Ben Goldsmith: Bioabundance

0:00Ben Goldsmith:It would have blown my mind if you told me 10-15 years ago when I was busy investing in renewables and water and waste, one day we will be able to get investors to invest in rewilding, the thing of your childhood fantasy. It would have blown my mind. Well, it's happening.

0:24Welcome to the Future in Sound podcast. I'm your host, Jen Wilson This is a podcast where we discuss people, planet, and profit In each episode, we'll learn from world-leading experts who can help us see the future we want and our role in it This is episode 41 Bioabundance

0:58the reason why I asked Ben Goldsmith to come on to this podcast is because I really wanted to bring in a conservation lens to this podcast which is helping finance leaders to incorporate sustainability into what they do day to day and I really couldn't think of anybody better than Ben to join us. He's been at the forefront of many conversations in Britain and globally on rewilding, and he's been involved in sustainable investing for decades. And with that, and surely I will be asking him many questions about his background and how he came to be doing what he's doing, but with that background, I thought it would be a fantastic opportunity to bring him into the Future in Sound podcast.

1:46So Ben, welcome. I'm delighted to have you.

1:49Ben Goldsmith:Well, thank you so much for having me on, Jen.

1:54So to begin with, you've worn many hats in finance, looking at the environment, supporting nonprofits and foundations. Could you give us a brief overview of your journey and how these threads connect in your life's work?

2:11Ben Goldsmith:Yeah, I guess it feels to me like I've had two hats in the sense that I grew up from a very early age with an intense fascination and love for nature and wildlife. So that has been kind of the overriding theme of my life since my earliest memories. If you'd come to our home in Richmond, West London, in quite a green and wild part of West London, by the way, on the edge of Richmond Park, which is an incredible landscape, you'd have found me in the back garden putting up bird boxes and trying to dig out ponds and looking for stuff and I would have had a story of something that I'd seen and that this was what I was obsessed with and rewilding wasn't a thing in the 80s that word I don't think had been coined yet but I was a rewilder I have a letter tucked in a drawer in a desk in the house that I grew up in where my mom still lives from the very patient manager of Richmond Park explaining to an 11 year old me why we couldn't release wild boar into the royal parks and so I wanted to see missing species back in Britain I wanted to see wilder landscapes and I refused to accept this idea that Britain is not a place where you can find wildlife where you have to get on a plane and go to Africa or India or even just across to the continent of Europe if you want to see real wildlife I thought why not here so that's why I've spent a whole chunk of my life working on nature and conservation policy as an activist and a philanthropist.

3:34Ben Goldsmith:And it's always been a big part of my life. But the other hat is one of investment. And I've been interested in commerce and investment. And I wanted to have a kind of grown-up career. 20 years ago, it was quite hard to imagine that you could devote yourself fully to nature and conservation. Now, of course, things have changed dramatically, and we're going to talk about that. But back then, it felt like you had to get paid and so on. had to go and work in kind of investment or banking or finance or something like that that that was kind of my father had been a big financier and and and entrepreneur and he died when i was 15 and i felt certainly an expectation that i would follow somewhat in his footsteps but i wanted to do so in a way that was green loosely defined and so i set up a green investment fund in early 2000s after a couple years working in a stockbroker i teamed up with some guys older than me and we set up a venture capital fund investing in what they called at the time clean tech and that grew from there and we built an infrastructure investing business looking at renewables and waste treatment and water treatment and this kind of stuff and um and then we added a listed equities business in in a strategy that you'd describe i suppose as esg environmental social and governance filters and and so i was in green investment but not necessarily nature investment so green investment so i was investing in the kind of hard engineered end of decarbonizing our human systems how do we transition to zero carbon electricity generation how do we move to clean water how do we move to closed loop use of materials and and an ending of this kind of linear production of massive amounts of waste and but it was all quite conventional stuff although it didn't feel it at the time i mean solar in 2005-6 felt like a bit of a pipe dream it was kind of a rich enthusiast's hobby my uncle teddy who i loved who was an old greenie he looked like an old testament prophet he'd been involved with greenpeace from the start and the green party and he was kind of adored my brother my father sorry his younger brother they were kind of chalk and cheese one the industrialist one the kind of hippie ecologist but i remember him putting solar panels on his roof and they cost a fortune and they didn't work and he got ripped off and the grid connection failed and and the the idea that solar could become one of the most mainstream infrastructure asset classes the world has ever seen receive a greater wall of capital than any category of infrastructure has ever witnessed uh would have would have felt felt crazy at the time so um so i i um i kind of wore these two hats i i i was an investor with a suit and tie building green investment uh products and strategies in in in the world of finance And I spent every spare moment either outdoors in nature or hustling and advocating on behalf of nature in various different ways, including a five-year stint on the board of the UK government's environment department, DEFRA.

6:28Ben Goldsmith:And now I'm hoping to kind of coalesce those two things and bring my experience in raising and managing capital to bear directly on the nature that I love. That's really exciting. And just one of the things that really strikes me about your story, Ben, is that, I mean, many people didn't really get into sustainability and investing until 2019, 2020. So you were 20 years in advance of that. What was it like starting a sustainability-themed investment firm in 2002 when it wasn't really on the radar? And how do you see where we are today versus where we were 20 years ago? So I was really young. I mean, it was actually 2004.

7:10Ben Goldsmith:I guess I was 22 at the time. And whilst I was working with some guys who had much more experience than me, they were both 25-ish years older than me. One had been at Rothschild. The other had been at Shell. It felt very exciting and very obvious to me that the world was going to undergo a green industrial revolution. Like we really believed our own shtick. We'd sit with investors and tell them this is what's going to happen. We're going to move to a world in which resources are used over and over again with circularity, that all power is generated by renewable sources, that all water courses are going to become swimmable, fishable, drinkable, to quote Richard Nixon, and that the technology is here and now to make that happen.

7:50Ben Goldsmith:and all we need to do is invest in it and we will save the world whilst getting rich. Now, it didn't work out in the way that I expected. That early venture capital fund didn't go very well. The second one that we raised went better and we ended up building a successful business over time, although most of the success was in the more conventional stuff. So in infrastructure investing and using proven technology at scale and some of the public equity stuff. So investing in North American freight railroads and semiconductor manufacturers and waste treatment and management businesses and so on. So it became more conventional as we went along and maybe a little bit less idealistic.

8:28Ben Goldsmith:But in parallel with us building that business, the world did indeed undergo a green industrial revolution. It's kind of happened in fits and starts. But I think Michael Liebright was the person who coined the idea of a sneeze theory in that things happen very slowly and then suddenly, like a sneeze. So if you look at solar, for example, it rolled out slowly in a way and then suddenly bam look at what's happening this year last year the whole world is going solar the same is happening in electrification of transport so our predictions proved right but we felt very ahead of our time and um i think probably my enthusiasm wasn't matched by the kind of success that we expected as you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation the two hats that you wear and i'm just interested my question is sort of drawing on both.

9:17How do you think mainstream finance should evolve to better support biodiversity? And what does that mean for some of the rewilding work that you've been focused on over the past years?

9:29Ben Goldsmith:So conservation has been turned on its head. It's been revolutionized in the last, say, eight or 10 years. Historically, conservation was about saving the very last habitats and wild places by micromanaging and aiming for very clear outcomes. So in Britain, for example, a species like the bittern is on the brink of extinction. It's a bird that requires reedy wetland habitats with very specific needs. And so charities like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the UK's largest nature charity, would then acquire pockets of land on which exactly the right conditions could be created through micromanagement in order to increase the number of bitters.

10:13Ben Goldsmith:And that has been very, very important during the last half century because a whole range of niche habitats and species would simply have disappeared into extinction if we hadn't had those conservation efforts. I think what's happened is people have understood that you can restore nature in a much less predictable way at much greater scale and more cost effectively by simply restoring natural processes and this is what rewilding is about and it's not micromanaged it's not conservation 1.0 this is conservation 2.0 it's self-willed unpredictable messy nature recovery and while the rising tide lifts almost all ships there will be some losers and we don't know what those will be and and and this is rewilding um so i i think A really exciting thing is happening in nature recovery, where we've gone from hands-on, small-scale, highly targeted conservation, which is expensive and vital, played a very important role, to a new model of rewilding, where we're trying to restore large-scale habitats and to connect them up with each other.

11:20Ben Goldsmith:A famous report, the Lawton Report in Britain, came up with the following strapline. If we're to restore nature in Britain, we need it to be bigger, better, and more joined up. And rewilding is the key to that. But where's the money? And that's what I think is interesting is now finally we have the possibility to tap up private investors, insurance companies, pension funds, wealthy families, and persuade them to invest in this idea of rewilding landscapes and seascapes at scale in the expectation of securing a financial return from doing that. And if you would have blown my mind, if you told me 10, 15 years ago when I was busy investing in renewables and water and waste, one day we will be able to get investors to invest in rewilding the thing, the thing of your childhood fantasy.

12:03Ben Goldsmith:I would have I would have blown my mind. Well, it's happening.

12:09Hey, it's Jen. I just wanted to take a quick moment to let you know a bit about RICO and what we do. We're a tech-enabled advisory firm that helps private market investors and companies measure sustainability metrics using our software platform. We also help you to set targets and focus your efforts on sustainability areas that really matter for your business. And finally, we help clients to translate all of this work into your core value creation strategy or your business model. Check us out at reed.co.com to get in touch. All right, now back to our conversation. Two questions for you. One, I just remember being in the Lake District many years ago, what was it, 15 years ago, doing a master's that brought me to the UK.

12:58And we were just talking about the landscape. And what are we conserving to, basically? Is it pre-Viking? What is the standard? Where do we want to get to? Because of course, humans have been interfering with the landscape for a long time here in the United Kingdom. So that's sort of one question. And the next is, I'd love to get an example of how pension funds, investors can get involved in rewilding. We at RICO do quite a bit of work with private equity funds, infrastructure funds, and helping them to embed sustainability into their investment approach so it'd be really interesting to better understand this new dimension but let's start with how do we decide what we are aiming for um conservation 2.0 you know what is what is the where do you want to get to i guess this uh points to who are we reintroducing you know what what does what does good look like in that regard i often get asked this like you know are you

14:06Ben Goldsmith:waiting for something in particular like what what do you have what's the end game um because obviously when you plant trees composite conservation 1.0 you plant a bunch of trees and you think in 20 years time i'll have a forest and you sit and wait well i've come to the view that nature is really a process rather than a static thing and it's about restoring the healthy flowing of that process so restoring those species interactions restoring the missing pieces of that piece of clockwork and then and then witnessing how it plays out with any particular without any particular expectation in mind um so the rewilding is a controversial term and i think what make one of the reasons why it's controversial is the re in other words we're going backwards we're going to wind the clock back and of course what was is a kind of inspiration but i don't think we're winding the clock back i like to think of it as looking forward and that we're creating something um that that works as nature intended even if we don't really understand what that is so we're creating a an environment in which you get massive biodiversity but also massive bio abundance and we've lost touch with this idea of bio abundance everyone talks about biodiversity that which means the number of species in a particular ecosystem which is obviously very important but bio abundance is so important that thing of i saw a video from someone sent me from Santa Cruz in California of a super pod of dolphins, massive numbers of dolphins and just the abundance, the awesomeness of seeing a huge number of dolphins in the sea or the skies darkening with migrating birds.

15:43Ben Goldsmith:There's eyewitness accounts from 300 years ago from Somerset where I am of the skies literally darkening with migrating ducks and geese and waterfowl and and and um and wading birds and so on that those numbers have collapsed we just the sheer abundance of life where i come from in britain has been diminished beyond belief so i think we're aiming for as much biodiversity and bioabundance as can be achieved but we don't know what that will look like until we try it and we effectively allow nature to play out as it as was kind of intended so i i um i i don't know that we're aiming for a particular date the only the only relevant dates to me perhaps are the dates on which species went extinct so i like to talk about how beavers have been extinct in britain for 600 years so you could say that by restoring beavers we're winding the clock back 600 years i think it's interesting for people to know when species disappeared from a landscape wolves disappeared from britain most likely in the late 18th century so we're technically winding the clock back a couple of hundred years when we bring wolves back eventually to britain so i think there's a relevance there perhaps in helping people to understand what we're putting back but but fundamentally i like to think of rewilding as a pathway not just to ecological renewal but to social and um and uh economic renewal so the lake district's a really good example of this the lake district is grazed to high heaven by sheep and to give you an idea there were probably a million to two million sheep in all of the british isles including ireland in 1850 today just in great britain there's around 40 million sheep depending on the time of year so this is a massive expansion in the numbers of sheep which are not native to the ecosystem they are the antithesis of a keystone species these are animals which live in asia minor the kind of dry dusty hills of kind of turkey and bring them into the sodden wet hills of england and you get 10 of them dying of exposure every winter they're not happy out there on the hills even though in small numbers they've been in great britain for probably two or even three millennia this is not a native creature and they are forensic in their grazing they eat the little wildflowers the little scrub the baby trees and the result is the completely naked landscape that you see in the Lake District.

18:06Ben Goldsmith:The Lake District would have been a great mosaic of bogs and wetlands and naturally meandering streams and rivers. And it would have had pockets of scrub and dotted trees. And it would have been like the upland landscapes of East Africa. And think of kind of Laikipia, Kenya. It would have been like a wetter, temperate Atlantic version of that, grazed by native longhorn cattle or belted galloways or perhaps the Scottish Highland cattle. and also people would have turned out their pigs in the autumn to feast on the acorns during a mast year in particular in a practice known as panage you'd have had wild boar you'd have had wild herbivores and it would have been rich beyond our comprehension in nature and then it was tamed it was kind of a colonial activity that took place now the british were good at this before they tamed and colonized far off lands they did it within great britain so we we went to landscapes like the Lake District and the uplands of the Pennines and of course then to the Highlands of Scotland, to Wales, across the water to Ireland and we enacted clearances.

19:09Ben Goldsmith:We cleared the trees, we cleared the nature, we cleared the indigenous people from the land and we created these vast sheep branches and that's what the Lake District is today. It's a huge sheep branch and the result is a landscape that is unable to host much in the way of wildlife or nature and is unable to do such basic things as hold water so in the communities around the lake district you get flash flooding in the winter you know the town of keswick floods every winter and and at great expense to taxpayers and great unhappiness to the people who live there and then three months after cleaning out the sediment and the water from their living rooms they're told there's a hose pipe ban because there's no water because the hills are simply unable to hold back water in the way that they were intended and so restoring nature in landscapes like the Lake District is a pathway to a whole new economic model for communities that live there.

19:57Ben Goldsmith:Because sheep farming doesn't pay. The average sheep farmer in Great Britain is getting a take-home income of somewhere around£8 ,000, so way beneath the minimum wage. It's not a profitable enterprise. And the least productive landscapes in Britain, the least productive 25%, say, of this island, produces less than 1 % of the food that we're producing. So it's not a food security thing either and that's why the average age of farmers in these remote upland landscapes creeps higher and higher and is now in the high 60s because the younger generation just don't want to do it there's no living in it they're not making an impact on national food productivity it's it's a it's a failing business model so if you can introduce such things as payments for natural flood management for water storage water purification pollution mitigation through the restoration of wetlands and naturally meandering streams and so on if you can restore the sponge effect of those landscapes not only does that provide the country with much needed national resilience and a kind of nature-based infrastructure around water but it also provides a whole new income stream for landowners land managers in those landscapes and then layer into that nature-based carbon and the the the market which is becoming very very big globally microsoft have announced publicly that they're going to aim to draw down from the atmosphere all the carbon that they've ever emitted cumulatively since the founding of the company in the 1970s.

21:17Ben Goldsmith:That involves the purchase each year of an enormous number of tons of nature-based carbon. And an increasing number with their AI production. With their AI, exactly. And it's not just Microsoft. So this is a huge global market. And then separate to that, there was a market in biodiversity credits. Companies like GlaxoSmithKline have said, we want to be nature positive. so they will invest in nature recovery in the form of biodiversity tokens of some sort or other and it's it's an emerging market and we'll see how that plays out and then you've got this concept of insetting let's just say you're growing apricots or you're a retailer buying apricots well restoring nature in the vicinity of those apricot farms builds resilience in terms of fresh water in terms of pollinating insects you need those insects to fly in and pollinate the apricot flowers So it's a way of building resilience within your supply chain whilst also contributing to the drawdown of carbon and the restoration of ecosystems.

22:10Ben Goldsmith:It's kind of the opposite of offsetting is insetting. So you've got a range of new markets growing up alongside a government funded stewardship scheme that offer a potential for real new sources of income for communities in these landscapes that have been utterly wrecked by a monoculture of sheep. so that that's the british experience but it's the same is true everywhere often land use is not economically rational and so it doesn't take much in terms of shifting incentives to create a tipping point and a massive change and and just to finish on the lake district nobody is telling these communities that their way of life must end that they mustn't farm anymore because these are communities that often go back generations in the same farms in the same villages the farmers in these communities are the soul and the backbone of society and you don't want them to stop farming because they don't want to stop farming and it's it's kind of it's it's like what makes England England to some extent it's when you go to these landscape in Wales the last native Welsh speakers are sheep farmers in the valleys so you you don't want to drive them from the land and you can well understand their fears around their way of life their culture and their livelihood but the fact is monocultures of sheep are not working and will not keep them in the land so what you're suggesting to them is that they switch to an older way of farming where perhaps food production is not the be-all and end-all but more of a by-product so switch back to the keystone native species that their ancestors farmed with which are native cattle native pigs in low numbers without supplementary feed roaming where they want eating what they want sleeping where they want using modern technology like no fence or vents collars which work incredibly well which are run by run on gps and then a whole new set of revenue streams in natural capital.

23:51Ben Goldsmith:So your farmer is selling a bit of nature-based carbon as part of a community scheme. They're receiving some government stewardship payments under the new environmental land management scheme. They might be in biodiversity credits one way or another. They might be paid by the local authority and the environment agency for helping to mitigate flooding. And plus they're farming with cattle and pigs and they're producing beef and pork and collecting a bit of wild venison and maybe dabbling in nature tourism. And you can begin to see how a much more dynamic and vibrant set of income streams can be introduced into communities that have lived off nothing but sheep and unconditional subsidies for decades.

24:27Ben Goldsmith:Now, those subsidies that the European Union has been providing, or in the US you have the Farm Bill, and I'm sure Canada has an equivalent, they're like an opioid drip that kill innovation. So England is doing something truly groundbreaking by withdrawing those unconditional subsidies and replacing them with a publicly funded stewardship scheme. The only country that's done anything similar is Costa Rica. So I think places like the Lake District are going to be transformed in a few short years. And my hope and my expectation is that they're transformed by the people that live there. This will be something that they do.

24:58Ben Goldsmith:It's not something that happens to them. Mm-hmm. Have more empowerment. And I'm really interested in, you know, so if I'm a private equity executive listening to this and thinking, how do I incorporate some of these rewilding principles and, you know, more of a focus on opportunities related to rewilding biodiversity? What are some of the practical steps I can take to incorporate this into my investment approach? so i think for for corporations that make stuff that sell stuff i think the opportunity is in aiming to be nature positive um and i think there's there's kind of two ways of doing that the first is looking within the business how can we reduce our impact on nature both within the business directly and down the supply chain and there's very interesting technology emerging around how to measure and and manage environmental footprint in that way And it's becoming a requirement.

25:57Ben Goldsmith:You've got the Task Force for Nature-Related Financial Disclosure, which is developing fast and is likely to become a legal requirement in a bunch of jurisdictions. So corporate executives know that they have to have a handle on what impact their business is having on the natural world around. and within the business there are opportunities then to become nature positive through this insetting idea so what can we do to build resilience into our supply chain by restoring nature and you see a lot of this now in invulnerable supply chains around for example cacao chocolate coffee you know where suppliers becoming threatened by an increasingly volatile climate and by increasingly degraded ecosystems in which those products are being grown so if you can go to those places and say okay we're going to restore forest around where the coffee's coming from we're going to make sure that the coffee is grown within the trees we're going to make sure that local communities are well set well looked after and have some price predictability then you'll find that in in in times of volatility and coffee supply you don't have to worry about it as a business so there's lots of very exciting stuff happening particularly in and around food and sort of companies that are resource heavy and then and then the second stage is to look at things like offsets and maybe not even call them offset some some use the term some don't i mean there's there's some controversy around the idea that you can offset your impact and and i buy that but i think if a company is doing everything right within their business and their supply chain why shouldn't they go and buy offsets and call them offsets and say we are nature positive and and frankly that's where we're going to get the money we need in order to invest in nature recovery at scale and so there is a growing market in nature-based carbon and some of those projects are extraordinary and very very big and then also there's just pure biodiversity credits because some ecosystems don't sequester massive amounts of carbon imagine if you're restoring semi-desert savannas in western arabia or northeastern africa where you can have incredible wildlife but realistically you're not going to sequester massive amounts of carbon per tonne and then And there are other ecosystems that are incredibly carbon dense.

28:03Ben Goldsmith:I mean, the tall grass prairies, for example, of southern Canada have fescue grasses if they're grazed ripe by bison that go down six meters in their roots into the soil. These are grasses that can withstand a 30 year drought. I mean, inconceivable resilience. And they sequester so much carbon. so when of course the the farming really started in earnest in the great plains of north america you could push a metal rod by hand three four five meters into this incredibly dense dark soil the darkness the black in the soil is the carbon so restoring things like tall grass peries of bison offer massive potential to lock in carbon and you can sell that carbon of course at 20 bucks 50 bucks 100 bucks a ton depending on how and where and what's the timing and so on so i think for corporates it's about a combination of looking within and then looking without and and there are huge opportunities to do that um and and the and the key word for me is resilience nature offers the ultimate resilience so there is a project in in the southern part of england right now on the river plym which is a river that's been um fundamentally altered across generations it's now dead straight in many places the banks have been hardened with concrete such that when it rains, it's like a fire hose.

29:20Ben Goldsmith:And the fire hose floods a whole bunch of assets at the bottom of the river. Food logistics hub, superstore, Ministry of Defense airfield, National Health Service hospital, network rail, national grid infrastructure. And when those assets are flooded, they're offline. It's not just about the damage, it's about the days offline. And it's almost uninsurable. And so those asset owners have come together and they've said, why don't we pay like an insurance bond in order to build resilience into this river catchment which is flooding us every year and so the amount of money they've agreed to pay on an annual basis is enough to offer an institutional investor in this case the west yorkshire pension fund an incentive to put up a large amount of money on day one for re-wiggling that river and restoring its natural function and reconnecting it with its floodplains and restoring the bogs and the ponds and the oxbow lakes and so on such that the river is able to hold back water and release it slowly through the year So this has nothing to do with government.

30:16Ben Goldsmith:This is businesses coming together to build resilience in the face of flooding and also drought through rewilding restoration of nature. So it's a partnership made in heaven. And I think we're going to see a whole lot more of that. And from the perspective of, in this case, the West Yorkshire Pension Fund, an institutional investor, they were able to invest in the category of natural capital. It could be either a kind of bond or some kind of debt instrument or equity. And they're going to get repaid along with a healthy financial return from the income derived from the savings that those businesses are going to generate through reduced flooding intensity and frequency.

30:51Ben Goldsmith:So I think that there's going to be a growing opportunity for institutional investors to invest capital in large-scale restoration projects in the expectation of securing long-term predictable financial yields with blue-chip counterparties, infrastructure asset owners, the public sector, and so on. So I think we're witnessing a new asset class emerging before our eyes. And of course, it requires a certain amount of regulation in order to make sure it works properly to get these things moving, but that's true of all marketplaces. It's really interesting. Recently, we had Paul Palman, the former CEO of Unilever on the podcast.

31:26And one of the things that he spoke to was when he had his sustainable living plan released in the early 2010s, he talked about partnerships, because if our supply chains are more secure, then, you know, business units are more secure. And he talked about how during his tenure, and obviously, you know, he could speak to his tenure and not what's happened subsequently. But he talked about how business units that had stronger partnerships with communities and focused on sustainability just were more profitable. So there's also a value creation angle to what you've just voiced over with two really powerful examples.

32:09So thank you, Ben. And one of my favorite questions to ask, and we're going to close on this, is if you had to choose one book that most shaped how you think, what book would that be and why?

32:22Ben Goldsmith:I loved a book called Feral by a guy called George Monbiot, who's a British writer and politically kind of in a different place from me, I guess. He's quite a sort of left-wing activist, and I'd consider myself a small C conservative and believe in free markets and so on. But he and I are good friends and we share a deep love of nature. And the book that he wrote, Feral, opened my eyes to this idea that we can aspire to so much more and to so much better when it comes to conservation. I think I was still in the mindset then of small scale restoration and a kind of acceptance in a way that most of our landscapes are going to be dominated by natureless farming deserts, even those landscapes that are not particularly productive for farming.

33:10Ben Goldsmith:and the idea that we can really push the envelope and go big in terms of restoration. I mean, he opened with a kind of crazy chapter on how there used to be elephants and rhinos in Britain in the interglacial period. They were along 100 ,000 years ago. And of course, he's not proposing that they be brought back, but he opened my eyes to the idea that we can rewild in a big way. And I'd say that was a turning point in my life, reading that book. Amazing. Ben, thank you so much for joining us on the Future in Sound podcast. Thank you so much for having me on, Jen.

34:08And if you have a moment to rate us in your podcast app, we'd really appreciate it. Until next time, thanks for listening.