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. My guest on this edition of the Rewilding the World podcast is Megan Eaves-Egenes, author of th...

"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 conservation in Africa has been told by outsiders. In the latest episode of the Rewilding the World podcast Ben ...

"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. Restoring big herds of wild herbivores such as bison and wild horses is one the keys to managing wildf...

"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, director of programmes for the Marjan Study Group in the department of war studies at King’s College London who has coine...

"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 rewilding is the big idea which has the potential to turn things round. George is a truly brilliant and articulate nature campaigner. He em...