Rewilding the World with Ben Goldsmith

"All of us involved in the project are driven by the opportunity to make a real difference for this special part of the planet." Eradicating giant mice from South Africa's Marion Island, a vital haven for seabirds. The vast, wild Southern Ocean is home to albatrosses, petrels and other remarkable seabirds which wander for years on end in search of food. Only to breed do the seabirds of the Southern Ocean need land, of which there are just a handful of tiny specs. One of these is South Africa'...

"A lot of Costa Rica's success on forest cover hasn't been emulated in terms of active rewilding. That's what I'm trying to start the wheels turning in Costa Rica; when do we need to use more of an active approach?" In this episode Ben Goldsmith is joined by Andy Whitworth of Osa Conservation, an organisation which is busy rewilding Costa Rica's ever wilder Osa Peninsula.Liberated from low productivity, highly damaging cattle ranching, much of western Costa Rica is returning to forest. On the...

“I would be very excited if I found a grasshopper on the balcony and my parents would put it in a jar for me to observe.”In this episode Melpo Apostolidou from BirdLife Cyprus tells Ben Goldsmith about the remarkable ongoing effort to return the vital, majestic Griffon vulture to the skies of Cyprus, in the eastern Mediterranean.Melpo and her team have achieved this extraordinary feat against a backdrop of poisoning, ill-considered and unsustainable development and, worst of all, rampant ille...

This episode’s release coincides with World Rewilding Day 2024, with this year’s theme being Hope Into Action. A great example of this in practice is the work being carried out by Jonathan Thomson who has created the twenty-two acre wild paradise Underhill Nature Reserve on the border of Wiltshire and Dorset in southern England.A lot of people wonder how to go about rewilding smaller patches of land. The answer can be found in playing the role of the keystone species yourself! In this episode...

“We’re already starting to see dramatic habitat and water quality improvement across that Kissimmee valley.”The Everglades, North America’s largest and most vital wetland, is a place of extraordinary beauty but is facing enormous problems. The immense ‘river of grass’ has been desperately disfigured, principally by ill-considered hydrological engineering and heavily subsidised industrial sugar production.In this episode Ben Goldsmith is joined by Steve Davies, lead scientist of The Everglades...

“Feral cats are the primary driver of the decline of small mammals. We’ve lost more than 30 mammal species in Australia over the last couple of hundred years and the primary driver of that is cats.”Australia has a mammoth problem with invasive species brought by European settlers to the country which had been isolated from the rest of the world for millennia. Now, major efforts are underway to restore vast tracts of wild land and the wildlife that once inhabited it.In this episode Ben Goldsmi...

“Think globally, but act locally. We need to start putting some of that stuff back locally otherwise we don’t pass on anything great to our future generations.”The Scottish Highlands is one of Britain’s most beautiful and ecologically degraded landscapes. Change is in the air, however, as long lost keystone species such as wild boar, wildcats, white-tailed eagles and beavers are returning.In this episode Ben Goldsmith speaks with Highlander David Balharry, who leads the John Muir Trust, an or...

“With abundance comes resilience and with abundance these animals and the wildlife populations can thrive and can survive these climatic changes.”Andreia Pawel is from ORKCA, the Orange River-Karoo Conservation Area, based in the south of Namibia. The country is made up primarily of desert but once was a the place where springbok migrations dwarfed those of modern day zebra and wildebeest. Andriea and her team have partnered with local landowners to secure areas surrounding the Orange River w...

“What we are doing is to create the conditions, ecological and sociological, for the return of these two large predators that are present… but we need to find conditions for them to settle and to grow.”Drive through Portugal and you will see vast plantations of non-native species like eucalyptus and pine. But with these plants comes the demise of the ecosystem and a huge risk of fire; in 2017 more than 100 people died in forest fires that were able to cross huge swathes of land and even dams....

“Our hallmark is the reintroduction of the Scimitar-horned Oryx… It’s a beautiful, beautiful beast and it was a tragedy that it was allowed to go extinct in the first place.”The Scimitar-horned Oryx, the animal symbol of Sahara Conservation, was driven to extinction in the wild in the 1990s due to a lethal combination of overhunting, drought and habitat loss.In this episode Ben Goldsmith is joined by John Watkin, the outgoing Chief Executive of Sahara Conservation. John and his team were char...

“The river is not only valuable for its biodiversity but also for the culture and spiritual significance that it has for communities.”The Amazon of Europe stretches across five countries and is one of the places where there are still wild, pristine rivers. Dragana Mileusnic from The Nature Conservancy is part of the United for Rivers project helping to protect these precious freshwater gems for future generations.It’s an area which encompasses a treasure trove of nature and culture. However, ...

“The first time I saw a tiger pugmark in Cauvery landscape I was totally thrilled, I can’t explain the thrill and the joy I had. That’s what you all work and survive for, right?” Sanjay Gubbi hit headlines six years ago after he was attacked by a leopard that had strayed on to the grounds of a school. Despite being seriously injured, Sanjay has made a full recovery and is very vocal about the problems that a loss of habitat is having on animals such as leopards.Sanjay and his team at the Hole...

“What we need more than anything now from our landscape is carbon sequestration, flood risk reduction, biodiversity improvement and all those other so-called public goods.”The Lake District is an iconic landscape loved by millions and people traveling from all over the world to revel in its beauty. It’s the land of Beatrix Potter, Wordsworth and one of the country’s most ambitious rewilding projects. Lee Schofield is an author and head of RSPB Haweswater in the Lakes, a place which inco...

“Even in ten years we changed the entire ecosystem in Gökova Bay and fisheries.” The world’s oceans have been depleted of many important species through overfishing. Removing parts of the sea’s ecosystem and the introduction of invasive species can have far reaching consequences both in and on the water. Zafer Kizilkaya is an award winning conservationist. In 2012 he founded the Mediterranean Conservation Society which built and oversaw Turkey’s first community-managed Marine Protected A...

“Affric Highlands is an area of landscape between Loch Ness and the west coast of Scotland, looking over to the Isle of Skye. It’s about 500,000 acres so it’s like a small country.”Scotland’s fabled highlands are not what we think they are. Once upon a time the great Caledonian forests stretched from coast to coast, famed for its wildness and size. It teemed with wildlife and large animals like wolves, bears and lynx. Now, so much of what was once there has gone.In this episode Ben Goldsmith ...

“When I see things like the crossing that’s just going in north of Los Angeles for mountain lions, bobcats and other species it’s a sign to me that humanity finally gets that it’s impacting nature and, essentially, impacting us.”The shorthand definition of rewilding is the ‘Three Cs’; Core areas, Carnivores, and Corridors. Jodi Hilty is president and chief scientist of Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, one of the largest wildlife corridor creating projects in the world. Jodi and h...

“As Kazakhstan became part of the Soviet Union a whole series of very large transformations took place. 45 million hectares of land within Kazakhstan was simply ploughed under the Virgin Lands campaign.” Mark Day is from the RSPB and part of the team delivering a project covering 180 million acres in Kazakhstan and Central Asia. The Altyn Dala, an area the size of France and Germany combined, is a huge grassland that once may have rivalled the Serengeti.The Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative ...

“We call it rooting your identity. That really brings people close to the ground and feeling powerful and connected.”In this episode Ben Goldsmith speaks to Astrid Vargas from Inspiration 4 Action. Astrid has been part of a plan to save one of the rarest big cats from extinction; the Iberian lynx. It was previously thought there were only 90 individuals left. Thanks to the efforts of Astrid and others, a captive breeding programme has succeeded in boosting the numbers of this extraordinary ra...

“If you combine all of these reserves together they constitute an area of about 200,000 square kilometres... it’s probably one of the world’s largest terrestrial protected areas.” Saudi Arabia is huge - almost ten times the size of Britain - and is well known for its deserts. However, once upon a time it had savannahs akin to those in East Africa, where once lived ostriches and striped hyenas and large predators like leopards and cheaters. A lot of that habitat has now gone following the arri...

“We really are focused on prioritising those species that are about to blink out. We must make sure that on our watch that doesn’t happen.”Welcome to a new series of Rewilding the World with Ben Goldsmith. In this first episode Ben speaks to Penny Becker, Vice President of Island Conservation. Island Conservation works to remove invasive invertebrate species from island ecosystems. Overwhelmingly, the majority of extinctions that have taken place over the last few centuries have occurred on i...

“We belong here. The challenge is can we be here without impacting detrimentally on the rest of the ecosystem. And the simple answer is yes we can; we know what to do and we know how to do it.”In this special episode join Ben Goldsmith as he speaks to conservationist and author Isabella Tree and Director of Rewilding Britain, Alistair Driver, about the concept of rewilding. Rewilding as a term means different things to different people, and can sometimes be viewed negatively. In this podcast ...

“If we can restore large scale damaged ecosystems then why don’t we do it?” Sometimes it’s said that the environmental and rewilding movement is not ambitious enough. Ben speaks to Ties van der Hoeven, co-founder of The Weather Makers, who is working on probably the most exciting and ambitious rewilding idea you have ever heard of.Drawing inspiration from landscape restoration taking place in China and elsewhere, Ties has an idea to regreen the Sinai peninsula, a triangle of desert that ...

“I thought well I can die tomorrow, it’s fine, they are back.”Kristine Tompkins is founder of Tompkins Conservation and former chief executive of the outdoor-apparel company Patagonia. She and her late husband Douglas have been pioneers of rewilding since the beginning of the movement.The couple purchased millions of acres of land across Chile and Argentina to restore to wilderness. Kristine speaks to Ben Goldsmith about her rewilding journey spanning the past three decades, including the rei...

“I think people are afraid that we want to remove all the dams in the world.”Dams can effectively act as concrete straight jackets. Weirs and dams and other obstructions cause all kinds of harm, some of which we understand and much of which we don’t. More than one million barriers are thought to exist in Europe’s rivers, with many of them over 100 years old. Some are old and obsolete, serving no economic or environmental purpose. Spain is leading the way in the number of structures ...

“If there is tens of thousands of hectares on the market then you might as well use them for conservation.”Christoph Promberger from Carpathia Wilderness Reserve, is rewilding an enormous woodland across Transylvania, Carpathia and Romania. He joins Ben Goldsmith from his home at the foot of the Carpathian mountains, a range which stretches through seven countries and home to some of Europe’s rarest large mammals including brown bears, lynx and wolves. Over the last few decades the area has b...

“Wild areas where you are going to be walking for two days completely alone, there is no one else.”No country in western Europe has as much diversity and abundance of wildlife and landscapes as Spain. Ben Goldsmith speaks to Deli Saavedra from Rewilding Europe about the exciting things which are happening there on scale. Deli is leading a project in the Iberian Highlands, the name given to an area of land stretching from Madrid and Barcelona of almost one million hectares. There, entire lands...

“This is where they have been for millions of years and they deserve a home on the Northern Great Plains.”The great American Prairies were once one of the greatest ecosystems in the world. We have all seen images and heard stories of great herds of bison roaming vast swathes of endless grasslands, but a lot of that landscape is now gone. But all is not lost. Alison Fox from American Prairie Reserve joins Ben Goldsmith to talk about plans to pull off a dramatic restoration project in Mont...

Join Ben Goldsmith for this brand new podcast as he speaks to some of the most influential people behind the most exciting and dramatic rewilding projects across the globe. Text Rewilding the World here. Let us know what you think of the podcast and if there are any rewilding projects you would love Ben to feature in future episodes.