Rewilding the World with Ben Goldsmith

"Eighty percent of the world’s population lives underneath a light polluted sky of some kind.  When you look specifically at Europe and North America that statistic rises to ninety nine percent. So basically almost nobody can see the Milky Way, or can see a truly dark night’s sky."  Most of us in Britain can no longer see the Milky Way from our homes, and we have barely noticed the loss....

" Come to Africa, find who should be responsible to carry out conservation and support that. Don’t take away the responsibility of Africans, because that hasn’t given us the results we need, and it’s very expensive.  Find those government institutions, community institutions, those households that must carry out this work, and support them to do that." For too long the story of conservat...

"Nature would like to change all the time, and that's guided by those landscape architects like large herbivores, but also other processes; wind, storm, disease, fire, flooding - you name it. Anything can change a landscape if we allow it."  According to the European Commission as of 7 September, 650,458 hectares of land has burnt since the start of 2026, the worst year on record. ...

"This is a natural progression of how to protect your borders. And the other advantage is that it's cheaper; it's already there. So I can see that as demands on the defence budgets go up and up and up, that warWilding will become more and more prominent because it's a cash win-win situation for the beleaguered defence budgets."  Ben's latest guest is Jasper Humphreys,...

"For me, the driver has always been love. It's been a love of thriving nature, it's been a love of rich and interesting landscapes and it's been this despair at seeing so few of them in our own country."  Reading George Monbiot 's book 'Feral' a decade ago opened Ben Goldsmith's eyes to the truly dire state of nature in Britain, and to the notion that r...

" This was very much an aesthetic concept in renaissance Italy; the three natures. The sort of ornamented nature, the cultivated nature and then the wild. So I've always thought about that as a fairly key principle. There comes a point where you've just got to sort of let up on the tiller a bit, and that it's lovely to grow dahlias and tulips outside your door but for God'...

" Our aim is to re-create that sort of biosphere level peat land on a massive scale and unsurprisingly everything begins with water. And we need flowers and of course with flowers we’ll build insects so really straight and extraordinary complex botany on site and that’s gonna be really very difficult." " The aim in any rewetting project that we might do, and Emblehope is one of them...

" The bison will stay, no matter what happens here, and we will pursue all legal remedies for appealing this decision... but we will continue to manage a herd of bison, we will continue to open these lands to the public, we will continue to grow American Prairie."  Ben Goldsmith is joined once again by Alison Fox, CEO of American Prairie, the ambitious conservation organisation working t...

"We are in an abusive relationship with nature and we all know what abusive relationships look like. They are when one part always takes, takes, takes and never gives anything back. That is the relationship we have with nature right now and that will not end well - for us - so it has to change." In the latest episode of Rewilding the World Ben Goldsmith is joined by Tim Christophersen ,...

" Our dream is that children growing up in Newcastle should be able to stand on those terraces, look out and see this wonderful sort of wild landscape, and be able to go to it and spend time in it and see how food is produced naturally and be part of all that. Why would anyone want to deny that future for children in Britain?" In this episode of Rewilding the World, Ben Goldsmith is join...

"The work that I'm involved with is more at catchment, at river basin scale. So it's trying to do the best we can - for us it's within the Thames - to hold as many eels in it as possible within that can grow up and migrate back to the Sargasso." The European eel is a truly fascinating creature, spending its life in freshwater rivers, streams, and even ponds, before turning...

"There's no silver bullet. It's a combination of efforts and it's a moving target. We constantly have to be adaptive, we constantly have to try and get ahead of the game and looking at it at a population level and not at an individual level is really, really important for the long term success here."  African Parks made the astoundingly bold move of buying out a bankrupt w...

"It's very important to remember - for the same reasons we bought back many of these other species like beaver, river otter, fisher, bald eagle - that all these species have a role ecologically in these ecosystems. And so the same questions should be asked for species like large carnivores to help restore those ecological interactions and ecosystem services." America’s apex predator...

"The amount of times I've been and just for a brief moment you almost sort of lose track and forget ... and you're just looking at this marvel on a really good migration day and the number of birds... and it's absolutely incredible and then the next thing you know, all of a sudden, you'll hear the gunshots start." The massacre of migrating birds each spring and autumn...

"I was driving once with my ranger - and we were in the car - and in front of us was a big, grey wolf. He was astonished. Both of us, we just stopped breathing." In the latest episode of Rewilding the World Ben Goldsmith interviews Croatian conservationist Marija Krnjajic of Rewilding Europe .  Marija Is leading an effort to restore and protect one of Europe's greatest wild places,...

"This place went from zero percent possibilities to sight a jaguar in two or three days to 100 percent possibility to see jaguars. This change in perception of the people, because now 'the jaguar is not a problem' is an opportunity." Rewilding champion Deli Saavedra joins Ben Goldsmith again on Rewilding the World.  Formerly Head of Landscapes at Rewilding Europe, Deli is now i...

"Myself and my colleagues were not fooled, we knew exactly what the were intending to do, and so we got the band back together and we rose up to build an army of activists and advocates to fight them over the last seven years." Last year, Ben Goldsmith was lucky enough to visit the great Okefenokee swamp in Georgia; the largest federally protected area east of the Mississippi. The place...

"If you give rivers more space to flood the lands, to bring sediment - sand, clay - they not only bring sediment, they also bring life!" In this episode of Rewilding the World, Ben Goldsmith interviews one of the most impactful architects of rewilding in Europe, Dutchman Wouter Helmer. Despite being the most densely populated, intensively farmed and heavily developed country in Europe, T...

"The animals are already existing in a mindful, non-thinking state and it's us who have to experience that moment where everything stops and you're just being, you're just experiencing in the most direct way the absolute beauty that the natural world contains." Like Ben Goldsmith, the latest guest on Rewilding the world, Dave Mountjoy, found deep solace in nature following...

"What are the things that really might just make a difference that take us out of a conventional nature conservation headspace and start to really push the boundaries of what can be done? And of course of one of the huge advantages we have is we've got the land to do it." In the latest episode of Rewilding the World Ben Goldsmith speaks to Bev Nichols, Forest Wilding Programme Manag...

"I don't want to make a zoo. I don't to take care of those animals for eternity, I want them to live on their own and in order to have a sustainable ecosystem it's extremely important to have all niches filled in this ecosystem."  In the place of the vast Siberian tundras were once great grasslands teeming with wildlife, until early humans hunted them out.  In the latest e...

"If it quacked like a Duck, to be honest I don't think we’d be that excited about it but because it sings like an angel and it looks so beautiful and it lives in liminal spaces - these wetland areas where we don’t really feel at home - all those things add together to make the Curlew a very mysterious and very loved bird." In this episode Ben Goldsmith is joined by Mary Colwell, Dir...

" We thought the project was over... We would lose the trust of the public and they were sceptical to begin with. We stuck together. " Michigan's mighty Boardman-Ottaway River has been liberated by the removal of four huge concrete dams, thanks to decades of hard work by Frank Dituri and Brett Fessell. In this episode you'll hear all about this staggering story of restoration....

"Our seas around the UK are so busy. There are so many different activities that happen on it, from fishing to offshore wind, to cabling, to shipping... so looking after and building space for restoration and regeneration and reseeding the sea is so important." On this episode of Rewilding the World Ben Goldsmith is joined by Sandy Luk about the Marine Conservation Society's ambitio...

"They don't hate wolves, they just hate the idea of losing their livelihood. So for me, if we can prevent the conflict, and we can empower rural areas and rural land owners and ranchers to be the best stewards of the land that we can, that's the best way to keep conservation alive in the West." In the latest episode of Rewilding the World Ben Goldsmith talks to range-rider Dani...