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Rewilding Earth Podcast
Episode 163: Steve Carver on the Challenges of Implementing Rewilding Goals Across Fragmented Geographic, Cultural, and Political Landscapes
00:43:04
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Ecological restoration is human led, nature enabled. So in other words, it's us using nature based approaches to achieve a particular outcome. And whether if that's restoration of coral reef or it's river restoration or whatever, we're using nature based solutions to achieve a particular desired outcome. Rewilding flips that on its head and we say that rewilding is nature led, human enabled. So it's nature determining its own ecological trajectory and it's us having the humility and the foresight to actually give it the space and indeed the time to allow it to do that. So we don't have a set outcome from rewilding. It's an open ended process in that respect. It.
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You're listening to the Rewilding Earth podcast. I'm your host, Jack Humphrey. What does rewilding mean on a global scale and how do we implement rewilding projects across a wide variety of different geographic, cultural and political constraints? To guide us through this intricate landscape is Dr. Steve Carver, a professor from the University of Leeds School of Geography and the co chair of IUCN's Rewilding Thematic Group. For nearly a decade, Steve and his colleagues have led a global effort on behalf of the IUCN to define what rewilding actually is. The result is a landmark paper, Guiding Principles for Rewilding and Conservation Biology and the new Comprehensive IUCN Guidelines.
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It's a discussion about scale, connectivity, coexistence.
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And the ultimate hopeful future of wildness.
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We begin with Steve giving us some.
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Background to lay the foundation for today's conversation.
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A
We produced a paper back in 2021 which has got quite a lot of traction. It was called Guiding Principles for Rewilding Conservation Biology. And there's some big names on that paper, not just in Europe, North America, but elsewhere. Yeah, that set out 10 guiding principles for rewilding and a definition. And it came off the back of a request from the iucn, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and that's made up of a series of pillars and it was the for ecosystem management that asked us to set up a rewilding task force to really kind of bottom out what rewilding is about, you know, come up with an attempt anyway, at least a unifying definition and a set of guiding principles. And so that's what we did. You know, that was based around a survey of some of the leading names, thinkers on rewilding and pioneers, a survey of the principles that had been already written down by a bunch of organizations that were doing rewilding and then a whole series of workshops. And I think we reached out to well over 100 people and organizations in coming up with the definition and the principles. And that's kind of rolled over into the document that was published last month that the World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi, which is this, you know, guidelines for rewilding document. So, yeah, it's been a long time coming. It's kind of eight years in the making. We're now a rewilding thematic group, so we're now permanent. And just, you know, before we lose sight of the fact, you know, I'm here with you today, which is great, but there's a whole bunch of other people behind this. You know, my colleagues in the CAR group of the rewilding thematic group, but all of the people that contributed. You know, I'm just, I'm just a, I'm just a secretary in many senses of the word and I get my name on the paper first.
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C
You're too humble. And the first question that I really have from that is how would you characterize the need for guidelines? Was it that chaotic before we started to organize ourselves internationally around rewilding? Because in North America we thought we had it pretty well defined, but it was a very North American rewilding. At the same time, bringing up differences between different countries gets confusing.
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A
Yeah, I think, I mean, to be honest, I think you probably did nail down the ecological principles pretty well. But I think what we need to recognize is that rewilding is very much a place based and a participatory outlook on approaches to conservation. And I think that's what changes as you move it around the world. We've written papers about comparing and contrasting North America with Europe. For example, I'm sat in Yorkshire, England and it's a very different thing. Yes, the ecological principles are uniform. They apply wherever you are. However, it's how you then apply those where you've got to be cognizant of the fact that, you know, different cultures, you know, different legal systems, all of that will mean, you know, big differences in how it's actually implemented and applied.
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C
It was a tough task, I would imagine.
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A
It's tricky, yeah. I mean, inevitably we've had to generalize. But you know, going back to what your comment about, you know, it was a bit chaotic in terms of how then rewilding as a concept and an approach was then being applied in different situations globally. A lot of people say, well, what is it? And Dolly Argenson wrote quite an influential paper back in 2015 and called Rewilding a plastic term. It became molded to whatever people wanted it to be. Yeah, okay. We've got this kind of general idea that ecological, you know, giving, giving, well, as we call it, you know, giving nature the space and the time to determine its own ecological trajectory. You know, but that comes with some baggage depending on where you are in the world. You know, we say it's got to be, it's got to be context specific.
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What would you say is the single most important principle that policymakers and the public, wherever they are in the world, need to understand from this work?
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Well, as I think it's the fact that rewilding is nature led. It's about functional ecological restoration and it's about scale as well. We aspire when we're looking at rewilding to think about large scale restoration through landscape scale planning. And that then brings in some of these political issues about land ownership and land management and collaboration across large areas. And a lot of people, particularly in Europe, and particularly in the uk, are doing very small scale stuff. And I think it's just that realization that what we talk about here is large scale giving space back to nature. And if you forget that, then you're somehow missing the point. With rewilding, you deal a lot in.
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C
Space, you do a lot of mapping work, and that's what you were well known for before you took on this project. And that's an issue when you start mixing in the politics, land ownership and everything else. When, when you hear people talk about 30 by 30 and 50 by 50 and these very, very lofty goals, considering also the global political climate seems to be tending away from what we would like it to do to hit those goals. That combined with the space and everything else, I mean, that's the GIS thing, right?
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A
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I've been chewing away at the problem of identifying and defining and modeling wilderness quality, wilderness character for many years now. And it just seemed a natural progression to move into looking at opportunities for rewilding in terms of. You're right. The UN's Global Biodiversity Forum Cumbern Montreal Agreement has these 30% targets. The 30 by 30 vision. You know, one of the, I think it's target two says we've got to restore, and if you can't, you know, want to call that rewilding, but restore 30% of degraded land, sea and water across the planet. And then there's target three, which says, you know, protect 30% of land, sea and water for high biodiversity nature. And that's, you know, those are great targets. Not quite the 50% of nature needs half or half Earth Projects, but, you know, they're good starting points. And the target for this is 2030. So that's, you know, that's less than five years away. And yeah, it's tricky to see how we might reach those. But as a geographer, the question I always have is, yeah, great, you know, but where it's easy for large countries with large areas of, you know, pretty empty. I'm talking about empty as in terms of human terms, landscapes like, you know, Canada or whatever. To using a European example, you know, the Scandi states. So Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, very easy for them to identify 30%. But it's, it's a tricky proposition for some of the smaller, more densely populated countries like England or Belgium or the other lowland countries in Europe. I think a better approach would be to look at it in terms of biomes ecological areas across whichever region we're looking at. And so we wrote a paper for the World Wilderness Congress last year where we'd already mapped wilderness quality in Europe, version two of that across continental Europe. And we started to sort of slice it up based on these 30 by 30 targets and say, well, you know, where is the top 30% wildest landscape in Europe? And if we were thinking about targeting areas for rewilding, that might seem reasonable. However, it's very biased towards the high altitude, high latitude areas if you do that.
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Rocks and ice they called it.
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Yeah, absolutely. As you would expect. So that's kind of missing the point. I mean, but we sliced it up politically as well. So we also said, okay, where's the top 30% on a country by country basis? And of course in doing that, you've got a lot of smallish countries in Europe. You suddenly increase the area, which if you're taking the total area of Europe, suddenly increase the area somewhat that's covered by these 30 by 30 targets. But then you think, well, actually this is missing the point entirely is where I think it was Leopold that said the first rule of intelligent tinkering is keep all of the parts. And as somebody who tinkers with old British motorcycles, I fully ascribe to that mantra. So why not, you know, why not look for the top 30% on a sort of European biome level? And then you get a really interesting image out, which I think is a more ecologically sound way forward. Of course, you then come back to the problems of political geographies because a lot of these areas are dealing with transboundary conservation. Of course you've got the tricky issue of how you coordinate across national boundaries, international boundaries to achieve Those aims. And, you know, as we started talking about there, you know, the world is not a particularly, you know, a place which, where everybody's speaking on the same singing from the same English sheet at the moment, politically speaking at least.
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C
Yeah, it is. It does seem like a club, you know, just hitting something over the head with a. We just need 30% when you bring up the biomes. And there are places, I mean, you could get to 30% in like in Nevada, the state. And that 30% would do next to nothing for, you know, biological diversity compared to going to all the hot spots. Yeah, I wonder. And this is a huge problem for you map guys, because when you get on audio podcasts, the very best thing that you can do to demonstrate your work is. That's right, show a map, look at this picture. But you've also been aware of this problem for quite some time and it's probably made you really good at explaining what you're saying, what you'd otherwise be seeing. Like, I'm really interested in, you know, what would an overlay look like when you went from just 30% to the biomes. How did those two maps look different?
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A
Well, as I said, the original map looked, you know, like we were looking at the, the northern climbs and the high altitude areas. There's very strong altitudinal and latitudinal bias to the top 30% in Europe, if you take Europe as a whole. So you've got all of the northern areas of northern Finland and Norway and Sweden, Iceland very well represented. And you know, northern areas, of course, we included Russia up to the Urals and all of the high altitude areas are nicely represented. So the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Carpathians, et cetera. As soon as you change that to country level, you know, you still see that in microcosm. So it's the high altitude, high latitude areas where, you know, those countries are represented as standing out. But then you see some very broken fragmented patterns in countries which are low lying, relatively highly populated, densely populated countries like Belgium and things, very sort of fragmented pattern. Soon as you then sort of think, well, okay, let's identify the top 30% via biome, then the pattern changes again entirely. Yes, you've still got those. Well, if you think about it, those classic school atlas images of all of the world's different biomes, then you start seeing, you know, the top 30% within those. And that's when it starts to get interesting. And it's really tricky to describe without having a map in front of us. But yeah, it's, it's problematic. And of course the problem with that is that all of the areas where we as humans have been able to exploit, particularly for agriculture, but also latterly for forestry and for fisheries and for other natural resources, those have been heavily exploited. So the lowland savanna and temperate woodland landscapes, all of them have been easy to occupy and to exploit. If you're thinking about human appropriation of net primary productivity, that's, you know, the stuff that we can extract from essentially soil and other resources where we've been able to grow food. And so wild areas are immensely underrepresented in the fertile areas, the areas which are easy to farm and to settle. And so that's why that image looking at the top 30% of the different biomes is quite interesting. Particularly when you look at those biomes where we've been able to easily farm and to settle, it's somewhat predictable.
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I mean, I don't think that you probably were too surprised by the results of looking at it that way. But it's also sad because it puts rewilding on that map in that context puts rewilding in direct opposition to human progress. It's like, we take all the good stuff and we're like, where's all the good stuff? And it's like, well, you're standing on where it formerly existed. And that's the case probably with these maps, they show very clearly that problem.
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Yeah. And I say that's why when you get into those landscapes where we have appropriated that, you know, productivity for growing food, you know, and don't get me wrong, we need to feed ourselves. So people quite often ran on me, say, oh, you want to rewild everywhere? I said, no, we don't. I'm as fond of my food as well that the next person. So, you know, it's a question of, you know, going back to the 30%. It's, it's where appropriate and where possible. But it is, it is, as you say, it's kind of sad that it's going to be really difficult to think about rewilding and giving nature some space back in those areas which are easily farmed or, you know, more productive land. So if you just take the UK for example, you know, a lot of our rewilding efforts are really focused on the low grade agricultural land. So like the us we have a land capability system which puts grade one agricultural land, which is great for growing high value horticultural products, fruit and veg, for example, and grade two lands, great for arable, for growing grain crops. Grade three is great for grazing, for Milk production and beef cattle, et cetera. Grade four, you start to get into marginal land where production is largely dependent on government subsidies for it to turn a profit. And then grade five, grade six, you can't really do much on that except a bit of forestry, bit of rough grazing and recreation. So it naturally rewilding finds its home in some of these more marginal landscapes. And that just makes it really fragmented and difficult to see how you can maintain connectivity in a representative set of ecosystems across a continent like Europe or indeed the US for example, where much of the productive land has fallen under the hoof and the plow.
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C
Which I think it's pretty obvious why we needed to add another C to the three Cs and that is coexistence. Because I don't see how you get two rewilding goals in these very tight delicate areas and situations and cultures and politics without a really big focus on coexistence.
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A
Yeah, and that's where we need that really big shared vision and common set of principles at a global level. I just don't see that happening, unfortunately. I don't want to be pessimistic, but I see a lot of good stuff going on at a sort of individual country level and individual philanthropic type projects and what have you. But I just don't see that global cooperation, what's necessary to produce these big wins for shared vision set of common principles which we've got now. But do you see those being applied at a global level? Well, yeah, I can't see that at the moment. Don't get me wrong again, there are some good projects out there like the Global Rewilding alliance pushing on this dog. But yeah, it is a tool for global sustainability and if we get it right, then I see there's hope. But if we don't and how many wakes the world go round that it's also a great source of inertia for any of this kind of forward thinking.
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It's also not made any easier by rewilding being such a popular term that people are using it for gut biome ebook sales men beating their chests and playing drums in the woods and calling racehorses. Yes, yes.
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Remember the racehorse called rewilding?
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I mean it is a fantastic word. It's one of the best words that humanity has ever come up with. But yeah, it is, you know, and that's why I wanted to talk to you because you are part of a team that tried to make sense of it all. And in a way that would make it make sense as best possible for anyone trying to understand how they might implement something in their country, in their city, in their town, anywhere in the world. And not a small task. And so why do you think is this still just way up in the clouds like you released all of this stuff? It's still being kind of discussed at a high level and everything. How do it fall from where it is to the ground and start to become maybe a messily applied factor in how people do rewilding in their area?
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Yeah, well, I, I think, you know, going back to that, you know, comment I made about Dolly Argenson's paper about it being a plastic term, I think this, you know, the work that we've done has tried to, you know, kind of solidify that and remove some of that undue flexibility in what is and isn't rewilding. And so I think having a unifying definition, which is kind of wordy, but it necessarily had to be, and a set of principles of which, you know, projects, individuals, organizations can go down a list of principles and go, tick, tick. Maybe not, you know, or oh yeah, we aspire to that particular principle, but we're not there yet. I think having those set of principles and a series of guidelines enables people to think, is what I'm doing rewilding or is it something else? And if it's regenerative agriculture or if it's more traditional ecological restoration, there's nothing wrong with that. I think conservation needs a spectrum of approaches. But let's be clear as to what rewilding is. Yeah, it's nice for people to say, well, I'm rewilding my gut biome by eating soil or whatever. You know, I probably did that as a kid, you probably did as well. But you know, when we're talking about it as a conservation approach, I think we need to be pretty clear as to what that is. And I mean, yes, it's a great word in some respects in that, you know, it's got the public imagination. It's also wound some people up as well. It's not universally like, and to be honest, I'm not awfully keen on it because the rebit has been a bit of a hostage to fortune. And a lot of people say, oh, we can't turn the clock back 2,000 years or whatever. I said, well, that's not what it's really about. It's a forward looking approach. So maybe wilding or nature led ecosystems or whatever, I don't know. But we came up with a simple model which explains the distinction between ecological restoration and rewilding in that we say that ecological restoration is human led, nature enabled. So in other words, it's us using nature based approaches to achieve a particular outcome. And whether if that's restoration of coral reef or it's river restoration or whatever, we're using nature based solutions to achieve a particular desired outcome. Rewilding flips that on its head and we say that rewilding is nature led, human enabled. So it's nature determining its own ecological trajectory and it's us having the humility and the foresight to actually give it the space and indeed the time to allow it to do that. So we don't have a set outcome from rewilding. It's kind of a, you know, it's an open ended process in that respect.
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C
And you scientists hate those things. Those are not conducive to, you know, but it's also, it's just really hard to you, you want it to mean what you just said without saying what you just said. If just one word could do that. And then there was a lot of fighting. There's fighting constantly to this day over the idea of wilderness, whether something's wilderness can be wild. What are you talking about? Pre industrial, you know, all of those arguments. And I saw the same arguments over rewilding and then the whole move to say, well let's come up with something else that makes that happen. And, and so I don't know, I think that speaks of wildness in our language, in our ability to communicate.
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But you know, you know, I'll quote Tony Sinclair here and he said that, you know, if a thing be restoration or rewilding term ra, you know, applies to everything, then it also means nothing.
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Right?
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We can't call everything rewilding even if we are, you know, and it's a very, there's a particular famous rewilding project called Self, a rewilding product in, in the uk and they wrote a big book recently called the Book of Wilding. And in there they said, oh you, you can even rewild your window box. You know, I think, well no you can't, you know, yeah, it's, you know, I think that's, that's taking things to, you know, silly extreme. You know, it needs to happen at scale, it needs to be connected, it needs to be nature led, all of those things. But as I said earlier, it's, it's not, it's, it's not the only solution. You know, I think, you know, there's a room for traditional conservation, there's a room for ecological restoration, there's Room for nature, high nature value farming as we call it, or regenerative agriculture. All of those things have a place. And that's where we've come back to that question about it being place based and participatory. These things happen in space and time, particular location, and that gives it context, be that political or cultural or geographical or ecological context. And rewilding needs to be cognizant of all of those things and, and only apply rewilding and the rewilding term where it is appropriate to do so.
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C
So what if an organization who will remain anonymous gets lots and lots of emails from people who don't understand what you're talking about here today? The scale, the scope, the principles of rewilding, and they are, they have just inherited 75 acres and they don't want to do what their parents did with it, they want to rewild it. Maybe 75 acres fits in the plan. But some people also write us about backyard level stuff which sort of screams the window box thing a little bit.
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A
Yeah, but everybody did it. Then there would be economies of scale, you know, those, yeah, hundred thousand, you know, million backyards, whatever, all doing, you know, kind of rewilding things. So instead of applying the glyphosate and you know, weeding out everything all of the time, then you know, letting nature take its course a little bit more, you know, and I do that in my little tiny little bit of the uk I don't cut my lawn. And until my, my wife sort of starts nagging me, you really ought to cut that because it's starting to look too messy. So I'll cut it maybe twice a year now. I wouldn't call it rewilding. You know, it's great for the pollinators and, and you know, maybe some of the local wildlife. But yeah, it's not really rewilding. But if everybody did it, then. Well, yeah, it kind of one of.
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C
The biggest, one of the biggest growth sectors in America is the American lawn. And it's like 40 million acres, you know, total under a foreign invasive species with absolutely no biological diversity whatsoever. And it's basically peer pressure from our ancestors, dead people are still telling us we need to have green manicured lawns. And everyone is, practically everyone is listening to that old outdated advice. And while they begrudgingly go out every week and mow it and they don't want to and use all of their water to keep it watered. And so, yeah, I mean, that's a real patchwork. We can't get more patchy than Just neighborhood backyards. And at the same time, if birds can jump from place to place and there are enough of those little places to get them along their way on their vast migration route, that has to mean something. If you could develop a movement around.
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A
It, the biodiversity gains would be great. Well, it could be massive. Going back to your 75 acres, there's nothing wrong with doing. I'd love 75 acres, thank you very much. And I'd do something similar, but again, it's about where that sits in the wider landscape context. If there's. Then. So going back really far back again in our conversation to the three Cs, cars, corridors and carnivores, when you start to idealize, create a little cartoon of that in the different types of corridors. So some of them might be landscape corridors, riparian corridors, mountain corridors, whatever, but some might just be stepping stone corridors where species can move quickly from one stepping stone to a next and get across a landscape which is otherwise farmed and developed just by taking those little jumps like you would on a chessboard. And so that's where I think the smaller projects can have a role, is bridging the gaps between the larger core areas where landscape corridors are just simply not possible. You know, because it's an intensive agricultural land or whatever, then the small scale stuff can play a really big role there. But it needs to be taken and seen in that wider landscape setting.
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C
What if we looked at it as flyway enrichment? There's another form of connectivity and it's in the air above our heads. And it's migration routes for species that find it much, much easier to jump from one thing to another. They can fly over the highways, they can fly over the cities, and yeah, hopefully they mostly get through without bashing in the windows. But, you know, they have, they have it better in that way. And what if we were enriching on the ground in little spots here and there? It would be highly important.
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A
That's a good example. I mean, you know, mammals can still do those jumps, but, you know, obviously for a bird species it's easier. You know, there are still some barriers to bird migrations, particularly in Europe, where, you know, some people like to shoot small birds, you know, on the migration routes, you know, and they'll wait for them coming and shoot them on migration. So there are still some human barriers there, regardless of the landscape barriers. But yeah, I get the point is that it's easier for bird species than it is perhaps for mammalian species. But you know, then also you got, you know, the floristic Species as well, they need to be able to, you know, shift, particularly with, as climate changes, they need to shift north, south, you know, maybe up and down the mountain. And so connectivity is also important for, for plants as well, as well as for animals.
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C
Yeah, I was just thinking about a story that Dave Foreman liked to tell about, to kind of put a head on that whole people like to shoot and other people might think, well, that can't be very successful in any way. But I would bring up the passenger pigeon and that's exactly how it went from blacking out the sky for hours and even days in the big flocks that would. To nothing to extinction. And that was precisely and only because of one thing, what you just described. So we are pretty powerful. Even when it seems like, oh, that just seems like a hobby or, you know, we have made it. Not a hobby before, but an effective extinction machine.
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A
Yeah, yeah. And I'm afraid in the UK there's a very strong, you know, game bird lobby which has a particular take on things which. And they, they do not. Almost to a man, they do. And it's mostly men do not like rewilding because it's seen as a, A, you know, a force for relinquishing control over habitats and species which they will profess to be protecting. They're interested in protecting their game birds, but you know, they will use the happy coincidences of other species benefiting from game bird management as a stick to beat the rewilding movement with, you know, saying, hey, look what we're doing.
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C
Yeah, it's always to protect what they are really interested in and not what they're saying on their brochures. It's never what they're saying on the brochure.
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A
Yeah. So in the uk we release, we as a nation, the game industry releases 50-plus-million game birds a year into the English landscape, the British landscape. And that's a biomass which is greater than all of the breeding, other breeding birds put together. You know, it's largely ringneck pheasants and redneck partridge. I was a bit surprised to find out actually from Tom Oprah, I was mentioning earlier that there is pheasant shoots in the US as well. So it's not restricted to the UK by any stretch of the imagination.
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C
Yeah, it's really, really hard to get over some cultural things that we adopted hundreds of years ago. They still seem to be going so strong and, but at the same time they seem completely outdated in this new landscape, this new world we find ourselves in. And I think there's some tension there that makes them desperately cloy to this idea that we have to have this. It's a tradition, it's a. I don't know, I can't put myself in their heads. I cannot fathom what it's like to be that obsessed with killing birds. But it's something to deal with and it's something to take seriously because it is definitely happening and they are definitely that good at trying to protect it.
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Their. Their.
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What they see as their turf.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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C
Well, I wanted to talk a little bit to wrap up here about the future. What are you excited about is a very, very difficult question to ask on this podcast lately, because I never know what I'm going to get from the other side. But where are the shiny spots that you hold on to and you remember when you hear bad news, you still got those shiny spots on the map that make you happy, make you proud and hopeful?
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A
Yeah, I think. Well, certainly from a UK context, there are some really interesting projects getting moving. We've got a problem in the UK with, we've got a very truncated biotic pyramid. Our largest mammalian predators, probably a fox or a badger, our largest avian predator, where we've reintroduced white tailed eagles or sea eagles to the uk, we've got killer whales starting to come back, hawkers. And so those are all bright spots. But back to the mammalian predators. We have an overpopulation of deer species because they don't have any natural predators other than ourselves. And that as a hobby, it's very different from in the us. It's very controlled. You know, you can't just go and, you know, take your ticket and shoot a deer and put it in the freezer. In the uk, you know, you've got to have access to land and know the right people and to do that. So we don't have that, you know, hunting culture. So, you know, I'm kind of excited by the idea that we might be on the cusp of reintroducing lynx back into the uk. You know, it was so close a few years ago with one of the previous governments. It was almost signed off on until somebody, oh, I can't name names, put, raised their head and it got, it got quashed. But I think we're close. I'm hopeful before I'm pushing up the daisies that I'll see links back in the uk. Wolves. Forget it. I quite often say that we're a small island nation with a small island mentality. And even though the UK and Ireland are the only two major European countries Without a breeding wolf population, because of our island status, we would have to consciously reintroduce them, and I just don't see that happening. But the bright spots, as I say, were these great projects involving some really wonderful and committed people doing all the good things. But, yeah, you're right, there are so many, so many depressing stories. But, you know, rewilding's a, you know, it's, it's a more optimistic view of nature conservation. And so, you know, I'll keep pushing at that bar, if you don't mind.
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C
Do you feel. Do you feel thankful that you are part of this area of conservation? Because it is, by definition, a hopeful view of possibility and the future? I mean, what would we do if we were out there in any other part of the conservation movement that didn't have. I mean, it was always front lines. It's always bad things happening, and it doesn't mean that we're hiding behind it, but it, it's nice to focus on a topic that has power, that has the ability to really do something, even if it's being completely restricted or somewhat restricted now.
- [38:58]
A
Yeah, I know the old sort of fortress conservation is always sort of fighting a rear guard. You know, conservation areas are shrinking, and although they're growing in number worldwide, you know, a lot of them are just paper parks. And so, you know, it's. Yeah, you're right. It's quite a depressing sort of view, you know, biodiversity loss and climate change and all the rest of it. But, you know, rewilding has the potential to bend the curve and, you know, change that trajectory or at least level it out a bit. And so, yeah, I mean, I'm, you know, immensely proud to have been involved in that at one level, as I say. And I, you know, I'm, you know, got a huge team of people that I owe a lot of gratitude to. And as I say, I mean, somebody have to have their name first. I don't know why it was me. I never put my name forward to do it. But, you know, maybe C, beginning of the Alphabet helps, but.
- [39:55]
C
Which has been your plan since birth, isn't it? I'm gonna put myself at the front of the Alphabet.
- [40:00]
A
I would be called Aaron A. Ardmark, the copy of 2000 AD comic from many years ago. Yeah, so immensely proud to have been involved and humbled to have worked with a really great set of people. But, yeah, I just, I'm fully aware of the fact that all I've done is draw some maps and write some documents. It's the People who are then utilizing that information and, you know, looking at these guidelines and those guiding principles and going, hey, you know what? This is what we're doing. This is how we're going to do it. And it's those people who are, you know, kind of doing stuff on the ground. You know, if I was a rich person and I had money, I put my money into, you know, doing this on some land that I own, but I'm not. So I'm kind of forced into providing some of that top level thinking at a global scale and then down regional and local to help people who do have the resources, the land, the time to do it, to give them a hand.
- [41:06]
C
Well, I'm going to push back on you. You're being far too humble. Of course, maps are just a way of telling a story about a landscape. And you are probably, I would put at the top of your list of things a storyteller, a quite good one. And we need people who can communicate these issues and the need and, and the complexities like you. So you stand out as an example in the world as someone who can do that. And it's too rare right now. And I'm always encouraging people to, you know, think of themselves as, as people who have stories to tell. The work that you do cannot just be submitted papers and, and things like that. It has to be to turn around and face the world and go, here's why, here's what I've learned, here's why it's important. And those are all the science communicators, all of the conservation communicators, as few as I think they are, I hope that they're growing and I hope they use you as an example, one example of how that could be possible and what that might look like for them. So thank you for all your work and also thank you for taking the time being here today. It was really a good timing. You said the students were having their reading week, so we couldn't have picked a better time.
- [42:21]
A
Absolutely not. Yeah. Thanks, Jack. Thank you, Steve. Yeah, appreciate it. And yeah, good luck in the future.
- [42:28]
B
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