like on the spiritual side of things and wanted to talk about more holistic farming and. And I think because of this origin that it was sort of more that space rather than of as a. Something that originated by, you know, research the university. I think that's more of concern that yeah, the government is not taking said BNF seriously in that sense and it's really not pushing hard that they want that evidence. You know, like yeah, people doing experiments and it's really generating rigorous evidence that is actually delivering on food and yes livelihood outcomes. I don't think it's quite. I mean I think India's big in general and I think that still didn't know they still have a big market to sell the products and there are still a lot of, you know, people following, you know, using agrochemicals and the practices. So don't think it's. It's. It's not yet the pushback wouldn't say by the business isn't huge. It's more sort of, I guess more political thing and different parties taking different stance, especially you know, the opponents. The government that wasn't in charge of rolling out this program, you know, being very critical of said bnf. I think. I think there's more conflict in that political space than the pushback by the private sector necessarily.
- [73:44]
C
They've been very clever. It seems to me that the zero budget natural farming people, because they try to go with the grain of Indian culture and religion and, you know, emphasize the sacredness of the cow and the cow dung as fertilizer and the history of using products like neem oil and extracting everything from the local area in the way that farmers thousands of years ago would have done. So politically, that seems very canny, you know, to tie it to patriotism and spirituality in that way.
- [74:14]
B
Yeah.
- [74:14]
A
But then obviously there's also the movement, you know, like, I mean, Modi is obviously a power of India at the moment and sort of actually taking India forward, you know, it's like sort of becoming new hub for technology and big business and actually getting. Staying away from this sort of, you know, peasant farming and just taking more.
- [74:30]
C
Sort of competing visions of what India is, is exactly holding up as this historic method of farming as being the Indian way versus the push to industrialize and copy the West.
- [74:42]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [74:43]
B
Yeah.
- [74:44]
C
Great. Okay, let's have a question. Let's have from three. Three rows back here.
- [74:48]
E
Yeah.
- [74:49]
C
And then we'll go back.
- [74:50]
D
Hello.
- [74:51]
B
Full disclosure, I'm Luke's wife.
- [74:53]
A
But the question isn't just for Luke. The question is for everybody.
- [74:58]
B
What do you think it's like to.
- [75:00]
A
Be an animal from a species that's going extinct? Do you think it's a bad welfare experience? Do you think there could be a.
- [75:08]
B
Welfare argument for preventing extinction because it's just really bad to go extinct or do the animals not care?
- [75:13]
D
Thank you very much.
- [75:15]
B
Yeah.
- [75:15]
C
What a question we should do. We should exclude Luke from conflict of interest.
- [75:23]
D
There's probably different answers for different animals, but it's hard to imagine. It's not pretty bad to be an animal that's part of a species that's going extinct. If you're a social animal, then you might miss out on all kinds of social ties. And it looks like more animals have social lives than we've previously appreciated. Maybe because we haven't been asking the right kinds of questions. I was thinking of shark and snake researchers that I know who are all about how sharks and snakes have social bonds and they're important to them, but that's just something that we're only starting to look into, so. Yeah, but even beyond that, if a species is going extinct, it's because the conditions are pretty bad. And so even setting aside all the other conspecifics you might have, there's going to be all kinds of things that are probably going to make for many animals their lives worse. And so, yeah, tons of common ground here.
- [76:09]
A
Yeah.
- [76:10]
C
But I'm sure we all agree it can also be very, very bad to be an individual in a species that is incredibly numerous, like the broiler chickens in intensive farming conditions.
- [76:22]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [76:22]
D
I was thinking while you were speaking, Luke. Yeah. Surely none of us would say if preserving biodiversity made the lives of many, many animals worse, that we did still be so committed to doing it. Like, implicit in our ideas about preserving biodiversity is the idea that it's also good for animals. And then you raise this question about, well, how often is that true or how often are we taking actions to preserve biodiversity in a way that's actually good for animals? And it really just, it pulls on this thing that so many of us assume that actually still needs to be supported. And I think that's so interesting and so helpful because it's a big pillar of why we care about biodiversity. We care about it for many reasons, but that is for sure a necessary aspect of why we think it's important.
- [77:04]
C
It's a real, I think, really extremely interesting. Yeah, I mean, the whole deep ecology movement, as it's called, is absolutely about valuing the richness and biodiversity of nature. So it's deliberately centering that rather than centering the individual animal and its experiences, which is quite a different tradition in philosophy. Huge amounts of alignment between these traditions. But yeah, it's good to have that critical pressure, isn't it? If you value diversity, why is that? Is it because of what the animals experience? Yeah, let's. Okay, let's go to the second row from the back.
- [77:40]
D
Thank you so much. A bit of a futuristic question, so maybe for Dr. Karen Kaka. I just read an article recently. There's millions and millions being spent on. On trying to bring back from extinction things like mammoths and dodo birds. And do you think these are sort of massive vanity projects for a bunch of tech bros, or do you think there's something noble to that pursuit in the way of undoing some of the damage we've done? I'm so glad you asked this question. Yes, Colossal Biotech is the culprit behind this latest. People have called the mammoth de extinction a publicity stunt and that seems not inaccurate to me. So what's good about this kind of technology? There are lots of good things about it. It connects to things like biobanks and frozen zoos. Like one imagines that life for humans and animals may get quite a bit worse before it gets better. And if we were able to have biological samples frozen and preserved through time that we could use in future captive breeding or reintroduction projects, that seems super important and super, super valuable. So there is an aspect to this technology that seems like it shows how much we care about the future if we're willing to invest in it. On the other hand, the dire wolves, the mammoths, they are not in any interesting sense a, you know, a revived, now non extinct species. It's not clear that the lives of the dire wolves are going to be all that good. And there's just all kinds of funny business going on. So one of these dire wolves is named Khaleesi and she's billed as a female. This takes us deep into questions about how to define these kinds of things. Khaleesi doesn't have a uterus, for example, because it's just not how they did the, the gene edits. And so we're so far from being for it being the kind of thing that it's supposed to be. The one of the newer projects Colossal is thinking about is like Raptor Dinosaur de extinctions. It's because it's for kids, it's to get them excited about it. Right? It's, it's, it's clearly a for profit motive. Like the specific ways they're trying to deploy and use the technology. It's not coming out of the other kinds of, of conservation motives. And yet of course, they want to capitalize on all the kinds of conservation motives. So while we should be excited about the potential for biodiversity preservation that some of these technologies have, we should be so critical of the way that they're being talked about and rolled out and used for other kinds of purposes.
- [80:20]
C
So, Jackie, do you have questions from the online audience? If so, please read one of them out. The microphone will come to you.
- [80:30]
A
Why is there general acceptance amongst conservationists for culling deer in Western contexts, while there is a strong opposition to elephant culling or regulated safari hunting in African nature reserves, even when both are aimed at managing overpopulation and ecological balance?
- [80:51]
C
That's a good one. I mean, obviously deer culling is. Because that means you would also defend the trophy hunting in Africa.
- [81:03]
B
No, no, not necessarily, no, but it population control in the absence of something that was there before. And I think you've got to think on scale. You know, this is. We talked a lot tonight about sort of projects of different scales. And when we're talking about NEP is 5 square miles, it's a pretty small, it's a tiny bit of land really. And in a global context, people think it's pretty big. In an English context, I wouldn't mind having that amount of land. But when you've got the kind of numbers of deer that we have and we don't have any predators, then the control of them is important for their own welfare and also for the way the landscape is shaped by what they're doing. Because if you have thousands and thousands of them, it would look very, very different. It is that sort of idea of the human playing an apex predator. It's also important though not to. And I think some of us touched on this earlier, but that idea about deer being sort of, you know, oh, it's a problem that needs to be solved. You know, deer belong in the landscape, they deserve to be there. You know, and we're not, we're very careful with our messaging not to say, you know, the deer are an issue that needs to be solved. It's just about controlling the, the numbers in terms of what is healthy for the population.
- [82:11]
C
Yeah. Any other thoughts on this? It's quite interesting because the whole, you know, trophy hunting is extremely strongly condemned usually in discussions. I think the question is quite interesting.
- [82:25]
A
Yeah, I think trophy hunting in general, I mean personally I'm a Paul bed and I don't understand why you want to do it. But at the same time I think we do need to give the local communities, you know, give the decision making to them. If this is like the only way for them to generate income and otherwise that land would be used maybe to convert it to agriculture or something else and like you wouldn't sustain any sort of wildlife. So I think we need to be a bit careful about sort of immediate demonizing it. But and to think a bit more about not as, you know, stepping away from Myers of Western scientist role and just thinking about what do local communities want. And yeah, in some situations, in some communities, and that's one, it's been quite, quite a successful conservation models because otherwise I don't think it would be income stream because obviously trophy hunters do pay a lot more than your, you know, typical ecotourist. So I think, yeah, we do need to be able to think about who's making the decision and maybe it should be more than local communities rather than us as western societies.
- [83:28]
C
Tough question.
- [83:29]
B
Yeah.
- [83:30]
C
I guess in this country we don't want to be seen to be doing anything to Promote it or to create an industry. So our role is kind of complex.
- [83:38]
B
It's actually a question we've had at NEP as well, around the control of the deer and whether we would sort of, you know, use that as a money making opportunity. And we've shied away from doing that because of the controversy and also because we have a trained team of stalkers who then are doing it properly, you know. And that again is always coming back to the welfare of the animal. We wouldn't want to put that at risk. And it just wouldn't sit right with the whole messaging of what we're doing at Net to have people sort of coming in and doing it for sports essentially.
- [84:05]
C
Okay, Is that a second one from online? Okay, so any more questions from in the room? There are over this side of the room. Yeah, we haven't been over there yet. It's to take the question from this side.
- [84:19]
D
Great.
- [84:22]
A
Thank you. So going back to kind of when we were talking about the fragmentation of natural habitats and the importance of having green corridors. So I work in urban planning and do you think that there's still value in trying to bring wildlife back into cities or do you think that we should be focusing our efforts outside of cities? Thanks.
- [84:48]
E
Yeah, I mean, as always, I'm sort of unsure of that. It depends on how they're brought back into cities. I don't think the fact that they used to live in a city and this would apply for any sort of rewilding.
- [85:02]
C
Sorry.
- [85:04]
E
Is in itself enough of a reason to be bring them back. But if. Yeah, it depends on whether we can provide good habitat for them. We think they would live good lives. But related to the habitat fragmentation part, I definitely think there's a big.
- [85:25]
C
Role.
- [85:25]
E
For thinking about urban planning there, especially for smaller animals, like, I mean even as large as foxes, for example, how they cross roads. But, but rodents, even like snails crossing paths. I, I constantly see on small scales like a verge of green space, very thin by the road set between like larger green space than the sidewalk, then a small green strip in the road. And I feel like again, this requires more research, but I feel like that's sort of creating a trap for like invertebrates, attracting them to make this dangerous journey across the sidewalk for not very much reward of food and stuff like that. So yeah, I think that's a good area to explore.
- [86:18]
C
Okay, well, this has been absolutely fantastic. Thanks to all of you for your excellent questions and let's thank our panel for all of their answers.
- [86:33]
A
Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events podcast on your favourite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.ukevents to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.