"Up in Oregon, sixty miles from that old dam site, adult Chinook salmon were swimming in the Klamath River. It happened in ten days, when our scientists were saying it might take ten years."

The largest dam removals in history just took place on California’s Klamath River. In the latest episode of Rewilding the World Ben Goldsmith talks with Chuck Bonham, Director of California Fish and Wildlife, about this iconic moment, and about the recovery of salmon, beavers, wolves and other wildlife in the Golden State.

This podcast was recorded before the wildfires happened in California.
Our thoughts are with all the victims of these tragic events.

Ben Goldsmith is a British financier and rewilding enthusiast. Join him as he speaks to people from all over the world who champion nature and are helping to restore habitats and wildlife to some of the most nature depleted parts of our planet.

This podcast is produced by The Podcast Coach.

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.

The Conservation Collective support locally-led environmental Foundations around the world. Together we'll protect and restore the wild places we know and love.

"River restoration is essentially a violent act, what we do, but it's because it's undoing a violent act. It's essentially an equal and opposite violent act to what was done to the rivers in the first place."

Rivers are meant to be wild things but we have tamed them out of all recognition in the UK. Our rivers and streams have been straightened, buried underground, encased in concrete and are nothing like their natural incarnations.

But there is a widespread river restoration movement taking hold across the country. In this episode Ben Goldsmith is joined by Mike Blackmore from the Wessex Rivers Trust who is one of the people leading the charge in restoring waterways back to health.

Ben Goldsmith is a British financier and rewilding enthusiast. Join him as he speaks to people from all over the world who champion nature and are helping to restore habitats and wildlife to some of the most nature depleted parts of our planet.

This podcast is produced by The Podcast Coach.

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.

The Conservation Collective support locally-led environmental Foundations around the world. Together we'll protect and restore the wild places we know and love.

"Larger scale restoration projects mean better ecological outcomes, but they're also more efficient in terms of cost-per-acre."

What can be seen as one of the most important things currently happening in rewilding is the opening up of private investor capital for the purpose of restoring nature. 

This has never happened before; it’s always been a charitable endeavour. However, that model is changing, and very fast. Adam Davis, a cofounder of Ecosystem Investment Partners is deploying millions of dollars of investors' money into huge rewilding projects across America. 

Ben Goldsmith is a British financier and rewilding enthusiast. Join him as he speaks to people from all over the world who champion nature and are helping to restore habitats and wildlife to some of the most nature depleted parts of our planet.

This podcast is produced by The Podcast Coach.

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.

The Conservation Collective support locally-led environmental Foundations around the world. Together we'll protect and restore the wild places we know and love.

"I'm very happy, last week we brought beavers to France and that was my 1000th beaver I had exported either myself or through the organisation. And that was not just to bring back the beaver, but also to bring back the benefits of the beaver."

One man is responsible more than any other for bringing beavers back to Europe; German ecologist, Gerhard Schwab.

There were probably two to three million beavers across Eurasia, reduced to maybe a thousand in 1900. Gerhard persuaded one state after the next in Germany to do reintroductions and physically led the process. He brought beavers back from the tiny refuges where a handful had survived in Poland, Belarus and the marshes of Germany and France. He mixed them up to create genetic strength and reintroduced them in one place after the next right across Europe.

Ben Goldsmith is a British financier and rewilding enthusiast. Join him as he speaks to people from all over the world who champion nature and are helping to restore habitats and wildlife to some of the most nature depleted parts of our planet.

This podcast is produced by The Podcast Coach.

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.

The Conservation Collective support locally-led environmental Foundations around the world. Together we'll protect and restore the wild places we know and love.

"If you look at restoring the whole Andes, the entire Andean mountain range, you can't just go at it by planting trees. There are so many other things that you need to do to holistically permit nature to actually come back."

In this episode Ben Goldsmith talks with inspirational Earthshot Prizewinner, Florent Kaiser. Florent is leading an effort to restore the high altitude forests of the Andes, stretching all the way from Venezuela down to Patagonia. Accion Andina is a truly earth changing initiative.

Ben Goldsmith is a British financier and rewilding enthusiast. Join him as he speaks to people from all over the world who champion nature and are helping to restore habitats and wildlife to some of the most nature depleted parts of our planet.

This podcast is produced by The Podcast Coach.

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.

The Conservation Collective support locally-led environmental Foundations around the world. Together we'll protect and restore the wild places we know and love.

"We just put together a project in Indonesia on restoring mangroves and it's 2000 hectares, and over 40 years the local communities will get in excess of 100 million dollars."

People are pretty much sold on the idea that we need to restore nature at scale. David Attenborough said it himself, we need to ‘rewild the world’ but the question is how do you pay for it?

What if there was a way, a market mechanism, for getting the world's largest companies to do just that? In this episode Ben Goldsmith is joined by Tim Coles who is pioneering a new market for biodiversity credits. His firm, rePLANET, is already pouring money from large corporates into rewilding projects. This, alongside an existing and fast growing market for voluntary carbon credits, might just be the source of funding the rewilding movement has been looking for.

Ben Goldsmith is a British financier and rewilding enthusiast. Join him as he speaks to people from all over the world who champion nature and are helping to restore habitats and wildlife to some of the most nature depleted parts of our planet.

This podcast is produced by The Podcast Coach.

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.

The Conservation Collective support locally-led environmental Foundations around the world. Together we'll protect and restore the wild places we know and love.

"Coming to terms with the wolf in Britain would be one of the biggest and bravest things we've ever done. But we desperately need to start a conversation about how we do this and when we do this and start to make progress towards attaining it as a real goal."

Beavers are the ultimate ecosystem engineers. Derek Gow is a farmer turned conservationist and played a major role in reintroducing the Eurasion beaver to England.

In this episode Ben Goldsmith speaks to Derek about how he led the charge to bring beavers back to waterways here in Britain, one of the greatest triumphs of the nature movement. The pair also discuss why there are calls to reintroduce the wolf to the UK.

Ben Goldsmith is a British financier and rewilding enthusiast. Join him as he speaks to people from all over the world who champion nature and are helping to restore habitats and wildlife to some of the most nature depleted parts of our planet.

This podcast is produced by The Podcast Coach. 

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.

The Conservation Collective support locally-led environmental Foundations around the world. Together we'll protect and restore the wild places we know and love.

"If you want to save any species on Earth, there's really only one species you have to fully understand, and thats homo sapiens, because are the cause and therefore we are the solution to just about every rewilding or biodiversity or climate concern."

This time on Rewilding the World, Ben Golsmith talks to Brett Jenks, CEO of Rare.org. They discuss how the St. Lucian parrot was saved - in part - by a rebrand and how changing the attitudes of ordinary people can have transformatively positive impacts on the environment.

Brett Jenks has championed behavior change in the conservation community for more than 30 years. As CEO, he leads Rare’s international mission to equip people in the world’s most biologically diverse countries with the tools and motivation needed to sustainably manage their natural resources.

Ben Goldsmith is a British financier and rewilding enthusiast. Join him as he speaks to environmentalists and thought leaders from all over the world who are working to help restore habitats and wildlife to some of the most nature depleted parts of our planet.

This podcast is produced by The Podcast Coach.

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.

The Conservation Collective support locally-led environmental Foundations around the world. Together we'll protect and restore the wild places we know and love.

"I remember genuinely thinking, 'we don't need insects. What's the point of them?' Little did I know!"

Welcome to a new series of Rewilding the World with Ben Goldsmith. In this first episode Ben is joined by Stephen Fry.

As well as being a national treasure, and one of the funniest people in England, Stephen has long championed nature projects both in the UK and abroad.

Ben talks to Stephen about where his love of nature comes from, and how he thinks we can go about bringing even more people to the movement.

Ben Goldsmith is a British financier and rewilding enthusiast. Join him as he speaks to people from all over the world who champion nature and helping to restore habitats and wildlife to some of the most nature depleted parts of our planet.

This podcast is produced by The Podcast Coach

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.

The Conservation Collective support locally-led environmental Foundations around the world. Together we'll protect and restore the wild places we know and love.

"Over a period of 10 years we were able to rear in captivity 331 Kestrels that we released back into nature."

In the latest episode of Rewilding the World Ben Goldsmith speaks with legendary conservationist Carl Jones about the island of Mauritius. Carl famously led efforts to save a variety of species. These included the Mauritius kestrel which was on the brink of going the way of the dodo, as well as a bunch of landscape-scale rewilding projects in Mauritius and its surrounding islets.

Carl describes Mauritius as it must have been when Europeans first arrived on the island; forests of ebony, palm savannas grazed by herds of giant tortoises, dodos ambling down the beach to greet the new arrivals, and a cacophony of strange and marvellous bird and reptile species. Now, inspired by Carl, Mauritius seems set to begin rebuilding these natural treasures.

Ben Goldsmith is a British financier and rewilding enthusiast. Join him as he speaks to environmentalists from all over the world who are working to help restore habitats and wildlife to some of the most nature depleted parts of our planet.

This podcast is produced by The Podcast Coach.

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.