THE BRITISH UPLANDS:
Podcast
A bright future?
Why this podcast now?
This landscape was forged thousands of years ago by mighty glaciers, but today, it is the hand of humans, which is facilitating the most rapid shifts in how our landscape looks. Given how key the uplands are for both biodiversity and climate change targets, I wanted to ask one simple question - what is the future of the British Uplands?
LISTEN HERE
EPIsode 1
“If you are given a simple answer as to how the uplands landscape should be managed, that simple answer has to be wrong”.
EPIsode 2
“The longer it is after an ice age, after a few thousand years, woodland tends to decline naturally because of poorer soils combined with grazing.”
EPIsode 3
“The practice of muirburn is, however, is instrumental in reducing the risk of wildfire because it manages the fuel load and it’s the fuel load that’s the real problem when it comes to the intensity of the fire that we’re seeing.”
EPIsode 4
“A drastic change in the way we approach such topics [muirburn] needs to be done really carefully because you could potentially be ofsetting the balance that those bees currently exist in.”
EPIsode 5
“I do think the universe has a rather ironic sense of humour in the sense that we build wind farms to reduce our carbon emissions. Where are the best locations in our landscape to build wind farms? What you want are gentle, whaleback hills - exactly the sort of place where our best peatland form.”