Britain's Lost Species: Should We Resurrect Our Extinct Wildlife? (Derek Gow)

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1:00host. My guest will be Professor Brendan Sims. He's a historian of international relations at the University of Cambridge and in contrast to much of the received wisdom and prevailing narratives, he argues that the UK remains one of the world's great powers alongside the US, China and Russia. Brendan bases his argument on the UK's economic strength, its reputation in the world, history of resilience and a military capacity that he argues still allows it to project strength in the world. But why does any of that matter? Well, Brendan also argues that great power politics has returned as the fundamental framework through which we should understand the world and that the post-Cold War consensus based on international law and economic cooperation has faded fast.

1:51In short, he thinks that a country standing in the world really matters. And unlike many of his contemporaries, Brendan Sims still thinks that we are still a key player. There is so much to discuss here and we want your radical questions to put to Brendan in our Q &A episode. We record it at the same time as our normal podcast, so please don't wait. Send them in now so you have the chance to be part of this absorbing conversation. Please leave us a WhatsApp voice note on plus 44 330 123 9480 or you can email us on radical at bbc.co.uk. I'll be back with you very soon. But now, on with this week's episode.

2:42Hello and welcome to Radical, conversations about the underlying forces that reshape our world and the radical ideas that could define the future. I'm John Byrne Murdoch. I'm a columnist and chief data reporter at the Financial Times, but I'm here with you on Radical this week. My guest this week is Derek Gow. Derek is a British farmer, conservationist, author and rewilder. He's long been an outspoken advocate of large-scale species reintroductions, but he's now doing something about it himself, which is especially radical. On his farm in Devon, Derek has been breeding British indigenous animals, some of which have been extinct in this country for hundreds of years, with the aim to inspire us to go further and faster on reintroducing native species into the wild.

3:30Think wild boar, beavers, water vole, even wild cats like the lynx, all being reared on his farm with the hope that one day these species will again be allowed to roam free. So why is Derek doing all of this? Well, according to a 2020 assessment of global biodiversity by the Natural History Museum, the UK only has half its natural biodiversity left, which puts it in the bottom 10 % of all countries globally. Derek wants to change that, not just because he wants to right what he sees as an historic wrong, but he also wants to harness the innate behaviour of our native species, in particular beavers, to restore and protect delicate ecosystems.

4:12Now, some farming and animal rights groups, it's fair to say, are not happy with the species reintroduction movement. They have concerns over safety, environmental impact, even legality. These concerns come after reports of underground reintroduction networks where members risk arrest, jail and hefty fines by carrying out covert and unlicensed releases of beavers and other native species. Derek says he's not one of those beaver vigilantes and that everything he does on his farm is perfectly legal. But he is sympathetic with those people who are frustrated with the limits of the law and he wants to change the way we think about species reintroduction and be much more radical.

4:54So with all of that in mind, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Derek Gow. Derek Gow, welcome to Radical. Great to have you with us. Okay, hi. It's lovely to be here. I wanted to start from the beginning, as it were. Can you tell us a bit about what you do today, but maybe start with the journey that took you to this? because you've not always been on sort of this side of the topic we're going to discuss as it were. Today at this point in time I'm rewilding my farm and some land that's associated with it. By rewilding what I mean is that we still have some domestic animals and some cattle and ponies but these animals are here essentially to create a landscape that is good for nature.

5:37We are not farming these animals, they're animals that are more or less pets, to live out their long lifespans. And the idea is to use them to produce clean blood, clean dung, hair, if it's something like a wild boar hybrid, to root all, to create ponds and wallows so that dragonflies and frogs and other aquatic insects can use them. So basically taking the entire landholding we have, the wetlands, the forests, the grasslands, and we're redeveloping this to create a landscape that is suitable for a whole array of other life. but before I did that for approximately, I don't know starting in 2003 I farmed the land for maybe 15-16 years so we had a flock of about 1 ,500 breeding sheep and approximately 120 suckler cows and their calves so we farmed that land fairly hard producing a lot of lambs for slaughter some breeding sheep and cattle again for the same so it seemed like a real change in ethos in my lifetime and and one line that stood out to me you talked almost about a contrast between nature and farming and i'm sure to some people that might be a bit of surprise so can you unpack that a little bit and maybe lead in from that to what your whole goal here is with the switch that you've made So the contrast between nature and farming is elementally simple.

7:03Farming always has been a war with nature. And so if you look at farming that rises in the Fertile Crescent, it means that you have to tame the grasses you're going to use to produce larger seed heads, which today we call grains. So there's your initial production of a staple dietary resource. It means you have to tame domestic animals to ensure that they are pliant. As far as the wider landscape is concerned, you have to ensure that the wild animals are not there because they're either competing with your domestic animals for grass or potentially, if you're looking at predatory animals, they're going to kill your domestic livestock.

7:38So that's where your war begins. And if you accept that that was the historic beginning of where we were with cultivation, now we've moved to a time where that war encompasses everything. We use chemicals and pesticides to sterilise the soil, so the things we call weeds, which are of course an array of other plant life simply can't grow in cultivated fields and arable fields you know we use toxic drenches and porons and cattle and sheep to ensure that the things that would otherwise live off their blood or or lay botflies in them can and in every sense when you look at you know what we're doing with the the landscape now you know both in the way we treat our animals but in the way we've drained it cultivated it and tamed it to do our bidding we've created a landscape where you know all too commonly very little else lives alongside farming and every statistic that is from farmland birds to insect declines you know shows us that this battle we've had forever with nature is now one that we've emphatically won but in winning it we are beginning to realize that the one we have lost so much natural life and two we have created a landscape which is formidable and very difficult for us to govern anymore.

8:50So you're trying to reverse some or as many as you can i guess of those steps by reintroducing some of the species that have been pushed aside or even eradicated back into the environments they used to inhabit yeah sure so i mean what what i'm doing is is we're creating environments where other creatures can live so and and and and bit by bit in tiny steps you see creatures responding to it so when you restart gorse in the fields which of course is is a plant that's viewed as near toxic by many farming communities and is burnt to ensure that it does not take over landscapes. Well, that's all very well.

9:26But gorse is full of pollens. It's an early flowering plant. It's also a very safe plant if you're a stone chat or a Dartford warbler and you want to nest. So we are replanting gorse. We are leaving the grass wards tall so that basically we reckon that when they brush the bellies of the horses and cattle, it's about the right height. But these animals, of course, create shorter days, but it's a very varied tapestry. And in response to that, things like cuckoos and grass snakes, grasshopper warbles, a whole variety of creatures that still survive in the surrounding landscape and returning to our place to breed.

10:01Also, we are very firmly focused on reintroductions of what creatures that we can restore. And this year we have, in conjunction with another two landowners, released approximately 400 turtle doves, which are a bird that was extinct in the southwest of England. back into the environment surrounding us. And this season, quite a significant number of those birds returned potentially from Europe or from Africa to breed again on our land. The most significant addition to the fauna that we have in the environment surrounding us now is the Eurasian beaver, which unfortunately escaped from holding enclosures on our farm very many years ago, and which have got into the old medieval ditch systems that the church created to drain the land and use it all.

10:48And by creating a whole series of dams, are holding a vast amount of water that otherwise wouldn't be there in a near arid landscape. So their pools are used by amphibians, by otters, by fish, by dragon. Everything you can think of that uses water abides with the beavers. What's the goal here? Are you trying to just rewild the entirety of the UK, starting in your little corner of Devon, or is this more about demonstration and awareness? What's the goal? Well, you know, as time and money allow, we formed a small CIC called the Keep It Wild Trust. We are developing a site where you show people what can be done.

11:26There's incredible indecision about just what should be done and shouldn't be done. And when things become massively complex and extensive bureaucracy surrounding them, then what happens is, you know, you have organisations and individuals who strive very hard to create an impression of doing something, but actually, you know, it's the impression that's important and not the actual end results. So what we're doing in our own small way is showing just exactly what can be done by a relatively small organisation that is sleek and slim and clear and intent. So it's a combination of the two. So to give you an example, there's a tiny little bird called a twite.

12:02It's this little dowdy thing that, you know, wasn't really discovered in Britain until the mid-1800s. It's like a small linnet. It used to be called the mountain linnet. And it's shared this island with us since the last glaciation. It's an upland bird, almost certainly at different times. Flocks of those tiny twittering things have looked down on the last of the mammoths going through the glacial valleys. The land change at a staggering scale has ensured that the seed-rich environments that this little creature needs to survive have all but gone. So we have assembled a bunch of twites that were bred in captivity.

12:37We have about 60 of them now. And this year, we are hoping to start putting them out into outdoor enclosures, teach them how to make their nests again, form colonies. And as soon as we have a reasonable number of these birds, we will start looking for release sites. But frankly, if we have to go to jail to release a finch, then that's what it might entail. So we do things. We don't talk about it. You're getting pushback. who are the people who don't like what you're doing or how you're doing it and why you know in the beginning i mean i've worked with in nature conservation for very many years and when i started with the beavers the ones that were real issues were organizations you'd expect like the national farmers union or um the salmon and trout association and or definitely you know pretty much there was what you found was as well there was a very common and widespread public enthusiasm for restoration of the species.

13:26And there was very decent and reasonable press and media interest in the restoration of them as a species for all the reasons that the beavers are important, for retention of water, for slowing the flow of water at times of flood events. But when it actually came to those institutions, they were really dead set on stopping it. And in fairness, government were really less than helpful. So, I mean, the government statutory agencies, Scottish Natural, Nature Scott, English Nature, and Natural Resources Wales, you know just just we're worse than useless. I'm just I'm just going to come in there and say you know none of these organisations or their representatives are in the room with us so they may push back on some of this and of course and I mean would it be fair to say that certainly in the case of the likes of the National Farmers Union their position is that what you're trying to do is often in tension with what they're trying to do the same land different purposes different goals.

14:18Well that's the way it's presented as a binary issue but the reality is of course that's nonsense. When it comes to it, you know, many of the creatures we're working with are things like white storks or turtle doves or water voles. I mean, what impact do these things have on agriculture? Absolutely none. So they'll tell you that I am a dangerous radical, but you've got to bear in mind this is the industry that has real issues. And what it needs is it needs to be prominent in the government's reckoning. And therefore, it likes to have binary issues that it can use to whip up a rabble every time there's any kind of issue.

14:50So you can send tractors into Westminster and deposit dung at the door of the Prime Minister when you don't like it and actually have your views heard. I mean, if you said that something like the beaver did present an issue because it floods wetlands, it could flood productive farmland and fertile farmland in the lower valleys. Well, you know, in the end, that's probably true. But when you look at where we are now, I was at Nettcastle the other day in Sussex and Charlie Burrell showed me a beaver generated wetland that ran through a valley bottom for two and a half miles, storing water in a landscape where there wasn't another drop.

15:23The rivers that I passed through to get to net the day before, many of the feeder channels and streams are all bone dry. So when you look at this argument that this thing is bad, the reality is that it's what we're doing with the land that's terribly bad. You know, creating a situation where, you know, we either have significant flooding in the winter because we've canalised everything, and the water has nothing to absorb and nowhere to go, or we've reached a time in a climate like this where there's absolutely no water at all, and the landscape starts to burn. And beavers are a very, very important part of a natural solution to that.

15:58So we'll come on to beavers in depth in a second. I just wanted to pick up on something that you mentioned, nepp. Is nepp essentially another variant of what you're doing in Devon, a different scale, different goals? Nepp is elysium. I mean, you know, when you see what the remarkable man and his wife Isabella Tree have done, an unfarmable estate which couldn't produce money in any sense when it was run as a conventional farming enterprise and now is a very successful mistake financially on the basis of the rewilding projects developed. It's just incredible. Here you take these 3 ,000 acres of unproductive Sussex land, you allow nature to find its own way and the most remarkable array of creatures return.

16:40NEP is absolutely a portal to what the future should be whereby we farm the best land in a sustainable manner that uses less and less toxic chemicals every year. And then we look at a lot of the other bits of land that really have no farming value and we start to restore them to nature for other purposes. What do you think politicians, organisations like DEFRA should be doing? Well, they should be listening to independent advice. And I mean, they have done that in the past. I mean, there was a time when, you know, Ed Miliband was talking about, you know, we're farming in a one world type environment and that one world has to take into account the fact There's a finite water resource and we need to retain it and use it more wisely.

17:21There's a finite soil resource. There are politicians who do understand this. But the farming lobby is, even though it's a tiny section of society, you have an organisation that's very good at lobbying. We have reached out to DEFRA and they didn't come back to us with a response on this. The National Farmers Union did come to us with a comment on this. Their vice president, Robin Muntz, has sent the following statement on farming in general, saying that farmers already manage 6.1 million hectares through agri-environment schemes and support multifunctional land use, but environmental delivery must sit alongside food production and taking large areas of productive land out of farming will not strengthen UK food security or help feed a population of 70 million.

18:04Farmers are in agri-environment schemes because it's another way of earning money. There are very many people who genuinely behave well and create wildlife-rich environments, But within those ranks, there are very many people who care very deeply about nature and are very worried about what's happening to it. So it's not the case that all farmers are the enemies of nature. They're absolutely not. But in my experience, organisations like the National Farmers Union are really not helpful when it comes to nature conservation at all and present a binary position or a binary picture of their industry's role in this landscape, which is just not realistic.

18:40So what exactly are the changes you would like to see with farming in the UK, for example? I think the details of how would this look different? What we need to do is look at this and readjust the landscape. So we need more water. So wherever you can, it should be a government priority to start holding water again on the land. Most of our river systems and the drainage ditches that surround them have been so deepened by dredging and extraction that they now sit perched above their old floodplains to the point where the water coming seasonally out in the winter is next to impossible. And as soon as the water does come out, it drains very quickly back into the watercourses so that the land can again be used for farming.

19:24When you have environments where you don't have complications of reeds and you don't have really absorbent aquatic plants like sphagnum moss, what you have is this flush rear water running very quickly, hitting towns, settlements, villages, roads, railways, doing incredible economic damage and inflicting huge human misery on the rest of the society year after year after year. The best thing that could happen is we start to look at how we're going to hold water again, recreate wetlands, which has been talked about since the time of Tony Blair's government, and create a situation whereby when the rain drains off the mountains, very simply you have massive sponges in the valley bottom to absorb it and to stop this constant process of boom and bust.

20:06So if I just come on there on water and wetlands. So as I understand it, what you're saying, this is about water management. It's about flood mitigation. And this is maybe a good point for us to go in on beavers as well, because presumably when we're talking about water management systems in a way that is truly in harmony with nature, we're talking about beavers. Are there other aspects to this or is that well? Engineering will have to be part of what's done. And so, I mean, the beavers in their own right will not bring up the base level of the bottom of watercourses that were bulldozed in the 1960s.

20:39Beavers are nature's water gardeners. They've been engineering water for 40 million years. So would they have a role in this? Yes, of course they would. They're the creatures that can dam the small creeks and streams and hold vast amounts of water in the upper watersheds, which are then because their landscapes are full of mosses, grasses, they're absorbent. So it's like having a big sponge in the bottom of the valley and lots of little sponges everywhere else. So the water that comes down in the wintertime and in the spring is held in the beaver-generated environments by the dams, then released very slowly through these environments.

21:15So as the water on the bottom of the valley dries out, you've still got water coming down that's been retained by the beaver-generated landscapes further up. We know from extensive study experience in North America and Europe and Eurasia, these are landscapes that also are very resilient to drought and to fire. Because if you have fire running through forests or through landscapes where you have a significant amount of dry vegetation, it can't burn through the wet valley environment. So as soon as it hits the water, that's it. The fires stop. Beavers are not a keystone species. They are a force of nature in their own right.

21:52And this is nature's way of regulating fire, drought and flood. They are our best friends and they should be fully employed to assist us with the task that's now ahead. We're dealing, as we record this, with an extensive record-breaking drought in the UK. We've had notable floods in Europe recently, such as the recent one in Valencia. Would these major events have been prevented if we had beavers roaming and swimming around? Or are we talking about a more marginal impact here? Something that is nonetheless something we should do, but is maybe not necessarily going to have these dramatic big impacts that we might need, given what's been happening to the climate.

22:34At the moment, it's insignificant because there's very few wild beavers in person. and you're seeing little wondrous gems of projects form like the one at Nepp where they're holding back the two and a half miles of water in a landscape that would otherwise be utterly dry. No fish, no frogs, no drinking areas for the deer and the horses, no water at all. But over time, if you give them enough land, this is an animal that will change landscapes, change them completely into swamps that are vast. We've known about this issue for a very long time. It's whether we're ready to employ it now.

23:13I hope you're enjoying my conversation with Derek Gow. Don't forget, you can subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds so you don't miss future episodes. And make sure you've got push notifications turned on and that way you'll get an alert whenever we publish a new episode so you'll never miss out. Now, back to Derek Gow.

23:35I'm hearing terms like vast. in terms of how you would like this to look, at the same time as saying, you know, the impact on actual farming as it currently exists would be negligible. Is there a tension there? I mean, it feels like the maximalist version of your goals here would be that a huge swathes of the countryside would be teeming with wildlife and storing water and trapping water, but in a way that surely at that scale, the scale which would be most beneficial for nature and water systems, food production industry would be taking a notable hit. It depends where you're producing food. At the end of it all, what you do is you look at, you know, the landscape is we're perfectly capable technically of doing something, right, the areas where we want to store water are here, here and here.

24:21These are the critical flow points above our towns and cities. This is a more efficient way of using the land for the benefit of wider society. This is what we should do. And it makes more sense to do that than to ensure Flossie, the worthless sheep, and its two pointless lamps have their feet dry. And if you think this is absurd, again, just go to the Netherlands. You drive through the motorways in that highly developed country which produces and exports massive amounts of vegetables from its landscape. And you'll see all the water running along the sides of the motorways. Every motorway intersection is a pond in the centre with breeding duck.

24:58There are flocks of spoonbills flying across the environment right beside you is you drive past villages, football stadiums, you know, shopping centres, everything that we think of as being completely normal in a human-generated landscape, and none of it is frightening at all. The compromise makes complete sense, and what you do is you prioritise the land you need for water storage, and then, you know, where the good farmland is, of course, that's not used for water storage, but the idea that every inch of Britain can be profitably farmed is nonsense. You're changing the way the landscape looks, And I mean, the beavers are one example of that, where you have an animal that can deliver natural processes that no other animal really can.

25:37But when you look at landscape itself, you know, why can't we make the fields oval and say, OK, there's your field. We'll pay you for all the bits around the edge. And what that does is it means the things like blackthorn can start to come in. You know, singing white throats can come back. You can leave log piles in it. Instead of doing what's happening at the moment in the agri-environment schemes, whereby you get grants to put up fences, those grants come with tidying up hedges and the tidying up hedges means that gigantic tree shears come in prune all these things off especially the old hollow ashes which is where the birds nest and the dormice are prune them all off put them in big heaps in the countryside and then they're burnt that's what happens but the point is if we just start to make these small changes before we know where we are we create more and more space for other creatures to exist as well and these are non-threatening binary moves that most farmers would welcome as a regular source of annual income.

26:30I mean, there's a single farming initiative thing that's out at the moment. These are capital grants for people to do a variety of different things, to fell trees and to rivers, you know, to do a lot of good things. And farmers are going for this very quickly. So as soon as an announcement's made that there's a pot of money there to spend on this, you then find three days later that 70 % of the budget that was announced on Monday is all committed by Thursday. And everybody's struggling, is just desperate to get their hands on that cash because it's one of the very few sources of income there is.

27:02But it's not like the old farm subsidies. It's not guaranteed by the European Union. You don't know you're going to get that money every single year. So when I was farming, I got my single farm payment was about£40 ,000, which wasn't based on anything I produced. It was based on the amount of land I owned. So I didn't have to produce a thing to get that money. as long as I was a registered farmer, I got the money for doing pretty much nothing and for no environmental benefit. Now that that payment's gone, there is no source of money coming into farmers which is paid, is guaranteed to be paid every single year going forward for, let's say, a period of 10 years.