We’re on location in Yadvinder Malhi’s office in Oxford, professor and director of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery. Yadvinder’s work-origin story begins when he first climbs sampling towers in the Amazon to look out on 1000 miles of rainforest in every direction. “I was absolutely bewitched. I felt it viscerally.” We talk about culture and nature, the wild force of nature, and the sense of living in a belly of something huge. He recalls being sent back to India aged six to reconnect, and see the value of the huge family network as another support system. “Vibrancy is more than abundance,” says Yadvinder. It is energy to be shared. Vibrancy is about connections and story.

We talk of ecological civilisation in China, and nature recovery in the UK. He says, “We need to be thinking about radical transformations of landscapes,” not just the utilitarian values of nature.

He also says, “Ecology and ecosystems are the constant negotiation of relationships.”

Yadvinder’s new book will be called “Vibrant Earth.”

His heroes and heroines are the small organisation and local people making positive change: the social underbelly beneath nations and governments. 

His book recommendation: David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous. 

His key action: don’t stop at connections to nature: turn to action. 

Website: https://www.yadvindermalhi.org/

Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery: https://naturerecovery.ox.ac.uk/ 

Oxford Nature Network: https://www.youtube.com/@oxfordnaturenetwork 

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery."

In Mann Woods in central Essex, therapist and outdoor leader Jo Roberts chats about the work of the Wilderness Foundation and the transformative power of being in nature. We sit around the fire as winter sun falls. She talks about the value of learning small competencies for young people, and how nature interferes to remind us of something greater. Just look up, count the stars. There’s a surprising finding about young people and social media too. She also talks about how discomfort takes us into deep places. Jo says, “the tears fall quickly when you’re in the wilderness.” But that, too, faces will be softer by morning. 

Jo’s heroine: Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya.

Her recommended books: Peter Wohlleben’s “The Hidden Life of Trees”; and Victor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” 

Jo recommended action: Be attentive, take time – see the world in a grain of sand. 

The Wilderness Foundation: https://wildernessfoundation.org.uk/ 

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery."

I’m chatting with author, academic and former double UN Special Rapporteur Olivier De Schutter at a street table in the heat of an Oxford summer. Olivier is professor at the University of Louvain in Belgium, and says, “We have not made the economy inclusive by design; we have allowed it to operate in another way." The new Roadmap for Eradicating of Poverty Beyond Growth goes beyond 20 new metrics recently proposed as alternatives to GDP, and this Roadmap now contains 80 options for governments, businesses and civil society to take ever-lengthening steps towards a new inclusive and sustainable society.

Growth is still an orthodoxy that leads to extraordinary accumulation of wealth by the few, the growing fear of scarcity, and persistence of poverty and the breaching of planetary boundaries. Olivier calls this “the counter-productivity of growth.”

The Roadmap, he says, will help “broaden the imagination.” Combined with the declaration of an Inequality Emergency, and the launch of the International Panel on Inequality (IPI), he says, “We are at a turning point.”

Olivier’s heroes and heroines are the many low-income and neglected people: “if we listened to them, if we valued their knowing more, we’d make fewer mistakes.”

Olivier’s most recent book is called “Poverty Beyond Growth.”

He recommends Kate Pickett’s new book, “The Good Society”, and says read Hartmut Rosa too, especially his “Resonance.” 

Olivier recommends, look people in their eyes, create special relationships, and learn from each other. 

Website: https://www.srpoverty.org/

Roadmap: https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-poverty/roadmap-eradicating-poverty-beyond-growth 

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery."

I’m talking online with Charlotte Hollins who with brother Ben are the farmers and business leaders of the Fordhall Community Land Initiative in Shropshire. Their father Arthur was an early adopter of organic methods in the 1940s, also of inviting the community in. over the years, natural and social assets accumulated. But their landlord sought to evict them after he died. They were in a deep hole. For a change, the small people win, and Charlotte and Ben come up with a model to sell non-profit shares in the farm: 8000 people invest in the idea. They can see that something magic lies ahead. Twenty years on, and the 130 acre (50 hectare) farm and businesses employ over 150 local people in summer. There’s the livestock and crops, also farm shop, glamping yurts, café onsite, social prescribing, care farm, residential groups, alternative education projects, mobile catering – and abundant nature. 

Charlotte says, “It’s a happy farm, full of energy, with so many people involved.” There are 1000 worms per square metres, otters in the river. 

“We’ve been very good at linking to people,” she says. It’s made them all more creative. 

Charlotte adds, “We’re still here, Fordhall’s thriving.”

Charlotte’s heroes and heroines: her father, and all their shareholders, who took a punt on them, a risk. 

Charlotte recommends we make small sifts in what we do and say, especially the everyday stuff, and talk to people. Start a social movement. 

She also says: buy a share in Fordhall, for in 2026 they’re going to ask the community again.

Fordhall Farm: https://www.fordhallfarm.com/ 

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery." 

In his farmhouse kitchen in central Essex, Simon Lyster chats about local nature recovery. He is Chair of the Essex Local Nature Partnership that comprises 40 organisations. Like all counties there is now an obligation to produce a statutory Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS). This is a spatial map of the whole county, where the aim is to protect and conserve 30% of the land and sea are by 2030 (30 by 30). It’s about making nature “bigger, better, and more connected.”

Over several decades, we have lost bio-abundance. We can recall the moth snowstorms driving at night. Now they are gone. Simon tells of personal stories of being in a hole, and getting out.

Simon recommends The Moth Snowstorm by Mike McCarthy.

He says on action: “Bring joy. We need to talk more of joy.”

“If you’ve got a bit of garden, let it go wild. Make a little pond. If you don’t, then plant a window box for insects.”

Local Nature Recovery Strategy: https://www.essex.gov.uk/about-council/plans-and-strategies/environment-and-planning/local-nature-recovery-strategy 

https://essexnaturepartnership.com/lnrs/ 

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery."

I’m sitting with Hattie Phillips in the OWLS community garden in Maldon during one of the summer heatwaves. She was one of the first WWF Youth Ambassadors, and is currently studying at Black Mountains College in Wales. She is a very fine communicator, and already has great experience of speaking in public, performing in theatre, engaging with community action and national climate events. She says, “We can’t solve the climate crisis without nature,” and notes that “Everyone can make a difference, but not everyone has a voice.” She also says, engagement with activism was so exciting: “I went from being one person to being a community.”

Hattie was at COP26, speaking early one morning to a group of CEOs who ate their croissants and drank their coffee and completely ignored the two young people ready to talk. “We said,” says Hattie, “We don’t care how much money you have. If you have children or grandchildren, they will be exposed to the effects of your actions for decades.”

She wrote and performed a one-person play in 2026 called “Letters of Land and Loss.”

Her heroes are the activists making so many sacrifices.

Her book recommendation is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “The Service Berry.” 

Her recommendation: “Go outside, connect with the land.”

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery."

In this online chat, award winning actress, director, producer and writer Aria Mckenna talks from her north Florida home on building bridges between climate scientists, policy makers and the media. She talks of efforts to get positive climate and nature narratives inside TV and films, and how to go beyond the tendency to think drama can only be created around apocalypses. “Climate disinformation,” she says, “is so successful, we’re at a breaking point.” The annual Climate Summit in Hollywood brings together a wide variety of writers, actors, producers, all personally concerned about the climate crisis. This is already moving the sense of what is possible. 

She says, “I see a lot of movement in Hollywood.” Using the power of storytelling is a way to “put the medicine in the candy” – to wrap the bad inside a compelling story that leads to the good. She says, use words like pollution instead of carbon emissions. Pollution is clear to everyone as a bad; carbon emissions are an abstract term that needs explanation. 

Aria founded Global Cooling Productions (media for planet earth), Saving Planet Us, and helped found the Healthy Planet Action Coalition (HPAC).

Aria is proud of her daughter and her generation. Her hero is Erin Brokovich, subject and title of a popular film, and mapper of environmental illnesses across the US. Aria recommends the book “Drawdown” by Paul Hawken – who says we need to heal not steal the Earth. Aria says, “advocate for political change, so that we can achieve systemic change.”

See HPAC at https://healthyplanetaction.org/ 

The Hollywood Climate Summit: https://www.hollywoodclimatesummit.com/ 

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery." 

In his wildlife-friendly garden in East Sussex, I’m chatting with author and scientist Dave Goulson about insects, and especially bees. “They’re clinging on in little fragments of habitat.” Across the world, there are one million species of insect, and perhaps another 4 million awaiting identification. But they’re in severe decline. The land has become hostile to insects, particularly from the use of insecticides and herbicides by farmers, gardeners and urban authorities. “It mystifies me,” he says, “why we allow the sale of poisons for our gardens.” We talk of the dreaded neonics – and how the poison spreads from fields into wild plants and thence to insects. Dave observes, “The system of pesticide regulation is fatally-flawed.” 

He also talks of nearby Knepp estate, the great wilding transformation, and how it’s become fabulous for nightingales and purple emperor butterflies. Surprises happen, when nature becomes abundant.

Dave is proud of having established the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, and of the role his research group played in getting neonics banned.

He has written many books. The most recent is “Eat the Planet Well.” Others include “Silent Earth”, “Insectarium” and “The Garden Jungle.”

He says, “There are simple things that people can do in their gardens, a gentle steer, don’t be over-tidy.”

Dave’s fine “ramblings on the wonderful, vital world of insects” are on his YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@davegoulson6831. 

His science website is at https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p126217-dave-goulson.  

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery." 

I’m sitting with the award-winning oral storyteller and author, Danyah Miller, in her West Sussex garden to hear about “swimming in the sea of story.” Danyah tells of vision and method – how story works best and what we might do to create story. She’s the first person to sing on the podcast, showing how young children can come to see how beautiful is the world. “Sharing stories in the seasons opens up a connection with the natural environment.” Personification is key too: speak of Mother Earth, Grandmother Moon, Brother Wind, Friend Robin, the Standing People. Story works slantwise to create inner courage and new paths. Danyah says, “I have no idea where each seed of story will go.”

Danyah also says, “I go to a place when time stops, when I’m telling a story.”

Danyah recent book is “Seven Secrets of Spontaneous Storytelling” (Hawthorn Press). 

Her hero is local suffragette Madge (Ethel Margartet) Turner: “I can’t get her out of my mind.”

She recommends the book, “The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911): “a challenging book, yet it’s also how nature can inspire us.”

Her action: share a story with children. Then repeat. “You can’t water the rose only once.”

Danyah’s YouTube channel is at https://www.youtube.com/@danyahmillerthestoryteller.

Danya’s website is at: https://danyahmillerstoryteller.co.uk/ 

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery." 

In his Field at Maplestead in north Essex, author and nature restorer James Canton chats about the transformation by renaturing of small spaces in the landscape. “I evolved,” he says, “the field evolved.” From barren land to cricket pitch to abundant patch of wildflower meadow, scrub, trees and pond. We talk about how life recognises life, and how when you create the conditions, nature comes fast. He describes digging out of the pond, and how quickly insects arrived, followed by fish (eggs from the feet of ducks, maybe), and great crested newts (walking great journeys across the land from other water). Also: think of the digger churning up the land as a herd of aurochs. James is Director of Wild Writing at the University of Essex, and also talks about how students of all ages have been creating story to talk about transformations. He says, “renaturing is open to everyone.”

James’ heroines and heroes are the unsung: Chris Gibson (“mothman”), Steve Carver of the University of Leeds, and local activist Lucy Manthorpe of Kiln Farm near Long Melford. 

James recommends “Lie of the Land” by Guy Shrubsole and “Ice Age Art” by Gill Cook. Also watch the online film on rewilding ideas in Siberia called “Pleistocene Park.”

James’s recent books are “Renaturing” and “The Oak Papers.”

He recommends, renature wherever you are. Even a window box. All through our talk, the rooks nearby are calling. 

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery."