Isabella Tree is a conservationist and writer of the award-winning book Wilding: the Return of Nature to a British Farm, which tells the story of rewilding a 3,500 acre farm estate in Sussex, which she oversaw with her husband Charlie.
The adopted daughter of Michael Tree and Lady Anne Cavendish, Isabella grew up in Mereworth Castle in Kent, and then in Shute House, a vicarage in Dorset. Following her expulsion from two secondary schools, she attended Millfield School as a sixth former, where mutual friends introduced her to her future husband. After reading classics at the University of London, she went on to work as a journalist and travel writer for the Evening Standard and The Sunday Times. Her first book, The Bird Man, about the Victorian ornithologist John Gould, was published in 1991. She married Charles Burrell in 1993 and settled at Knepp, a dairy and arable farm in Sussex. She continued to travel, writing books about Papua New Guinea, Nepal and Mexico.
In 2000 Isabella and Charlie closed the farm business at Knepp, and turned the estate into a conservation project, letting the land develop on its own, and eventually introducing free-roaming animals – cattle, pigs, deer and ponies. Two decades later, the project has seen extraordinary increases in wildlife, fungi, and vegetation with extremely rare species like turtle doves, nightingales, peregrine falcons and purple emperor butterflies breeding there. The soil is richer in micro-organisms which help to recapture carbon from the air and promote a functioning ecosystem where nature is given as much freedom as possible.
She lives at Knepp with her husband Charlie and has two children, Ned and Nancy.
DISC ONE: ‘The Whole of the Moon’ by The Waterboys
DISC TWO: ‘These Foolish Things’ by Billie Holiday
DISC THREE: ‘Life’s a Gas’ by T. Rex
DISC FOUR: ‘Where’s the Telephone Bill? by Bootsy’s Rubber Band
DISC FIVE: ‘Three Little Birds’ by Bob Marley
DISC SIX: Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, played by the Brindisi String Quartet
DISC SEVEN: BBC Sound recording of Nightingales And Bombers The Night Of The Mannheim Raid
DISC EIGHT: ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’ by Toploader
BOOK CHOICE: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
LUXURY ITEM: Mask, snorkel and a neoprene vest
CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: These Foolish Things by Billie Holiday
Presenter: Lauren Laverne
Producer: Cathy Drysdale
This is an unofficial transcript meant for reference. Accuracy is not guaranteed.
Pvc sounds music, radio broadcasts, hallo unlearned event, and this is the desert island discs. Podcast. Every week I ask my guest to choose the eight tracks book and luxury they want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert, island
rights reasons the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening
The
my castaway this week is the right
and conservationist isabella tree. She started out as a travel journalists, but it was
Venture she undertook at home that would make headlines around the world in two thousand and two. She and her husband, Charlie, made a controversial decision to take their hands off the wheel, surrender their three thousand five hundred acres state to nature and see what happened despite bitter opposition net castle estate in sussex. Just forty five minutes from london, with transformed from conventional farmland into natural wilderness and now boasts a kaleidoscope of purple emperor butterflies, nightingales turtle, doves nesting peregrine falcons, thirteen species of but under prize winning author is about his best selling.
What about the project. Wilding has been hailed as a landmark in nature. Writing. She says we just loved the feeling of life rebounding the noise of the birds and insects, barking, foxes, roaring stags. There is a sense
the very ground beneath your feet is coming to life again with wormcast anthills dung beetles, fleeting bodies of funky moles. You just feel like the land is heaving with life. Isabella tree welcome to desert,
an discs. Thank you very much. So your twenty years into your rewinding project now foolishness who have yet to view your online webcam paint a picture for us. What would we see smell and feel unrivalled? Well, if you come in the sky,
you are standing in a landscape that really looks
more like the serengeti, because it's this extraordinary, thorny scrub into space,
with water meadows wallflower meadows
and then wandering through out at all. We ve got our big free roaming herbivores, longhorns cattle exports ponies Tom was pig
they're all allowed to go wherever they like, so their disturbing the landscape. Creating this amazing said a vibrant
as you say, kaleidoscope of habitats and then the surround sound, birdsong and insects is now so loud that if you stand out there on a may day, you can literally feel it reverberate in your stomach two decades in. To what extent do you think the
dear of re, wilding or wilding is catching on that this might be a turning point for the way we think about the lance
current historian in the annexes,
it is, I don't know Linda smells good- have helped the right word. It's me
establishing, I think in the initially. In the last couple of years, something's happened and I dont know whether it six.
Rebellion plastics revolution, whatever it is, the suddenly a feeling out there? I think that people were
something different that they know their missing something in the landscape they want.
Thing wilder back and I think that's really incredibly exciting. The key benefit free wilding is that it can increase biodiversity in the soil itself.
Why is that necessary? We ve been abusing our soils across the globe for millennia. I think scientists now
looking about having a hundred harvest left across the globe before we have no talks on in which to grow anything we have to move
to which energy farming, if you restore-
your soils than your plants are going to be able to take up the nutrients.
Minerals from those soils and at the moment I think, under the sort of industrial systems that we have, you have to eat ten tomatoes
to get the nutrition out of one to Martin, the nineteen. Fifty some in all our food nutrition has plummeted under this chemical system and obviously, if you can do projects
this if he can be while you actually pulling down
in carbon out of the atmosphere. If it's one of the most important tools we have at our disposal to combat climate change and how has that richness of soil returned? What is it that you've done? That made that happen? Stopping chemical farming
as the best too hot, but it's really being driven by free roaming animals. The way they do so.
The ground, particularly
and the urine. We have
Amazing number of dung beetles because we don't put worm as into the cows, were not giving them antibiotics, the cow parts wonderfully organic and charlie my husband has but of a tongue
it'll fetish under very happy some accounting dung beetles in cow pats on the kitchen table and managed to find twenty three different species of dung beetles, a single cow, pat they're, pulling that dog back into the soil, enriching it with new chance and and kicking off a dynamic system beneath the soil. Again isabel
We ve got so much. We want to ask you about today, but of course we also want to hear your music. So, let's get started. This is your first disk will is
the whole of the moon by the water boys and I've loved it ever since it came out, it speaks
inspiration of people who think politically this
first to Charlie my husband. He has a wonderful way of thinking about nature that joined up things in ways I couldn't even begin to, and everyone from humboldt darwin
to Einstein I mean this speaks of learning about different perceptions.
Yeah.
Pass,
the
Why
whole of the moon by the water boys, so isabella tree
two thousand and two, your husband Charlie, sent a letter of intent to deaf rat outlining your aim to, I quote: establish a biodiverse
wilderness area in the low wheel of sussex. What did you need to do to get started after the last harvest? We just simply let the fields lie fallow
We took up about seventy seven miles of internal fences, we let the ditches silt up and we took up gate posts and then, finally, when we got funding from our level stewardship, we difference the whole area so that we can release these free remy animals within it.
Set a few parameters force isabel. How much difference is there between what you doing now and conventional conservation or what we might think of it as conservation, I think convention?
conservation has played a hugely important role. They really targeted species that we would have lost. That would have gone extinct without it. We aren't talking-
Not at all. So I think the idea of rewarding is not the goal. It's the process.
So it's allowing free, roma animals and water systems to manage the landscape for you to sit back on your hands as human being, which is very, very difficult for human beings to do, but to allow the animals under the nature that would have been there before human impact. To just do it's thing and see
what happens is very difficult to do that to sit on your hands in that way, I wonder what the most difficult
lessons to learn, have been doing the rebuilding process early on. I think there was a moment when we did begin to lose on earth. We suddenly had creeping fissile come in over
tens and then hundreds of acres and that can really colonise fast and as we made this pledge to let nature work itself
we felt we had to sit on our hands and see what would happen on it, carried on like the day of the tributes whom the course we
angry letters from the neighbours and then suddenly about three or four years in we woke up one sunday morning and there were
painted lady butterflies, tens of thousands of
and they were landing on the creeping fissile, so you could stand inside the thistles and
close your eyes, and you could hear the sound of the butterflies around you like a waterfall amazing, and course the official is the painted lady butterfly food sources where they lay their eggs and what their caterpillars eat
this? Just happened to be a year, whether being a huge migration from morocco and the next year, the creeping fissile, the whole thing had disappeared,
and it was our first lesson that sitting
your hands works? You have to be a little bit patient, but sooner or later, some pathogen some past. Something will come in to get rid of a monoculture
what about in situations that are perhaps more urgent, longhorns cattle giving birth unattended? As someone who has been a farmer for many years, letting them do that for the first time must have been quite nerve racking. That was very odd for us, because you you,
always intervene in intervention system, farming, livestock and where
we walked round and found a calf laid up and a little bed underneath the tree and ditch somewhere. You know you sought this copyright. Should we take
to his mother, but the mother knows exactly where it is and it waits until the coffee, three or four days old until it then introduces
the herd, and then this is amazing moment whether sniff the cough and kind of low and welcome into the herd, but obviously, if there is a problem than in, of course, we go in with that my attention, but as much as we can, we leave them to it. Lets you some amazing stanfield. Second disk, my father play jazz literally the moment he got up at six in the morning to when he went to bed and we had wonderful background music to our childhood. Everything from do kennington to jack tea garden,
but always his favorite was billie holiday. So these foolish things it's gotta be now
an airline rome.
King
and one man no common? Why banjo
what
man.
Yeah
yeah man,
now
foolish things by billie holiday. Taking you back to your childhood isabella tree was that when your love of the natural world took root too
does it did I mean we had a very feral upbringing. I think you know the old benign.
Neglect school of upbringing, and I would spend
days and days are on my chopper bike, with my mates and sometimes my youngest sister, and
building dens in lighting campfires and just this wonderful, swallows thousands kind of existence, perhaps than usual
You knew that you adopted from an early age. Now your adoptive parents were lady, Anne tree and Michael tree. What did they tell you about your birth? There was none
shock. I'd have always knew I was, which I think was very clever of them, and they always put it to us that my sister and I that we were extra special because they chosen us and that did make us feel very special. I think you're adopted family was aristocratic sue. Your mother, lady entry, nay cavendish, was brought up at chatsworth house. Iran was lady waiting to princess Margaret one of your own.
Married dep remit and other married Kathleen Kennedy. Sister of J f k, your mother sounds pretty remarkable. She was a campaigner
synergy. Yes, she was astonishing, really she's, very anti authoritarianism and she was a prison.
Her holloway for twenty years or so, and she
upon this amazing idea of teaching prisoners particular lifers. How to say
and she and some wonderful women from the royal school needlework would go in and teach them how to so. An ultimate issue
They were producing such beautiful things that really they should be allowed to be paid for them, but the
want to see it that way. It took a long
time, including a letter. I think she wrote to the home secretary. Some choice,
language in their choice of something which my thing she said. It shifts
you that bring this country down on it was framed.
And put on the wall, I think in the home office. Eventually it did the trick. What about you, father, Michael? What did he do for a living
he was a nazi for a bit. He was director of christie's, but he was her with a director, colefax and fowler, which is a declaration from that. My grandmother, Nancy lancaster, had to take an on with John five
so he grown ups and in some very, very beautiful houses and love. Beautiful things went through money like a nice through butter, but it was incredibly generous stance, your next piece of music. What are we gonna hear life's aghast by t rex? I had a slightly chequered school career. I think
was looking back on it because I haven't really knowledge. My adoption and I love my
my sister, but there was in the background
this needling feeling that something was quite right. My father said that I was always looking for the hole in the fence and unfortunately, the offence was quite often a school and- and I ended up getting kicked out of a couple of them so when I finally got expelled from,
countered bushes of boys, public school, was too exciting, ready to lhasa for too long my boyfriend at the time
sent me this track by t rex
applause
stop
that guy
t rex
and life's aghast so isabella tree, I'm going to need a little bit more on that chequered school career of yours. You are expelled twice. Why? Well. I think that the first woman
I was at a convent and always a anglican in a catholic school. So I think that was a recipe for disaster, but I felt it very cluster phobic and I think the nuns web
I felt is trying to stamp all sense of joy out of us, his children and I also
couldn't understand religion when I just asked to believe something on questioning me, so
I used to do I'm a very annoying things like genuflect on the wrong knee and do the sign of the cross upside down, and we used to have a wager board and try and speak to people
the other side, it is the stuff of the devil really to wine. The nuns up they are generally pay a real pain. I think, and finally what I when I was expelled from counterfeit that was slightly more dramatic, and my mother rang me up so that I could prepare myself and be dignified when, when I was sacked ass, she put it and she ran up and said it's cartons, I'm afraid
You said that your rebelliousness was in part due to some anxieties that you'd felt about your adoption. Years later, you did trace your birth mother, Geraldine first fire your letter and then on the phone. I mean that must have been such a big moment for both of you
How did it go? It was really astonishing and I remember feeling very guilty to begin with towards my parents, but when I told the nice gonna do this, my mother oversee prepared herself for this, and she said the most wonderful thing. She said. Don't worry about meeting your mother. I hope you love her. It does
mean you'll love us any. The less. The human heart is the most amazing thing it can just grow and grow and grow. It has infinite capacity and that really with such relief, it made me sit in in completely different way and when I finally found geraldine, I
thought I would cry or something, but the relief was so enormous that I just laughed and she laughed and laughed and often talked for hours on the phone and she wants to know what I look like.
And set its extraordinary. If you had written a letter any later than you do,
I would have been abroad,
you going. She said, papua new guinea and I said, but that's where I'm going next week,
so it was really astonishing. But I remember,
came down the street literally and know what people mean when you walk honor, that's how it felt it felt like some burden has been lifted.
And from that moment, on that little rebelliousness. Little kind of grit that had been gnawing away at me vanished, and I felt,
settled, and what about your relationship after that? Your mother said. You know, I hope I hope you love her. How does that fail to kind of rebuilding a relationship with your biological mother
is a little difficult to begin with. She was lovely, she was really lovely, but I think, from her point of view, she had been
very anxious and been longing to meet me, which was wonderful. So she
I commend to the house with huge generosity like I was returning home, but I had this whole other life and family. So it is very difficult for me. I think, to strike that balance,
We could be close, but she would never really be my mother and
in the event that she jolting died. Very young and her early fifties so
I never really had a chance to get to know her very well, but her daughter, Jamie has made me godmother to her daughter whose cool geraldine, and that is the most wonderful feeling because it seems to have joined the circle mended something- and so I am godmother of my birth mothers granddaughter. It's amazing. That's some amazing. What can be the next one?
he's. Wonderful, it's what's a telephone bill by boots in his rubber band, and it reminds me of being a teenager in my husband, Charlie's mothers farm, and it was very,
ps, I suppose, making people coming to stay a lot of work on the farm stone. Picking looking after the pigs, a lot
lobbying and then long, dinners arguing about everything under the sun and then
lying on being bags whole gang of us listening to amazing, music, gravel being back here, we go
I sing.
And
bad
when
yeah
What's a telephone bill by
boot sees rubber band isabella tree by the time we were ready to
go to university. You already wanted to become a writer, but you chose to read classics rather than english as you'd originally intended to. Why was it was really the advice of ours
doc. She was a great friend of my uncle David sessile, who used to come to lunch every sunday
She was there one day and asked what I wanted to do in the future, and I said you know said rather shamefacedly from this one from novelist that I wanted to be a writer and she said well what he studying a university- and I said- well english, of course- and she said: there's no, of course, about it and study English. Any fool can read a book. You should be studying classics, and then you really know how to use language so that
What I did- and I still have this hankering to read english, but once I got to university and started reading the classics, I absolutely loved it tissues right. She was absolutely right here.
Would go on to become the travel writer with the evening standard now intrepid. I don't think that's great the words antarctica, cambodia, iran with any of the travel has it is. I don't know if I was ever seriously in any danger doing. I'm usually brave,
flying and mission planes in papua new guinea was pretty scary over, we know limestone cost, pickles and landing on a sixpence in a twin otter with reverse thrust. It's pretty scary, I loved pappy.
Guinea, particularly it was really thrilling to see people who could be living in this incredible landscape in rain forest and gardening. In this incredibly sophisticated way,
and living with pigs, who cool, something's, amazing, symbiotic relationship with pigs, its
and for some music, a fifth disk. This is three little birds by both molly and when I was pregnant with our daughter nancy, I tested positive for toxic plasma. Isis. I've just been to IRAN and it looks
if I contracted it that so we had to wait for test to tell if this pathogen was growing. It was decreasing that be no problem, but it was increasing and it probably would be increasing. If I could have dinner on then something
happen probably to the fetus? It was a very, very nerve, racking moment being pregnant,
and worrying about the future of the civil child.
And we were in indonesia- and I couldn't sleep- and I was so worried and charlie, said: let's just turn a on and listen to music, and it was
track
wow,
the
I
no
the
I
there's more,
bob
they re little goods a comforting voice, isabella tree when you have pregnant with your daughter nancy, you did turn out to be ok, your husband, Charlie, inherited net in nineteen. Eighty seven now it had belonged to his grandparents
what are your memories of your first visit in those taste ass? It hardly been changed since the second world war, so they were still black outlines in the windows and if you'd flicked alight switch, she was have thrown back of your feet with an electric shock and no central heating, so it wheezing charlie. Initially,
that he could really turn the farmer and so for seventeen years we tried to be the best farmers that we could be
bigger machinery, more chemicals, different types of crops. We ve tried diversifying into ice cream that was poised to go national until the darth vader of ice cream
haug and asking on the scene and blue is out of the water isabel, its own views
so by the late nineteenth he had two children, Nancy and ned, and and it was increasingly difficult to make a living from farming. What wasn't working when it
our soil, really. That was up against us, the clay, soil and the fact that you were out of action for six months of the year, because you you just couldn't get heavy machinery onto the lad and you couldn't so spring crops every diversification. We try to do just didn't
seem to work and at the same time we had to put central heating in, and then we discovered asbestos in all the lagging
He now remember just looking at my cereal with east crying children and watching the dust settled
to cereal interesting. I just don't know if I can cope with much more profits and it wasn't just your family's feature
at stake, I mean they were jobs on the line for those who worked on the estate. Yes, so we had the full manager who is wonderful and a good for manager, and we had to make him redundant and nine other men lost their jobs. It was a very very black day when we made that decision, but we knew we had to find something else that could keep. This very historic estate
other than that process began with a visit from an expert in managing oak trees, ted green, or did he tell you
heads amazing. We brought him
to advise us on this big old oak tree, it's about five or six hundred years
and he saw this wonderful specimen. He said, there's nothing wrong with it. It could go on for another three or four hundred years
but then he turned round, and he looked at these lovely oaks and what had been the wrapped in park around the house that we,
had been merrily ploughing light up to the trunks and
ted says you know I can just tell when a friend of mine isn't looking well
friends of mine on not looking well and we said well, what was it was at the trout was it you know. Is it
storms and he said no, it's what you're doing to the soil underneath is the chopping up of the routes, the chemicals and that's. Why they're? Looking like that,
and suddenly we felt my god this is down to us. These tree,
that we assumed would be there forever were dying and we will want was causing it, and that was the
tiffany? I think when we realized we ve got to change our ways. Time feel sixth disk. Today isabella task right this one.
Will this is Mozart's. Clarinet quintet our great friend patrick cannon, started the brindisi string. Quartet say this is his recording patch. It was really one of the reasons that charging I ever met. Heave introduced.
And this reminds me of the sleepless nights we had when the children were little. The house was dealing with its past us. The ice cream business was going down the tubes and we didn't know what was going to happen with a farm. Neither of us could sleep, so we play this in the middle of the night
the
the
The
the
moods, that's clarinet, quintet played by the brindisi string quartet, with Nicholas carpenter on clarinet, so isabella
Obviously, the beginning of this process, you and Charlie, were passionate about take full of nerve and full of hope, but many people were horrified by what you were doing. Yes,
often, I think it's to do with aesthetics if ill used,
looking out on our green and pleasant land when some
comes along and just let it go. I think it's not
surprising that she that we had the reaction that we too hid did you expected at the time. I think we expected it a little, but I dont think we ran ass. Quite how how heated that feeling was going to be
really the letters were enormous sum in the numbers of letters and your grandparents would be rolling in their grave will this kind of thing, but I
We knew enough about what we were doing. We could already see species coming back things like nightingales entitled us, then I think so
people began to change and think a will. There is perhaps method in their madness, but also, I think it's
we're getting used to it. We are now in a better financial position than when you were farming.
He won't run wild life. Safaris you rent a farm buildings, this dumping on site. How
aging, is it for non landowners and small farms to make a financial success of wilding? I think it is some
that can be scaled down. I think the potential for eco tourism is huge.
Seeing an increase in farm clusters, farms that joined together than pull up the boundaries between them to produce a project that could be viable and what about land value a mean, reverting arable land to scrub or woodland. Half its value does not at present, I think we ve got
to see a change in and how we approach that and the governments of the future. I think, will have to address that and see the valley
of changing our ways and and having scrub back in the landscape what it does for
bob mitigation, soil control and biodiversity,
perhaps we are putting a financial value on retirements. At least land managers need to be rewarded for providing public goods and for acting responsibly with the land. Why should we? The taxpayers, have to pay higher water bills because the water companies are having
take nitrates and pollutants and soil out of our water. It is owned collectively by us all. You know that that the soil, the the air, the water,
it needs to be looked after one of the very sobering meditations in in your book about wilding the farm is that if it hadn't been for
the financial necessity to take a different approach. She would still be farming conventionally. How does it feel to reflect on that? It is shocking to look back on it, but it's
It's true. When we were farming, the fields were always ploughed and if the ploughing would be killing apple, the worms and saw about her in the microwave funky said there was real.
Really nothing in those fields, a tool
we were in a different line, search on. I think it's really important not to denigrate the farmers here, because it's not the farmers faulty or just doing the best you can and your being driven
incentivize in a particular way and your responding to that in the way it was intended, so we just have to change the system. Let's have some music is a pillar what's next, this is an extraordinary work.
Loading of nightingales, which was done during the war and in the middle,
the recording you can suddenly hear the sound of lancaster, unwell, wellington bombers flying overhead. They were not bombing.
Two mannheim in germany and first,
Well. I hope it will remind me of home. You remind me of the nightingales
Got and listen to every may when they come back, but what I love
about this is the sound of this valiant fast.
Little bird, throwing its song to the house.
Ends and trying to compete with the thrum of the bomb as a psycho over and somehow it gives me hope that whatever human beings do, nature will try and respond and do its absolute utmost to see it through and to bounce back.
The
Me me me me me me me me
the
Abby BC, sound recording of nightingales and bombers, a knight of the mannheim rate recorded in
nineteen forty two isabella tree you're part of company,
to really wild one percent of the country by twenty thirty. Where were the best opportunities to do that? I think we have to think really big here and think about connectivity
moving we wilding intercity so that people genuinely have access to wilds
This is again unwise that important. I think it's important
for all those ecosystem services at the public goods it I've been describing, but is also important for your mental and physical wellbeing. I think
something that I hadn't really ever occur to china before we started doing this project? But the effect
it. Has a new psychologically is his huge set in
desire and all of us to connect with living things and when you're walking down,
a waterlogged on a sunny some evening and you hear a total of two touring. It's this kind of sense of joy that takes over the sense
this kind of completeness your suddenly somewhere, where life is humming,
buzzing all around you it it's where you're meant to be
and what about our listener? Who is sitting listening to us today, perhaps in?
spired to make a positive difference, or can they do all of us can make a difference.
We can do amazing things with gardens connecting yoga
with your neighbors having a hedgehog whole cut in the fence, perhaps allowing nature to control your pests rather than using chemicals. This time for one more disk
today is about what we can do here. This is
dancing in the moonlight by top louder, my daughter, she both my
chosen, a great dont says, but not see particularly, is fantastic, don't send, she knows if she wants to get old, mother up and dancing. This is the one that will do it and I would love to just think of them and be dancing with
please abandoned on my son of a bitch
when did the dancing in the moonlight by top low down. So it's time to send you have to your island isabella tree now, I'm assuming it's gonna be a wild one. I'm do you much in it. I hope you and beings haven't ever stepped out before answer that
the wild life, will be naive and completely on afraid of me and if a monkey fools
The tree and I'm breaks lag or something
Maybe I can nurses cuddle up with different species when I go to sleep at night? Oh, I hope you got
cut a monkey. Absolutely I can give you the bible in the can
works of shakespeare to take with you, as well as a book of your choice. What would you like? I would love war and peace by leah. Tolstoy is my favorite burke, and I think that will
sought me out. I could read that several times over and still find one funny things in it even possible
luxury item, what you fancy I'd love
ask and snorkel I hope it's gonna be a coral reef. It hasn't been affected by bleaching and I'll, be wonderful kaleidoscope of fish to look at, but I did get very cold. So could I have kind of like a
preen faster than I have that. So I can t stand the water even longer. I think that's quite a shake outfits, lacerated it's yours ones and lastly,
I ask you to save just one of your eight discs, which would you like to rescue. I think it would have to be this foolish things with billie holiday,
the military. Thank you so much for letting us here, your design discs. Thank you very much for having me.
I think, is a
it will be very happy snorkeling around her island, and I particularly like the idea of her finding a monkey to god I mean who doesn't need one of those. I hope you
Join our conversation in the desert. Island discs back.
Blog? There were many guests share: shadow love and knowledge of nature, including horticultural list, christopher lloyd, gardening, writer on a payload and the naturalist, Sir David Attenborough. You can hear all of those programmes on BBC
Hence, in the year two thousand sue lowly castaway primal, tell you just Jane Goodall. At the age of twenty six, she travelled to combat national park
on the shores of lake tanganika in tanzania sue asked her how quickly she knew this was a place. She'd be happier
I knew from the moment that I went along the lake shore looking up at the rugged mountains, that this was going to be a challenge, but that I was going to just have an amazing, extraordinary adventure, and I can actually believed that it was happening. It was very
for me to think that this is me- and this is really real and not a dream anymore, because it was well Udall was intended to be. Yes, it was africa, africa from the time when I was eleven, it had to be africa and you know eventually through thick, and then I got this amazing opportunity came. Can you describe it to me, described the place festival looking from the shores of lake tanganika, which is the longest freshwater lake in the world? You look up the skies. Usually
blue and as the mountains, the rift scotland with the steep forested valleys and the rather more open slopes peaks in between
and when you get in there, when you woke up families valleys, it's a whole new world of forest, with dim light and little flags of sunlight, coming down from the canopy and dancing on the floor, and it's quiet and it's it's. My idea of heaven on earth is your garden of Eden. It's my garden of eden with bright butterflies and birds, calling a little rustles and then the chimpanzees. How long did it take you to
be accepted by them. Were you ever totally accepted the chimpanzees at first just ran away. I'm in even high was on the other side
If the valley a steep sided valley, they would take one look at this weird white ape and flee they're very conservative, and it was because I just sat and didn't try and get too close too quickly and wore the same colored clothes every day and pretended not to
interested in them. You know, eventually, they realize well she's, not a terrifying, as we thought so all those years ago, when was the moment that you knew now, they have accepted me. I think, whether what to moments actually, the first was when I came by accident to close to a group and a set of running away. They looked at me, went on greening and one of the chimps in that group was Dave.
Graybeard who lost his fear before all the others. At the moment that I can never forget was when I was following him. Am I thought I'd lost him. I was pushing through these thorny undergrowth and there he was sitting by a little stream and near him was a ripe red palm. Not so I picked up that not because they loved them and held it out to him and he looked deeply into my eyes and he took that not and dropped it, but at the same time, while he still looked in my eyes, he gave this gentle reassurance squeezing of his fingers on my hand, and it was like going back into the distance
The path to a language which are ancient common ancestors must have used a remarkable encounter, Jane, Goodall speaking to sue lonely in two thousand next time, or does it
the disks I'll, be casting away the director of the documentaries, senna Amy and diego
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I have a buddy, I'm caitlin jenner and I am a guest on Simon Monday's. Don't tell me this score. Podcast, we talked about everything, deal, impacts, trans issues. In all the lessons that I have learned along the way I really enjoyed recording the bog cast- and I hope you
enjoy. Listening to it, you can hear it on BBC sounds just search for dont. Tell me the score
Transcript generated on 2022-06-08.