Latest / Live Free Ride Free with Rupert Isaacson / Rewilding, Regenerative Farming & Imagination with Nick Viney | Ep 29 Live Free Ride Free

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Rewilding, Regenerative Farming & Imagination with Nick Viney | Ep 29 Live Free Ride Free · Live Free Ride Free with Rupert Isaacson

• 0:00
  Rupert Isaacson: Thanks for joining us.
• 0:01
  Welcome to Live Free, Ride Free.
• 0:03
  I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of
• 0:06
  The Horseboy and The Long Ride Home.
• 0:08
  Before I jump in with today's guest, I want to say a huge thank you to you, our
• 0:13
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  books, and other courses, please go to rupertisakson.
• 0:33
  com.
• 0:34
  So now let's jump in.
• 0:39
  Welcome back to Live Free, ride Free.
• 0:42
  Today I've got Nick Viney from the southwest of England.
• 0:46
  Who, what is she?
• 0:49
  Is she a regenerative agriculture person?
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  Is she an artist?
• 0:52
  Is she a re wilder and introducer of endangered species?
• 0:57
  Is she a glamping host?
• 1:01
  Is she a wildlife ranger?
• 1:03
  Is she, well, I, it appears that she might be all of these things.
• 1:07
  And in terms of living a self-actualized life down there on Dartmore, I'd say
• 1:13
  she's having a pretty good crack at it.
• 1:15
  So, Nick, thanks for coming on.
• 1:18
  Who, who are you, which of those things are you and, and,
• 1:22
  and how and why and stuff?
• 1:27
  Nick Viney: Well, thanks for the introduction, Rupert.
• 1:28
  Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm definitely trying to be all those things and in my,
• 1:32
  certainly in my bio and, and I've had a fairly intense last few years helping an
• 1:39
  organization that I work for and, and I'd lost my, lost my artistic thing a little
• 1:46
  bit, my own thing because I was putting it all, all that creativity into their place.
• 1:50
  And so I decided I would definitely put my artist side first and foremost, because.
• 1:56
  If you ask me the question, what do you want to what do you want to do today?
• 2:01
  You can do absolutely anything.
• 2:03
  I would say I would like to paint the world a better place.
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  So I, I have this show that I'm working on, which is a large
• 2:12
  scale live painting event.
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  Where we show the transition from where we are now in land use through
• 2:21
  to a regenerative abundance state.
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  And so there's lots of there's lots of questions and answers,
• 2:26
  lots of audience participation.
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  And, and you layer up the you layer up a painting in the same
• 2:33
  way as you have to restore land.
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  You can't just immediately bung in a golden eagle.
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  'cause you know, three days later it's just gonna die.
• 2:43
  You have to do the groundwork, you have to build it up.
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  So, so primarily an artist.
• 2:48
  And, and in terms of.
• 2:51
  What, what I then bring to the nature recovery space is is imagination.
• 2:57
  And for me it's, it's really one of the massive missing tools in
• 3:02
  our toolbox in landscape recovery.
• 3:05
  And in, in, in agriculture then we have been conditioned to, to
• 3:09
  see to see agriculture, to see the landscape a as it is now.
• 3:14
  So the uk, what is it, 75% minimum agriculture.
• 3:20
  And we have been con conditioned to see it in that way at, you know, if we're
• 3:25
  lucky, we get a crisscross of hedges.
• 3:27
  This is all a construct and this has, and we have, you know,
• 3:31
  farmed nature outta this picture.
• 3:35
  And so for me, I like to, I really like to, when I look at a landscape,
• 3:42
  I like to imagine it, how it wants to be, how it was before we started
• 3:47
  putting up our boundaries and, you know, saying, get off my land.
• 3:50
  And, and understand really how does water move?
• 3:53
  How does it wanna move on that landscape?
• 3:55
  How should it move on that landscape to to allow for regeneration?
• 4:00
  Where would trees like to be what animals should be passing through this landscape?
• 4:07
  Yeah, so imagination.
• 4:09
  So I'm,
• 4:09
  Rupert Isaacson: I'm looking at the those, those people who are listening on, on
• 4:13
  apple as opposed to those of you who are watching on YouTube will not see that.
• 4:16
  Nick is sitting in her studio and I'm looking behind your back.
• 4:19
  I see a, a raven or a crow.
• 4:22
  Yeah.
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  Talking to somebody perhaps Odin, I don't know.
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  And then on the other side, I see what looks like a, a rough of a lady
• 4:30
  riding side saddle to the hunt, but the hounds of foxes perhaps or something.
• 4:35
  Nick Viney: I like that.
• 4:35
  I like that interpretation.
• 4:37
  Rupert Isaacson: That's what it looks like.
• 4:38
  And I, I certainly like that idea.
• 4:40
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 4:41
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 4:41
  But you come, you're a farmer.
• 4:45
  Yeah.
• 4:45
  And one of the things I like about your bio is that, 'cause I I also
• 4:50
  come from a park farming background and there's this absolute division
• 4:54
  that people make in their minds often about, well, if you're a farmer,
• 4:57
  you couldn't possibly be an artist.
• 4:58
  Which of course isn't true.
• 4:59
  But also a lot of farmers might make that.
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  I know a lot of pharmacy would also, you know, and the sort of
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  anti-intellectualism or the anti artism among the farming community is as bad
• 5:11
  as it is in other parts of society.
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  And one of the things which I did grow up with, because my family
• 5:18
  farmed in Africa, but they also farmed a little bit in the uk and.
• 5:23
  In the work that we do with you know, autism in the brain.
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  Actually a lot of the people we work with are farmers many of whom are
• 5:29
  special needs parents themselves and have learned how to bring their land
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  into play in this way for sort of human wellbeing as well as well for the,
• 5:39
  the, the mental and emotional wellbeing as well as the nutritional wellbeing.
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  'cause farmers, of course, are involved in human wellbeing.
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  It's easy to forget that 'cause they feed us at the same time they're
• 5:48
  grumpy, bunch of grumpy grumps.
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  And I know this because I grew up among them and they're their own worst enemies.
• 5:55
  So that this idea that, well you've got to respect the farmers and, but often
• 5:59
  they're just so horrible to deal with.
• 6:01
  That unfortunately it creates this alienation between town and co.
• 6:06
  Or it promotes the alienation within TA between town and country, which
• 6:11
  I always sort of think, yeah, but dudes, there's more people in the
• 6:14
  cities than there are of you or us.
• 6:15
  So how about a charm offensive?
• 6:18
  Because they resent the fact that you own this land, even if, even though
• 6:21
  you're producing food for them, and no amount of telling them they shouldn't,
• 6:24
  doesn't, and certainly being grumpy to them is not gonna help that you sit.
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  It seems it's all really interesting to me squarely in the liminal space
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  between those two populations.
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  And so you to some degree have an ambassadorial role there for the land.
• 6:41
  And it, it seems to me that maybe you're pissing off both sides that,
• 6:44
  you know, you're, you're, you're going into the traditional farmers
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  and saying, well, maybe we should do regenerative agriculture and some
• 6:49
  rewilding and that sort of thing.
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  And then perhaps the urban environmentalists are saying,
• 6:54
  ah, but it's not enough.
• 6:56
  You know, this has got to be completely rewild and therefore are you, are
• 6:59
  you in that position where you are annoying everybody and you therefore
• 7:02
  kind of can't get, can't get it right.
• 7:06
  Nick Viney: Quite possibly.
• 7:08
  You might, you might have just described the last 20 years of my life.
• 7:10
  But
• 7:11
  ' Rupert Isaacson: cause the people who do that are the people I trust the most.
• 7:14
  Nick Viney: But I, I, I believe other people
• 7:15
  Rupert Isaacson: trying to do the right thing.
• 7:16
  Right.
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  Nick Viney: I fully intend to stay in that position because I, so, so
• 7:24
  we had a small farm here growing up, and I'm lucky, lucky to, to be here,
• 7:28
  back here where, where I grew up.
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  And our family business was the vets, the local vets.
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  So we were You were vets.
• 7:34
  We were vets.
• 7:35
  Okay.
• 7:36
  So, so we were, so my, my stepfather.
• 7:40
  Was a vet.
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  And eventually as a little, I had a little detour into business studies, couldn't
• 7:46
  hack that and became a veterinary nurse.
• 7:48
  And, and we were a small mixed practice, so think James Harriet.
• 7:52
  Yeah.
• 7:53
  And so we did everything from, you know, pets to you know, an hour later doing a
• 7:59
  cesarean on a cow to going and shooting a pony that's been hit on the mos, or, you
• 8:04
  know, so this incredibly varied existence and a very trusted part of the community.
• 8:09
  And so I was able to to be in that, in, in that space, in the, in the farming
• 8:17
  space, grew up going to young farmers.
• 8:20
  All yeah, so, so a very a very enjoyable and, and, you know,
• 8:25
  hugely rewarding time of my life.
• 8:27
  And then.
• 8:32
  But, but, but I was, you know, it's interesting you, as you talk about
• 8:36
  that, that painting I can remember a day that on the Thursday I was called
• 8:44
  or we were called to a fox in a snare.
• 8:46
  Okay.
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  So I drove across the mall.
• 8:48
  I was, I was 17 years old.
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  I've not, not long past my driving test, I drove across the mall.
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  I found where the, where the fox was in a snare.
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  Okay.
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  So I climb up the hedge and I can, and I see the fox in a snare.
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  You know, I have to approach this fox, you know, it's, it's struggling.
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  It's it, and I had to make a decision to, to get it to asphyxiate itself,
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  to the point where I can get close enough to get the new soft around
• 9:14
  its neck and, and see what happens.
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  I didn't have any choices there.
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  So, so I do that and it, and I take the, I take the snare from
• 9:23
  around its neck and, you know, eventually it gets up and it's gone.
• 9:27
  On the Saturday I go hunting on my horse and we go out and kill foxes.
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  So,
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  Rupert Isaacson: which hunt, by the way, which dartmore hunt,
• 9:41
  Nick Viney: am I allowed to say that?
• 9:42
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 9:42
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
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  Spoons.
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  Spoons and westmores.
• 9:44
  I've hunted with the spoons.
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  Have you?
• 9:46
  Ah yeah.
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  So they're, you know, right on my doorstep here.
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  Mm-hmm.
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  And never thought a thing about it.
• 9:53
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah,
• 9:54
  Nick Viney: never thought a think about it.
• 9:55
  It really, and we never did.
• 9:58
  We, we never, we never questioned those things.
• 10:00
  We did, we did all the work for the hunt for free.
• 10:03
  Yet we would be patching up wildlife and, and, and animals all week.
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  So, so completely unbeknown to me there are these, these odd cognitive
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  dissonance then maybe setting, setting themselves up in, in myself.
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  And it really wasn't until I had, I had my own kids.
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  I actually had three kids under a year old.
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  And that was pretty incapacitating in terms of what, what else you can do
• 10:31
  with your life at that time and, and our land here, we destocked everything
• 10:37
  and our land here was able to have a rest for the first time in my lifetime.
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  And for the first probably, you know, it'd been conventionally
• 10:47
  found for however long.
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  And we saw orchids for the first time and then I started to think about how.
• 11:00
  You know, how what I was doing was impacting and how is that possible that
• 11:04
  spending my entire life on this place, how, how I never seen that plant before.
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  And I just, you know, and then I got into permaculture
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  design and holistic management.
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  So really looking at energy systems and the flow of energy through,
• 11:20
  you know, through your land and holistic management obviously.
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  And, and that really, that got me into planned grazing.
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  So, and planned grazing was the key for me to understand.
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  I didn't have to be, I didn't have to have no animals.
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  And.
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  Rewilding wasn't a thing then.
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  I could actually understand how these animals worked in nature and
• 11:48
  then play those animals to their strengths and then actually restore
• 11:52
  the land using those animals.
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  And so that's what I've been doing ever since.
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  And they're absolutely fanatic grazer.
• 12:00
  I, I mean, I, I just love, how
• 12:02
  Rupert Isaacson: do you digest the grass?
• 12:02
  Sorry, I'm just kidding.
• 12:05
  Nick Viney: Exactly.
• 12:06
  And I just, yeah, I just, there is an absolute joy, not just
• 12:10
  for me, but for those animals.
• 12:11
  When you move animals daily you know, when you see those pictures of those
• 12:15
  films of those dairy cows when they've been let out for, you know, for the
• 12:18
  first time since last autumn, and, you know, they're bucking and kicking
• 12:22
  and everyone's really happy, that's every single day for these animals
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  because it's completely clean grass.
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  No one has shot over it.
• 12:30
  It's all, you know, it's, it's just pristine.
• 12:33
  And it's pristine every single day.
• 12:36
  Rupert Isaacson: Well, if, if they're living on it every single day,
• 12:37
  how are they not shitting on it?
• 12:39
  Nick Viney: Because you move them every day.
• 12:41
  They move to fresh pasture every day.
• 12:43
  So, so what you, what you do is you replicate natural systems.
• 12:47
  So in our case, we don't have, you know, we've killed everything.
• 12:50
  We don't have wolves left in this country, which would keep all these herba wars
• 12:53
  bunched up and moving in this slight fear state, which is, you know, why horses
• 12:59
  are so good at bolting because, you know, they have that flight instinct.
• 13:03
  We don't have the, the, the carnivals now.
• 13:06
  So, so we have to replicate that, and we do that with a bit of electricity
• 13:09
  either side, and so we keep 'em bunched.
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  So, which, which affects not, it's not just about it's not just about
• 13:15
  the fear state and there, and there is no fear state, particularly they, you
• 13:18
  know, they learn within three days.
• 13:19
  I don't go near that fence.
• 13:20
  I don't go near that fence.
• 13:21
  And, and I'm, I've lost my thread here.
• 13:26
  Rupert Isaacson: I talked about shit.
• 13:26
  Sorry.
• 13:27
  It's, it's because Yeah, no, you're, you're, you're, you're saying you're
• 13:30
  replicating the way that the animals would move through the land naturally
• 13:34
  as opposed to in an unnatural way.
• 13:36
  And this of course regenerates the land and this I completely get and
• 13:40
  so, you know, when I flippantly said, well, how are they not, why
• 13:43
  are they on pristine grass every day?
• 13:45
  That's not being shot on, that wasn't quite as flippant as it sounded.
• 13:48
  Okay.
• 13:48
  Because I think you, you need to understand that most
• 13:50
  listeners wouldn't know that.
• 13:53
  From what you described, you were necessarily moving the stock every
• 13:58
  day to make sure that the land gets grazed as evenly as it would if the
• 14:04
  livestock were ranging across it in a natural way with the pressure
• 14:09
  of predators and or just moving.
• 14:13
  Because when you eat down one area, you move to the next and you
• 14:16
  eat down other, you know, and we are used to seeing animals either
• 14:19
  static in fields or in sheds.
• 14:23
  And if, if they're in sheds, actually we don't see them.
• 14:25
  We're unaware of it.
• 14:26
  You drive past those sheds, you never know that those pigs are there.
• 14:28
  You never know that those chickens are there.
• 14:30
  You see the, you see the corn fields on either side, but you wouldn't
• 14:32
  know the factory farm that was going in because there's a big sign
• 14:35
  saying 10,000 cows in cow fits here.
• 14:39
  That exactly.
• 14:39
  Obviously people don't wanna, don't wanna advertise that fact.
• 14:42
  So the reason I asked that was because it's, it's not necessarily known.
• 14:48
  And what's interesting with grazing is that people assume, I think quite
• 14:53
  rationally that that is how farmers would graze their fields, right?
• 14:57
  You would graze down a field, you'd move your animals to another
• 14:59
  one, they'd graze that field, you'd move them to another one.
• 15:02
  So why isn't that the norm?
• 15:04
  I.
• 15:06
  Nick Viney: I, as far as I'm concerned, it's, it's shepherding.
• 15:09
  We, we are no longer good shepherds.
• 15:12
  Mm.
• 15:12
  And I, and I mean that in the, in the biblical sense is it because it's
• 15:16
  Rupert Isaacson: too labor intensive now, you know that people don't actually
• 15:20
  have the money and they don't have the extended families living on the land.
• 15:24
  So you've either gotta employ people or you've gotta have them in your own family.
• 15:27
  People have neither anymore.
• 15:29
  So the animals are more like to sort of sit where they are because you
• 15:32
  haven't got the time to move them, or
• 15:34
  Nick Viney: possibly.
• 15:34
  But I think, you know, what have we done?
• 15:36
  We've, we, we've, we've, we've removed shepherds, you know, because all our
• 15:42
  huts now go for glamping, don't they?
• 15:44
  I mean, you know, shepherd,
• 15:45
  Rupert Isaacson: but also who can afford to pay a shepherd,
• 15:47
  Nick Viney: who can afford to pay a shepherd.
• 15:48
  But, but if, I mean, can you think of a better job than being a shepherd
• 15:55
  than, than than herding all day?
• 15:58
  I just, for me, and I guess this is why I'm, you know, managed 20 years on the
• 16:01
  range, was, was because, well, I, I'm very I'm very calmed by the sound of
• 16:09
  grazing animals for me, when I, you know, if I go anywhere, if I, if I leave home
• 16:16
  for a long time, I will seek out, you know, the sound of animals cutting or, or
• 16:24
  it's, it is a very restful thing for me.
• 16:27
  But, but, but actually I, I think.
• 16:30
  As a shepherd.
• 16:32
  And I feel there's a,
• 16:37
  if you imagine the land as the garden, I mean land with a capital LI don't, I
• 16:42
  don't like to call it the land because I feel like land is, is a thing.
• 16:48
  It's an, it's an alive thing.
• 16:49
  It's a bio, it's a, it's like a bigger version of us.
• 16:53
  You know, that goes all around the outside of the, the world.
• 16:56
  For us, in order for us to have a place in that, I, I feel like shepherding
• 17:01
  is a, is a very important role.
• 17:04
  A very important role.
• 17:06
  When you say shepherding, you don't
• 17:06
  Rupert Isaacson: just mean sheep, right?
• 17:07
  You mean
• 17:08
  Nick Viney: No.
• 17:08
  Okay.
• 17:08
  In general.
• 17:09
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 17:09
  I
• 17:09
  Nick Viney: mean, I mean, herding, herding and that could be, you know, that could be
• 17:15
  pigs, that could be, you know, my perfect little, my dream scenario is going around
• 17:20
  helping people restore their land with my little you know, precision grazing ponies.
• 17:25
  A couple of, couple of mini cows, a co and a pig.
• 17:29
  And the odd chicken coming up behind, or Turkey just scraping the,
• 17:32
  you know, the shit around because we don't have any birds left.
• 17:34
  So, but, but coming back to the, to the human place in it.
• 17:39
  But we, especially in the UK where we don't have predators, we have to keep the
• 17:45
  stock off the trees or else, guess what?
• 17:47
  We won't have any trees.
• 17:50
  And, and this is where we're at.
• 17:52
  We have coming back to that aesthetic.
• 17:56
  We think that you have trees in woods, up to this fence here,
• 18:00
  and then you have pasture.
• 18:03
  This is a dead end.
• 18:05
  If this is the way you, you think land behaves.
• 18:08
  This is a dead end because how do trees reproduce?
• 18:13
  They have to roll out into the landscape.
• 18:16
  They have to move in this dynamic way because they, there's a tree here
• 18:21
  and, and, and it drops its babies here just into the, just into off the
• 18:26
  skirts, off of the canopy where there should be brambles to receive these
• 18:32
  baby trees to then let them grow up.
• 18:34
  Then this tree dies down here, falls down, whatever.
• 18:37
  And this tree tree comes up here without the predators.
• 18:40
  And because we have an aversion to scrub, scrub is not a dirty word,
• 18:44
  but we cannot tolerate anything that stings us or prickles us.
• 18:49
  Then there is no way these trees can get away.
• 18:53
  So, you know, in, in, in a landscape where most of a land completely shaped by sheep
• 19:03
  and sheep farming, 85% of which we export
• 19:11
  85% of timber, we import.
• 19:16
  We can't grow our own trees, you know, when the floods come, what
• 19:21
  are we building our life raft with?
• 19:25
  Rupert Isaacson: I'm gonna ask you a couple of devil's advocate questions
• 19:28
  because I think they bear explanation, but they need to be posed in a way that
• 19:37
  allows for context, if that makes sense.
• 19:39
  So the part of England that I partly grew up in Leicestershire, big
• 19:46
  horse area, big hunting area very much livestock, large livestock,
• 19:51
  so beef, cattle, sheep, big hedges.
• 19:55
  So I love hedges.
• 19:57
  I would argue that England is a forested landscape that the miles and miles and
• 20:03
  miles of hedge rows, which now die.
• 20:05
  For example, I live in Germany where you don't see them, but we have big
• 20:09
  blocks of forest here in Germany.
• 20:11
  Different type of land management.
• 20:13
  But those snaking hedge systems through the uk, assuming they haven't
• 20:19
  been rubbed up, are in fact forests.
• 20:21
  It's just that instead of covering a blanket canopy or a Savannah,
• 20:30
  which as you might find in say a park they are yes, contained.
• 20:35
  But there's so many thousands of miles of them that as you know, along the
• 20:40
  side of each one, you get what's called woodland edge, where the thorn and
• 20:45
  the larger trees that are in the edge meet the grassland or the cropland.
• 20:51
  And in there, of course you get a big insect wildflower, narrow
• 20:56
  corridor, but nonetheless, an intense corridor which supports a
• 20:58
  lot of wildlife and so on and so on.
• 21:00
  So are we not actually still a forest landscape in the uk, but just now one
• 21:06
  that has been shaped by humans in a slightly loving sort of a way that
• 21:11
  still is biodiverse, or am I wrong?
• 21:15
  Nick Viney: Well, you're wrong about the biodiverse.
• 21:17
  I mean, the UK is, is the most nature depleted country in
• 21:20
  Europe, not in Europe anymore.
• 21:24
  So, so as much as I absolutely love our hedgerows, and I completely
• 21:29
  agree that they are they are the last remaining corridors, but we
• 21:36
  stock fence right up to those walls.
• 21:39
  If we're lucky enough to have hedges, you know, we, we stock fence right up to them.
• 21:43
  And, and so nothing, I mean that's, I was on a site yesterday and yeah,
• 21:47
  you could see, you could see beautiful emergence of meadow suite and dog violets
• 21:53
  yesterday and, you know, and inch this side of the wire and it's just nothing.
• 21:58
  It's just, just rye grass, you know.
• 22:00
  So yeah, they are, they are fantastic, but the, the bar is very, very low.
• 22:06
  And so, and of course one of the things, and one, one area where farmers are
• 22:13
  judged harshly, and this is amongst their peers, is is through tidiness.
• 22:19
  Mm-hmm.
• 22:19
  And, you know, you are considered to be a poor farmer and that would be poor in
• 22:24
  both senses of the word, poor as in your crap, and poor as in you don't have enough
• 22:29
  fuel to be cutting those, you know, to, to be trimming those hedges, you know,
• 22:35
  within an inch of the top of that bank.
• 22:37
  Yeah.
• 22:37
  Now you, you know, these hedges are offering.
• 22:42
  A massive amount.
• 22:44
  They are desperately trying to deliver fruit nuts.
• 22:48
  Yeah.
• 22:48
  Shelter, you know, they year on year, they push back and they'll grow another meter.
• 22:53
  And, you know, and, and every November will come along and we'll smack 'em down.
• 22:59
  And, and this for me is just, you know, it, it really is
• 23:05
  nuts, you know, because northern hemisphere, massively high rainfall.
• 23:10
  One thing we are really good at growing is trees.
• 23:14
  So, so when I reimagine a, a farm or, or a landscape for someone, it's,
• 23:19
  it's always going to incorporate fruit and nut trees and livestock,
• 23:25
  you know, silver pasture type thing.
• 23:26
  So, so, you know, yes, it's a, it's, it can be slightly contrived
• 23:31
  looking to see all these, say, say we wanna put trees on contour.
• 23:36
  But I'm prepared to go with that aesthetic if it means we get more
• 23:39
  trees into the landscape and we can still you know, fairly reasonably
• 23:45
  push a mob of cattle through.
• 23:47
  What I'm trying to avoid is, is, is driving on the landscape as well.
• 23:52
  Rupert Isaacson: Is your, is your farm, how, how, how many acres is your farm?
• 23:55
  Nick Viney: It's only 40 acres.
• 23:57
  Okay.
• 23:57
  Actually, we should talk about, we should talk about, 'cause we, you
• 24:00
  know, you asked me, was I a farmer?
• 24:01
  I said yes.
• 24:02
  Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
• 24:02
  Nick Viney: Now in this area.
• 24:04
  You know, without doubt there would be people here that say, oh
• 24:08
  yeah, but she's not a real farmer.
• 24:10
  Rupert Isaacson: Sure.
• 24:10
  Nick Viney: So I wanna know what, what's a real farmer?
• 24:13
  Rupert Isaacson: Well,
• 24:15
  Nick Viney: is it somebody who you know, do
• 24:17
  Rupert Isaacson: you produce food off your land for sale to other people?
• 24:20
  Nick Viney: Yes.
• 24:20
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 24:21
  I think for me, that would define it.
• 24:22
  Nick Viney: And, and fiber.
• 24:24
  So we try and use all, all the animal.
• 24:26
  Rupert Isaacson: Right.
• 24:27
  And so describe to me now, okay.
• 24:30
  Presumably when you inherited the farm or when you came into custody of the
• 24:35
  farm, you inherited what I would know from the English landscape of a patchwork
• 24:42
  of semi rectangular fields intersected by either hedges or banks or walls.
• 24:47
  And 'cause you're there on dartmoor, for those listeners who dunno what Dartmoor
• 24:51
  is, Dartmoor is one of the wilder areas of Southern England where it gives way
• 24:56
  to open moorland, upland, low mountain ranges that are somewhat wild by English
• 25:02
  standards, including we have herds of wild ponies up there and things like that.
• 25:06
  And a bit of a sort of hostile landscape above a certain altitude.
• 25:09
  So it protects its integrity to some degree, although probably it ought to all
• 25:14
  be covered in forest and isn't, but pay.
• 25:17
  But you would've inherited that patchwork that we all love to see.
• 25:20
  So how's it look differently now that you, so you like trees, what?
• 25:26
  Have you done with trees on your place?
• 25:28
  And how can we picture that and imagine that?
• 25:31
  And how does that look different to what was there before?
• 25:36
  And why isn't that attacking the integrity of the English landscape madam?
• 25:40
  You know, talk to us about that.
• 25:42
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 25:42
  Well, it would be classed as bloody untidy if you ask my mother.
• 25:47
  Yeah, she's, you know, she's, she's, she's good now.
• 25:51
  She gets it.
• 25:51
  She gets it now.
• 25:53
  But
• 25:53
  Rupert Isaacson: have you fenced off areas for trees to grow?
• 25:55
  Have you actively planted trees?
• 25:57
  Are you letting trees rewild themselves?
• 25:59
  What, what's the, what's the philosophy?
• 26:01
  Nick Viney: So my, yes, we've planted some trees fruit trees mainly and walnuts.
• 26:07
  But my holy grail in terms of what I want to be as a land manager
• 26:14
  is someone who allows trees to, to reproduce on their own.
• 26:21
  'cause no shit.
• 26:23
  They've done that for years.
• 26:24
  And how you gonna do that intensively
• 26:26
  Rupert Isaacson: grazing your land enough to be commercial
• 26:29
  Nick Viney: years?
• 26:29
  You have to mob graze your cows and you have to be, you, you have to be creative.
• 26:36
  In how you, in how you do that.
• 26:39
  So, so if, if the only thing you can stomach is going in straight lines
• 26:43
  with, with your electric fences, then sure you're gonna run into problems.
• 26:47
  I mean, you can come, you know, why not for a start just bring them two meters off
• 26:53
  that hedge and give those, you know, give that hedge the opportunity to reproduce.
• 26:58
  Well,
• 26:58
  Rupert Isaacson: because again, delve as a advocate, someone would say,
• 27:00
  well, if I do that, then I'm losing X amount of hectares and therefore
• 27:04
  that's losing X amount of money.
• 27:05
  So what's your answer to that?
• 27:07
  If somebody says, well, I can't afford to,
• 27:09
  Nick Viney: because most people are grazing extensively, and, and
• 27:13
  your carrying capacity will go up at least three times when you start
• 27:17
  putting your animals in a mob.
• 27:19
  And that back, why, why back fencing?
• 27:22
  Why
• 27:22
  Rupert Isaacson: is that more?
• 27:23
  Nick Viney: Is that because the, everything about the way the animal
• 27:28
  behaves is com is then complimentary to the landscape from what goes in the
• 27:33
  front end to what comes in the back end to how their feet move on the soil
• 27:37
  to how then when you move them on, you don't come back there for a long time.
• 27:42
  So rest is a massive part of this.
• 27:45
  So you have to, you have to understand and appreciate, appreciate rest.
• 27:53
  It's just like, it's just like us.
• 27:55
  You know, you can, you can train and train and train and train, but part
• 27:59
  of that training you have to have a recovery time and or else you don't
• 28:03
  mill, build muscle in the right way.
• 28:05
  Or you, or you or you succumb to injury.
• 28:09
  The, exactly the same thing is happening in land and at landscape scale.
• 28:14
  It is wearing out,
• 28:17
  Rupert Isaacson: indeed.
• 28:18
  You've got 40 acres, you've got cows on it.
• 28:21
  If you want to rest those bits of land so that they regenerate in that
• 28:25
  way, how long must you rest them for?
• 28:27
  And how many cows can you have on that 40 acres?
• 28:33
  Nick Viney: So like a lot of these things, it depends.
• 28:36
  So I want to, I'm mainly floodplain here, so I don't want to be in a
• 28:39
  position A where I've got too much stock over winter and b I don't
• 28:46
  wanna be putting stuff in sheds.
• 28:48
  'cause if I've got anything in a shed, I've got a massive pile
• 28:51
  of shit at the end of the winter and what am I gonna do with that?
• 28:54
  I've got a mile stretch of river.
• 28:56
  Anything that goes onto this land is going to be straight into the river.
• 29:00
  So, you know, so when I say it depends, what I mean is it is really complex stuff.
• 29:07
  So anyone who thinks that managing that, but what
• 29:08
  Rupert Isaacson: do you do?
• 29:09
  Nick Viney: Simple.
• 29:10
  Okay.
• 29:10
  So we, we tend not to over winter.
• 29:13
  So I will run stock on, I will, I will fatten stuff because we can
• 29:18
  grow a phenomenal amount of grass in the summer and then kill it off.
• 29:23
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 29:23
  And how much, how many stock will you have there in the summer?
• 29:29
  Nick Viney: It depends.
• 29:30
  Maybe only four bullocks and, and 20 sheep.
• 29:35
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 29:35
  Or,
• 29:35
  Nick Viney: or we, or we go a whole year because if, if, if I, if I can, I would
• 29:45
  like to give this ground a year off.
• 29:48
  It's only my, my sort of, you know, addiction to keeping animals.
• 29:57
  Rupert Isaacson: Well, that was gonna be my question, given that, so
• 29:59
  you, you couldn't possibly with that number of sheep and that number of
• 30:03
  bullocks make a quote unquote living in the modern sense of the word.
• 30:08
  So, you are, you're obviously, we haven't gone in yet to.
• 30:12
  The other ways you're making a living.
• 30:13
  We haven't gone into how you make a living as an artist.
• 30:15
  We haven't gone into how you make a living as a regenerative, you know, land person.
• 30:19
  And rewilding, which I'm gonna go into and I'm gonna ask you about in a minute.
• 30:22
  Rewilding is obviously a hot topic right now, and it should be, A lot
• 30:25
  of people want to know about it, but it's a misunderstood topic, I feel.
• 30:28
  But you, you are diverse.
• 30:29
  You're also farming people.
• 30:30
  You, you, you're glamping.
• 30:32
  And I'm not saying, and this is exactly of course, what one ought to do, but
• 30:35
  my question is, well then as a Rew Wilder and so on, given that in the
• 30:40
  paleolithic landscape where you are, it probably would've been somewhat open
• 30:44
  canopy, Beachwood, Beachwood, I should imagine, with some grazing planes from
• 30:50
  large ungulates, you know, interspersing that why not go back to that?
• 30:54
  Why, why farm at all?
• 30:57
  Nick Viney: I, I, yeah.
• 30:58
  I ask myself that a lot and I
• 31:01
  Rupert Isaacson: surely that's what the land wants at the end of the day.
• 31:04
  I mean, if you left it alone completely, that's more or less what it would do.
• 31:07
  No,
• 31:08
  Nick Viney: I've got, I've got one paddock, call it a paddock which
• 31:13
  we haven't grazed for 40 years.
• 31:16
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 31:17
  Nick Viney: And I'm just, and I'm just, it's like.
• 31:22
  It's like what the rewers would pray for, but I'm doing it in reverse, so now
• 31:27
  I've got a completely scrubbed over area.
• 31:31
  And
• 31:32
  Rupert Isaacson: with what?
• 31:32
  With Hawthorne?
• 31:33
  Blackthorn?
• 31:34
  Nick Viney: With mainly with Bramble.
• 31:37
  Uhhuh, yeah.
• 31:38
  But with, with a certain amount of blackthorn, willow ash trees.
• 31:42
  I mean, you know, massive s and this is all self colonized.
• 31:44
  Rupert Isaacson: You haven't gone in there and planted it.
• 31:45
  Nick Viney: We haven't done anything.
• 31:46
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 31:47
  Nick Viney: So, so then I thought, right.
• 31:50
  I, I wanna actually just reclaim this a little bit and just start sculpting it.
• 31:55
  And so I'm gonna start put putting these ponies in.
• 31:59
  So I,
• 32:02
  but I, but I want to main is it is a massive songbird breeding
• 32:06
  area, as you can imagine.
• 32:06
  Mm-hmm.
• 32:07
  You know, it's really, there is a direct correlation between the amount of bramble
• 32:12
  you've got, the amount of scrub you've got, and how many songbirds you have.
• 32:15
  Yeah.
• 32:16
  If, you know, if we were ha if we had a, just
• 32:18
  Rupert Isaacson: explain why that is, for people who might not know the correlation.
• 32:21
  Nick Viney: Because if we had a, a full ecosystem, say we would
• 32:26
  have, we would have wildcats.
• 32:28
  So what we think of in the UK as, as, as a Scottish Wildcat
• 32:32
  it, it, it's not Scottish.
• 32:34
  We just drove it to Scotland and not in a car.
• 32:37
  We, we just killed everything.
• 32:39
  It had a price put on, its on its head.
• 32:41
  So the brambles
• 32:42
  Rupert Isaacson: will give you safe cover from small predators?
• 32:44
  Nick Viney: Exactly.
• 32:45
  So cats will not pounce through, through, through bramble.
• 32:50
  So really, really safe nursery.
• 32:52
  You know, not just for young trees, but for young, young birds.
• 32:55
  So that's why s
• 32:56
  Rupert Isaacson: eat.
• 32:57
  Nick Viney: Exactly.
• 32:58
  Yeah.
• 32:59
  Okay.
• 32:59
  And, and also under brambles the soil is, is the best soil you'll find.
• 33:04
  So
• 33:05
  Rupert Isaacson: is that because, are they nitrogen fixers?
• 33:07
  Blackberry bushes,
• 33:08
  Nick Viney: it's not, I don't know whether it's nitrogen and I, and I don't
• 33:11
  I never it's much more complex than that.
• 33:14
  What I would say is the microrisal connections under
• 33:17
  brambles are really phenomenal.
• 33:20
  And so the soil health you know, is always just fantastic.
• 33:24
  So, so in times of carbon sequestration you know, fabulous.
• 33:28
  So, so how do you, you're gonna drive
• 33:31
  Rupert Isaacson: some large ungulates into it in the way that, that's exactly
• 33:34
  Nick Viney: what I'm doing.
• 33:35
  Rupert Isaacson: Paleolithic.
• 33:35
  Why not some cows as well, because they would've been a rocks.
• 33:38
  They would've been wild captaining.
• 33:39
  Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 33:40
  Nick Viney: Exactly.
• 33:40
  So, so at the moment we're just coming out of, we're just coming out of winter.
• 33:45
  And so there is only hairy little ponies here, and particularly hairy
• 33:50
  ponies with, with, with long feathers are fantastic for, for this job.
• 33:55
  So I go in and if I think, okay, I wanna make a a very, and for those
• 33:59
  Rupert Isaacson: listeners, feathers are not bird feathers.
• 34:01
  They are the hairs that grow on the lower part of the horse's leg.
• 34:05
  If they are shaggy horses, which are designed to go through rough areas.
• 34:08
  Okay.
• 34:08
  Yeah.
• 34:09
  Nick Viney: So they're like armor plated.
• 34:11
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 34:11
  Nick Viney: And, and so they will, you know, happily and the,
• 34:14
  and kind of small ponies with big feet and feathery, feathery legs
• 34:18
  are really, really good for this.
• 34:20
  In, in the rewilding sort of, field ex mos have become very popular.
• 34:25
  It's, it tends to be a bit, a bit fashionable for me.
• 34:29
  I'm.
• 34:30
  It's, it's in the same way as in other things.
• 34:32
  It's not the cow, it's the how.
• 34:34
  And this is, you know, we don't have to be specific on the pony type.
• 34:39
  Wait, talk about
• 34:39
  Rupert Isaacson: my mother.
• 34:39
  Sorry.
• 34:41
  Nick Viney: It's a, it's a, it's a pony and it's gonna behave like a
• 34:43
  pony, you know, if you let it near trees, it's gonna strip the bark.
• 34:46
  It will eat very close to the ground if you leave.
• 34:49
  Right.
• 34:49
  Rupert Isaacson: It will create wallows, it will dig up the ground a bit.
• 34:52
  Yeah.
• 34:52
  Nick Viney: And it'll also, and these things with, with
• 34:54
  hair will plow through ramble.
• 34:56
  So all I have to do is I, I don't want dead, I don't want any straight lines.
• 35:01
  There are no, you know, nature doesn't really do straight lines.
• 35:04
  I'm about creating edge.
• 35:05
  So at the moment I've got this big you know, field of, of brambles.
• 35:09
  And now I wanted to turn those into islands of life.
• 35:12
  So we still have lots of, we still have lots of loads for the
• 35:15
  birds to, to nest and to feed.
• 35:18
  But I want to be able to sort of per ambulate through this.
• 35:20
  Rupert Isaacson: Right.
• 35:21
  And presumably those brambles would serve as nurseries for hardwood trees too.
• 35:26
  Yeah.
• 35:26
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 35:27
  Rupert Isaacson: So eventually in your perfect world, it would end up
• 35:30
  looking like a paleolithic savanna.
• 35:32
  Nick Viney: Yes.
• 35:32
  Rupert Isaacson: More or less, right?
• 35:33
  Nick Viney: Yes.
• 35:34
  And then, but, but, but also, so as those big trees, you've gotta
• 35:38
  have the succession, you've gotta have big trees and medium trees
• 35:41
  and little trees and tiny trees.
• 35:43
  And you, so you have to, so the landscape is doing this all the time
• 35:47
  and, and this is why land ownership.
• 35:51
  You are always gonna be struggling because you've only got this amount of land.
• 35:55
  And so, you know, you've, you wanna do this there and you, and you, you can't
• 36:00
  get your head around how, how on earth are you going to have these islands?
• 36:03
  And then they're not only islands, they're moving islands, you know,
• 36:06
  because they've gotta creep around and grow big trees and little trees.
• 36:08
  So I, it's complex and it's brilliant.
• 36:13
  Rupert Isaacson: Well, it's interesting, it's interesting because I was 20 years in
• 36:16
  Texas and the, the part of Texas is huge.
• 36:19
  There's many ecosystems.
• 36:20
  So the particular part of Texas that we have written, it's Central Texas,
• 36:22
  which is around the Austin area.
• 36:24
  And that's what you call post Oak Savannah.
• 36:28
  And interestingly it's a landscape that looks almost identical to
• 36:33
  say the Southern Spanish, Southern Portuguese Post Oak Savannahs.
• 36:38
  Yeah.
• 36:39
  But it looked like that before the whitey showed up with their cows
• 36:44
  because bison were grazing it and basically doing the same effect.
• 36:48
  And so what you've got, what you get is these very big oak trees
• 36:54
  that put their branches quite low and then that creates a shade camp.
• 36:59
  'cause it gets very, very hot there.
• 37:01
  Creates a shade canopy where animals do come and shelter from the shade.
• 37:06
  But there's seasons where they don't go because it's.
• 37:10
  More temperate.
• 37:11
  And then under those things you get a lot of thorn coming up.
• 37:15
  And in that thorn you get the young trees.
• 37:17
  And that's how when one tree collapses and dies, the other ones can come up.
• 37:21
  But the look of the thing, generation to generation tends
• 37:25
  to look like an English park.
• 37:28
  Large stately trees.
• 37:29
  Yeah.
• 37:30
  Because you can't, you're not really aware of those younger ones coming
• 37:33
  up because they're coming up sort of slightly camouflaged by that canopy
• 37:37
  with some areas of thicket as well.
• 37:40
  And particularly in the, in the swampy areas or, you know, things.
• 37:44
  What's interesting about that landscape is it's basically pre-Columbian landscape.
• 37:47
  It looks basically the same as it did before the colonists showed up there.
• 37:53
  And it's, that would've been 500 years ago.
• 37:55
  'cause it's Spanish, early Spanish conquest close to Mexico.
• 37:59
  And it's made that shift to a European
• 38:04
  Nick Viney: aesthetic
• 38:05
  Rupert Isaacson: livestock thing.
• 38:06
  It's not really farming, it's livestock.
• 38:08
  It, it's more herding really, it's cattle ranching without losing much of
• 38:12
  its biological integrity unless they decide to put a shopping mall and a
• 38:17
  McDonald's on it, and then they can like do an entire county in like a weekend.
• 38:21
  And that's awful.
• 38:22
  But as long as they don't do that, it's as it was.
• 38:25
  What's what's interesting to me about.
• 38:28
  England is that we're better at preserving the land than they are in the us.
• 38:33
  Like one, one of the heartbreaking things about living in the US is
• 38:36
  that you can fall in love with the landscape 'cause it's so beautiful.
• 38:39
  And one year later, you know, some that your neighbor can just flog that
• 38:45
  for housing development and it's gone.
• 38:47
  Boom.
• 38:47
  There's no, there's no conservation laws, nothing.
• 38:51
  And they'll just go and bulldoze, you know, a thousand year old trees.
• 38:53
  It's, it's, it's, it's really heartbreaking.
• 38:56
  In the UK we are much, much better at preserving the aesthetic of the
• 39:01
  countryside, which I'm a great believer.
• 39:02
  We need spiritually, we need to be able to see that green.
• 39:06
  We need to be able to get out of a city quickly and see it, and if
• 39:12
  possible, walk on it and touch it.
• 39:14
  Which in Texas you can't 'cause they'll shoot you.
• 39:17
  So people don't feel any kind of you know, attachment to the land because they don't,
• 39:21
  they didn't grow up playing under that tree or whatever because it's so weirdly,
• 39:25
  I think there's some things we get really right in the uk with land ownership
• 39:29
  give, we, we have large landowners, but quite a lot of ac public access to the
• 39:34
  land, even though the ramblers would say that they don't just go live in Texas.
• 39:38
  And you'll be like, actually we have a lot of, you know, and the
• 39:41
  worst that will happen is if you stray from the footpath in the uk.
• 39:43
  Someone might yell at you, but they're not gonna shoot you, you know?
• 39:46
  But they probably won't even yell at you, you know, and
• 39:48
  there are plenty of footpaths.
• 39:50
  I.
• 39:54
  Now we're talking about Rewilding in the uk.
• 39:58
  And so you look at a landscape and you say, well, how does the water want to go?
• 40:05
  Or how do the trees want to go?
• 40:08
  You've now helped farmers in the UK to sort of go towards this.
• 40:17
  Are we going to lose this whimsical landscape that we know and love
• 40:24
  of the patchwork field system and the the hedgerows and all of that?
• 40:28
  Whether people argue that it's not bi biodiverse enough or not, it's
• 40:32
  beautiful and, and it's there and at least we have a countryside to
• 40:35
  argue about, which is a good thing.
• 40:39
  Or are we gonna, is it gonna be replaced by something else, or are we
• 40:44
  gonna have kind of a mishmash of both?
• 40:45
  What, what are we gonna see in the next 20 to 50 years?
• 40:51
  Nick Viney: I think we're gonna see a more beautiful, an even more beautiful version.
• 40:58
  So, you mentioned the word green and how, how people it's important for
• 41:01
  people to get out into the green.
• 41:03
  What we've gotta remember is.
• 41:06
  Yeah.
• 41:07
  And, and we, and we are, we are wired to recognize green as this, you know,
• 41:10
  calming influence on us, aren't we?
• 41:12
  And also
• 41:12
  Rupert Isaacson: biodiverse, we, we see it as, I think when, when we know that, when
• 41:17
  I say biodiverse, I mean food producing.
• 41:18
  It mean we feel calm inside when we know, oh, we're in a place
• 41:22
  that can support life basically.
• 41:24
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 41:25
  Unfortunately, ryegrass, which is that holy kind of shade of green if, you know,
• 41:32
  if you, there are certain colors that that land should be at certain times of year.
• 41:37
  Right.
• 41:37
  And, and that kind of blue, th green in spring is, is really a reflection
• 41:44
  of the, the awful, awful amount of nitrates that are on there and really
• 41:50
  burning through the soil health and really having detrimental effects on,
• 41:55
  on not only the cows that eat them, eat that, which, you know, obviously
• 41:59
  they're burning out within three years.
• 42:01
  You know, that's a very, very short life expectancy for a cow.
• 42:06
  You know, it would naturally live well, well into its teens and beyond.
• 42:11
  So, so it's nuanced is what I'm saying.
• 42:15
  Green does not necessarily mean healthy.
• 42:18
  What actually is a much healthier landscape is, is lots
• 42:23
  of different shades of green.
• 42:25
  And, and to, to not.
• 42:28
  Not expect to see the land in this very linear sort of you know,
• 42:32
  flat feel to a 90 degree hedge if you're lucky to have a hedge.
• 42:35
  And then, you know, that's, you know, we've talked about clipping
• 42:38
  those hedges off very, very tight.
• 42:42
  What, what you could imagine in a more abundant landscape and,
• 42:47
  and with abundance comes beauty, real beauty that we recognize and
• 42:53
  it literally resonates within us.
• 42:56
  So when you go into, I've got a nice bit of floodplain Maya down there,
• 43:00
  and when that is just humming within insects and, and you, you just dunno
• 43:05
  where to walk because you can feel under your feet that every footstep you
• 43:09
  are treading and squishing something.
• 43:12
  There is something that resonates inside you.
• 43:16
  And really I hope I would like everyone to get an opportunity to experience
• 43:20
  that because when you experience that and, and I'm someone who is sort of not
• 43:27
  religious and and not sort of, I wouldn't have classed myself as spiritual, but
• 43:33
  there is something unmistakably moving.
• 43:36
  When you experience those kind of those kind of.
• 43:41
  Ecosystems.
• 43:43
  And, and as to what that would look like now in our, in our green
• 43:46
  and pleasant land, I think our hedges are a great place to start.
• 43:49
  So they, you know, they're still old trees in the hedges.
• 43:51
  So, so what, what I'm planning on doing here is, is where I've got these lovely
• 43:56
  hedges, I just wanna knock a hole at one end and a hole at the other,
• 44:00
  and then that, that whole line then actually becomes a big circle in itself.
• 44:05
  I see.
• 44:05
  So the
• 44:05
  Rupert Isaacson: cows could just rotate through.
• 44:06
  Nick Viney: So, so, yeah.
• 44:07
  So we'll just You keep the
• 44:08
  Rupert Isaacson: hydro
• 44:09
  Nick Viney: Yeah, exactly.
• 44:10
  Rupert Isaacson: As you know, if you followed any of my work, I'm
• 44:13
  an autism dad and we have a whole career before this podcast in helping
• 44:20
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• 44:25
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• 44:37
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• 44:39
  So I reached out for mentorship, and I found it through an amazing adult
• 44:45
  autistic woman who's very famous, Dr.
• 44:48
  Temple Grandin.
• 44:49
  And she told me what to do.
• 44:50
  And it's been working so amazingly for the last 20 years.
• 44:55
  That not only is my son basically independent, but we've helped
• 45:00
  countless, countless thousands of others reach the same goal.
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  Working in schools, working at home, working in therapy settings.
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• 45:13
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• 45:29
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  We really want to know.
• 45:50
  We really want to help people like me, people like you, out there
• 45:55
  live their best life, to live free, ride free, see what happens.
• 45:59
  Nick Viney: Because the, the, you know, why would we set ourselves back?
• 46:03
  There's, you know, there's very old trees and especially stuff like
• 46:05
  asht trees, you know, which are dropping like flies, you know, a
• 46:08
  middle-aged asht tree now, dead gone.
• 46:10
  The only ones left standing for now are the you know, are the really old ones.
• 46:16
  So, you know, a lot of these tree diseases, you know, we experienced
• 46:21
  this in the seventies with the elms and going, which dramatically changed
• 46:25
  the, the way our landscape looked.
• 46:26
  Mm-hmm.
• 46:27
  You know, we have to appreciate that with the ash trees, you know,
• 46:30
  with no baby asht trees coming up.
• 46:33
  This is a, this is a major problem.
• 46:35
  We don't, we don't really see that yet.
• 46:38
  And, and I do worry about, you know, what's ne what's coming
• 46:42
  down the road for the trees.
• 46:43
  Next.
• 46:44
  Rupert Isaacson: Well, I presume that your efforts with Rewilding, which
• 46:48
  I want to talk about now, might hold some of the keys to this, right?
• 46:52
  So you've been involved, I know, in the reintroduction of the beaver to the uk.
• 46:58
  And at the risk of making 27 do entendre jokes.
• 47:01
  I just want to lit tip my hat to the, all the do undre beaver jokes, so I don't
• 47:05
  have to make one every time we say beaver.
• 47:08
  However, the European beaver was as we know, wiped out largely in western Europe,
• 47:13
  almost completely in western Europe.
• 47:15
  And that led and then they went east, you know, into the Baltic and into Russia,
• 47:20
  and then they depleted them there, and then they went to the Americas.
• 47:25
  And the fur trade in the Americas was what opened up the northern
• 47:29
  end of, of, of the Americas.
• 47:31
  But now for the first time in four or 500 years, people like
• 47:36
  you are bringing beavers back into the landscape of Western Europe.
• 47:41
  Let's talk about that.
• 47:42
  You talked about how water would flow.
• 47:44
  We know beavers and water are synonymous.
• 47:48
  Why bring back beavers?
• 47:50
  What do they do for the landscape?
• 47:52
  Why did they get rid of them in the first place?
• 47:55
  And then let's talk from that species towards other lost species.
• 48:00
  Okay, so why beavers?
• 48:01
  Why, why, why did you get involved in, in the reintroduction of them?
• 48:05
  Nick Viney: So f first off I just wanna say that really there's, there's
• 48:08
  three people responsible for bringing back the beaver to the UK and who
• 48:12
  we all need to be grateful for.
• 48:13
  Derek Gao rashe Campbell Palmer, and Ghar Schwab.
• 48:17
  So, do those names
• 48:18
  Rupert Isaacson: again slowly so that people can write 'em down if they want to.
• 48:21
  Nick Viney: Derek Gao.
• 48:22
  Rupert Isaacson: Derek Gao.
• 48:23
  GGOW.
• 48:24
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 48:26
  Hin Campbell.
• 48:27
  Palmer
• 48:28
  Rupert Isaacson: Hin.
• 48:28
  Campbell Palmer.
• 48:29
  I dunno how to spell hin, but Campbell Palmer, I think people can,
• 48:33
  Nick Viney: R-R-O-I-S-I-N.
• 48:35
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 48:36
  Rashe Campbell Palmer.
• 48:37
  And,
• 48:37
  Nick Viney: and Gerhard Schwab.
• 48:40
  Rupert Isaacson: Gerhard, that sounds German.
• 48:41
  Nick Viney: It is, yeah.
• 48:42
  Yeah.
• 48:42
  Rupert Isaacson: Gerhard Schwab.
• 48:44
  S-C-H-W-A-B.
• 48:46
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 48:46
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, yeah.
• 48:47
  In the uk or in, in No,
• 48:49
  Nick Viney: he's in Bavaria.
• 48:50
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 48:51
  Right.
• 48:51
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 48:52
  And the, these guys are, sorry.
• 48:54
  These, these guys are they've, you know, they have, we need to be great.
• 48:59
  Very.
• 49:00
  Why, why do we need to be grateful
• 49:01
  Rupert Isaacson: to them?
• 49:02
  What, what's the value of the beavers?
• 49:04
  Nick Viney: So beavers, beavers are known as a keystone species, and
• 49:08
  that this means that the presence of beavers in a, in an ecosystem has a
• 49:14
  profound effect on every other species.
• 49:19
  What, what the Beaver offers is water security.
• 49:24
  So without water security, we are nothing.
• 49:28
  Rupert Isaacson: You mean water conservation?
• 49:30
  They keep water in a landscape.
• 49:32
  Nick Viney: They keep water in a landscape.
• 49:33
  They purify water.
• 49:34
  They slow water down.
• 49:36
  So, so, beavers, beavers, willow and water are, are this incredible sort
• 49:44
  of you know, just that, that they work together in this very nuanced
• 49:49
  and, and beautiful, beautiful way.
• 49:52
  If you've, if you get a chance, watch beavers on Go.
• 49:55
  Go on Beaver watch.
• 49:56
  Come to Rewilding Cobes head.
• 49:57
  Watch beavers at night.
• 49:59
  Watch them working the incredible way these, these creatures can hold
• 50:06
  back water with only sticks and clay.
• 50:09
  Now if you've, you know, try and do it yourself.
• 50:11
  Try and hold back water.
• 50:13
  Try and create something, you know, and these, and these dams can be 10 foot
• 50:17
  high and holding back water and just letting it come through very, very gently.
• 50:23
  So what that does, and, and especially as we shift into much more erratic weather
• 50:29
  patterns, is it, is these storm surges.
• 50:32
  These, these, so we have if you think about what the UK looks like, we have
• 50:36
  these uplands that are completely naked, completely devoid of trees,
• 50:40
  highest rainfalls in the country.
• 50:42
  So it's like a bald head drops all this water on it, what's
• 50:46
  gonna happen to that water?
• 50:47
  It just rushes off completely unimpeded, getting faster and faster and faster.
• 50:51
  And then just smashes everything out the way as it goes down and out to sea.
• 50:56
  Not only does it smash up all our urban areas, but it takes thousands
• 51:00
  of years worth of soil with it.
• 51:03
  And in that soil, nothing can, nothing can live in those waters.
• 51:07
  Our salmon can't, you know, they can't breed.
• 51:10
  So, so the, the knock on effects of having water, leaving the
• 51:14
  land too quickly is huge.
• 51:17
  Absolutely huge.
• 51:18
  So we are in Devon, we've got maybe 2.4
• 51:21
  meters of rain a year.
• 51:23
  What's that?
• 51:24
  I don't know.
• 51:25
  Is that eight, nine feet?
• 51:26
  I dunno.
• 51:29
  This is a high rainfall area, and we have to slow that water
• 51:34
  down and in slowing it down.
• 51:35
  And the beavers do this all night for free.
• 51:38
  Absolutely.
• 51:39
  For free.
• 51:39
  All as they ask is, can I have some trees?
• 51:43
  And I, and I'll do the rest.
• 51:45
  So we have to, we have to, it's not to put it this way, it's not too many beavers.
• 51:51
  It's too few trees per start.
• 51:54
  Where did they go in the first place?
• 51:55
  So, so we had, you know, we had beavers throughout the uk.
• 52:00
  But we hunted them all, every single one.
• 52:04
  We killed them all.
• 52:05
  And we did that because A, they have this incredible fur, this incredible
• 52:10
  double you know, double kind of very soft under fur and beautiful, beautiful fur.
• 52:16
  So, so like you said worldwide, they've, they've been hunted.
• 52:20
  But also they have this very interesting relationship with willow and the tree
• 52:25
  willow which contains salicylic acid.
• 52:29
  Salicylic acid.
• 52:29
  Rupert Isaacson: Aspirin
• 52:30
  Nick Viney: is aspirin.
• 52:31
  Exactly right.
• 52:32
  And so we hunted the beaver for its scent glands because of the
• 52:36
  massive amounts of salicylic acid in those, in that, in those glands.
• 52:40
  And we use that medicinally for hundreds of years.
• 52:44
  So we just like, like all good humans, you know, we just, castor
• 52:49
  Rupert Isaacson: oil, cast oil
• 52:51
  Nick Viney: castor.
• 52:52
  Okay.
• 52:53
  Yeah.
• 52:54
  Not castor oil different.
• 52:55
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 52:56
  Castor.
• 52:57
  Yeah.
• 52:57
  'cause castor is beaver in Latin, right?
• 52:59
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 53:00
  Yeah.
• 53:01
  Rupert Isaacson: And actually in French still castor.
• 53:02
  Yeah.
• 53:02
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 53:03
  So, so as we, you know, as we go into these erratic climate you know,
• 53:07
  climate change events, we're gonna have massive rainfall events, but
• 53:09
  we're also gonna have droughts.
• 53:11
  So, so a way of steadying our water cycle is very, very important.
• 53:18
  And, and whereas, you know, we certainly around where, where I am on
• 53:23
  dartmore, you know, there, there would be a ne very negative pushback on,
• 53:27
  on free beaver release, for example.
• 53:31
  I would predict.
• 53:32
  Yeah.
• 53:32
  Yeah.
• 53:33
  Thanks.
• 53:33
  I would predict that it give it three years, five years max.
• 53:38
  There will be, people will be fighting to get beavers onto their land.
• 53:43
  Rupert Isaacson: Well, this is, this is actually a question.
• 53:45
  So do you have beavers on your land now?
• 53:47
  Nick Viney: No.
• 53:48
  No, I don't.
• 53:48
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 53:48
  Why not?
• 53:50
  Nick Viney: They are a few miles down, down river.
• 53:53
  But
• 53:53
  Rupert Isaacson: why, why not?
• 53:53
  Why not?
• 53:54
  Nick Viney: Why not re introduce them?
• 53:55
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 53:56
  Nick Viney: Basically because I don't, I would've had to up until, up until very
• 54:01
  recently, the last few weeks I would've had to have put them in an enclosure.
• 54:04
  And most people can't afford a beaver enclosure.
• 54:09
  It's very, very expensive to put up that kind of fencing.
• 54:12
  The
• 54:12
  Rupert Isaacson: legislation has changed You now no longer need I.
• 54:15
  Nick Viney: The legislation has changed and you can apply or have an expression
• 54:19
  of interest for, for a free release.
• 54:22
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 54:22
  Yeah.
• 54:22
  Yeah.
• 54:23
  And this is literally like the last few weeks.
• 54:25
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 54:25
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 54:26
  So this is historic now, but let's say then you do that, are your neighbors
• 54:30
  not gonna say, well, hold on, you know, they're not gonna stay on your land.
• 54:35
  They're gonna come on my land.
• 54:36
  Nick Viney: Exactly.
• 54:37
  So
• 54:38
  Rupert Isaacson: what about that?
• 54:40
  Nick Viney: So at the moment, and this is the downfall of this new
• 54:42
  legislation, there is mass celebrations, but actually what it means is if
• 54:45
  you, if you are the license holder for this free release, then you are
• 54:48
  liable for whatever happens either way.
• 54:50
  So it, it's crazy.
• 54:52
  This is an, an animal, it is a native animal.
• 54:54
  It is, you know, it is supposed to be here.
• 54:56
  Yes, we are going to have to work around it.
• 54:58
  We cannot farm right to the water's edge.
• 55:00
  If you plant carrots within three meters of, of the the water's edge, it's, you
• 55:06
  know, either the beavers that they're gonna come out and eat them or as,
• 55:09
  as beavers makes dams, and they don't tend to make dams across big rivers.
• 55:12
  It's not, they're, they're not into that.
• 55:14
  It's these little tributaries.
• 55:16
  And then the water starts moving.
• 55:17
  You know, once they put in a dam, then the water starts moving laterally, both sides.
• 55:20
  And and that's when they can come into conflict with landowners.
• 55:24
  It's, it's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
• 55:27
  I mean, you put a drone up, it's the most stunning environment
• 55:31
  and the, the, the life that is.
• 55:35
  Brought back by beavers.
• 55:37
  You, you know, we have never ex, there's nobody alive that has
• 55:42
  experienced this other than people that are living close to beavers now,
• 55:47
  you know, we don't know on baseline.
• 55:49
  Yeah, no, I, I,
• 55:50
  Rupert Isaacson: yeah.
• 55:50
  You are preaching to the converted here.
• 55:53
  I know that though.
• 55:55
  Okay.
• 55:56
  You might be liable.
• 55:57
  But I think, you know, and I both know that there's quite a lot of
• 56:00
  Gorilla Rewilding going on and people taking it into their own hands to
• 56:06
  just release things into the wild now.
• 56:09
  And you know, quite recently they found all those links as
• 56:12
  in Scotland and rounded them up.
• 56:13
  But I know people are doing it with Beaver.
• 56:15
  I know people are doing it with other things, and I don't think that's
• 56:17
  something that's gonna go away.
• 56:19
  So, and honestly, I have to say I'm on the sidelines with pom poms because
• 56:26
  sooner or later it's gonna happen.
• 56:29
  So one can get grumpy about it and say, oh, it's terrible.
• 56:33
  Or you can say, well, this is part of historical process, which is
• 56:37
  inevitable, and I'd rather see that than ripping out hedges, frankly.
• 56:41
  But talk to me about that.
• 56:42
  So I, I presume that's going to make that change, right?
• 56:45
  Because let's say for example, you did want to do a free release
• 56:49
  of Beaver, but you think, oh, but I'm, I can't afford the liability.
• 56:54
  But then some beavers show up on your land.
• 56:57
  Because somebody, either they got out of somebody else's place or there and you
• 57:01
  decide, well, I didn't put them there, therefore I can just leave them alone.
• 57:08
  Are you still liable if one of these self rewild or gorilla rewild beavers
• 57:15
  shows up in your land and makes a damn, are you supposed to therefore
• 57:18
  go and kill it to protect you?
• 57:20
  Nick Viney: You can't kill them.
• 57:21
  You can't kill them.
• 57:22
  But what I mean is are you wouldn't matter who you're supposed to, they're protected.
• 57:24
  Are
• 57:24
  Rupert Isaacson: you still liable, basically?
• 57:26
  Or can you say, look, it's got nothing to do with me and it's outta my control.
• 57:29
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 57:29
  As far as I'm aware, you can, you know, if, if you haven't put them
• 57:33
  there, it's, you know, they are just part of the fabric of the ecosystem.
• 57:37
  They are protected.
• 57:38
  They cannot, if you, if you know, you are in big trouble, if you kill 'em now,
• 57:42
  I'm not saying it's not gonna happen.
• 57:44
  Right.
• 57:44
  You know, look at, look at all the birds of prey that are still persecuted.
• 57:48
  You know, sure.
• 57:49
  There's, there's gonna be, you know, as Brits, we love killing stuff, don't we?
• 57:53
  I mean, we have export.
• 57:55
  Oh,
• 57:55
  Rupert Isaacson: everybody.
• 57:56
  We, that's not just the Brits, everybody.
• 57:58
  Nick Viney: I just feel like, you know, at, at a colonial level, we've,
• 58:01
  we've got some pretty, you know, some pretty strong history in this.
• 58:06
  And this is very,
• 58:11
  it's very much part of the, the, you know, the fabric of the,
• 58:15
  of living in the countryside.
• 58:17
  What has, and that, that sort of.
• 58:22
  That mindset has, has continued.
• 58:25
  But the, the things that have been available, you know, to, to, to be
• 58:29
  killed are are less and less and less that really there's only foxes.
• 58:34
  The only reason we have Red Fox in the UK is because we kept them to hunt them.
• 58:40
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 58:40
  We, we, we created Super foxes.
• 58:42
  Yeah, yeah.
• 58:42
  Basically we, we, we promoted their habit.
• 58:46
  Well, but again, devils have got, we have actually a lot of
• 58:48
  quote unquote game animals in the UK for the very same reason.
• 58:51
  So, you know, our partridges are better in the UK than they are in
• 58:55
  Europe because we like to shoot them, obviously have a lot of pheasant.
• 58:59
  I know that people raise them, you know, in pens, but there's also a lot
• 59:02
  of wild pheasant 'cause they go feral.
• 59:04
  There are graphs on the mos.
• 59:06
  There are, you know, and as you say this is because people like to kill 'em hairs
• 59:09
  in the fields and so on, but they don't want to kill them to eradicate them.
• 59:13
  They want to kill them to have a relationship with them.
• 59:17
  And this is, you know, having lived with hunter-gatherers, I grew up fox hunting.
• 59:22
  I don't do it anymore.
• 59:24
  And I can tell you an interesting story about how and why I gave
• 59:27
  up, but I would say that it, I.
• 59:32
  Is responsible for my environmentalism because it was something that brought
• 59:36
  me into relationship with having to look after habitat as a young boy.
• 59:40
  We hedged, we looked after the hedgerows, we looked after the
• 59:43
  spinnings because we wanted foxes.
• 59:44
  Yeah.
• 59:45
  And there was knock on effects for a lot of other wildlife.
• 59:48
  And we wouldn't use chemicals and that sort of thing for the same reason.
• 59:51
  But there's, so, to my mind, there's nothing wrong with having a relationship
• 59:56
  with hunting because, or let's say if you think it's wrong, it's gonna
• 1:00:00
  happen anyway because it's in humans, because we are hunter-gatherers.
• 1:00:04
  So I do respect someone's philosophy that they don't want to, or they feel
• 1:00:09
  it's wrong, but it's gonna happen because that is how we've always related to that.
• 1:00:14
  So if we're going to have this, surely then these new rewild species that are
• 1:00:20
  gonna come in are also going to be hunted or surely must be hunted, or we won't be
• 1:00:26
  in any kind of relationship with them.
• 1:00:28
  That's authentic.
• 1:00:29
  And then how do we dance around that?
• 1:00:31
  'cause I think there's a, a difference, again, between hunting and extermination.
• 1:00:34
  Extermination is a whole other thing, right?
• 1:00:37
  But how are we gonna dance through all of this?
• 1:00:41
  Nick Viney: Well, how, how do we know what, which is
• 1:00:45
  the last beaver for a start?
• 1:00:47
  I mean, how do you know?
• 1:00:48
  It's like who chopped down the last tree on Dartmore?
• 1:00:51
  We just, you know, we don't really pay attention to, to
• 1:00:55
  those, to those sorts of things.
• 1:00:58
  And, and I think in terms of ecosystem restoration, then you have
• 1:01:03
  to build up a massive population,
• 1:01:05
  Rupert Isaacson: right?
• 1:01:06
  Nick Viney: A healthy population right before you then put yourself in a position
• 1:01:09
  where then you can start thinking about culling out young males unhealthy.
• 1:01:14
  So, so we're a long way from that.
• 1:01:17
  And, you know, just, and look at the deer population so, so equal
• 1:01:20
  to our sheep population in the uk.
• 1:01:23
  You know, the, the trees have a double whammy and double nemesis.
• 1:01:27
  You know, the deer, the outta control deer population in the uk.
• 1:01:30
  So, you know, a little Scots Pine, for example, Scotland,
• 1:01:35
  you know, Scott's Pine this big.
• 1:01:37
  Is it a year old?
• 1:01:38
  You look at it closely, it could be 15 years old.
• 1:01:41
  And it's still this big because it's just had its head taken off year after year
• 1:01:45
  after year, and yet it's still trying.
• 1:01:48
  So until we get those, you know, the, these, these massive sort of
• 1:01:53
  oversteer problems under top, but we do hunt a lot of deer, right?
• 1:01:56
  Rupert Isaacson: We, we do shoot a lot of deer in the uk,
• 1:01:58
  Nick Viney: not nearly enough.
• 1:02:00
  Rupert Isaacson: But how would we, how would you possibly shoot
• 1:02:01
  more deer than we do already?
• 1:02:03
  You'd have to have like everyone walking around with a gun.
• 1:02:06
  Nick Viney: I think, I think, well, I dunno about that, but I would
• 1:02:10
  certainly like to see us shift away from industrial pig and poultry
• 1:02:15
  and into wild venison and, and, and these things aren't set in right, but
• 1:02:20
  Rupert Isaacson: how, like really you must have thought it through a bit bit.
• 1:02:23
  I'm quite intrigued.
• 1:02:25
  Well,
• 1:02:26
  Nick Viney: I, I, I know someone who has a who has a butchery business and
• 1:02:30
  they have so much deer coming into them from, from, you know, guys out stalking.
• 1:02:37
  You are kind of, you're getting into, you're talking about more
• 1:02:39
  Rupert Isaacson: stalkers, you're talking about more hunters, basically.
• 1:02:41
  You would need more hunters than we have currently.
• 1:02:44
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 1:02:45
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:02:46
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 1:02:46
  Rupert Isaacson: What's the likelihood of that?
• 1:02:51
  Nick Viney: I think it, it's, the reason I'm
• 1:02:52
  Rupert Isaacson: asking you is this question is going somewhere.
• 1:02:54
  Nick Viney: I think it's the only okay.
• 1:02:58
  So, so whatever I'm saying here and now I think is relevant to here and now.
• 1:03:04
  I'm not saying it's a forever solution.
• 1:03:08
  What I'm saying is we have an, we have an explosion of deer population,
• 1:03:12
  so some native, a lot not and.
• 1:03:18
  But those are, that's a relatively clean, a very, I would say, a
• 1:03:22
  very clean source of protein.
• 1:03:25
  So if, if we were, then I'm with you.
• 1:03:26
  If we were then harvesting those and that could positively impact our tree
• 1:03:32
  you know, our tree, lack of trees.
• 1:03:34
  Then for me, for now, that's a good, that's a good solution.
• 1:03:40
  Rupert Isaacson: Should we have fewer deer or fewer sheep?
• 1:03:43
  Nick Viney: Both.
• 1:03:44
  Rupert Isaacson: Right.
• 1:03:46
  If sheep, and we were looking at a healthy UK ecosystem, I presume that
• 1:03:51
  you would go to any part of the UK and see a relative profusion of road
• 1:03:58
  deer, some big-ish herds of red deer moving through the landscape and, okay.
• 1:04:05
  We have people say fallow or not, we're introduced by the Romans.
• 1:04:09
  But given that that's 2000 years ago, okay.
• 1:04:11
  I think we could sort of say that they're naturalized and then we
• 1:04:15
  got the ones that are from Asia.
• 1:04:17
  We got the M Jackson, the Chinese water deer, but they're not gonna go away.
• 1:04:22
  But you and I both know when you drive through the English countryside, you
• 1:04:25
  do not see a plethora of rho air you do in Germany, where I'm from, I was out
• 1:04:31
  this morning, so I would expect to see X number of rodia every time I go out.
• 1:04:38
  I'm sorry.
• 1:04:39
  In some areas of the UK you do, but most of the UK you
• 1:04:41
  actually don't and not like here.
• 1:04:44
  And the Red Deer, yes, there are some contained populations of Red Deer
• 1:04:50
  below Scotland, but you don't see that.
• 1:04:54
  Like you'd see migrating elk, for example, in parts of the
• 1:04:57
  American West or that sort thing.
• 1:04:59
  So how is it that we have too many deer?
• 1:05:02
  It seems to me that no, do we actually have too many deer or do we actually have
• 1:05:05
  too many people in conflict with deer?
• 1:05:09
  Nick Viney: Well, yeah, okay.
• 1:05:10
  We're an island, aren't we?
• 1:05:11
  It isn't getting any, it isn't getting any bigger.
• 1:05:14
  Rupert Isaacson: But it's not like you're seeing deer every time you go out.
• 1:05:16
  You know, you're not,
• 1:05:18
  Nick Viney: you are not.
• 1:05:19
  So I would say, well, I am, I am.
• 1:05:22
  Rupert Isaacson: You live in a, the se the second really wild corner of the uk,
• 1:05:25
  Nick Viney: the second you make habitat, it's a, it's a magnet.
• 1:05:29
  So anything that needs somewhere to hide it needs to, you know, it's the second you
• 1:05:34
  start growing trees and, and giving cover.
• 1:05:37
  Yeah.
• 1:05:38
  You, you are a magnet.
• 1:05:39
  It is,
• 1:05:39
  Rupert Isaacson: are gonna show up.
• 1:05:39
  Yeah,
• 1:05:40
  Nick Viney: yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:41
  The, the, one of the biggest problems in the UK and, and why you have these
• 1:05:44
  concentrations of, of, say deer for example, is, is the lack of connectivity.
• 1:05:50
  So this, this herb Oh, okay.
• 1:05:52
  Has to stay, you know, it's only you're talking about
• 1:05:55
  Rupert Isaacson: corridors, wildlife corridor.
• 1:05:56
  Nick Viney: Yes, exactly.
• 1:05:56
  So it can't, you know, so, so I.
• 1:06:00
  I've been on the range and I've seen I've seen stags cross from, so three Dartmore,
• 1:06:05
  365 square miles of missed opportunity.
• 1:06:09
  I would say.
• 1:06:10
  But you know, you'll see stags coming right across the top in the open, open
• 1:06:14
  moland, you know, they're not comfortable in that scenario, but they know, you
• 1:06:17
  know, they can smell over the hill.
• 1:06:19
  There's, there's somebody good over the other side of the hill and they will,
• 1:06:22
  you know, try and use Dartmore as this sort of you know, they'll bolt for it.
• 1:06:27
  And, and Dartmore still has just a few you know, few of these wooded valleys
• 1:06:31
  where they can, you know, get down into those and, you know, and they're steep
• 1:06:34
  enough and, and uninhabited enough that they can have a quietish life.
• 1:06:39
  Rupert Isaacson: And we haven't gone into your 20 years as a wildlife
• 1:06:42
  ranger on Dartmore, which, not,
• 1:06:44
  Nick Viney: not a wildlife ranger.
• 1:06:45
  Rupert Isaacson: Sorry,
• 1:06:46
  Nick Viney: not a wildlife ranger.
• 1:06:47
  No.
• 1:06:47
  What were you No, I'm a, I'm what's called a range clearer.
• 1:06:49
  So Uhhuh, I actually so I would be on horseback with the dogs.
• 1:06:54
  So that's the, that's the, the, that painting there.
• 1:06:57
  And and I would move livestock.
• 1:06:59
  So Dartmore parts of dartmore are used by the military.
• 1:07:02
  And and so you have live firing ranges, so people and livestock
• 1:07:07
  have to be kept out of those areas.
• 1:07:09
  And so, range clearers are employed to move the livestock off those areas
• 1:07:14
  and then hold them back in, you know, until, until the live firings finished.
• 1:07:18
  What
• 1:07:18
  Rupert Isaacson: Brilliant job.
• 1:07:19
  How long do you do that for?
• 1:07:20
  Nick Viney: 20, 20 years.
• 1:07:22
  Rupert Isaacson: Why'd you stop?
• 1:07:23
  Nick Viney: Complicated reasons, but you still
• 1:07:25
  Rupert Isaacson: do it a bit like, is that still part of what I still
• 1:07:27
  Nick Viney: I still got my ticket.
• 1:07:28
  Yeah.
• 1:07:28
  Still a ticket.
• 1:07:28
  Yeah.
• 1:07:29
  Is that something
• 1:07:29
  Rupert Isaacson: you can actually make a, a full living off?
• 1:07:31
  Like you could be like a, a fully bring up your kids and pay mortgage on that?
• 1:07:36
  Yeah,
• 1:07:36
  Nick Viney: yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:36
  I did that.
• 1:07:36
  Yeah.
• 1:07:37
  Yeah.
• 1:07:37
  Rupert Isaacson: Brilliant.
• 1:07:38
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 1:07:38
  Rupert Isaacson: That's a good, so that's actually, yeah, well,
• 1:07:40
  Nick Viney: you know, because it's actually a, it's an un and the job is
• 1:07:42
  unchanged for over a hundred years.
• 1:07:44
  Okay.
• 1:07:44
  You know, Dartmoor is, dartmore is full of unexploded or ordinance, you know,
• 1:07:48
  it's, you know, we've been, we don't have tanks down here anymore, but you
• 1:07:52
  know, these, these open wilder areas were considered in a sense waste ground yeah.
• 1:07:57
  That you could, you could just lob things into.
• 1:07:59
  Sure.
• 1:08:00
  Actually what the ranges are, and this is true on Dartmore, but also up and
• 1:08:05
  down the country, is they are some of the best, recovering landscapes, I'm
• 1:08:10
  sure in the UK because we, we keep people off and we create rest by, by
• 1:08:15
  keeping the stock on certain areas.
• 1:08:16
  Well, this
• 1:08:16
  Rupert Isaacson: leads me to the, so the reason I, I, I was asking
• 1:08:19
  all those devil's advocate questions about deer is the obvious one, right?
• 1:08:22
  You yourself have said We lack large predators.
• 1:08:24
  You are a rew wilder.
• 1:08:26
  Okay.
• 1:08:27
  So we all know what the top predator in the UK ought to be.
• 1:08:30
  Now it's the wolf.
• 1:08:32
  So in Germany where I live it's very interesting.
• 1:08:36
  I live in Hessen but not far from Frankfurt.
• 1:08:38
  Like you could be in downtown Frankfurt from where I'm sitting right now, and
• 1:08:42
  40 minutes, you could be in downtown v Spartan in about less than 20.
• 1:08:47
  But the forest and the, the farmland around here is the
• 1:08:51
  farmland is either crops or orchard.
• 1:08:54
  Not all of the orchard is managed, so a lot of it is semi rewild.
• 1:08:58
  And big areas of forest, which are working forests, they're all owned, like,
• 1:09:02
  like in France, they're owned by the local community and they're logged, but
• 1:09:06
  they're logged some semis sustainably.
• 1:09:08
  So there's a lot of wildlife in them.
• 1:09:10
  In the last five years or six years, wolves have shown up again.
• 1:09:14
  And I lived in Canada for a while and lots of Ws.
• 1:09:18
  You never saw 'em, like, you know, so you, I think I saw one once.
• 1:09:22
  I was, however, as a journalist involved in covering the early stages of the Wolf
• 1:09:27
  Free introductions in Yellowstone National Park in, and I watched how the landscape
• 1:09:32
  regenerated itself once they came in and all of the ranches going up in arms.
• 1:09:38
  I said, and I realized actually you guys aren't, it's not the wolves.
• 1:09:42
  You just hate government and, and you are just resentful of the fact that
• 1:09:46
  government has put these things here.
• 1:09:48
  But you and I both know you're not gonna go outta business 'cause of
• 1:09:50
  a wolf because economically that's just not gonna happen anymore.
• 1:09:55
  So you are, it's an inherited hatred of it's an inherited farmer or herder
• 1:10:04
  to the com com competition with another predator that's come down the generations.
• 1:10:09
  And it's also resentment of government interference.
• 1:10:12
  But ecologically, there's no question.
• 1:10:14
  It's a good thing.
• 1:10:15
  Anyway, as on horseback here I don't know, about four years ago and I'd
• 1:10:20
  been reading, oh yeah, they're back.
• 1:10:21
  And they sort of pinpointed where they'd seen a breeding panel.
• 1:10:25
  Yeah, but we won't see 'em.
• 1:10:26
  I totally, totally saw one and it was a small female and she popped out on the
• 1:10:31
  woodland ride in front of me and then she ran up the ride for a good a hundred
• 1:10:38
  yards before she popped off into us.
• 1:10:40
  Wow.
• 1:10:41
  I got to see her.
• 1:10:42
  Well, I haven't seen her since because there's been a shoot shovel and shut up.
• 1:10:46
  Policy.
• 1:10:47
  But no matter how much the locals here will do that, I suspect the wolves will
• 1:10:54
  find their foothold because times have changed economically that people are
• 1:10:59
  not living off the land in the same way that they were a hundred years ago.
• 1:11:03
  So, and people are more and more tolerant, not less and less tolerant, but equally,
• 1:11:07
  the, the story of why the wolves got here in the first place is so weirdly
• 1:11:11
  human, because it's because of Bel.
• 1:11:14
  When Chernobyl happened, you know, they basically created
• 1:11:16
  a massive wildlife reserve.
• 1:11:18
  All Yeah.
• 1:11:18
  As you say, you give once, soon as the cover comes, all the, all the stuff comes
• 1:11:22
  back, then it comes, then it goes out.
• 1:11:24
  And the wolves just began to expand westward first through Poland
• 1:11:28
  and then, you know, into here.
• 1:11:29
  Now they're, they're in Belgium.
• 1:11:31
  So, but what's interesting to me is I then was in Poland a couple of
• 1:11:37
  years ago, and there were wolf kills.
• 1:11:39
  There's a big red deer wolf kill, like right outside where we were staying.
• 1:11:43
  And, but they were farming cattle and other livestock.
• 1:11:47
  And I said to them, aren't you in conflict with the wolves?
• 1:11:50
  And they said, oh, Rupert, the W See, the thing is the wolves never left
• 1:11:53
  here, so we know how to live with them.
• 1:11:55
  And I said, so you, you let your calves cow carve out your cows,
• 1:11:58
  carve outside, not, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:12:00
  And yeah, sure, we lose one or two, but honestly no more than we would
• 1:12:04
  lose to other th you know, winter crap or this thing or that thing.
• 1:12:10
  Rupert, it's not a big deal.
• 1:12:12
  But the Germans, they're all panicking because they were without the wolf for
• 1:12:17
  over a hundred years, and now they kind of dunno how to live with it anymore.
• 1:12:20
  And so sure, you've gotta hunt some of them.
• 1:12:21
  If you got a problem, one, you're gonna, you're gonna go shoot it.
• 1:12:24
  But in general, they, they, they, they're not interested in you.
• 1:12:26
  They keep away.
• 1:12:27
  And as long as you've got enough deer, that's really what they want to eat.
• 1:12:30
  Yeah.
• 1:12:30
  Now the uk so I don't believe we really have too many deer.
• 1:12:35
  I'm sorry.
• 1:12:36
  I just don't, I grew up in the countryside in the uk.
• 1:12:39
  It's not like I was tripping over a deer every five seconds.
• 1:12:41
  I do know that there are issues with growing trees, but one
• 1:12:44
  can also fence trees off.
• 1:12:45
  And they do, otherwise we wouldn't be able to grow the industrial
• 1:12:48
  plantations of trees that we do.
• 1:12:50
  And that's another environmental thing.
• 1:12:52
  But yet they do grow those trees.
• 1:12:53
  So clearly th there are ways to manage the deer, but we ha
• 1:12:58
  we do have a plethora of sheep.
• 1:12:59
  We do have a plethora of humans.
• 1:13:03
  Bringing back the wolf is obviously a conversation that's been going on for
• 1:13:06
  30, 50, a hundred years or whatever.
• 1:13:08
  Is it gonna happen, do you think, in the uk because surely that would be
• 1:13:13
  the authentic landscape, would it not?
• 1:13:16
  The top predator back in play and us living with it.
• 1:13:21
  Nick Viney: Well, if you are looking for the cheapest, quickest
• 1:13:23
  solution to landscape recovery, then yeah, it's an absolute no brainer.
• 1:13:26
  For
• 1:13:27
  Rupert Isaacson: sure.
• 1:13:28
  Nick Viney: Nothing.
• 1:13:30
  It's just not that simple, is it?
• 1:13:32
  Rupert Isaacson: No, I'm not saying it was,
• 1:13:33
  Nick Viney: you talk about us being tolerant.
• 1:13:34
  I'm really not sure how tolerant we are.
• 1:13:37
  Especially in the, especially in the countryside.
• 1:13:40
  Yeah.
• 1:13:40
  I mean this is a massive, you know, we have the rise of reform, Nigel Farage,
• 1:13:45
  you know, you'll see those, those boards all over the place in the countryside,
• 1:13:49
  you know, and that's not, they
• 1:13:51
  Rupert Isaacson: what No wolves.
• 1:13:52
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 1:13:53
  Yeah.
• 1:13:53
  Yeah.
• 1:13:54
  So, you know, I
• 1:13:57
  Rupert Isaacson: think he is the w
• 1:13:59
  Nick Viney: it's, it's the sensible thing to do, but, you know, but will it happen?
• 1:14:03
  When do we go for that?
• 1:14:05
  Yeah.
• 1:14:05
  Do
• 1:14:05
  Rupert Isaacson: you think it'll happen at some point?
• 1:14:06
  Eventually?
• 1:14:07
  Nick Viney: Yeah, I think it will happen.
• 1:14:09
  Rupert Isaacson: If you made it this far into the podcast, then I'm
• 1:14:12
  guessing you're somebody that, like me, loves to read books about not
• 1:14:17
  just how people have achieved self actualization, but particularly
• 1:14:21
  about the relationship with nature.
• 1:14:25
  Spirituality, life, the universe, and everything.
• 1:14:29
  And I'd like to draw your attention to my books.
• 1:14:32
  If you would like to read the story of how we even arrived here, perhaps
• 1:14:37
  you'd like to check out the two New York Times bestsellers, The Horseboy
• 1:14:42
  and The Long Ride Home, and come on an adventure with us and see what engendered,
• 1:14:47
  what started Live Free Ride Free.
• 1:14:49
  And before we go back to the podcast, also check out The Healing
• 1:14:53
  Land, which tells the story of.
• 1:14:56
  My years spent in the Kalahari with the Sun, Bushmen, hunter gatherer people
• 1:15:01
  there, and all that they taught me, and mentored me in, and all that I learned.
• 1:15:06
  Come on that adventure with me.
• 1:15:07
  Yeah.
• 1:15:07
  And, and how will it happen?
• 1:15:09
  'cause I'm interested in this, you know.
• 1:15:10
  Well,
• 1:15:11
  Nick Viney: they, you know, they're not gonna cross the channel, so they,
• 1:15:13
  we will be humans bringing them back.
• 1:15:16
  It may not be, I, I don't know how long that's gonna
• 1:15:19
  be, but something will happen.
• 1:15:22
  And what
• 1:15:23
  Rupert Isaacson: do you think will happen?
• 1:15:26
  Nick Viney: I think we'll wise up, I think.
• 1:15:28
  Rupert Isaacson: But specifically like where would they do it
• 1:15:30
  and how would they do it?
• 1:15:32
  And
• 1:15:33
  Nick Viney: I think they, I think probably they'd do something in Scotland.
• 1:15:37
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:15:38
  And I think it will be the best thing they ever did economically, because I
• 1:15:41
  mean, that is seriously progressive.
• 1:15:44
  You know, there's, there's a, there's a incredible, you know,
• 1:15:48
  even just from ecotourism, forget, forget the timber perspective.
• 1:15:51
  No
• 1:15:51
  Rupert Isaacson: doubt.
• 1:15:52
  Nick Viney: You know, it's just, or t-shirts.
• 1:15:53
  Rupert Isaacson: No, for sure.
• 1:15:54
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 1:15:55
  Yeah.
• 1:15:55
  So yeah, I mean, that it would just be extraordinary.
• 1:16:00
  Yes.
• 1:16:00
  Extraordinary.
• 1:16:02
  But
• 1:16:02
  Rupert Isaacson: do you think, do you think it's 10 years away,
• 1:16:05
  20 years away, 50 years away?
• 1:16:07
  Nick Viney: No.
• 1:16:07
  No.
• 1:16:07
  What do you reckon?
• 1:16:08
  I, I think it, I'd, I'd say 25 years and some biblical shit climate wise.
• 1:16:15
  'cause I think, I think it's not until we really start feeling it, it's like,
• 1:16:20
  you know, you know, look at what, look at what happened to us in COVID.
• 1:16:23
  Okay.
• 1:16:24
  You know, within two weeks of COVID, the shelves are empty.
• 1:16:27
  You know, we, we are all faced with the reality that we have bugger
• 1:16:34
  all resilience in our food system.
• 1:16:38
  Okay?
• 1:16:38
  So we all turn to our local farmers, blah, blah, blah, and everything's,
• 1:16:41
  you know, and the weather's fabulous.
• 1:16:43
  And and we all you know, things look like there's a, there's
• 1:16:46
  a moment for change here.
• 1:16:48
  Well, the second we, that people started to to look sideways for food,
• 1:16:55
  then suddenly we're all back to work.
• 1:16:58
  Back to work, get the gravy train going again, because, you know.
• 1:17:04
  Food resilience, food sovereignty, the ability to feed yourself is
• 1:17:10
  the most subversive act there is.
• 1:17:13
  You know, if you can self sustain what you see you to, to, you know, whoever
• 1:17:18
  wants you to be their bitch, it's just not you know, I guess they can tax
• 1:17:24
  Rupert Isaacson: your something, but Yeah, they can
• 1:17:25
  Nick Viney: tax something.
• 1:17:26
  Yeah.
• 1:17:26
  So, so I, I guess what I'm saying is that took a pandemic.
• 1:17:33
  So, and, and I, and I think c climate wise, we haven't so
• 1:17:39
  climate wise we're looking at 30 to 40% higher rainfall events.
• 1:17:44
  You, you know, as, as we get through this century, you know, I, I live, you know,
• 1:17:48
  I've grown up next, next to a river.
• 1:17:51
  It is an awesome, awesome power.
• 1:17:55
  I, I, I love to, to this feeling of kind of insignificance that, you know, if I was
• 1:18:02
  to go near that water, I just wouldn't, you know, you just wouldn't last a minute.
• 1:18:06
  And I, and I like that because I like to be reminded that, that
• 1:18:11
  Rupert Isaacson: you're talking about flash floods, nature
• 1:18:13
  Nick Viney: is powerful.
• 1:18:14
  It's not really flash floods.
• 1:18:15
  I mean, the, the, the problem is there's nothing keeping it down there.
• 1:18:18
  It's like, you know, there's no beavers up there slowing it down
• 1:18:22
  'cause there's no trees up there for the beavers to eat, you know?
• 1:18:24
  So, so, so these rivers get, literally get overwhelmed.
• 1:18:30
  And, and I mean that in a,
• 1:18:33
  in they are like, we get overwhelmed.
• 1:18:35
  Literally sense.
• 1:18:37
  Rupert Isaacson: Whelm is the old English for wave over.
• 1:18:40
  Waved over.
• 1:18:41
  Nick Viney: Nice.
• 1:18:42
  Rupert Isaacson: Blowing over.
• 1:18:43
  Nick Viney: Okay.
• 1:18:43
  Well, so, so I didn't know that, but this is how I sense this river is.
• 1:18:49
  And it's not just, it's not the, the river's not the thing is that the
• 1:18:51
  river's, the, I have this idea that water, one water is all water, okay?
• 1:18:58
  And water is all as water is trying to get to do, is to get
• 1:19:02
  back to the main body of water.
• 1:19:04
  And
• 1:19:05
  Rupert Isaacson: nicely put,
• 1:19:06
  Nick Viney: And it doesn't, you know, so it's out at sea and then, and then
• 1:19:11
  something happens and it's, and it's, and it's drawn up into the clouds, you
• 1:19:16
  know, and then these, these droplets are all, are all there and they're,
• 1:19:20
  and in these things called clouds, and then they're getting heavier
• 1:19:23
  and heavier and heavier, and then something pulls them to the ground.
• 1:19:26
  And they are smashed into the ground.
• 1:19:29
  Now if what, what water really wants is a soft landing.
• 1:19:33
  And a soft landing is, is lots of soil is, is lots of cover on the soil.
• 1:19:40
  Is is a, is a nice lot of vegetation.
• 1:19:43
  So it's, so it's cushioned as it gradually meets the ground.
• 1:19:47
  And ideally then it starts to.
• 1:19:49
  Percolate into the ground and then work its way down through the soil
• 1:19:52
  profile where it can have a rest in the aquifer to it gently coming out
• 1:19:57
  into a nice, steady river, which then allows it to go back to sea.
• 1:20:03
  What happens is, like we talked about earlier, smashing of, you know, everything
• 1:20:07
  overwhelmed and and it's a, it's a crisis.
• 1:20:10
  So, so it,
• 1:20:11
  Rupert Isaacson: so as this relates to wolves is the scenario as follows, we
• 1:20:15
  get more of these extreme weather events.
• 1:20:18
  There's more flooding in the urban areas that are downstream of, and the
• 1:20:23
  farming areas, but mostly the urban areas that are downstream of these uplands.
• 1:20:28
  Therefore, we need, we realize we need more trees on those uplands to contain
• 1:20:33
  the rain and beavers and things like that.
• 1:20:36
  And because of that we need fewer things up there that would eat the trees.
• 1:20:40
  And so therefore, rather, like in Yellowstone where they found that,
• 1:20:43
  where they've been overpopulation of elk when they brought the wolves back
• 1:20:46
  in, not a vast amount of them even, but they brought some back in immediately.
• 1:20:51
  You've got regeneration of forests on the upper slopes.
• 1:20:53
  That was the first thing that everybody saw.
• 1:20:55
  Is that what we're talking about?
• 1:20:56
  Is that, that the sort of biblical type event that you think would bring back the
• 1:21:02
  wolf in 25 years where people suddenly say, okay, we need this sort of working
• 1:21:06
  thing to contain the water, basically?
• 1:21:09
  Nick Viney: Yeah, that, and I think it's the cheapest, you know, we're
• 1:21:11
  all driven by the economics of it, and it's just the cheapest thing there is.
• 1:21:15
  And, and I'm not saying you wouldn't get 10 years into it as a, as
• 1:21:18
  a thing, and then you'd have to start, you know, culling, who knows.
• 1:21:22
  Yeah,
• 1:21:22
  Rupert Isaacson: sure.
• 1:21:23
  Well, hopefully, hopefully they would get a healthy enough population.
• 1:21:26
  Yeah.
• 1:21:26
  That that would be a thing.
• 1:21:28
  Yeah.
• 1:21:29
  But you and I both know then that, of course, the other thing the Wol
• 1:21:31
  would do is they'd migrate and they'd migrate down the uplands of Southern
• 1:21:37
  Scotland, and then the Pennines
• 1:21:40
  then they would begin to show up in areas like yours.
• 1:21:47
  You are the manager of Dartmouth at this point.
• 1:21:51
  Okay.
• 1:21:51
  Let's posit that you are.
• 1:21:53
  And now the first wolves are showing up and we say, Hey Nick what's the strategy?
• 1:21:58
  What would be your strategy?
• 1:22:01
  Nick Viney: Oh, let 'em come, let 'em come.
• 1:22:03
  And, you know, and like I said at the beginning, it's
• 1:22:06
  all about good shepherding.
• 1:22:07
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:22:07
  So, you know, wolves are turned up in the Netherlands.
• 1:22:10
  This is a Yeah.
• 1:22:10
  This is an equally densely populated country.
• 1:22:13
  It's, it's very, if not more so.
• 1:22:14
  Yeah.
• 1:22:14
  Yeah.
• 1:22:14
  Very similar to us.
• 1:22:15
  Yeah.
• 1:22:16
  And they, you know, one way or another, they're kind of making it work.
• 1:22:19
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 1:22:19
  Nick Viney: So it is doable.
• 1:22:21
  And, and I'm always, always gonna go for the nature-based solution.
• 1:22:27
  Always.
• 1:22:28
  Rupert Isaacson: So you are the manager of Dartmoor.
• 1:22:31
  It's 25 years on from now.
• 1:22:34
  And Nick is the, you know, generalism of, of Dartmore.
• 1:22:39
  Am I seeing
• 1:22:42
  the recovery of the upland Beachwood?
• 1:22:44
  Am I seeing bison?
• 1:22:46
  Am I seeing moose?
• 1:22:49
  Am I seeing wolf?
• 1:22:50
  Am I seeing links?
• 1:22:51
  Am I seeing what else has gone?
• 1:22:53
  Obviously wild cats.
• 1:22:55
  Nick Viney: Eagles,
• 1:22:56
  Rupert Isaacson: Eagles.
• 1:22:57
  Am I seeing all of that?
• 1:22:58
  Is it, is it suddenly starting to look paleolithic?
• 1:23:05
  Nick Viney: It is for me.
• 1:23:05
  It is always in my head.
• 1:23:07
  Yeah.
• 1:23:07
  That's exactly how I, that's exactly how I live, you know?
• 1:23:13
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 1:23:13
  50
• 1:23:13
  Nick Viney: years.
• 1:23:14
  It is, that's, that's the thing I see all the time.
• 1:23:17
  You know, when I, you know, you can be riding across dartmore, so 5,000
• 1:23:21
  more than 5,000 pre-historic remains.
• 1:23:24
  You know, hu hut circles the longest stone rose in Europe,
• 1:23:29
  you know, phenomenal archeology.
• 1:23:32
  Rupert Isaacson: Hmm.
• 1:23:32
  Nick Viney: Those, those people would not have been there in this naked landscape.
• 1:23:36
  You know, what, what would they have lived on?
• 1:23:38
  What would they have hunted?
• 1:23:39
  What would they have burnt?
• 1:23:40
  You know, what, what would've sheltered them from the wind?
• 1:23:43
  You know, it was, there were trees, there were open areas.
• 1:23:47
  It was, you know, to to coin the phrase, it was a mosaic of habitats.
• 1:23:52
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 1:23:53
  Yeah.
• 1:23:54
  It's interesting, you know, about an hour from.
• 1:23:57
  Bit more hour and a half from where I'm sitting now.
• 1:23:59
  There are now wild bison again, European bison in the, in the woods
• 1:24:04
  of a low mountain area called the Z Land, which is a bit north of us.
• 1:24:09
  And I know that in Kent, in the uk So interesting that it happened in Kent,
• 1:24:13
  which is for those listeners who dunno what Kent is, it's like that little bit
• 1:24:17
  that sticks out east of London into the cheekily, sort of into the north Sea.
• 1:24:22
  But it's like really populated.
• 1:24:24
  It's sort of where the channel tunnel comes out and like you'd expect they were
• 1:24:27
  gonna reintroduce the European bison.
• 1:24:29
  It would've been in Scotland or Wales or Dartmore or something.
• 1:24:32
  No, it's Kent crazy.
• 1:24:35
  But yeah, they did it.
• 1:24:36
  Have you been following that and are you like among the Rewilding community in
• 1:24:44
  the uk Do you all know each other and it, are you all talking with each other
• 1:24:49
  about expanding that and creating those corridors for those types of species?
• 1:24:53
  And
• 1:24:55
  Nick Viney: so, so yeah, we certainly work closely together and, and big shout
• 1:25:00
  out to Paul Whitfield and the Wilder
• 1:25:02
  Rupert Isaacson: bleed, isn't it?
• 1:25:02
  Wilder Bleed.
• 1:25:03
  Yeah.
• 1:25:03
  Nick Viney: So the Wildwood Trust for, for getting that project.
• 1:25:06
  So, so.
• 1:25:08
  What you have to start off with is you have to have a suitable habitat.
• 1:25:13
  Yeah.
• 1:25:14
  You know, and so they had a suitable woodland that needed those, you
• 1:25:17
  know, those you know, needed some of that brash taking out of it.
• 1:25:21
  But they could have, they could have put like
• 1:25:22
  Rupert Isaacson: old English longhorn cattle in there or
• 1:25:24
  something, but they didn't, they went for the bison, which I applaud.
• 1:25:27
  But why,
• 1:25:28
  Nick Viney: Charismatic species?
• 1:25:30
  Slightly different behavior.
• 1:25:31
  Very, you know, just, just those tiny little details that, you know, in a, in
• 1:25:37
  a, in a conversation between a, an animal and a tree are very, very significant.
• 1:25:43
  Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
• 1:25:44
  Nick Viney: So yeah, and, and I think obvi experimentation, you know, we have
• 1:25:50
  to be, we have to have this imagination and bravery to, to experiment.
• 1:25:57
  You know, gay Brown says, you know, if you're not making one
• 1:26:00
  massive mistake every year, you are not trying enough things.
• 1:26:05
  Rupert Isaacson: Mm.
• 1:26:05
  Nick Viney: You're not, you know, we are just stuck in this.
• 1:26:07
  This is the way it's, we've always done it, and this is
• 1:26:09
  the way it's always gonna be.
• 1:26:10
  Well, it isn't gonna be bloody like this because it can't be, because we
• 1:26:13
  have proved it is not sustainable.
• 1:26:16
  So now we have to think about, we're not talking about sustaining,
• 1:26:19
  we're not talking about keeping the same 'cause the same is shit.
• 1:26:22
  We have to regenerate.
• 1:26:24
  We have to create abundance.
• 1:26:26
  Abundance is not only good for us, it nourishes us, but it's
• 1:26:30
  absolutely beautiful to look at.
• 1:26:33
  It's the Garden of Eden.
• 1:26:35
  And, and we have such a forgiving climate in the UK that we can
• 1:26:39
  create the Garden of Eden.
• 1:26:42
  Rupert Isaacson: I love it.
• 1:26:45
  That's a rather artistic, imaginative
• 1:26:52
  worldview.
• 1:26:53
  And we started by looking at some of the art that's behind you.
• 1:26:57
  You are also a living and working artist as well as a farmer and
• 1:27:01
  land regenerator and re wilder.
• 1:27:05
  What are you doing with your art?
• 1:27:07
  How does your art come into this conversation?
• 1:27:10
  And also crucially, how do you make that part of the economics of your whole thing?
• 1:27:15
  'cause really, while a lot of people are listening to this podcast is
• 1:27:18
  this idea of self-actualization.
• 1:27:20
  And I think we, what we find when we talk to everybody on here is people come on,
• 1:27:26
  you know, usually wearing a certain hat, you know, I'm a musician or I'm a horse
• 1:27:31
  trainer, or I'm a educator, or whatever, and I've made this big thing outta it.
• 1:27:37
  But when you actually talk to them, you actually realize
• 1:27:40
  that they do about 50 things.
• 1:27:43
  And th those 50 things all like an ecosystem sustain both economically and
• 1:27:52
  spiritually, emotionally, and so on.
• 1:27:55
  So your art, talk to us about how you got going with that, because it's very good.
• 1:27:59
  I'm looking at.
• 1:27:59
  The stuff on your one.
• 1:28:00
  I, I want that one of the, the size saddle lady with the foxes.
• 1:28:04
  And I, I know you don't think that's what it's, but I think that's what
• 1:28:06
  Nick Viney: it's, no, as soon as I as far as I'm concerned with
• 1:28:09
  the painting it's, well what happens with most paintings anyway?
• 1:28:13
  No, and I'll tell you what, I'm not, if you
• 1:28:15
  Rupert Isaacson: actually paint it that way, I'll buy it.
• 1:28:18
  Nick Viney: I,
• 1:28:18
  Rupert Isaacson: as long as I can afford it.
• 1:28:21
  Nick Viney: What I was gonna say was the, what happens when you paint is
• 1:28:26
  this glorious thing called creativity or whatever this weird thing is
• 1:28:33
  that happens that, that, you know, each of us explain differently,
• 1:28:36
  connection to source, whatever it is.
• 1:28:38
  But there's this, this out of body state.
• 1:28:42
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:28:42
  Okay.
• 1:28:42
  So you set flow, you set out flow.
• 1:28:45
  We, we set out with a certain intention for a painting.
• 1:28:48
  This is how it works for me.
• 1:28:49
  I'm sure it's different for everybody.
• 1:28:50
  I set out with a certain intention and at some point something else has taken over.
• 1:28:57
  Now I don't know when that point is and I, I can't be conscious of that
• 1:29:03
  point because else I'm out of flow.
• 1:29:06
  So, so the important part for me is just to get it done.
• 1:29:10
  It's to get it outta me.
• 1:29:12
  And there it is.
• 1:29:13
  It's, it's ma it's now manifested.
• 1:29:17
  That was the thing for me.
• 1:29:20
  If for you it's a side saddle lady with two foxes.
• 1:29:24
  Going hunting for whoever, people, I don't know.
• 1:29:28
  It's exactly what you want it to be because it's moving on, it's
• 1:29:33
  moving into a different life.
• 1:29:35
  So, so that's my thing about paintings.
• 1:29:37
  I don't get possessive over the meaning.
• 1:29:39
  This, you know, this is bird, this is birds bring ideas.
• 1:29:43
  So this is a, a Jungian a Jungian philosophy about birds bringing ideas.
• 1:29:48
  And I had this, I had this time where I, you know, I'd be doing something.
• 1:29:56
  Rupert Isaacson: What is, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.
• 1:29:57
  What is the Jungian philosophy of what, what did Carl Jung
• 1:30:01
  say about birds bringing ideas?
• 1:30:03
  Because not everyone knows.
• 1:30:05
  Nick Viney: I don't know anything more than birds bring ideas.
• 1:30:08
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:30:08
  Nick Viney: It's been a long time since you're not, you're
• 1:30:10
  Rupert Isaacson: not like a, a a a, a deep Jungian.
• 1:30:12
  Nick Viney: No, no, I'm not.
• 1:30:13
  I'm, no.
• 1:30:14
  I was lucky enough to grow up, grow up with some very, starts, some deep
• 1:30:18
  youngian people, and, and I said, I said, this weird thing keeps happening to me.
• 1:30:23
  I, I'm like, you know, I'm doing something.
• 1:30:25
  I dunno, I'll make the bed or bend over to share my ch list.
• 1:30:28
  And I get this sensation of this, of this bird swooping down over
• 1:30:32
  me, just like over the top of me.
• 1:30:35
  And, and, you know, and he just turned around and he said, well, you know
• 1:30:37
  what Carl said, birds bring ideas.
• 1:30:40
  And, and maybe it was the fact that, the birds were bringing me
• 1:30:43
  ideas, but I wasn't seeing them.
• 1:30:45
  And you, you know, if you're a creative person, and I think actually,
• 1:30:51
  I think everybody's creative.
• 1:30:52
  Sure.
• 1:30:53
  I do not believe that there is this thing, oh, I don't have
• 1:30:55
  a creative bone in my body.
• 1:30:55
  Right.
• 1:30:56
  But some people do
• 1:30:57
  Rupert Isaacson: and others don't.
• 1:30:57
  Yeah.
• 1:30:57
  Yeah.
• 1:30:58
  Nick Viney: And, and not only that, it's not, some people have
• 1:31:01
  really had it knocked outta them.
• 1:31:03
  Indeed.
• 1:31:03
  And it's, it's a profound sense of inadequacy that, that, you know, and it
• 1:31:10
  could just be a flippant comment as a child, and, and that has knocked, you
• 1:31:15
  know, completely knocked that out of you.
• 1:31:17
  And, and so in enter stage left only Art and Beaver will save us.
• 1:31:23
  Which is, which is a, a program of of creative workshops where
• 1:31:30
  where I use the, the native species at Rewilding COO's head to.
• 1:31:35
  To, to really understand what should be in our landscape, what we have
• 1:31:39
  a right to, what we really have a right to see what has a right to
• 1:31:44
  be in our landscape here in the uk.
• 1:31:46
  And then really understand what role they play in i i in the
• 1:31:51
  ecosystem and trying to connect us to nature through our creativity.
• 1:31:55
  So it doesn't, you know, I don't believe you don't have to have a, you
• 1:31:59
  know, an arts practice or anything.
• 1:32:01
  You just want to be driven to to ha to have a nature connection.
• 1:32:06
  And so talking about your, your various, you know, people coming on with lots of
• 1:32:12
  different hats on you know, a I'm 55 years old now, so, you've gotta have acquired a
• 1:32:18
  few, like, you know, whatever experiences.
• 1:32:21
  Yeah.
• 1:32:22
  And, and then trying, you know, and then weaving those different experiences
• 1:32:30
  through to then create something that hopefully then does some good, is.
• 1:32:38
  It is something that's very interesting to me.
• 1:32:40
  And and I, you know, some people think maybe they say I'm an idealist
• 1:32:45
  and I, I wanna be an idealist.
• 1:32:47
  Okay.
• 1:32:48
  Because if I'm not an idealist, what am I, I'm like, oh, this is
• 1:32:51
  okays, or this is absolutely shitty.
• 1:32:54
  I
• 1:32:54
  Rupert Isaacson: think I know what we offer an idealist.
• 1:32:55
  Bored.
• 1:32:58
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 1:32:59
  So I want to see this.
• 1:33:01
  Yes, I wanna see this better world because it, we are so, it is so within
• 1:33:07
  our grasp, and this is why, you know, this is why I'm not actually a rewild,
• 1:33:12
  or, yes, sometimes I'm a rewild.
• 1:33:14
  Part of my land, you could say was rewild, but actually I'm blurring the
• 1:33:18
  lines all the time because land is a, the whole thing is a very dynamic thing.
• 1:33:23
  And we have to, we have to allow it to move.
• 1:33:25
  We have to allow our rivers to move across the floodplains.
• 1:33:28
  The trees have to be able to, you know, be in a procession across the landscape.
• 1:33:34
  So, so yeah, weaving all that through to find some sort of to make some
• 1:33:39
  sort of living is is, is, yeah, what I spend all my days doing.
• 1:33:44
  And, and
• 1:33:45
  Rupert Isaacson: that's brilliant.
• 1:33:47
  It, it sounds, what it sounds to me like is there's a couple
• 1:33:51
  of images sprang to mind.
• 1:33:54
  The, you know, we talked at the beginning of this conversation a little bit,
• 1:33:57
  or at least I did, about, the sort of anti artistic, anti-intellectual side
• 1:34:03
  of both, say the farming population and also the urban population that
• 1:34:07
  doesn't like the farming population.
• 1:34:08
  The two sets of grumps grumping at each other from either side of
• 1:34:12
  a, of a perceived divide, which of course is completely illusory anyway.
• 1:34:17
  And but what they're essentially arguing about is even if they don't know they're
• 1:34:22
  arguing about it, is, is, is the nature of happiness and nature and access to it.
• 1:34:28
  When I was working with the initial group of Sun Bushman hunter gatherers in South
• 1:34:37
  Africa, which got me drawn into my human rights thing, and I got drawn into that
• 1:34:40
  'cause I turned out to be related to them and I could go into that whole story.
• 1:34:44
  I wrote a book about it called The Healing Land.
• 1:34:46
  He said, plugging his book, the Healing Land, available in all good books.
• 1:34:50
  We turned out to be cousins in-law through a weird thing.
• 1:34:54
  So I got involved in their land rights struggle and one of the interesting
• 1:34:57
  things was that there, they had been kicked out of what is now South
• 1:35:02
  Africa's second biggest national park in the 1970s amid a sort of fake news.
• 1:35:10
  Thing that there were no real bushmen left.
• 1:35:12
  These guys were just, what they then we call actually
• 1:35:15
  still wood colored mixed race.
• 1:35:18
  They're not really like that anymore.
• 1:35:21
  They might have had some ancestry, but no, they're just like rural slum dwellers.
• 1:35:24
  Yeah, no, they were totally living in there.
• 1:35:26
  And they, they got kicked out and they were living by the side
• 1:35:28
  of the road for about 25 years.
• 1:35:30
  And after Mandela came to power, they popped up and said, we are still here
• 1:35:34
  and we'd like our land back please.
• 1:35:36
  And long and the short of it, they got it.
• 1:35:40
  And so I've been involved in three big land rights struggles in my life.
• 1:35:43
  One in with the Cree in against Hydro Quebec.
• 1:35:46
  So I've eaten a lot of beaver, I have to say that.
• 1:35:50
  And it jolly good at taste too.
• 1:35:52
  With the Ani Bushman in South Africa with the qua and boom
• 1:35:56
  Bushman in Central Kalahari Game Reserve, which came after that.
• 1:36:00
  In each case they won and they won against all odds.
• 1:36:05
  Hydro Quebec, one of the biggest power companies in the world, they
• 1:36:09
  won de Beers diamonds, which is basically what they were up against,
• 1:36:13
  you know, in box one at day one.
• 1:36:15
  And up against the, the, the post apartheid National Park system, they won.
• 1:36:19
  Now those guys were all artists.
• 1:36:24
  They were living off the land fully, a hundred percent, including the cr, the
• 1:36:28
  Cree, they were still living under canvas up there in like minus 30, minus 50.
• 1:36:34
  All of them creating art all the time.
• 1:36:37
  Was it Confucius said, for happiness, practice, the arts.
• 1:36:41
  So some of them, it was music, some of them it was visual arts.
• 1:36:44
  Some of it was, it was sculpting.
• 1:36:46
  Some of it was philosophy and storytelling.
• 1:36:48
  And it was completely, completely, completely tied up with livelihood,
• 1:36:53
  nature, and the real practicality of just like surviving in these
• 1:36:57
  incredibly harsh environments.
• 1:36:59
  They still were so good at it that they had the time for culture.
• 1:37:05
  And to my mind, the, the image of sort of human authenticity, it's
• 1:37:09
  the, it's the, it's the caved dweller painting on the, the rock wall, right?
• 1:37:16
  You what's that cave?
• 1:37:18
  Well dweller done, he's not just come from a Starbucks, you know, he's been out there
• 1:37:24
  carving the intestines out of a wild sheep.
• 1:37:28
  But now he's painting with paints that he's made actually from the
• 1:37:31
  blood of that wild sheep and the fat.
• 1:37:32
  And that the, and he is fully involved in the spirit of these bushmen these son had,
• 1:37:39
  were, had been kicked off some areas of land, particularly up in Botswana, where
• 1:37:42
  they had traditionally done rock painting.
• 1:37:44
  Yeah, because the rock painting, this is an area called the Soo Hills had
• 1:37:48
  been designated a national monument, so no one was allowed to deface it.
• 1:37:53
  So Bush kicked out to live, you know, five kilometers that
• 1:37:57
  they were allowed to be guides.
• 1:38:00
  That was nice of the government to, to let them show you around.
• 1:38:03
  But no, they weren't allowed to paint anymore, even though their painting
• 1:38:06
  tradition had never, they still had a living rock painting tradition.
• 1:38:10
  So, of course, what did they do?
• 1:38:10
  They would sneak in and they would just continue their rock painting,
• 1:38:14
  and then they would show people the, these ancient paintings.
• 1:38:18
  And then to me, they'd sometimes giggle and say, Rupert, that
• 1:38:20
  one's actually from last week.
• 1:38:22
  But they knew how to make it look old.
• 1:38:25
  Yeah.
• 1:38:25
  And they said, and they, and, and, and then you read all these
• 1:38:27
  anthropological things saying, oh, we don't know, really know what they
• 1:38:30
  mean and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:38:31
  We, we speculate that this one is about, you know, some rain thing and this, and
• 1:38:36
  they said it, dude, we know exactly what they mean and they would tell me, but
• 1:38:39
  they said, but no one listens to us.
• 1:38:40
  No one asks us.
• 1:38:42
  And if we tell them they don't believe us because we're just little brown people.
• 1:38:45
  And what would we know just about that?
• 1:38:46
  The fact that our mom and dad actually painted those things.
• 1:38:50
  So this disconnect is in incred, you know, but flow seems to me therefore
• 1:38:55
  the that meeting of culture and nature.
• 1:38:59
  And it seems to me that that's what you do, Nick.
• 1:39:03
  And if you have something to impart to the world, whichever hat that you are wearing,
• 1:39:10
  I could encounter you as a regenerative farming person and you could be showing
• 1:39:15
  me how to you know, have my livestock better so that my land can be healthier.
• 1:39:21
  Or you could be helping me rewild.
• 1:39:24
  'cause I know that you guys were involved in a beaver reintroduction
• 1:39:27
  on some land that actually a friend of mine has down in Cornwall.
• 1:39:31
  And or you could be involved in, you know, water stuff, or you, I
• 1:39:37
  could encounter you as an artist and in eat, or as a horse woman.
• 1:39:41
  And in each of those things, you'd be authentically, you could say,
• 1:39:45
  yeah, I'm wearing that hat today.
• 1:39:47
  But in each of those things, what would I be encountering?
• 1:39:50
  I'd be encountering a person who's self-actualized through this
• 1:39:55
  melding of culture and nature.
• 1:39:58
  And that you, by doing it, would be showing me, Hey Ru,
• 1:40:02
  it's possible to do this.
• 1:40:04
  It's possible to be in this flow state.
• 1:40:06
  Would you like to do it too?
• 1:40:09
  Because it makes humans happy to do this.
• 1:40:12
  And that seems to me a great contribution to the world.
• 1:40:15
  You may not see yourself that way, but I could say that through this conversation.
• 1:40:26
  What I would take away is
• 1:40:30
  also the happiness of applying my imagination to the landscape and
• 1:40:36
  entering into an interaction with the landscape that involves the imagination.
• 1:40:45
  And then seeing where that leads.
• 1:40:50
  And that seems to be quality of life.
• 1:40:52
  What, I mean, what do you think to that?
• 1:40:55
  And if you agree with that, how do we make that more possible for more folk?
• 1:41:02
  Nick Viney: You, you're absolutely right about quality of life.
• 1:41:04
  So for me, it's I always, I, I value time more than money.
• 1:41:11
  I don't have a particularly good, I would, I'm not very
• 1:41:18
  driven to make money in, in that.
• 1:41:21
  I, if I've got enough money to do the things I wanna do and, and look after this
• 1:41:27
  place in the way I wanna look after it, then, then I'm kind of, I'm, I'm happy.
• 1:41:31
  What I value more than anything is being able to go, I'll, I'll say, I'll
• 1:41:40
  say to my partner here, I'm just, I'm going out to stare at things 'cause
• 1:41:44
  I'm not, you know, maybe I've been hours on my computer or whatever.
• 1:41:50
  And actually.
• 1:41:53
  Being, being out there, there is no time wasted with your feet on the,
• 1:41:58
  on the ground is what I would say.
• 1:42:01
  Rupert Isaacson: Moving in the landscape as a human being part of it.
• 1:42:02
  Yeah.
• 1:42:03
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 1:42:03
  Just moving, literally staring at stuff.
• 1:42:05
  You see stuff that you just, I, like yesterday one thing I I I, I locked
• 1:42:12
  onto this when I was going into little corners of the, the, this place to hitch
• 1:42:18
  up fences where you wouldn't normally go.
• 1:42:19
  'cause it was a pain to get in there to hook up fences for,
• 1:42:23
  you know, to move livestock.
• 1:42:24
  And I, and I noticed that we had this particular beetle that I'd never seen,
• 1:42:28
  you know, I hadn't clocked before.
• 1:42:29
  And turns out this beetle is like, yeah, it's quite rare, but it, it's got
• 1:42:34
  the most amazing lifecycle where it's, its babies crawl up onto the, onto the
• 1:42:38
  flowers and wait for a particular type of miner bee, and then these, these
• 1:42:43
  scrubs climb onto that miner bee and then ride it back to the hole and then
• 1:42:49
  go down the hole and then feed off.
• 1:42:52
  Paint no dragon.
• 1:42:53
  Yeah, exactly.
• 1:42:54
  So, so these things are happening out there and, and I suppose what, what is,
• 1:43:03
  what is the ultimate feeling for me?
• 1:43:05
  Is it's to, it is to like, feel connected to it.
• 1:43:10
  It is all connected.
• 1:43:11
  Everything, you know.
• 1:43:14
  The, the, the work is, is connected.
• 1:43:17
  The, the going out and staring at things is connecting.
• 1:43:22
  And you know, like our glamping thing, you know, we could have, we could have
• 1:43:25
  like expanded and made six of them.
• 1:43:26
  Most people would put six in the field that we've got one in.
• 1:43:29
  Because that would certainly be the economic thing to do.
• 1:43:32
  But actually when people, you know, we, we say with the glamping thing, we're
• 1:43:37
  changing the world to, to campers at a time because it is profound the, the
• 1:43:44
  level of rest that people get here.
• 1:43:46
  Yeah.
• 1:43:47
  And the, the quality of of rest.
• 1:43:50
  Leeward glamping.
• 1:43:51
  By the way rewilding futures.co
• 1:43:53
  Don't worry, we're gonna give you all your websites in a minute.
• 1:43:55
  Yeah.
• 1:43:56
  And I mean, people that stay here for a week, they're like, they go
• 1:44:03
  to Ton, you know, the village two miles up the hill, and they think
• 1:44:06
  it's like fast paced because things have slowed so profoundly for them.
• 1:44:12
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:44:12
  That, you know, it really is a, you know, we're, there's lots of
• 1:44:18
  things driving us in this, in this construct that we have created.
• 1:44:22
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:44:22
  And,
• 1:44:25
  and it's extremely hard to get away from that.
• 1:44:29
  Whether it's your, you know, the wifi or, or the, or the anxiety because
• 1:44:33
  you've left your phone plugged in because it's off grid and you've had
• 1:44:35
  to go like 400 meters away from it.
• 1:44:40
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, he said, looking for his phone.
• 1:44:41
  Yeah.
• 1:44:41
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 1:44:43
  Rupert Isaacson: To plug my phone.
• 1:44:43
  Nick Viney: Exactly.
• 1:44:44
  But, but
• 1:44:47
  last year, no, not last year, A couple years ago, I, I I, there was
• 1:44:51
  a lot going on and I was spending way too much time at the computer,
• 1:44:55
  so I thought, right, that's it.
• 1:44:56
  I'm, I'm picking up my tent and I'm going down the valley.
• 1:44:58
  So I went down the valley, I hung out with some animals and I'm walking around
• 1:45:03
  in the moonlight and I thought, oh shit.
• 1:45:05
  I've, I've dropped my phone over there and I, but then I kind of look
• 1:45:11
  at my hand, my phone's in my hand.
• 1:45:13
  It's like, so what the hell's that?
• 1:45:15
  Interesting?
• 1:45:15
  And I went up to it, and it's a glow worm.
• 1:45:18
  I hadn't seen a glow worm for 50 years.
• 1:45:21
  Okay.
• 1:45:21
  Here.
• 1:45:23
  You know, and this, this, this incredible bioluminescent beetle,
• 1:45:26
  you won't believe how bright it is.
• 1:45:27
  And, and literally I can remember the last time I saw one at the bridge.
• 1:45:33
  So have they come
• 1:45:34
  Rupert Isaacson: back because of the rewilding work that you've done?
• 1:45:37
  Nick Viney: They have not been, they've obviously hung on here.
• 1:45:41
  And then, you know, maybe, hopefully I've, I corrected, you know, how I was treating
• 1:45:47
  the land in time that hopefully they're gonna be able to you know, proliferate
• 1:45:51
  and actually, you know, this is, it's such a charismatic, it's such a beautiful
• 1:45:55
  thing for kids, especially, you know, to have this bele that glows in it.
• 1:45:59
  I mean, how many, how many?
• 1:46:00
  Well, I think, yeah,
• 1:46:01
  Rupert Isaacson: it's more than that.
• 1:46:02
  I mean, if, if you want the personification of magic, if you
• 1:46:04
  want the personification of what it feels like to dance with God,
• 1:46:07
  you know, in the landscape Yeah.
• 1:46:09
  Is to walk among fireflies.
• 1:46:10
  Yeah.
• 1:46:11
  Yeah.
• 1:46:11
  It's, it's
• 1:46:12
  Nick Viney: just, just phenomenal.
• 1:46:13
  So I, I, I just want,
• 1:46:17
  you know, everybody, we are all connected and we are all connected to nature.
• 1:46:21
  Whether we, whether we like it or not, we all eat.
• 1:46:23
  And how we eat profoundly affects what is going on in the countryside.
• 1:46:30
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:46:30
  And, and so, so what we have is this opportunity for farmers to de deliver
• 1:46:36
  food, but also have, have the solutions which help mitigate climate change.
• 1:46:42
  So, so farmers, you know, they can get a bad rep for various things and
• 1:46:47
  there are some bad things going on.
• 1:46:50
  Actually what we have here is an amazing opportunity.
• 1:46:53
  And don't give me the guff about who's gonna feed the world, because
• 1:46:57
  you know, that's not, we are, we have 40% waste in our food system.
• 1:47:02
  Rupert Isaacson: Sure.
• 1:47:02
  And we're gonna go to vertical farming in cities and all of that.
• 1:47:04
  We, we can,
• 1:47:05
  Nick Viney: there's so many, you know, if, if you, if you, if you come off
• 1:47:09
  this call and wanna do anything, I would say get yourself on a course, a
• 1:47:13
  permaculture design certificate course, because it will change your life.
• 1:47:19
  It will expand your brain like you never thought possible.
• 1:47:23
  And I don't care how old or young you are this is not a farming thing.
• 1:47:27
  This is a life thing.
• 1:47:29
  This is, it's really hard to bring, bring artistry into everything you do, into the
• 1:47:35
  design of your life and just, just the most beautiful you know, the, the earth,
• 1:47:41
  the earth care manual Bill Linson's.
• 1:47:45
  You know, it's a phenomenal piece of work, man.
• 1:47:48
  Doesn't matter what, you know, what you're interested in, there's
• 1:47:51
  something for you in there.
• 1:47:52
  It's just fabulous.
• 1:47:53
  So yeah, permaculture, permanent agriculture systems, you know, it's
• 1:47:57
  about sustainable civilizations.
• 1:48:00
  I dunno if you can hear me 'cause I'm in a tin.
• 1:48:02
  She, and it's starting to rain.
• 1:48:05
  Rupert Isaacson: Permaculture.
• 1:48:06
  A design system for creating sustainable and self-sufficient ecosystems
• 1:48:10
  by mimicking natural patterns.
• 1:48:12
  It aims to integrate human activity with the natural environment to
• 1:48:16
  minimize waste, prevent pollution, and maximize biodiversity, resiliency
• 1:48:21
  and sustainability in practice.
• 1:48:23
  Permaculture applies principles of design, engineering, and land management to create
• 1:48:28
  productive and resilient landscapes.
• 1:48:31
  Thank you, ai.
• 1:48:33
  I just looked it up.
• 1:48:33
  Thank
• 1:48:33
  Nick Viney: you.
• 1:48:33
  Thank you.
• 1:48:34
  I couldn't have said it better myself.
• 1:48:36
  Well, but it's, it's one of
• 1:48:37
  Rupert Isaacson: those things with one, here's the word a lot and I think
• 1:48:39
  when people hear that word, unless they have been exposed to it, it's
• 1:48:43
  almost like an eyes glaze over thing.
• 1:48:45
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:48:45
  And it's, and it's a boring word.
• 1:48:46
  Permaculture is a boring word.
• 1:48:48
  Word.
• 1:48:48
  It doesn't, it doesn't really, if we called it magic making so you can
• 1:48:58
  eat while supping with the gods or something.
• 1:49:04
  But that is basically sort of, kind of what it is.
• 1:49:06
  Yeah.
• 1:49:07
  And it's interesting in Botswana, you know, where I spent a lot of time
• 1:49:09
  actually banned from Botswana 'cause of the human rights work I did there.
• 1:49:12
  But when I was spending a lot of time in Botswana they have a, they have a
• 1:49:15
  whole department of permaculture Alright.
• 1:49:19
  At government level.
• 1:49:20
  Yeah.
• 1:49:20
  It's very interesting because dry land, agroforestry.
• 1:49:24
  Is, is a big thing.
• 1:49:26
  Yeah.
• 1:49:26
  And so interestingly, while persecuting the sun and the bushmen, they've
• 1:49:29
  actually learned a lot from them and apply a lot of, a lot of you know,
• 1:49:34
  those, those principles to the land.
• 1:49:36
  And it, it gives me great joy that people like you who are coming from that
• 1:49:46
  sense of stasis that we had in the farming community in the uk growing up,
• 1:49:52
  you're my generation, are now looking at it in this way because it depresses
• 1:50:00
  me, I have to say, when I see the wind farms go up and it depresses me
• 1:50:05
  when I see the solar panels covering fields because the reason is, is it's
• 1:50:10
  not beautiful and humans need nature.
• 1:50:13
  Nature is beautiful.
• 1:50:14
  So when we see industrial shit on the landscape, even if it's providing us with
• 1:50:21
  clean energy is profoundly depressing.
• 1:50:23
  And I hope to, I, I and I actually have faith that our technology's gonna move
• 1:50:28
  us beyond that relatively quickly and we won't need to put concrete on green things
• 1:50:34
  in order to not pollute the environment.
• 1:50:38
  It's people like you out there doing what you're doing that
• 1:50:40
  are moving us towards that.
• 1:50:41
  And I'm grateful, grateful for the work that you're doing.
• 1:50:45
  So.
• 1:50:46
  With that in mind, people need to know how to get to the work that you're doing.
• 1:50:51
  So you have your regenerative agriculture practice, you also have your glamping
• 1:50:54
  sites, which sound brilliant and I think I would like to come and stay in that.
• 1:50:59
  You also have your art, so these things have different websites.
• 1:51:02
  How do people reach you, Nick?
• 1:51:05
  Nick Viney: So I can pretty much always be reached on www.nickfiy.co.uk,
• 1:51:12
  N-I-C-K-V-I-N-E y.co.uk.
• 1:51:15
  I will be sort of trying to split up everything so it's
• 1:51:18
  less confusing for people.
• 1:51:19
  I operate if you wanna come and stay here, you can come to www.rewildingfutures.co
• 1:51:29
  uk.
• 1:51:31
  I, I made up that name just because I'd lost my other
• 1:51:35
  name to a computer era thing.
• 1:51:38
  I had no idea at the time what a buzzword Rewilding was gonna be.
• 1:51:45
  Interesting.
• 1:51:45
  And yeah, so it's.
• 1:51:48
  And I'm only part re wilder anyway, so, but yeah, so Rewilding Futures,
• 1:51:52
  and it's really about giving people the opportunity to, to have a different
• 1:51:57
  aesthetic, you know, try and then try and scratch their head and wonder why
• 1:52:02
  is she laying so many brambles grow?
• 1:52:05
  And you know, and then hopefully see those trees coming up.
• 1:52:07
  And yeah.
• 1:52:09
  What else do we do?
• 1:52:09
  So Rewilding coombs head, ww dot rewilding coombs head.co
• 1:52:14
  uk is, is where I work.
• 1:52:16
  And
• 1:52:17
  Rupert Isaacson: s there's many ways to spell co.
• 1:52:20
  So how we spelling Coom in this
• 1:52:21
  Nick Viney: so Rewilding Coombs head, C double O-M-V-E-S-H-E-A d.co
• 1:52:28
  do uk and there you can do Beaver Watches and we run yes, short.
• 1:52:35
  We do, you can stay in the Shepherds Huts, obviously.
• 1:52:38
  No shepherds left.
• 1:52:39
  We've got Shepherd Huts.
• 1:52:40
  You can come and.
• 1:52:43
  Come to our conferences.
• 1:52:44
  So for example, we've got a conference a kind of a rolling
• 1:52:47
  theme called, if Not Now, when.
• 1:52:49
  And this year is, if not now, when Sea Beyond.
• 1:52:53
  And we're actually, we're, we're taking the, we're we're following
• 1:52:56
  the water from the uplands, so from the peat bogs, and we're following
• 1:52:59
  that water down and out to sea.
• 1:53:01
  And we're talking to experts about all the critters.
• 1:53:04
  When is this conference?
• 1:53:05
  And this conference is July the 25th, 26th and 27th.
• 1:53:11
  In Devon.
• 1:53:12
  And if you, at yours at, in Devon?
• 1:53:15
  At at Derek Go Rewild and CO's head.
• 1:53:19
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:53:20
  Yeah,
• 1:53:20
  Nick Viney: I, I've, I've sort of converted his barns
• 1:53:23
  into a conference center.
• 1:53:24
  We call it the, the straw auditorium.
• 1:53:26
  Gosh, I'd like to get
• 1:53:27
  Rupert Isaacson: to that.
• 1:53:28
  Yeah.
• 1:53:28
  Yeah.
• 1:53:28
  Nick Viney: And, and you know, the, the most phenomenal speakers come every year.
• 1:53:32
  We have the most, you know, we've got this year we actually have, so we
• 1:53:35
  have John Lister, k Charlie Burrow, and these guys have been so generous.
• 1:53:39
  They've come every year to, to, to supply.
• 1:53:42
  Listeners
• 1:53:42
  Rupert Isaacson: might not know this goes across the English speaking world.
• 1:53:44
  Who are these people?
• 1:53:45
  Nick Viney: Okay, so, so, so John Lister.
• 1:53:47
  K so formed AGA Field Center, one of the first field centers up in the
• 1:53:52
  Highlands of Scotland, up in Inness.
• 1:53:54
  And is absolutely one of the original nature conservation guys.
• 1:54:00
  And it's like having this.
• 1:54:03
  Comedian in the place.
• 1:54:04
  He is the most fantastic standup comedian.
• 1:54:08
  He just brilliant.
• 1:54:09
  And, but all in nature recovery,
• 1:54:11
  Rupert Isaacson: John Lister.
• 1:54:11
  K,
• 1:54:12
  Nick Viney: so John Lister.
• 1:54:13
  K, yeah.
• 1:54:14
  KAY, K-A-Y-E-E.
• 1:54:16
  And then Sir Charlie Bur so of the great NEP estate so we've got
• 1:54:22
  Rupert Isaacson: net per state in Su in Sussex.
• 1:54:24
  Nick Viney: Yes.
• 1:54:24
  And so that's with A-K-K-N-E, double P.
• 1:54:28
  And
• 1:54:29
  Rupert Isaacson: just again, for listeners who dunno what that is
• 1:54:31
  we talked about where they've got the, the bison, the European bison
• 1:54:34
  coming back in Kent of all places.
• 1:54:36
  But Sussex, which is another place that's actually very close to London,
• 1:54:39
  but also oddly wild there's a massive estate down there where they turned
• 1:54:44
  it back to the wild and the net.
• 1:54:46
  K-N-E-P-P, it's sort of a thing in the uk, but outside the uk it may not be known.
• 1:54:51
  Yeah,
• 1:54:52
  Nick Viney: yeah.
• 1:54:52
  So it's so it was a, it was a big farm, a big estate.
• 1:54:55
  It's through 3000, 500 acres.
• 1:54:58
  And it was a very uneconomic farmer anyway, so they've
• 1:55:01
  turned it back to nature.
• 1:55:02
  And, and really, so this is, so Charlie Bur and his, his wife
• 1:55:07
  Isabella Tree and that Isabelle Tree wrote a book called Wilding.
• 1:55:11
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:55:11
  Which I would recommend everybody reads.
• 1:55:14
  It has touched so many people and it will help.
• 1:55:18
  It will.
• 1:55:19
  She's so eloquently, describes the struggle of, of a, a lot of really what
• 1:55:24
  we've been talking about here, that that's, that's that conflict between
• 1:55:27
  rewilding and conventional agriculture and really how we're going to, you know,
• 1:55:32
  segue through that and, and they've, you know, they've lived that experience.
• 1:55:36
  Really recommend that book.
• 1:55:39
  Rupert Isaacson: Where can people find your art?
• 1:55:41
  Nick Viney: Well, my art.
• 1:55:43
  My art.
• 1:55:43
  So through the website.
• 1:55:45
  Which website?
• 1:55:46
  Nick viney.co.uk.
• 1:55:48
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:55:48
  Nick Viney: And I'm really rubbish at getting new stuff up there.
• 1:55:51
  So what I tend to do is, well, apparently nothing for two years until
• 1:55:56
  I've got a big enough body of work.
• 1:55:57
  And then maybe we do open studios, or maybe I spend a week trying to
• 1:56:01
  get everything onto the website.
• 1:56:03
  But it's much better off contacting me direct and then I'll just walk
• 1:56:07
  around the studio with a webcam and say, do you like any of this?
• 1:56:11
  Or, I'll come and stay.
• 1:56:12
  Come and stay.
• 1:56:14
  Rupert Isaacson: I presume you also do commissions too, if
• 1:56:15
  somebody wanted something painted.
• 1:56:16
  Nick Viney: I do commissions.
• 1:56:17
  I, I did used to do a lot of commissions.
• 1:56:19
  I'm a little bit what would I say?
• 1:56:21
  I you know, I don't like to, to compromise when it comes to my
• 1:56:26
  creativity and I, yeah, I like to put my own stamp on stuff, but
• 1:56:30
  Rupert Isaacson: if somebody comes to you with an idea that tickles you, you.
• 1:56:34
  Do it.
• 1:56:34
  Nick Viney: Absolutely.
• 1:56:35
  And, and really the, the, you know, the paint the world a better place is, is, is
• 1:56:40
  all commission in a sense, what I describe is, so say I go to a conference and they
• 1:56:45
  have a particular problem and they're trying to describe a transition between
• 1:56:49
  where we are now and where we wanna be.
• 1:56:51
  As soon as I understand that problem then, you know, I can paint that transition.
• 1:56:56
  That's cool.
• 1:56:56
  And, and, and that can be, you know, you can have a, this is where we are
• 1:57:00
  now, and this is where we end up on the same painting, or we can go together
• 1:57:05
  through, this is where we are now, and then layer it up into something.
• 1:57:09
  Well, people
• 1:57:09
  Rupert Isaacson: bring you as an, as a sort of consultant to do that.
• 1:57:12
  Nick Viney: Yeah.
• 1:57:12
  So we call it an artist in residence and you know, for, for however many
• 1:57:16
  days or hours or whatever it is.
• 1:57:19
  And once I get my head around a problem, I can, you know, I, I, I
• 1:57:23
  think in images, so interesting.
• 1:57:25
  Rupert Isaacson: So
• 1:57:26
  Nick Viney: I feel like my job as an artist is to distill complex
• 1:57:30
  problems into very clear imagery, which, which allows people to have
• 1:57:37
  their own penny dropping moments because we don't know what that is.
• 1:57:40
  And that's, that's, that's difficult with the written word.
• 1:57:42
  Not all of us absorb the written word very comfortably.
• 1:57:46
  Right.
• 1:57:47
  But with art we can, we can, yeah.
• 1:57:49
  We can fill in the gaps as we are, as, as we were.
• 1:57:53
  So somebody
• 1:57:53
  Rupert Isaacson: could, could contact you to come in and do that.
• 1:57:56
  Nick Viney: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:57:57
  That's really what I'm leaning into now is, is I feel like it's, it's
• 1:58:02
  a sort of a science communicator.
• 1:58:05
  But, but yeah, I really wanna bring the bring the art and
• 1:58:08
  the sh and the show into it.
• 1:58:10
  Yeah.
• 1:58:11
  Okay.
• 1:58:12
  Rupert Isaacson: Well, fantastic.
• 1:58:14
  Right.
• 1:58:14
  I'm gonna read the websites back.
• 1:58:15
  So if you want to check out Nick's art and it's good 'cause I'm looking at it.
• 1:58:20
  And if you would like to hire her as an artist in residence, come in
• 1:58:23
  and paint your problem and solution for you, which sounds brilliant.
• 1:58:28
  Nick Viney, N-I-C-K-V-I-N-E-Y-N-I-C-K-V-I-N-E y.co.uk.
• 1:58:37
  Don't worry, we're gonna put this in the show notes.
• 1:58:40
  If you are wanting to go glamping on her land and who
• 1:58:45
  wouldn't rewilding futures.co.uk.
• 1:58:52
  If you want to check out the Rewilding work that she's also doing with Derek
• 1:58:57
  Gao, who's a bit of a legend in the UK and go Beaver watching Hoho and
• 1:59:02
  stay in the wild and such like, and do this amazing conference that she's
• 1:59:06
  talking about down there in Devon.
• 1:59:08
  Rewilding, Coombs head, C-O-O-M-B-E-S Co, of being a narrow, shallow.
• 1:59:18
  Upland Valley bowl thing in old English rewilding coombs head.co.uk.
• 1:59:26
  And the theme is, if not now, when?
• 1:59:29
  July
• 1:59:31
  Nick Viney: 25th to 27th.
• 1:59:34
  Rupert Isaacson: 25th to 27th, yeah.
• 1:59:36
  Got it.
• 1:59:37
  Of this year, 2025.
• 1:59:39
  And if you come across this podcast, not in 2025, well, I presume there's gonna
• 1:59:46
  be one next year and the year after.
• 1:59:48
  And you can contact Nick.
• 1:59:50
  Nick, it's been brilliant.
• 1:59:52
  Nick Viney: Rob.
• 1:59:52
  Really enjoyed this Ruper.
• 1:59:53
  Yeah,
• 1:59:53
  Rupert Isaacson: thank you for taking us on this, on this
• 1:59:55
  self-actualization journey.
• 1:59:56
  It's, it's, I've learned a lot.
• 1:59:58
  Inspiring course.
• 1:59:59
  Yeah.
• 1:59:59
  Nick Viney: Great.
• 2:00:00
  Yeah.
• 2:00:00
  And hopefully see you in the southwest.
• 2:00:02
  Rupert Isaacson: I hope you enjoyed today's conversation as much as I did.
• 2:00:06
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• 2:00:10
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• 2:00:14
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• 2:00:20
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• 2:00:20
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• 2:00:24
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• 2:01:07
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• 2:01:11
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• 2:01:16
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