Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast. We are the charity and think tank that is all about

achieving ambitious leadership for the environment. In this episode, Green Alliance's strategy

director, Belinda Gordon, interviews Charlie Burrell on his Nepper State in West Sussex.

We've got to have nature brought back to all of us in all our lives, wherever we are.

If we don't do this, we're going to lose too many species to even think about, to even contemplate.

Charlie is the owner of the estate and the former chair of charity Rewilding Britain.

Since 2001, NEP has been undergoing a pioneering rewilding project.

What was once an intensive arable and dairy farm

has been transformed by removing fencing, introducing deer,

longhorn cattle, ex-more ponies and Tamworth pigs

and letting nature take over with incredible results for the environment.

I wanted to start off by talking a bit about kind of nature and the rather parlous state that it is in at the moment.

I think many of us are aware of the kind of threats to wildlife globally and we get sort of hung up on these charismatic kind of megafauna like elephants and rhino which are declining. But since the Second World War,

there have been really huge declines in wildlife in the UK. And I wondered if you could start off

by kind of briefly outlining what do you think the causes of those declines have been.

It's quite interesting the ideas that habitat loss keeps on being used as the one thing that really does matter.

And I think that's absolutely right.

I think what we are seeing is the consequences of habitat loss.

Just been listening to and seeing David Attenborough's new witness statement on TV.

And it becomes very clear from his point of view as well that what we're seeing is this

catastrophic loss of habitat.

And that I think stems throughout all our systems, all our farming systems, all our, it's just loss of habitat. And that, I think, stems throughout all our systems, all our farming systems, all

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