Professor Ian Rotherham is an expert on a range of environmental issues, including urban wildlife, extreme weather, flooding and climate change. He has published extensively in academic journals, and has released a number of books on UK wildlife and the environment. Ian is a man positively bursting with enthusiasm and knowledge and ideas.

Ian poured forth a cheerful stream of lessons on the environment, eco-tourism and rewilding.
We talked about the cultural severance between cities and wildness, and the reassuring dictum that you can change the world, a little bit at a time: perhaps by beginning with rewilding your back garden.

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SHOW NOTES

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• Ian Rotherham's blog
• Ecotourism should not only be "take only photographs, leave only footprints", but we also need to try to help people in a benign way.
• Adventure literature is often about "defeating nature" rather than pausing for a while or caring for the landscape.
• We need more respect and awareness when dealing with the vulnerable resource of the natural world.
• How best to minimise your damage and maximise your positive impact
• Rewilding, in all its guises, (including rewilding the mind) can save the NHS millions, as well as all the other benefits.
• Sheffield Trees Action Group
• The communities that are able to protest about their environment are usually the most affluent ones.
• Trees give you a sense of place and seasonality. They are therapeutic and spiritually uplifting.
• The new urban wild and bringing wild to the people
• Cultural severance in urban landscapes - a broken connection between cities and wildness
• Feral - George Monbiot
• Shadow woods - Ian Rotherham
• You can change the world, even incrementally and a bit at a time. Rewilding your garden is a good start.
• Globally and in Britain, in terms of nature conservation, biodiversity and sustainability we are indeed in a very bad way – essentially the ecosystem is broken and we need to mend it
• The problems are not as simple as carbon = climate change = plant lots of trees! Such naïve thinking is actually dangerously misconceived
• Rewilding offers a radical new approach to resolving many of the issues in ways which are, paraphrased from Lawton (2010), bigger, bolder, better, more joined …..However, this idea needs to connect with a far wider community especially in urban areas
• Additionally, approaches have to be paid for and not just with ‘ecosystem services which are community goods’ – but with MONEY ….. (This is a fact not popular with politicians for example!)
• I suggest that farmers & farming have to be part of the SOLUTION and are not, as often portrayed, the problem

TRANSCRIPT

Below is the transcription of our conversation. It’s done by AI so is perhaps a wee bit ropey here and there. If these transcripts prove sufficiently useful then I will make the effort to clean then up and make them better. Do let me know if you think it’s worth my time to do that. (Or, better still, do it for me…!). If you’d like to listen as you read along you can do that here:

https://otter.ai/s/4mbmzPCyRr2gYKfRXYdvbQ