Show Notes
"We have to make this crime type too risky and lower the reward. We need to seize all the assets that they gain from their criminal enterprise... it's something I'm very committed to." The illegal trade in wildlife and the body parts of wild animals is driving many creatures towards extinction; yet governments put little effort into busting the culprits and closing down this vile trade. In the latest episode of Rewilding the World, Ben Goldsmith talks to Olivia Swaak-Goldman, formerly of the ...
More from Rewilding the World with Ben Goldsmith
"While people consider deer, wild boars, macaque as crop raiding pests, wolves were considered as good animals, benign animals, because they were considered to protect agricultural fields from such crop raiding pests. In fact, in many parts of Japan wolves were worshipped as gods." Japan's last wolves disappeared more than a century ago, and today its forests are overrun with deer. Might the wolf one day return? In this episode of Rewilding the World Ben Goldsmith speaks to Ryo Sakurai,...
"Eighty percent of the world’s population lives underneath a light polluted sky of some kind. When you look specifically at Europe and North America that statistic rises to ninety nine percent. So basically almost nobody can see the Milky Way, or can see a truly dark night’s sky." Most of us in Britain can no longer see the Milky Way from our homes, and we have barely noticed the loss. My guest on this edition of the Rewilding the World podcast is Megan Eaves-Egenes, author of th...
"Come to Africa, find who should be responsible to carry out conservation and support that. Don’t take away the responsibility of Africans, because that hasn’t given us the results we need, and it’s very expensive. Find those government institutions, community institutions, those households that must carry out this work, and support them to do that." For too long the story of conservation in Africa has been told by outsiders. In the latest episode of the Rewilding the World podcast Ben ...
"Nature would like to change all the time, and that's guided by those landscape architects like large herbivores, but also other processes; wind, storm, disease, fire, flooding - you name it. Anything can change a landscape if we allow it." According to the European Commission as of 7 September, 650,458 hectares of land has burnt since the start of 2026, the worst year on record. Restoring big herds of wild herbivores such as bison and wild horses is one the keys to managing wildf...
"This is a natural progression of how to protect your borders. And the other advantage is that it's cheaper; it's already there. So I can see that as demands on the defence budgets go up and up and up, that warWilding will become more and more prominent because it's a cash win-win situation for the beleaguered defence budgets." Ben's latest guest is Jasper Humphreys, director of programmes for the Marjan Study Group in the department of war studies at King’s College London who has coine...