In Ben’s Rewilding the World podcast series, he talks to the individuals behind some of the most inspirational and dramatic rewilding projects around the world. From the UK and Europe to Africa, the Americas and Asia, their work is helping return areas of land and sea to its natural state and creating spaces where wildlife can thrive.
The largest dam removals in history just took place on California’s Klamath River. In this episode Ben Goldsmith talks with Chuck Bonham, Director of California Fish and Wildlife, about this iconic moment and the recovery of salmon, beavers, wolves and other wildlife in the Golden State.
This podcast was recorded before the wildfires happened in California (January 2025). Our thoughts are with all the victims of these tragic events.
Rivers and streams are meant to be wild things but we have tamed them out of all recognition in the UK. They 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. Mike Blackmore from the Wessex Rivers Trust is one of the people leading the charge in restoring waterways back to health.
What can be seen as one of the most important developments currently taking place 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 lots of investor money into huge rewilding projects in America.
One man is responsible more than any other for bringing beavers back to Europe – German ecologist Gerhard Schwab.
Once there were probably two to three million beavers across Eurasia, reduced to around a thousand in 1900. Gerhard brought beavers back from the tiny refuges where a handful had survived in Poland, Belarus and the marshes of Germany. He then reintroduced them in one place after the next right across Europe.
"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.
"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?
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 corporations 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.
"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 helping to restore habitats and wildlife to some of the most nature depleted parts of our planet.
"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.
"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.
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. Now, inspired by Carl, Mauritius seems set to begin rebuilding its natural treasures.
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“There are a growing number of extraordinary, huge-scale rewilding efforts taking place across the world, and nobody knows about them! I started my Rewilding the World podcast series to illuminate these, and to give people a regular dose of optimism.”
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