Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Vet Chat. This beginning our series on sustainability and regeneration, we're very fortunate today to have Craig Bennett, who is the CEO of the Wildlife Trusts. I'm sure Craig's gonna tell us a little bit about himself as we start, but, Craig, obviously I really enjoyed listening to you at the recent SIs conference.

I'm so pleased that you've agreed to, to come on today and . Yeah, tell us a little bit about how you found the new job at the Wildlife Trust and how it's differed from Friends of the Earth, two slightly different environmental organisations, but obviously all going for improving the environment. So how are you finding a new job?

Hi Antony, yeah, really good to be joining you. Well, I'm loving it really. It sort of ended up being quite different, in, in how I'm going about it, to what I might have anticipated for obvious reasons.

I actually started contractually as chief executive of the Wildlife Trust on April the first in 2020, so. Perhaps that was a bit of a clue that it was gonna be an interesting start to the job and not quite what I expected. I thought I'd spend my first year travelling around the country seeing lots of reserves and and meeting teams in the field, but obviously I wasn't able to do as nearly as much of that as I thought I would, and I've spent a lot of it from my.

Attic in Cambridge, my attic study in Cambridge and instead spending a lot of time on Zoom and Teams like so many other people. But actually what I'm loving about it is just that sense of scale, across the Wildlife Trust Federation. We're made up of 46 independent.

Autonomous but interdependent wildlife trusts ranging from ones that are very local, like the Isles of Scilly or individual cities like London and Sheffield and Rotherham and, and Avon Wildlife Trust through to ones that cover whole counties, Essex and Kent and. Shropshire and many others to groups of counties, like Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, and Cambridgeshire where I am now, to national wildlife trusts like, Scottish Wildlife Trust and Ulster Wildlife Trust. So collectively, to put it in scale, we're about 3000 staff, we're actually one of the biggest landowners in the country, collectively.

We have more nature reserves than McDonald's has restaurants, about 1000 more in fact. And we estimate that 60% of the British population live within a 3 mile walk or cycle ride of one of our reserves. So it gives you an idea of just how local we are up and down the country, as well as national.

And we're in a very good place to, I, I think in the decades ahead to put nature firmly in recovery, so that's really exciting. I think it's really exciting also to see that there are, there are areas that you're looking to take on and and really rewild as well, so I know the, the, the campaign is 30 by 30. Tell us a little bit about that as well.

Yes, well, I mean, despite the sort of work we've been doing over the years and those of other excellent nature organisations like RSPB and National Trust as well, the fact is nature is in decline still in this country. In fact, the UK is one of the most nature depleted countries anywhere in the world, if you, If you look at the sort of things, reports like the State of Nature report that was published by a whole coalition of NGOs in late 2019, 41% of our wildlife species have fallen in abundance, some of them very severely since the early 1970s. So in my lifetime we've seen this catastrophic decline in species that some of them were once common and now rare.

And we all know this, you know, I remember going on family holidays, in the 1970s and you go for long drives through England and by the time you get to the other end there'll be. dead insects all over Dad's windscreen, or if I'd leave my bedroom light on, when I was growing up, at night, you know, sooner or later it'd be surrounded by moss. That doesn't happen anymore.

So, so many, we have experienced this huge decline in abundance. Of so many species, and actually that just means nature's not working as it should, apart from anything else, as well as us losing that joy of nature that should be all around us. So it's not good enough for us just to be talking about slowing the declines in nature.

In fact, it's not good enough just to talk about protecting nature. We need to stop those declines, reverse them, put nature into recovery. And we need to do that broadly in three ways.

We need to make more space for nature. So actually, our reserves become the foundation for nature's recovery, and we have to, we have to get many more areas, much greater space across our countryside, being protected from nature. That's where the 30 by 30 target comes in, 30% of our land and sea in recovery for nature by 2030.

That's all part of a global target as well. We need to have nature abundant again, restoring nature, we need to have nature working again, things like getting our wetlands wet, make sure nature's functioning, reintroducing species that are missing that should be here like beavers, and that can all make our, our, our countryside, our ecosystems more resilient as well. And really we need to also then be making sure that nature is helping solve the problems that we face as a society.

So the role that nature can play in helping, helping us address or address physical and people's physical and mental wellbeing, which we've really learnt over the last year. The role that nature can play in sucking carbon out of the air and helping us. Tackle climate change, but also helping us to adapt to climate change as well.

The role that nature can play in actually cleaning up pollution, for example. So if we can do those things, make more space for nature, get nature working again and make sure it's helping deliver those nature-based solutions to the problems we face in society, then we'll be in a good place. How do you see yourself going about that in the next 8 years, getting, I mean, at the moment, obviously you said there's so many nature reserves, which is fantastic.

I have, I call it the the jewel in the crown. I don't know if you agree, but Lunt is, is like a little paradise, you know, it's not many people visit it, it's a, it's a gorgeous spot just a couple of miles down the road, so you're right, you know, there's always a. And nature is er quite close.

What percentage of land do you have under ownership and perhaps, you know, all of the charities like the National Trust together, what would you say at the moment was the kind of percentage of wild areas in the UK? Well, I mean, actually, I suppose it's not so much about ownership, as to just what state the nature is in. If you added up all our, all the different designations in this country, roughly you get to something like 26%, but you only get there by including our national parks and our areas of outstanding natural beauty and so on.

The problem is, is if you take national parks and ANOBs. Those are not nature designations, they are landscape, cultural landscape designations, and that is all very good and we can think that's a nice thing, but let's not pretend those are wildlife or nature designations, they're not. And in fact, a lot of the wildlife in our national parks is in a worse state than those outside it, I mean.

Take our sites of special scientific interest, they should be our very best sites. Many of our triple SIs in national parks in a worse state than those outside them. So, I mean, we could and should be doing a better job in making sure our national parks and areas are outstanding attributy are working for nature, but at the moment, they, a lot of them are not in the way that they should.

If you take our sites as special scientific interests, as I said, those should be a representative sample of our very best wildlife sites. Roughly across the UK that's sort of around 10% of our land designated that way. But our nature organisations, our statutory nature bodies like, like Natural England, for example, estimate that only around half of those are in good condition.

So really, it's closer to, rather than 26%, and certainly not 30%, it's probably closer to around 5% of our land across the UK on average, that's currently in a good state for nature. So we've got a very long way to go to get to 30% by 2030. Now the way we think of the wildlife Trust, that needs to happen.

Is of course we need to make much more space for nature by designating more sites. We've proposed a new designation called Wild Belt, so you can designate land that is currently of low biodiversity value, put it into recovery. That's gonna be crucial for building a nature recovery network, in other words, creating the wildlife corridors that connect up existing reserves and creating much larger areas for wildlife as well.

But crucial to this will also be obviously working with the likes of farmers, for example, and the new agricultural schemes, that are being put in place now. We've worked hard to make sure that there will be, that where public subsidies gets used for supporting farming in the future, that actually those public subsidies are for public goods including nature. So the higher tiers of under the new agricultural regimes will be hopefully, if, if the government delivers them right, will enable us to put nature into recovery as well.

But really, a lot of this is about having those policies in place, making sure it happens in the right locations, making sure it's a protected and connected network for nature's recovery, all the way into our towns and cities and right out into the countryside. And then that we can restore the abundance of those species, say also by reducing pesticide use, just get nature working again. I believe we can do it if we are really to, you know, pull together all the resources we've got to make that happen.

And it's got to happen, you know, a for, for reconnecting people and nature again. But secondly, of course, nature is the foundation for everything that matters. You can't, you can't even have a sensible conversation about food security or agriculture if nature's in decline, which is kind of ironic because agriculture has been one of the biggest drivers of the declines in nature, so.

You, it's it's the foundation to food productivity, it's the foundation to our, medical and to our physical and mental well-being. It's the foundation to, producing clean air, clean water, and so on. So, for hundreds and hundreds of reasons, we have to do this.

I think it's really interesting. I think there is a renaissance, you know, after the, or during we're still in the pandemic, but there's been a reconnection with nature from a lot of people. Obviously last year, the roads were much quieter, we had the bird singing, I've just got a group of starlings fighting over some food outside, so great to see that and we've obviously had .

A lot of people planting wildflower meadows, for example, we've planted a little one outside our office. It's only a very small area, but of course it brings the bees, it brings the butterflies in. My wife got some money off the local council to put a wildflower meadow at her school as well.

And I suppose that's really where you're coming from also from the agriculture, the use of fertiliser has turned a lot of our meadows into fairly monoculture fields. That look nice from a distance, but actually don't support a great deal of wildlife, do they? Do you think that that will, that, you know, we've lost the Common Agricultural Policy.

Do you see that the, the laws coming in, you know, from a British government now rather than a European one, can help to sort of turn around some of those policies to make it, as you say, more attractive for farmers to farm for wildlife rather than just industrially produce. Not necessarily always the most healthy food. Yes, I mean, I would say there's a caution here.

You, you, you're never gonna hear me defending the old Common Agricultural Policy. It had huge problems with it, of course. Yeah.

But actually, a lot of the problems were as much with how we implemented it in the UK as as in itself, at least in recent years. I mean, you know, since, since changes to the Common Agricultural Policy about 10 years ago, it wasn't just focused on food production and. It wasn't particularly good for for nature, but it was kind of pretty neutral in the scheme of things.

The problem was then how we interpret aspects of that in the UK that caused a lot of problems, and that's why, of course, you see such a great range across Europe, across different member states of the European Union. There's quite a big range as to how that's interpreted in quite a big variety as to the state that nature's in across the European Union. So that kind of should be obvious.

Having said all that, we are where we are and er Brexit was a great opportunity for us to shake up, you know, the agricultural policy in this country and however, people voted on what side they were on that referendum. We can all agree that there's a great opportunity to, to try and do something different on agriculture. And it had to happen anywhere, it would have had to have happened whatever, but it did mean that in this country we could try and win that principle, which I think broadly the NGOs did win, that if you're gonna use taxpayers' money to fund farming, it should be funding not for what the market can provide, in other words, not paying for food as such, why, why would you subsidise that?

Actually subsidise the things the market doesn't pay for. In other words, those public goods we require. Such as nature and ecosystem services and putting nature into recovery.

So that argument was broadly one. There are these big opportunities now, as you say, that that the new new agricultural policy coming in. There's these things called environmental land management schemes.

There's sort of three tiers of those. There's a sustainable farming incentive, which will be the most basic tier that says. You know, is supporting farmers to, to farm, funnily enough, but, but actually with, we hope, more stringent criteria than were under the Common Agricultural Policy.

The detail's not there yet, but we hope so. And, and in, in particularly in supporting approaches like integrated pest management, which is essentially using less pesticides when, when growing crops. The next tier up is supporting local nature recovery, so higher tier of payments, but to do more for wildlife.

And then the, the highest tier of payments for farmers and other landowners will be landscape scale recovery. So really kind of what you might call people might understand the rewilding agenda. And as I said, the detail hasn't been published in government yet, bits of it are emerging, but we hope when that comes, that will play a big role in really shifting things in terms of that, the, the, the approach that we've seen in farming and to support farmers to have a good quality, you know, income and a good livelihood in doing that as well.

That will be very important. You're right that I think. The zeitgeist has shifted a lot over the last few years, but particularly this last year during the pandemic.

At the wildlife trusts around this time last year, we were, experiencing a 2,000% increase in the number of people looking at our webcams from our nature reserves over the same months the year before. It was very clear that people were desperate to have their daily dose of nature and to find any way of doing it during lockdown. And I think people have come to really appreciate nature in a new way now, you know, and maybe not take it for granted so much, given how much they've, it has been important to people during lockdown.

And I think people are coming to understand the scale of the global ecological crisis, indeed, the scale of the global climate crisis and how the two are completely interlinked as well, and we can't hope to solve one without the other. So it's exciting to get this kind of renewal and excitement about the need to address these issues. The problem is these are issues where there's a ticking clock and we've got to move fast on it, you know, we cannot drag it take forever about solving them.

We've got to move fast with and with real urgency and treat it like the emergency it is. So the question is, can we move fast enough? Do you see, obviously COP 26 is happening later on in the year in Glasgow.

I saw a programme about Greta Thunberg talking very much about the amount of carbon we've perhaps got left to pump into the atmosphere before we go above the 1.5 degrees that was kind of set as the limit at the Paris conference. Obviously having another one of these conferences, is there a danger that You know, the British are hosting it, but as you say, being the least wooded er country in Europe, one of the, the worst countries for Nature degradation that it could end up being a a talk shop.

How do you, how do you think that that COP 26 will, will pan out? Well, there's a always a danger when you have these international summits, they could just become a talk shop and there's a danger, yes, world leaders come together, take a nice photograph together and not don't agree much and and move on. Having said that, they, I do think they're essential nonetheless, and it, it, you feel with those international agreements we perhaps inch forward sometimes and if nothing else, hopefully we lock in, you know, ratchet up what the, lowest common denominator action is, so it's never that inspiring, but at least it is that, and that's really important.

At this COP, at this conference of the parties, COP 26 in Glasgow in November, what will be absolutely crucial, and what everyone's looking to the UK government to do is use their diplomatic skills to try and get every country to agree to ratchet up their ambition and the effort that they're gonna put into cutting carbon emissions as fast as possible. So that you keep that target of 1.5 degrees alive.

Now bear in mind we're already at 1, 1.1 degrees warming above pre-industrial levels. So that's gonna be tough, you know, that requires much faster cuts in emissions than we've seen to date from all countries, but particularly the rich countries that of course have been primarily to blame for climate change.

The reason 1.5 matters is because if we go above that. It's much higher chances that we hit what's called positive feedback loops in the Earth's climate system.

And they're positive feedbacks in terms of a, that's the sort of scientific jargon. It doesn't mean they're good. It means things like the Amazon rainforest starts to dry out even more.

In fact, there's signs today, there's just news reports today that there's more evidence of that happening. And as the Amazon rainforest dries out, it becomes a source of carbon rather than a sink of carbon. And also the ice obviously melting quicker as well we've seen.

Exactly, exactly. Sea ice, if sea ice melts quicker, the white reflective surface gets replaced with dark sea water which absorbs more of the sun's energy. When the tundra, thaws and melts, that releases methane, and there's many, many of these positive feedback loops in the Earth system that could lead to more runaway climate change, which takes away our options to slow it in the future.

So that's what's really concerning. The other thing that's often lost in this debate is this is all based on 50/50 chance of this happening. So, those aren't great odds, you know, Russian roulette has better odds than 50/50.

So, we really have left it very late to act. So at COP 26, we absolutely have to see that agreement for, for 1.5 and scaling up the effort to achieve that.

That's gonna be much easier to do if the rich countries come forward and offer the finance to the poorer countries to do that and for the technological transfer, and bear in mind, In the Paris meeting back in 2015, the rich countries promised 100 billion pounds to do that. They haven't delivered that yet, so rich countries are really behind on this. But you know, you, you also pointed Antony is that what matters here is to have credibility in that.

The UK as hosts has to be doing the right thing at home as well. And you know, the UK has broadly set pretty good targets on trying to tackle climate and to cut carbon emissions. Actually following through on the practise has been pretty poor.

So it was only in the last month we saw the government's own climate advisors, the Climate Change Committee, advising that the government was way off track on delivering on the ground what's needed to meet its climate targets. And that's a real problem, you know, we need to see a comprehensive plan and action from government across all sectors to really deliver on its targets. It's like, you know, I always say it's like if we were hosting the Olympics in 2030, in the UK you'd expect a very clear project plan about how it's gonna be delivered with Gantt charts and milestones, and you'd, you'd know whether you're on track to deliver or not.

And that's the kind of approach we need to tackling our, our contribution as the UK to climate change. At the moment what we see is kind of a, a bunch of sporadic policies announced here and there that sound good and make the headlines, but do they, and some of them might be good. Don't get me wrong, but does it add up to the emission cuts that we need to, to stay on track for 1.5, and that's what's missing at the moment from, from the government, I'm afraid.

I think we really need innovative thinking because the incremental changes aren't probably going to be enough, so it's, it's, you know, using solar energy more, it's wind power, you know, to help us get to those targets. Do you, I mean, governments move very slowly, is my impression. How much do you think that businesses can help, and obviously we have the big businesses like Microsoft and Google and Facebook and so on.

But also bringing this down to the level of, you know, veterinary practises and so on, do, do you see there being some very easy wins that, for example, a veterinary practise should be doing to help to reduce its carbon footprint, have you got any thoughts on that? Absolutely. So, I mean, to come back to your big point there, I mean, it's funny how we often look to governments to lead.

But in my experience, they don't normally. They, they normally follow, they normally act when they get the sense that er communities, their population or business wants them to do a certain thing. So in fact, actually, the leadership on climate change, it has to come from communities, it has to come from people, communities, for businesses, small and large, and then the government will really act.

And of course it'd be so much easier if I don't know, a green JFK walked in or something and offered that kind of hero leadership on the climate agenda. I. Waited too long for that to happen, it's not gonna happen.

So actually, the leadership falls to all of us as individuals, as communities, as people, as veterinary practises, as companies, big and small, to demonstrate that leadership in the way that is right and authentic to us and whatever roles we're playing in our, in our lives and in the economy and in the community. And then when we see that happening, governments will speed up the action on climate, which will then become mutually reinforcing and make it easier for us to take the action we're committed to. So each of us as individuals should try and, you know, make the commitments that feel right to you, whether it's eating a bit less meat, you know, and I guess what, I eat meat, but I try and eat much less of it than I once did and eat less but better meat.

That can make a huge difference. Fly a bit less, try and make sure your energy is from renewable sources, insulate your homes, all these kind of things. There's lots of things that we can and learn about these issues, you know, make sure that you're reading around it and taking it seriously and, and, and so on.

As veterinary practises, you know, I would say that the big challenge, the big opportunity out there is as many veterinary practises as possible that can commit to go net zero by 2030, the better. That's what we need, and, you know, let's have as many veterinary practises proudly saying they're committed to go net zero by 2030, which means that they are only admitting, they only emit the same amount of carbon as they absorb, but really it should be possible for most vet practises to get down to, To almost zero without having to worry about other approaches, you know, that should be really important, and in fact, the more that the sector as a whole, the more that the veterinary profession as a whole can commit to reach net zero by 2030, that will in itself offer real leadership. And big questions there, what about the role that veterinary surgeries, given that they are places where the community interacts, you know, the, the fact that if veterinary, Surgeries are seen, practises are seen to be adopting renewable energy, seen to be insulating their, their buildings well, seen to be taking these kind of steps, get adopting electric vehicles, all of those kind of things, then that will have a leadership role within our communities, it will make a huge difference.

And that's on carbon, on the nature side of things as well, you know, what what I said at the conference was I would love to see the veterinary profession offering real leadership about. Trying to reduce the risk of, you know, those chemicals and those treatments that do cause problems. I mean there's like invermectins, which, you know, the worming treatments for the use of livestock which actually then cause real problems for bats and beetles and dung beetles for.

As well, we've seen the use of neonicotides, which have been banned in agriculture because of the impact they have on, bee populations, but they, you know, they're still, available in pet parasite products, and the problem is, is you're getting spray your icoids on a dog and a a dog goes running through a watercourse as mine does quite often. My Labrador loves nothing better than to go swim in the river. But if they've been sprayed with neonicotoids, bear in mind these are chemicals that 1 teaspoon of them can kill quarter of a billion bees.

So, you know, how on earth have we ever ended up with using chemicals like that in these kind of treatments? We need the veterinary profession to show leadership and say it's unacceptable to be using chemicals like that and pesticides like that. We've got to find alternatives, and yet use our bulk purchasing to say we're gonna stop buying them and stop using them and and to support the alternatives.

And that's the leadership role this profession can play. How do you feel about, you obviously talked about insulation, which is really interesting. I live in an old Victorian house, I've got solar panels on the roof, we just had to have them taken all off because there was a a leak in the roof, but got it fixed.

How, how do you feel about solar and and wind, wind obviously a bit more difficult, but also heat pumps and so on, do you feel that? They're part of the, the mix of businesses as well to be using those. I mean, 100%.

I mean, the, the thing about renewable energy, it's this whole family of technologies. And they're very exciting and you know, solar has its role and, and you know, I've got solar panels on my house and I, I reckon we generate about 2/3 of the electricity that we use every year through solar. Wind is very useful, very powerful as well, and we've seen that there's huge ability, we're seeing more and more electricity in this country generated through wind, both onshore and offshore, and of course onshore wind is now the cheapest form of producing electricity in the UK.

From any source, it's cheaper than even burning coal now, which is, fantastic. So, you know, we're seeing that, for example. The thing to really understand is how that interacts both with energy efficiency.

So actually, the more that we insulate our houses, the more efficient our buildings are, that, or indeed our products and, and, technology in our buildings as well, our kettles and fridges and so on. The thing that's often not understood is that actually. Knocks out the peaks in demand, actually, the more the the more we have energy efficiency, so it requires much less generating capacity overall.

And it also means that we're less reliant on storage or presents much greater options for a much more dynamic energy system. And a smart energy system where our products actually like fridges and electric cars and so on, can we can start to have much more localised energy storage, and we move from a very central sort of grid provision where we have a handful of big power stations, but a long way from where we consume electricity. To actually generating electricity much closer to where we use it and have a much more kind of demand management response.

That is the future, that's inevitably where we're going, and the longer we cling on to big centralised old fashioned power stations, the more we're holding up the the emergence of the future. So it's really exciting. The sort of Tesla batteries and and that sort of stuff as well, you think.

Yeah, although I, I, the thing I'd really kind of point out is that all the technology we have now in terms of energy and you know, even today's solar panels, the most modern technology we have now in relation to renewables, is still the equivalent of like the brick size mobile phones in the 1980s to to smartphones today. I mean, the technological change we're gonna see in this area. Over the next decade or so is gonna be extraordinary.

I mean, if you bear in mind that they've already developed solar panels that look just like normal windows, you know, and now it's just a question of how long it takes for those to come through to market and fall come down in cost. They've developed a a a spray on solar that you can spray on the front of your building and you can't even detect it really, and that essentially becomes a a solar panel. The possibilities here are endless, and, and there will be opportunities for, energy in the renewable area that we can't even imagine now.

And that's why I get so frustrated at how, you know, when sometimes people focus on what I consider a very old technologies like nuclear and so on, that technologies of the last, century that actually remain us keep us wedded to the past rather rather than unlocking all these amazing possibilities for the future. And I think this is finishing off that loop shows how business maybe will get us out of this more than than governments will. Just, just one final one, Craig, I've really appreciated your time.

Obviously we're in plastic free July, plastic is reducing, it was great to see the amount of reduction in plastic bags once we put a levy on those. Nevertheless, you know, we, we see animals dying with, Whales dying with huge amounts of plastic in in their their stomachs. How do you think, we don't see the oceans as much as we see the the land, but how do you think we should be developing things like the marine protected areas to to really help us to, to take the planet forward, because obviously the majority of our planet is covered with water.

It's such an important resource, it can be forgotten about because we we don't see it, we don't live in it, do we? Yeah, well, there's a couple of points, so Anthony, let's talk about plastics first, because I myself, you know, I've been kind of a professional environmentalist, if you like, for 25 years now. And I've been on quite a journey through my career on plastics, you know, I used to think that the answer was to promote better recycling.

But you know, I've, in recent years I've come to understand it's really not, because the problem is you can't really recycle plastics properly, you can, you, you can to an extent you can reuse them for other purposes, but. The problem is, is what plastics always do is they keep continue to shed microplastic pollution. So even if you recycle a bunch of plastic bottles into, say, a fleece into plastic clothing, the problem is, is each time you're wearing it, and I've got, I've got the, you know, fleeces made from recycled bottles, don't get me wrong, but you know, you're shedding billions of tiny bits of micro plastic.

We don't really understand what the long term impact on that is on the environment or our health. I mean, there is some research, and it's, it's early days yet, so it's still pretty speculative. But believe it or not, there's some research that actually microplastic pollution might be linked to some of the insect declines because there's been, examples of insects basically dying because of tiny, tiny, tiny microplastics being found in their stomachs.

That's quite shocking. We don't know the long-term impacts of that. We don't know the long-term impacts of microplastics on our health.

You know, bear in mind that microplastics are known to, have toxics that adhere to them. And all of us, you, me, all of us have, thousands and thousands of tiny bits of microplastic in our, in our bodies that we, you know, don't know quite what the impact is having on us. My strong sense from talking to scientists that worked in this field.

Who will tell you more when they're down the pint, down the pub with you over a pint, than, than they would if, until it's in a peer reviewed paper. You know, a lot of scientists are very concerned about actually the long-term impact of plastics and our health. On top of that, of course, plastics are made from what, oil and gas, they're made from fossil fuels.

And we've got to phase out fossil fuels. So guess what, really, we've got to phase out plastics, we've got to completely stop manufacturing of plastics, fossil fossil fuels. I agree, Craig.

Now, now, a lot of people think that sounds bonkers, cos you look at all the huge use of plastics around us. But guess what? 20 years ago, people thought it was bonkers when we said you've gotta phase out fossil fuels, and now pretty much everyone agrees to that.

And if we're phasing those out, we've gotta phase out plastics. Now do we have any alternatives to them yet? No, not necessarily, but that's why we've got to, we've got to have a big goal, like getting rid of plastics, and then that stimulates the research and innovation to find the appropriate solutions.

And we've got to do that. One of the problems, Craig, is that in the UK we dump our plastics in places like er Turkey, don't we, so I saw that. A whole load of plastic dumped outside of 10 Downing Street recently because obviously we are not looking after our own rubbish, which just ethically isn't right, is it?

So it's a, it's a huge, huge problem and I mean it's appalling. I mean, I think future generations will look back and be astonished and appalled at how at, at how we create plastic pollution in the way that perhaps we would be astonished and appalled that once children were sent up chimneys. I mean, it really, I, I do think it will be like that one day.

What we take for granted now actually will be seen as absolutely appalling in future years. You asked also the question about the marine environment. Well, of course, here in the UK 50% of our biodiversity, you could say, is found in the marine environment.

Sadly, it's very badly degraded. We have overfished our our seas, we have, dredged pretty much every bit of the coast, and, it's in a highly degraded form. And yet, you know, if we could only put our marine environment into recovery, not only is that fantastic for biodiversity, but it would really help us address the climate crisis as well.

Because actually when you see if if fish fish populations are growing fast, that's all sucking carbon out of the air. If sea grasses if kelp and so on are growing faster it's doing the same thing. So actually around 30% of our seas around the coast of Britain are theoretically designated marine protected areas at the moment, that's good.

Sadly, those are very weak and they're basically paper parks, they don't really exclude any extractive activities. So at the Wildlife Trust we've been campaigning hard for highly protected marine areas which would exclude extractive activities such as dredging and fishing, and this is critically needed. It's not to say that you exclude that everywhere, but if we can, if we can have properly protected marine areas up to around 30% of our sea area, then we will start to see fish populations rebounding and fish populations growing fast.

Of course that will be good for. Fishermen operating outside those areas anyway, and actually more to the point, we will just start perhaps to to start recovering the abundance of our fish populations and other parts of the marine environment in a way that starts to mean we have a, a, a sort of seascapes and a marine environment that starts to approximate to what it should be, at least in some areas. But there's a very long way to go on that.

It's sensible, it's sustainability, which if we do it right, leads to regeneration, doesn't it, which I think is obviously what we need in the country. Craig, that's been really splendid. I've really enjoyed speaking to you, .

I think it's so important somehow to have some optimism within there as well, you know, there are some, some nice stories that obviously they're regenerating and they're rewilding revolution that I think is, you know, happening obviously in the Wildlife Trust also, the the lovely book by Isabelle Tree, which I think has encouraged a lot of us to, to do what we can do because obviously as an individual I'm not a government, but I can act locally and and then. Think globally as I think it was Greenpeace that said, so leave us with one last optimistic message if you can. Well, it is this really, Antony, you know, I, I am, I am an optimist about this, which lots of people find hard given so much my job is focusing on the, the problems.

But actually I couldn't do this job if I didn't, and I couldn't start this job every day if I didn't believe that change was possible. More to the point, I believe there is an inherent, logic, and there is an inherent, sense that as we really get going on this transition, it will speed up. If you look at the last year and the lessons we've learnt from this appalling pandemic, you know, how we learn that humans are capable of incredible things when we really put our mind to it.

We didn't think it was possible to. Build hospitals in a period of weeks or months rather than years, we didn't think it was possible to both develop, let alone roll out vaccines in a period of months, rather than many, many years. We don't know how quickly we can tackle the climate crisis and the ecological crisis.

Guess guess what, we haven't really tried yet. The moment we get serious about it, the moment that as a whole society we really, really put our shoulder into this and really put effort into it, I think we will surprise ourselves about how quickly we can turn things around, but we've really got to go for it. And let's hope in 5 years' time we look at the pandemic as being a time of terrible sacrifice, but maybe a blessing somewhere that it made us rethink and start to recalibrate.

I think surely, you know, the most fitting way to remember all those family members and friends and colleagues that that have passed away in the last year because of this pandemic will surely be to do things differently. And surely will be to kind of create a better future where actually we shouldn't forget, of course, why the pandemic emerged in the, in the first place. Almost certainly, it's been a zoonotic escape from spillover wildlife populations.

2030 years ago, scientists were warning that if we kept fragmenting wildlife habitats around the world, particularly in the tropics and trading in endangered species and. And so on, that that would lead to increased frequency of pandemics, and we saw that with NPA, SARS, Ebola, and more recently, COVID-19, of course. Surely, the real way to pay tribute to the, millions of people around the world that have died the last year because of COVID is to reverse the declines in nature, to put nature into recovery, to, to deal with the ecological crisis and the climate crisis, and then hopefully we might lead to a better life for humans as well.

No, thank you so much, Craig. That's been excellent. I hope you have a great rest of the day.

Take care. Thank's great to talk to you.