The Life Scientific: Tony Juniper

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1:03Hello.

1:04Tony Juniper:Today's guest is an environmentalist whose career has taken him to some remarkable places, from searching for parrots in the Brazilian rainforest to writing books with royalty. Tony Juniper is the chair of Natural England, the public body that advises the government, and indeed the rest of us, on how to protect and revive nature. Over the years, he's tackled that problem wearing different hats, from fieldwork documenting endangered species to campaigning on global climate issues to advising British policymakers and indeed the monarch. Tony has also held senior roles in some of the world's leading environmental organisations and has never been shy about plain speaking when it comes to warning both the public and the powers that be about the deepening crisis facing our planet.

1:51Tony Juniper:Threaded throughout his whole story is a lifelong passion for the natural world and a determination that we should protect it. Tony Juniper, welcome to The Life Scientific. Thank you very much, Jim. It's a great pleasure to be here. Now, as I just said, you've been an advocate for nature your entire life. So tell me, how do you feel about the state of our natural world today? And perhaps more importantly, modern attitudes towards protecting it?

2:15Brian Cox:I guess I see the world as it is now with a combination of terror and sadness, but also with a huge amount of optimism that we can turn things around, because what we see before us is literally unprecedented in human history in terms of the speed and scale of climate change and the changes taking place in natural systems, not only with huge implications for wildlife and nature, but also for the human world. One of the things that we must get past very quickly is this idea that looking after the natural world is somehow different to looking after the future of people because these two things are bound fundamentally together.

2:55Tony Juniper:Earlier this year you started a record third term as Chair of Natural England and just recently you set out a five-year plan for recovering nature.

3:04Brian Cox:What are your big priorities? Well it's really that last thought Jim about the extent to which the recovery of nature is very much bound up with the future well-being of humankind and so our new strategy is an attempt to locate those big priorities about recovering ecosystems, reducing pollution, dealing with climate change, extending the area of natural habitat in a way which is about the future of our economy, about public health and well-being, and the idea that we can enhance food and water security through the recovery of the natural world.

3:39Tony Juniper:Certainly, given the current political climate in some circles, it's clear that some people see these two things as diametrically opposites. You can either protect nature and the environment, or you worry about the well-being of people.

3:51Brian Cox:It is exactly that. It is this either-or analysis. Either we do nature, or we do economic growth, compared with the both-and approach, whereby we see nature as a means of achieving economic and wider social goals. I did think some years ago that we've kind of got past that but it's come back again and the reasons for that are there for everyone to see in terms of the economic difficulties the global security situation with wars and tensions in different parts of the world and those things are displacing what was really quite a strong environmental commitment over recent years with things that look more immediate and more important and so there's still work to do in convincing everybody that nature is essential national infrastructure and that we need to be rebuilding it in order to secure our interests for the future.

4:39Tony Juniper:Now you've long been a keen ornithologist Tony and you have a particular interest in parrots. What is it about these birds that fascinates you?

4:48Brian Cox:So I started early in life with I don't know where it came from just an absolute fascination with with nature and I went through various phases. I had a butterfly phase, a reptile phase, I was very interested in fossils and geology for a period But the things that never went away was my passion for birds. And so I became an avid bird watcher.

5:10Tony Juniper:Well, Tony Juniper, let's go back to that childhood. You were born in 1960 in Cowley on the edge of Oxford. Tell me about your parents.

5:19Brian Cox:So my father worked in a factory. He had served in multiple theatres in the Second World War in North Africa and in Sicily and was in the Battle of Cassino. Very intelligent man. But I think the trauma of that experience kind of put him in a place where he never kind of went back to full time study or professional training. And my mother was a waitress and the two of them brought up my sisters and I in a very happy family home where I roamed free looking for wildlife and became very acquainted with the nature around where we lived. And that's really where the passion was fueled from.

5:57Tony Juniper:and and when it came to school you did do a levels in biology geography and art then you took a year out you you washed dishes at Raymond Blanc's famous restaurant Le Manoir aux Cates Caisons while also doing a psychology a level what was it like working at Le Manoir um working with Raymond

6:17Brian Cox:I mean he'd just become famous his restaurant had just been declared restaurant of the year right and so the place was heaving and I helped in the kitchen I did a combination of washing dishes and preparing vegetables and also cycling into Oxford to the covered market to buy fish amongst other things and I'd cycle all the way back up the Banbury Road with a bag of well turbot was a was a favorite fish that he made into a pate and he'd shout that it was no good take it back to that fishmonger and tell him I want some proper quality fish and so I spent much of my time learning about what good quality turbot looked like it was great doing that and I combined it with studying in order to get sufficient grades to make a university application.

6:59Tony Juniper:But you had three A-levels already. I mean, why did you feel you wanted to add psychology?

7:03Brian Cox:Well, because of a course at Bristol University in animal behaviour, a joint degree in psychology and zoology. And I discovered that it would be very helpful to have psychology in making an application for that course. And so I did that and was successful. And so laid the foundations for basically the study of animal behaviour. And that fascinated me, this juxtaposition between how animals and people behave and Darwinian science and how evolution not only changes what animals look like, but also what they do.

7:37Tony Juniper:Well, you decided your future lay in conservation. Yes. And once you'd made your full recovery from the accident, you got a job with a new project in Oxfordshire,

7:48Brian Cox:educating school kids about the great outdoors. Yes. It was a little project called the South Oxfordshire Countryside Education Trust. And they had correctly assessed that if we're going to have rational approaches to looking after wildlife and nature in the future, that we had to equip children with knowledge and passion and inspiration. And so they managed to get a bit of government money to hire six of us to work in a group of South Oxfordshire schools. and we took the children out so far to 11 year olds we took them out to the local beach woodlands beautiful grasslands in the chilterns down to wetlands by the edge of the river thames the idea was really just to bring children into contact with nature and i have to say it worked spectacularly well and really reinforces this idea which is backed up now by quite a lot of research about this innate disposition that we all have to interact with nature to be in it and to be part of it and this of course is the source of a lot of evidence then we have about the well-being benefits of access to nature yeah and i do think that piece whereby people are connected with it is so vital and i was going to ask you that do you then think

8:59Tony Juniper:there's enough focus in schools today ensuring young people are in touch with the natural world

9:05Brian Cox:um i don't think so and you know actually it's interesting um having conversations with colleagues more in the academic world and they remark on how their experience of nature was very much based on going outside and looking at things whereas now a lot of the work is basically literally in a laptop and so you know the kind of replacement of field experience with these more kind of technology-based approaches which you know they're of course hugely important but there is a shift going on in terms of how we connect with the natural world undoubtedly you went on

9:38Tony Juniper:to do a master's degree in conservation at University College London, then got a job with the Council for Bird Preservation, now BirdLife International, as their parrot conservation officer. You started a major project focusing on the Spix's macaw, one of the most endangered birds in the world. Now, first of all, for people who aren't familiar with it, can you tell us a bit about this

10:01Brian Cox:macaw? So this bird was first described in 1817 by a chap called Johann Baptist von Spix, He was a Bavarian naturalist and he travelled to South America in search of specimens and he trapped and killed one of these birds, labelled it, sent it back to Germany. It wasn't for a while until actually people realised it was a distinct species. He thought it was something else to begin with. But it's a long-tailed blue parrot and he found it by the edge of a creek in the northeast of Brazil next to a river in quite a dry area. and that bird was then recorded a few times through history but mostly it was turning up in captivity.

10:41Brian Cox:They were being caught in the wild and by the time I got to BirdLife International this thing was deemed probably critically endangered, possibly extinct and therefore we undertook field work to try and find out what the true position was.

10:54Tony Juniper:You went on an expedition to Brazil to follow up on a rare sighting of one of these macaws.

11:00Brian Cox:How did that go? Yeah, so we'd had a fax saying that someone had seen this thing, and we decided to mount a search. And so I joined four Brazilian scientists, and we went into the interior of northeastern Brazil looking for this bird. And we spent weeks speaking to people, asking bird trappers whether they'd ever heard of such a thing. And we found this place where we were told you could still find these things. and we went there and we found a single bird and spending a couple of weeks in the field following it, looking at it, measuring its habitat we concluded this was the last one in the world Wow and it was in exactly the same spot where von Spix had found this species back in 1817 thereby leading us to conclude this was probably the only place it had ever lived and at the time there were 13 more in captivity so the choice was do we just leave it now and assume it's extinct or do we do something?

11:56Brian Cox:And so we thought even at this stage, let's try and do something. And so the work continued to try and facilitate a proper breeding programme. And would you believe a couple of years ago, the breeding programme got to the point where there were several hundred in captivity and birds have now been released back into the place where we found the last one and they've actually been breeding in the wild. Now, there's lots of complications remaining. There's a disease issue with this wild group that are back outside now. However, this, I think, is really quite an achievement. It really does give the idea of where there's life, there's hope, some meaning, because that thing looked like it was going extinct for sure, and now it's coming back, and that was really a great, great thing.

12:40Tony Juniper:Well, this experience with parrots set you up for your next job at Friends of the Earth, heading up their tropical rainforest campaign.

12:48Brian Cox:That's right, and this, of course, was a very different world, which was a campaigning organisation.

12:52Tony Juniper:This campaigning side, yes, yes.

12:53Brian Cox:And so that's where I learned about campaigning.

12:55Tony Juniper:You obviously went on over the next decade to campaign on a whole range of issues, from GM crops to industrial pollution. In 2003, you were made its director. And it was during your tenure at the top that there was a massive initiative. People might remember the Big Ask campaign. Tell me about that.

13:15Brian Cox:Well, it struck us in that period, 2003-04. You could see the conversation about environmental issues. It was shifting. And we said to ourselves, let's go for a climate change law in Britain that would require successive governments to reduce greenhouse gases in line with what the latest science says in order that we get to a position of safe greenhouse gas pollution by the middle of this century. And so that was the birth of the Big Ask campaign, which called for a new climate change act. and we launched that in 2005 and we had the assistance of the great Tom York from Radiohead who enabled us to reach all sorts of audiences that we never would otherwise have reached and we got political support for that and it was finally enacted in 2008 and it was the first legislation in the world and that was an absolute breakthrough and if you look across the globe now you can see more than 50 countries that have pretty much copied that step made by Britain

14:14Tony Juniper:I mean, it started off, I think it was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 % by 2050. It was amended in 2019, I believe, to the net zero emissions target by 2050. How do you think it's going today?

14:28Brian Cox:Well, it's interesting, you know, the huge cross-party support we had for that. And you look at the situation today in this country and some others, and you see that that consensus is now more shaky. And this couldn't be at a worse moment, of course, if you look at what's going on in the world. Those floods that hit Sumatra a few weeks ago, the historic flooding going on in Saudi Arabia, we can see the impacts building up. And so the consensus does need to reform and very quickly, because if we don't deal with it, the costs down the track and not very far down the track could be truly catastrophic.

15:04Tony Juniper:Well, after 18 years with Friends of the Earth, Tony, in 2008 you decided to leave the organisation.

15:10Brian Cox:Yeah, so being involved with leading a big NGO has its personal stresses and challenges, that's for sure. I was quite tired at the end of 18 years and so I embarked on a mixed approach of being a writer and being an advisor and also being involved with the Prince of Wales' now King Charles' Prince's Rainforests Project at the time which later became his International Sustainability Unit. So tell me first about that the then Prince Charles Rainforests Project how did it come about? So he was absolutely devastated by what he was reading and seeing about this continuing loss of the Amazon the Congo forests and so he got a group of people together to set up a project that would try and foster a consensus amongst a diverse group of people to see if we could find a way of making the forests worth more alive than dead was how he put it because he correctly determined that the problem was an economic problem it wasn't to do with there being insufficient science about the importance of the tropical forests it was the fact that the world still saw them as worth more when they were cut down and turned into wood or cattle pasture or palm oil plantations rather than being more valuable as carbon sinks, as the source of fresh water, the biggest repository of biodiversity on planet Earth.

16:30Brian Cox:And so he felt that we had to switch the equation to understand that. And so his particular role on this was this unique ability to bring people together. And we continued that work alongside other things that he wanted to focus on, including marine issues, food security, fresh water in his International Sustainability Unit, as it became.

16:51Tony Juniper:And over many years working with Prince, now King Charles of course, the two of you have gone on to co-author three books including one of the much-loved Ladybirds series for children about climate change. Yes. That must have been fun. How does it work when