How To Build A City, Episode 2: Working With Nature

Joe Reeve

Welcome to the second episode of the Forest City podcast, How to Build a City. Today I'm joined by Paul Powlesland, who has written our nature reports. He's a fascinating guy, he's done a lot of fascinating work, so we're going to get into some of that. And then just look at what forest city means for nature. So, Paul, thank you so much for coming over, we really appreciate it. Yeah? Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself, your standard introduction that you would give normally when meeting someone new.

Paul Powlesland

Oh, it depends who I'm speaking to, but generally I say I'm Paul. I'm a barrister and founder of Lawyers for Nature, which campaigns for the rights of nature in the UK. And I'm also a guardian of the River Roding in East London, where I look after London's third biggest river. But also, perhaps most importantly, use all of the learning that I have from that care, practical care for the river, to work out how we can change law and policy and ways we build things in the UK to make them better for nature.

Joe Reeve

So, what does it mean to be a guardian for the River Roding then?

Paul Powlesland

That's a good question. To me, it means establishing a relationship with a specific part of nature. So, for me, the River Roding and then doing whatever is necessary to protect, care for and restore that part of nature. And you can start off easy, you know, a bit of litter picking, a bit of tree planting. But as I've gone into it more and more, I've found that I've had to become an expert on dozens of different areas because so many different areas affect nature and we don't have one central body or person who is representing nature in all those different systems and therefore nature often doesn't get represented and gets treated badly. So, I've had to become an expert on sewage and urban drainage and planning law and tree planting and river geomorphology and flood defences, motorways, road runoff. It's just a lot of stuff because they all affect the river and yet nobody is acting as a central point to represent the river and make sure that the river's best interests are upheld and crucially, and we're going to be coming back to this over and over again today, that the river's interests are balanced with other interests. Because rights of nature and nature guardianship doesn't mean that nature gets to trump our interests. That's not how it works. It's about balance and ensuring that we can have flood defences whilst also letting the river be as natural as possible or build a city and giving the greatest natural vitality we can.

Joe Reeve

So, you mentioned that about the river having its rights represented or what it needs represented as sort of personifying the river in a sense, and that's something that you do with lawyers for nature as well. Can you explain a little bit more of that?

Paul Powlesland

Yeah, so at the moment we broadly have a system in the UK where nature is seen as a sort of dead thing, a resource to be managed largely for human ends. And even when we have things that supposedly are good for nature, like environmental law, they often still come from that foundation of seeing nature as a resource. But we manage it a bit better. Like, for instance, we don't want to have sewage in our rivers because that will make them awful to look at and not nasty to swim in, but never actually asking, well, what's the interest of the river here? And broadly, the Rights of Nature movement takes a perspective that's more indigenous, that nature has a right to exist here as well, that nature is alive, and it has its own rights and interests. And crucially, then, we must represent those in our systems. But we're at a really interesting juncture in the UK Rights of Nature movement at the moment because Rights of Nature is already a reality in many countries around the world. So New Zealand has a river called the Whanganui, which has a self-ownership and guardians who look after it in its own interests. And there's also Ecuador, which has Rights of Nature in its constitution, and that has been upheld in, I think, heading towards 100 cases now, including in the Ecuadorian Supreme Court, where they said that the rights of the Los Cedros Forest meant that you couldn't gold mine it because it would result in its destruction. But that's all well and good in those countries where you have large tracts of, if you like, untouched nature. Like the Los Cedros Forest is a cloud forest. No one lives in it. It's one of the most diverse places on Earth. And its rights are very much a binary issue. You either uphold the rights of the forest to exist and not allow the gold mining, or you allow the gold mining and destroy it. But in the UK, we have almost no decisions like that because humans and nature have been here interacting together for so long that it's rarely a binary choice. It's about how we manage our relationship together. And to go back to it again, how we balance our different rights, the human right to not be flooded or the human right to have drinking water versus the river's rights to have a natural flow or its course and that kind of thing. And so it's one of balancing through reasonableness and proportionality. And to do that, we need to represent nature in that decision-making process. Of which Forest City is now becoming one of the first examples where that's been done for development. Like right from the start, you have allowed me to speak for nature in the project. And obviously, I haven't just said, well, yeah, we shouldn't have Forest City and we should just give over all the land to forests because that's not going to work. But I think by balancing the needs of nature or at least having them heard, I think the whole project is going to be far better than it ever could have been without having that voice as part of it.

Joe Reeve

That's interesting because maybe a lot of the caricature that some people might have of people championing nature, some people might think, well, they're just trying to block all development because there's nature above everything. And I think from talking to you, you've got the story about the car park, right? From around the River Roding. Would you mind telling that story?

Paul Powlesland

Yeah. So I began to think we actually need to have nature represented in our planning system. But I also thought that if we try to do that in the normal system, it would be seen by some and potentially used by some as a kind of ruse where we just have nature represented and the river says, well, we're not going to build your flats, you know, which they might do in some instances, you know, actually it might be in the interest of nature in this country to never build anything again. But that's also not politically feasible or realistic, I don't think. And yes, on the Roding, I decided to trial a process to work out what it would look like for the river to be represented in a planning decision. And could we find ways to square the circle, to balance the needs of the river and nature with the human need for homes?

Joe Reeve

So you said you decided to trial this process.

Paul Powlesland

Yeah.

Joe Reeve

Does that mean there's no, was there someone that said, yes, you go ahead?

Paul Powlesland

No, no. No, I basically, there was a developer who wanted to build 800 homes on an old Wickes car park site in Central Barking right next to the Roding. And I just went along to their community consultation, was like, hi, I'm here to represent the river. And they were like, oh God, those nutcases again. I think there was slightly, maybe more, but there were a bit suspicious at first. But I basically said, look, I know I have no legal right as such here. My only right here is that I want to negotiate a better settlement with you. And if I don't negotiate something that I think is good enough for the river and reasonable, I'm not trying to be, you know, I'm not gonna be a dick about it, but being reasonable here. If you're just being unreasonable, then I'll just start a local campaign against the development and use whatever local, you know, almost the river's local Facebook groups and our relationship with local politicians to try and stop your development. But I really hope that doesn't happen because frankly, I've got other things to be doing, you know, take a lot of my time. And I think we can actually get, I think we can get somewhere here. And so we then had a number of meetings where I started going through their development. And like starting from the very beginning, I was like, I'm not here to, I'm not here to block homes. I'm not going to say anything about the total number of homes on this site. It was a bit unfortunate that we, I sort of came in a little bit late in the process. They'd already roughly worked out the kind of development was going to be sort of four blocks. And actually, I think if I come in an earlier stage, like I have with Forest City, something much more radical could have been done. Like I imagining like building 800 homes in a restored marshland or something could have been incredible. But, you know, but I was working within what I had and then started negotiating. So some of the things I got from them were all native planting on site. Really easy. Didn't affect anything. Actually, possibly cheaper.

Joe Reeve

So I guess their default is just we'll buy some.

Paul Powlesland

We'll buy some plants and look a bit nice. And they'll, you know, and also like a lot of time they'll choose non-native because they need maybe less watering or they're kind of a bit more hardy. It's really bad for nature. But they're not necessarily thinking about it through a nature lens at all. They're just like, what's the default thing we can get? And most of it wasn't like, or I don't think any of it was like them deliberately trying to like, you know, pull a fast one on nature. It's just a lot of time there's not really thinking about it or not knowing about it. And one of the really interesting ones was the planting along the river. Obviously, we have a legal obligation for biodiversity net gain. But a lot of the time, because nature's not represented, the developer can kind of fiddle the figures a bit to make it look like they're making BNG when they're not. And so on this development, they were saying, oh, yeah, we've got BNG. Because there are some trees on the site already and some kind of scrub at the edge of the site next to the car park. We're doing BNG, though. We're going to take all that down. We're doing BNG because we're putting in X amount more area of flower bed. And I was like, yeah, that's like on a square metre basis. That's correct. But on a metre cubed, it isn't the same for nature. If you replace like trees or scrub, which are quite high, with like tiny little flower beds. It's not the same thing. So can you do BNG on a metre cubed basis? And they were like, that's kind of fair, actually. I get that. OK, sure, we will. Got them to put another wetland in until we got to the stage where with SuDS wetlands, they were trying to encourage more wetlands to deal with the runoff from the site. They were like, Paul, we can't put any more wetlands in after that. We just haven't got enough water on the site to feed them. Great. You know? Yeah. And the final bit of negotiation came down to they wanted to put a car park, a disabled car park right next to the river. And I was saying that looks awful. And, you know, we can't have the site so close to the river being a car park. And they were like, it has to go there because we've got nowhere else to put it. It's a legal obligation to have a car park. I said, right, negotiations off. I'll just oppose your development. They came back and then said, let's try it. And there must be something we can do. And I was like, well, yeah, use your imagination. Put the car park underground. They were like, no, we can't. I was like, I don't know, put a green roof over it or something. They were like, oh, yeah. Actually. And they came back with a design. And they designed the car park with trees every two or three spaces going up through a green roof and a native hedge at the back. So from the river, what you'd see is a hedge line, trees and a green. Really? I was like, yeah. And then you just saw what the car parking space is. You know, it's just all this stuff. There are so many win-wins. And when I see such crappy, poor development around London, which is ugly and also bad for nature, when we could easily have had beautiful nature-rich development that also provides human beings with homes, it kind of breaks my heart a little bit.

Joe Reeve

Yeah. I think my gut feeling, and you may correct me if I'm wrong, it feels like a lot of this comes down to the developers versus nature, nature representatives even, rather than it being. It sounds like by the end of it, you were being quite collaborative with them. Like, oh, let's come up with solutions.

Paul Powlesland

And to be fair, a lot, this developer was very good. And I think actually, well, one of the reasons was because then I then supported their development and they went through first time. And they got what they wanted, right? They got 800 homes passed. They're going to make tens, hundreds of millions of pounds out of it. You saved money on the planning and then also made a nicer place to be. So at the end, they said, look, I won't pretend this is an easy process. It's been an easy process. It was quite hard at some point. So we were, you know, we were butting heads a little bit. They were like, actually, now it's been done. Our development is better. And we actually put it to sell these homes easier and for more. And the architect I was against, I now work with to try and do this approach elsewhere. But the other developers, like another site opposite, near the River Roding, I've been working with, well, I've been negotiating with Berkeley Homes. And they've been less than candid a lot of the time. And I feel like just constantly trying to pull a fast one to deliver their usual kind of cheap cookie cutter development whilst pretending that they're listening to these concerns. And again, the annoying part is, is I'm not trying to block the homes. I've actually, for instance, I've said to them, I'd actually rather you maybe build a bit higher and take less ground space so we have more space for nature. Why are you building three or four storey blocks in London? Build a 10 or 12 and give more space to nature. And presumably, again, that's nicer for the people that live there. Right. Get it going. And I'm trying to sell it to them, going like, this site is like, it's really one of the worst sites in London you can want to live. It's right next to the North Circular, sort of right on the edge of East Ham. No shops, no amenities, no nearby transport, nothing, no reason you would live there. It's the only reason people live there at the moment is because it's cheap. It's one of the cheapest places to live in London. But actually, it used to be one of the main, it used to be a part of a tidal marsh of the River Roding. I was like, what if you could be one of the only people in London who lives inside a restored marshland with like wild land? And also, they can't build over most of it anyway because it's metropolitan open land. So it would be basically two thirds of the site would be this wild restored marshland and one third would be housing and interspersed with this wild nature. People actually might want to live there because it's unique and beautiful rather than just because they're forced to. There's a slight poverty of imagination a lot of the time, I think.

Joe Reeve

Well, in this room, we're not sure.

Paul Powlesland

Yeah, yeah. That's a good link. Yeah, exactly.

Joe Reeve

Well, one thing, actually, before we get onto Forest City and sort of how we met and came into it, maybe I just want to a little bit. Obviously, as a lawyer, you use law to sort of defend, represent nature. Yeah. But sometimes you have to use law to defend yourself, don't you?

Paul Powlesland

Yeah.

Joe Reeve

A few occasions, specifically Aldersbrook.

Paul Powlesland

Yeah.

Joe Reeve

Can you walk us through what happened there? Because I think it involves some players that people might expect are the ones that are supposed to be doing the job that you're doing.

Paul Powlesland

Yeah. I mean, it's a slightly long story. To cut it short, there's basically a side channel of the Roding, probably its ancient course, called the Aldersbrook. And to me, it's one of the best rivers in London to restore because it's one of the only rivers in London that's tidal, but a small brook. And it has all its original bed and meanders because most of the rivers in London that were kept have been dredged and straightened and canalised and culverted and all this kind of stuff for flood reasons. So it's like a river time capsule of what rivers in London used to be. And it's really easy to restore because it runs through a golf course. There's no real flood risk to any, there's no flood risk to any homes. And it's on public land. And it's, we know exactly what needs to be done to restore it into a beautiful natural brook again. But the Environment Agency, I've asked them to do it and they were like, no, haven't got the funding, not our responsibility. I was like, can we do it? And they said, no, it's too dangerous, health and safety. So I decided to go and do it anyway. So I got a group of, and partially to show how possible it is, because also they, I think a lot of these projects are grossly overspecked by both big river charities and also the Environment Agency, where they're charging somewhere between 10, 20 and 50 and 100 times what the actual going, what the actual underlying costs of doing the work are.

Joe Reeve

You're telling me government agencies are bad at procurement.

Paul Powlesland

Yes.

Joe Reeve

First time I've heard this.

Paul Powlesland

Right. But also it's actually really bloody serious for nature. I mean, obviously it is for everything, but for nature particularly, we, there is not the funding available to restore our rivers to health using the levels of costings, the costings that the EA is currently going on. We'll just do, it will always be piecemeal bits here and there. But from this project, I now know that it is fully possible with the current funding we would have from the government and from charities to restore our rivers to health if we took this much more strict back approach.

Joe Reeve

Okay. So you went to the Environment Agency, you said there's this really important bit of the river, we want to restore it. They said, we're not going to do it. You said, can I do it? They said, no. And then?

Paul Powlesland

Yeah. And then even if I did want to do it, they would then charge me thousands of pounds for a permit, even though I'm doing it in my spare time. And I have to spend days of my time filling out their permit for them. And then they take 12 to 18 months to process it and not having that permit as a criminal offence, which I knew. And I was like, well, okay, I'm going to do it without the permit. And what will either happen is I will either restore the river and they won't do anything, in which case, great, the river is restored. Or they'll come for me and I know that that will be, I'll have a good way to turn that back on them. And I think most people will be outraged by it, as indeed they were. So I basically hired a digger on my credit card and then me and an East End builder called Mick retired. He's 80. And he remembers playing in the river in the 1950s as a kid. And I particularly like this bit of the story because there's quite a lot of things about, you know, kind of older people who see the world get worse around them and just moan about it. And he was like, sod this, I'm just going to go and do it. You can just do things. You can just do things. He spent 10 days on the digger with me in his spare time for free, just digging this river out. And then we've got local volunteers. And so basically we, again, the environment would demand that that silt be landfilled because it might be toxic, but they never actually prove whether it is or not. And it's basically just organic stuff and rubbish. It's like leaves and silt and mud, basically. There's no source of toxic pollution to there particularly. So, yeah, we pulled it all out. And then we, using hand saws, chopped overhanging branches to bring light back to the river. And also to be able to access the river because, again, a lot of agencies to do that kind of dredging would come and just chop all the trees down so they can easily get access in. Whereas we analysed each access point. Like, how do we, can we chop over this little branch here, leaving the tree in place and then edge in here and then pull it out there? So each one was kind of carefully calibrated to make sure we do the work without damaging nature. And then volunteers came in and literally rifled through the wet silt for two weekends in a row to pick out hundreds of bags of rubbish, knives, safes, mopeds, everything. And over the course of that time, we restored 250 metres of the river. And I then put it online to our local group and said, if anyone wants to contribute to the cost of the digger, please, here's our link. And all the money came back from local people. And so the whole thing cost a grand. Whereas the Environment Agency probably would have charged hundreds of thousands of pounds and taken two to five years to do that work.

Joe Reeve

And then?

Paul Powlesland

Well, and then, and I think that's part of it. I think they're pissed off. They're like, who the hell are you to show us up? Because they normally say, well, only we can do this. And I've seen this mixture of, like, outrage and slight perplexion on their faces when they dealt with me. Like, you're mad. You hired a digger in your spare time and for free just did all this, like, major work on the river. Like, what is wrong with you? And it's like, because it goes to the heart of their system, right? Because they normally, they would tell people normally, oh, of course it does. So, you know, there's this reason and that reason, that reason. But I can now go to a specific physical place and show them, you know, this. And it's amazing. When I showed journalists afterwards, the place where we restored had fish back, had weed beds and bulrushes and herons and birds and ducks all come back. It was incredible. And the environmentalist reaction was to send, within 10 days, they sent an investigation team down to site and then wrote a letter saying that they're considering prosecuting me for not having a flood risk activity permit, which jail sentences up to two years. It did not go well for them. I then got the media involved and it went viral around the world because people were like, this is utterly ridiculous. And the EA tried to say that, oh, you know, he could have been doing something wrong. But I was like, what? What? What? And they haven't been able to come up with anything. They actually wrote a government webpage blog, which is a kind of chock full of lies, just desperately trying to grasp onto why this was bad. And on a site visit with them, I actually said to look at it, just look at it and look at the bit we haven't done. You know, mud, rubbish, invasive species, not even a river anymore. Can you honestly tell me what is if this is substantively bad? And they couldn't. Yeah.

Joe Reeve

Well, obviously doing something is better than doing nothing in this case, right?

Paul Powlesland

Yeah.

Joe Reeve

I mean, if you'd gone and poured a bunch of toxic chemicals everywhere, you might understand them.

Paul Powlesland

Well, this is the other very interesting part. The other question they can't answer. I said, OK, now then, if you think what I did was wrong, would you want me to put all of that silt and rubbish back in? And they're like, no. And also, interestingly as well, to do that would then require a FRAP. So if I was to undo my work now, that would be another criminal offense for me. Because it's like, you need a frap. And that actually is genuinely damaged. It probably is a flood risk to put all that silt and rubbish back in the river, you know? Yeah, wild. And this is where you get to with these organisations that are just stuck. They're just in this kind of weird impotency that they can't get out of.

Joe Reeve

It reminds me a little bit of the process we went through with cleaning the graffiti on the London Underground, on the Bakerloo Line. Where we just went and did it, just to prove that you could do it. It was initially just me and 10 friends went and cleaned graffiti outside at Old Street. And then a bunch of... That was one of the most divisive things I've ever done. It was literally 50-50 people saying, that was a horrible thing to do. And saying, yes, great, thanks for cleaning the graffiti. We did it inside the tube. And Sadiq Khan himself gets angry that the chief of the TFL accuses us of putting it on deliberately. And say they're going to get the police to come after us. Which is bonkers. We clearly made it better. This is... Nobody could say otherwise. So yeah. Amazing work. You can just do stuff. You can just do stuff.

Paul Powlesland

And actually we need to because the government and the Environment Agency councils are just far too wedded to the risk approach. They only see... None of them have a positive duty to make things better. So it's only a downside for them. When they look at that...

Joe Reeve

You think this is a more general problem with the Environment Agency then?

Paul Powlesland

It's absolutely... It's probably one of the biggest problems facing the UK. None of the people who should be doing things have a positive duty to make things better. So anything that happens... But they do have downside risk of health and safety or whatever it may be. And costs and funding and all this kind of stuff. They spend all of their energy and time and money making sure something bad doesn't happen rather than making sure something good does happen. And they never weigh in the balance. So for instance this river they'd be like, oh well what happens if he spreads some invasive species? There's actually already invasive species spreading down the brook which will happen if nothing happens. And actually one of our volunteers said... I think it's really... I don't think she's meant to be this profound but she just looked in this giant pile of rubbish we were cleaning. And said to the reporter, this is what happens when nothing happens.

Joe Reeve

That's brilliant.

Paul Powlesland

And it's true. And that's what the government is allowing to happen. And what we need to stand up and stop happening.

Joe Reeve

Let's move on because this is amazing. We could talk about this for hours. Forest City. Yeah, let's move on to Forest City. So your first sort of impressions of... How did you first come across Forest City, LFG, that sort of group, that crowd?

Paul Powlesland

So I think it was via Twitter. And I came to you as a hater. You know, I was... I'm generally on the side of the NIMBYs on things. Actually, I still am in many ways because quite a lot of development in the UK is quite poor quality and inappropriately sited and doesn't take nature enough into account. And we need to stop it. And a lot of the time, the only people doing that are unfunded local communities trying their best to stop major developers foisting poor quality nature-destroying development on us. And so I sort of ended up as a bit of a kind of... I mean, I'd like to say that... I think Lauren should probably say that I was a reasonably kind of, you know, critic, but I was a polite, friendly critic, I would say. And I went along to your event at the O2 Arena largely to kind of... I mean, spying sounds a little bit, you know, nefarious. But to see what you were doing and, like, find ways of, if you were advocating things I didn't want to, to find ways to, like, argue against that. And I think you came on stage and advertised or spoke about Forest City. And I then went on Twitter and did a little kind of slightly bitchy tweet about it. And Shiv messaged me saying, well, if you think it's bad for nature, do you want to come and change that or try and make it better? And I genuinely, I wasn't thinking of coming on board. I was kind of meeting up with Shiv largely to find more arguments to say why Forest City wouldn't work for nature. But Shiv is very persuasive. And actually, I believe, wants to do the right thing. And that's what I found through this whole experience. And so I said, you know, fine, if you think... You tell us what you want in this city for nature. Be the voice of nature, effectively. And that's what ended up happening.

Joe Reeve

Yeah. So in that sense, you sort of entered into an agreement with Forest City, with myself and Shiv. And you put together this nature report. But there was sort of a condition of you coming on board and sort of providing this sort of nature report and supporting the project insofar as it makes sense. Which was that if you feel like at some point Forest City is not doing the right thing by nature, then you'll sort of make a kick up a fuss about it, right? Is that fair?

Paul Powlesland

Yeah. And also would... Yeah, exactly. I would leave the project, explain why I've done that. And crucially as well, my... And this is one of the reasons I wanted to get involved. If I were to do that, that would be far more damning for Forest City than the usual NIMBY suspect saying they don't want development. Because everyone's like, well, of course you say that. You would say that. Whereas if I'm the person who's like... Said that actually I came on board. I tried to make this work. And these guys are actually, you know, charlatans who are pretending to want things for nature. But actually they're doing it as kind of greenwashing. I think that would be more devastating.

Joe Reeve

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and from my perspective, I want to live in the city. I want to live in a lovely nature-filled city. I love nature. So I'm very excited for... For me, it's really important that the city is sort of... Does have space for nature and space, yes, for nature to be on its own. But also to intermingle a bit with humans.

Paul Powlesland

When I entered into it, I did have some trust there. But to be honest, it was possibly... In my mind, probably about 50-50 as to whether it would actually be a genuine thing where we could do something amazing for nature or a kind of greenwashing that I'd have to call out. I wasn't by any means certain it would work. But the more I went into it, the more I was actually, this is totally possible. To not only build a city which minimises the damage to nature, but build a city which positively is a net positive for nature. Both in the city, in the nature reserve, and in its impact on the wider country and economy.

Joe Reeve

I don't think we can say who publicly, at least yet. But I think multiple charities now have reached out because they quite like the approach to having nature as part of development. So they've reached out to you, I think, about taking some of the principles that were in your report. And just generally the sort of lawyers for nature, I suppose, approach to development. So it seems like there's impact further than just the forest city.

Paul Powlesland

Yeah, exactly. And it's because, I think, of a very basic political fact. Although some people who are anti-development say, you know, we don't want any, you know, any building on Greenfield. We think we can solve the housing crisis on Brownfield and by renovation and taking empty homes and all this kind of stuff. Which actually looking into, I don't think is true. But even leaving that aside, even if it were true, the political reality in this country is that the majority, I think pretty much all the major political parties are wedded to some form of Greenfield development. Because they realise, I think, that is one of the only ways we're going to solve a housing crisis, which is becoming a generational issue. And therefore, these big charities who realise that are like, well, these big nature charities are like, well, we can't, we're not, we're not King Canute, we can't turn that tide. And so we have two, the reality is we have two options. People who love nature have two options. We can either keep fighting the principle of any development, you know, like the last, you know, Japanese person fighting on the islands for 30 years after World War II ended. I think that all we can try and make the development that is going to happen as good for nature as possible and actually ideally better for nature than if that development hadn't happened. And I'm increasingly realising it's the latter that we're going to do because I think the political reality is that we're either going to have what we're currently on course for, which is hundreds of thousands of poorly built, badly designed, nature damaging, crappy, greenfield, edge of town, car dependent developments. Or we're going to have something imaginative like what's proposing for a city that genuinely takes nature into account from the very first and balances the needs of nature and humans so that we both, we solve both our housing crisis, the housing crisis for nature and the housing crisis for humans.

Joe Reeve

Amazing. So there's a long rant where I point out all the problems. You know, we all know what that shit development is, don't we? We've seen it. We go past it on the train. We see it and we know it's shit and everyone hates it. And we're still building it. It's so frustrating. It's so frustrating.

Paul Powlesland

And it breaks, like, I just think, yeah, it just breaks my heart to imagine that, you know, in 30 years time, I'm just going to see that everywhere. And to think that we maybe had a chance to not do that, I think it's worth grasping.

Joe Reeve

Yeah, I totally agree. So in your report, maybe let's start going through the report. I think the summary of your report was actually that we can, it's not just that you build the city and you minimize damage, but it was that we build the city and it's better for nature than if we hadn't built it. And that's in part due to what's already there and part what the opportunities you have when you're doing, again, greenfield, nature, nature sort of restoration. So maybe we should talk about what's already there and what sort of impact for nature is there. And then we can sort of move into your approach to putting together this sort of, the report that ended up in the Forest City report.

Paul Powlesland

Yeah, I mean, and that's, what's already there is one of the key reasons why we can build there without, not damaging nature, but also while making better for nature is because, frankly, we're dealing with a low baseline. And this is one of the interesting things that critics of building on greenfield, I think, don't deal with. It's actually one of the best ways to stop it would be to make our existing greenfield spaces better for nature. Because BNG means that if farmers went around now just making their fields incredibly good for nature rather than industrial agriculture, then it would make the BNG calculations not work. Because the higher you push the baseline, the harder it would be for developers to be able to increase biodiversity on a BNG, biodiversity net gain basis. And I visited the site, I've cycled all over, I had a very good look and it's, you know, it's very industrial agriculture. Big fields where headlines have been grubbed out, woods grubbed out and just sown in huge monocultures, basically.

Joe Reeve

Because a lot of people, in England at least, will think farmed fields, that's the beautiful English countryside, that's nature. Is that not the case then?

Paul Powlesland

No. No. Farmed fields are often worse for nature than suburban gardens, which have a lot more natural features in them. You know, there aren't that many species that can survive in the midst of a massive field with no permanent trees, hedge lines or plants that is like brutally ploughed, sprayed with glyphosate, sprayed with chemicals, sprayed with pesticides, harvested and drained and then irrigated and all this kind of stuff you need for modern industrial agriculture. There are some, but not many.

Joe Reeve

And I guess you get some birds, but not as many birds as you might get in a woodland or something.

Paul Powlesland

Well, and even then, pretty low. I mean, I spent quite a lot of time looking at agricultural fields. One of the things I, you know, I'm self-taught in terms of nature. And so I just observe what's around me and where nature is rich and where it isn't. And I looked at a lot of fields, just having a good look at them. And just like, just go walk into industrial agricultural fields and just stand there for an hour or two and see how much life you see. The answer is very little a lot of the time. The other thing it does as well is it means that the things that we want to save whilst building for it, it makes it possible to save the good stuff whilst also still building for a city. Because, for instance, we want to save as much hedge lines, trees, woodlands as possible. If they were all intermingled, if you had small fields with trees along the edge, that would make it very difficult. But you'd have to try and like fit housing in amongst them. But because there's such big fields with nothing in them at all, your housing can go there whilst maintaining the hedgerows and the woodlands that are around them. And there are some amazing ancient woodlands and ancient hedgerows in their area. And I think that was part of the approach was step one, retain all ancient woodlands and hedgerows. And that was the key principle I started with, is that currently in the UK, development proceeds from a tabula rasa approach, which is we go in, we destroy everything that's there, we get a flat site, we build our thing around it and then we put back in some nature around that by planting some trees that will probably die because they're really unhealthy and we don't water them. And that's just completely the wrong approach. We need to keep whatever is irreplaceable and work around that. And that was one of the first times that I realised that Forest City, you and Shiv were serious about it because I said, you know, we need to build the city around what is irreplaceable. And Shiv was like, yeah, okay, great. So we need you to then tell us where we can build. So I went with a map of all existing woodlands, SSSI's and other irreplaceable habitat, rivers, marshes, grasslands, that kind of thing, and tried to work out how best to design the 12,000 acre nature reserve to incorporate those and ensure that they were protected. But more importantly, not just protected as like a little island of nature in amongst a sea of concrete, but also improved by joining them together and ensuring that natural processes and connectivity could restart again, which wasn't always easy to do. There are trade-offs involved. You know, you could design it as one block, but that would be hard because then the woodlands are kind of dotted throughout the city site. You could do it as kind of like a big belt around the city, a nice circle, which would look nice to human eyes, but actually would probably make it too strung out. So you want massing, but you also want connectivity. So it's an interesting question of how you take it. So you want multiple masses that are connected to one another. Exactly, exactly. Like a nature corridor. Yeah, so connectivity is good, but if you just make it too like a string and you just have lots of edges, the edge effect is bad for nature. It brings in pollution. It brings in light pollution. So what's the edge effect though? That's just when you've got lots of surface area of nature. Yeah, so basically the more edge it has, the worse it is for nature generally because that's where it meets places that are not nature. That's where cats from suburban houses come in or light pollution or agricultural pesticide pollution or wind knocking trees down. So generally you want to avoid edge, but you also want connectivity. So it's a trade-off. But then I designed this map, which you can see online, which is really not symmetrical and quite ugly. If you look at it in a way, it's just like weird splodges.

Joe Reeve

You say ugly, but I remember when you presented it for the first time because I remember logging in and watching you on our map tool. I really was stalking you. Yeah, I was watching it. It was amazing. It was really fun to watch. And you were fiddling with the software I'd built so I could see when it was breaking. My fault. But I remember when you presented it for the first time to a group and Jackie sat at one of our board members was there. She might not forgive me for saying this on camera, but it looked like she was almost going to cry just seeing this and realising because you'd gone back in history as well. It wasn't just here's some nature where the nature is right now. You'd actually gone back in time. It looked for woodlands that had been destroyed so we could put those back and that kind of thing. So it was a true restoration of nature. And actually I think to everybody in the room it felt quite beautiful. It wasn't an ugly splodge. It was, wow, this is an amazing, it's going to be amazing to live here because it's going to be all over the place. You can sort of explore it. And it has affected big things.

Paul Powlesland

I realised as I was making the map that right in the centre of the city where the central business district might normally go was quite a large amount of ancient woodlands that would make it really hard to put the CBD there. So I actually said, can we shift it further to the right eastwards? And it was agreed. And there's a lot more kind of tabula rasa there because there's a much more open field system where there are less trees in ancient woodlands so it makes it much more possible. And actually we realised that that would make, the place with all those amazing nature reserves right near the centre would probably make the best upscale neighbourhood because actually in our new utopia, I think the new luxury is going to be living that close to nature.

Joe Reeve

Is it new? Like if you think of the poshest areas of London, they're often the places with like the most greenery like Hampstead and Highgate. That's not a coincidence that rich people want to live there.

Paul Powlesland

They live right next to the heath in amongst this like natural beauty, you know? Of course they do. And I think we just need to bring that back.

Joe Reeve

Yeah. I totally, totally agree. I mean, yeah. So maybe let's talk about the nature reserve as a whole then because obviously it's 12,000 acres. It's got this beautiful... You went back and found old maps. Joined it all together. It's this sort of beautiful splodge as you put it. What's it supposed to be? Because obviously it's called Forest City. Is it all forest?

Paul Powlesland

Well, firstly, I think we start from the principle of governance, which is fundamentally, whilst there will be other parks and... There'll be other green spaces and parks and things like that for humans. This 12,000 acres is for nature. Doesn't mean... We're not saying humans can't go in there, but fundamentally its purpose is to be managed in the best interest of nature. And hopefully there might be ways within Forest City to actually make that into governance. I don't know if it's self-ownership or some kind of trust thing. And then, yeah, so we then say, how can we use this land to give rise to the greatest abundance and variety and vitality of life? That would be the key question. The principled question. And then beneath that, then there's lots of ecological detail, effectively. So for me, it's things like we keep all the ancient woodland. It's irreplaceable. The soils are irreplaceable and restore that back to life. Connect it together. And so if there are a couple of ancient woodlands next to each other, then we connect some of those up with trees. But also taking this idea more... It's interesting that... I don't think Shiv was mean this when he called it Forest City. Do you know the ancient distinction between forest and woodland?

Joe Reeve

Yeah.

Paul Powlesland

So actually forest in the English legal system doesn't necessarily mean trees. It's like a legal classification of land that was hunting forest, effectively. And it wouldn't have just been trees. It would have been a kind of mosaic of some tree woodland areas mixed in with kind of meadows and single standing oaks and scrub and marshland and ponds and that kind of thing. And that's basically what we want to have in Forest City because that is by far the most ecologically rich way to have land. In actual fact, closed canopy woodland, which is a lot of what we have in England because we don't manage our woodlands anymore, is actually less rich for nature usually than woodland which is managed where they coppice the trees, allow some openness, allow this mosaic habitat to come back. A bit like what they've done at Knepp in Sussex, one of our most famous rewilding projects in the country. They haven't just planted the whole thing with trees. They've got this shifting mosaic of scrub, trees, meadow. And in terms of sort of laying that out... It's called wood pasture. It's kind of like this mixture of like wood and grass and scrub. Wood pasture. Okay.

Joe Reeve

And in terms of then implementing that, is that a, we've just got to go and plant 100,000 trees and other types of plants or is it you leave it to rewild itself? How does that work?

Paul Powlesland

A mixture. And it very much depends on the local circumstances. In general, in my experience, planted trees survive a lot less well than self-sown. And actually a lot of the time, we actually had this year a mast year of oaks where they basically produced lots and lots of acorns. So across the country, millions of acorns have self-seeded themselves. Most of them will be destroyed by mowing and ploughing and all this kind of stuff. And then we just left them be. Whole oak forest would have come up from this year alone, right? So anywhere where there's an existing forest or hedge line, basically let that spread, let it kind of move out and expand itself. In certain places, there may need to be a thing of taking seeds from elsewhere and planting them because there's no, it's too far away from existing woodland to spread it. And in some places, we might have to do some planting. But any planting should be, like Forest City should have its own tree nursery with local seed stock, doing local seed stock for local people. But no, for trees, it does matter because, you know, they're adapted to that area. And also with some potential changes, so we can do some research around climate change and ensure that we get some trees in, say, from France that are better suited to the climate that we might have in the future. And also bring, we have an amazing opportunity to bring back some of our lost trees. The English countryside is so much the poorer for no longer having elms and ashes. And actually there are breeding programs to provide trees that are resistant to Dutch elm disease and ash dieback, which we could then bring those back into this country.

Joe Reeve

And then animals. There are lots of animals that I think we're imagining might end up living there, right?

Paul Powlesland

Yeah. So again, it sort of depends exactly on the ecological conditions, but the amazing thing about the nature reserve will be, it'll be one of the biggest in the UK. I think the biggest national nature reserve is in Somerset level is 15,000 acres. This is 12,000. So it would be up there. I think it's actually the biggest contiguous land-based nature reserve in England, it would be. Which is, so yeah, the fact that the nature reserve is contiguous means that we can start reintroducing a lot of lost native species, especially charismatic ones like beavers, also storks, potentially some of the bigger rewilding species. So either kind of, some kind of auroch replacement, basically. Because the aurochs are famously a part of the, um, Stonehenge, right? Yeah. There's an aurochs buried at the entrance. I mean, basically in this country, I talked earlier about this idea of closed canopy woodland and open woodland. If you left this, the UK completely, it would eventually all become closed canopy woodland. If you left it without animal intervention, but effectively we had these massive herbivores who would crash through and knock trees over and open up light and create this kind of dynamism. So that would have to be replaced here. Otherwise eventually, well, either we'd have to come and do it, which would be a bit of a nightmare, over 12,000 acres, constantly trying to keep trees open. Or we just have animals that do that for us, like they have at Knepp and other places.

Joe Reeve

What kind of, because there aren't aurochs in England anymore, are there?

Paul Powlesland

Yeah, you can do them with, if you're, if you're going sort of, if you're going kind of lesser measure, you can do it with certain forms of cattle, but you can also maybe get in like, things like buffalo or others to like, kind of come in and.

Joe Reeve

You get a bonus mozzarella cheese every now and then.

Paul Powlesland

Yeah, exactly. So it depends. The detail on that is to be determined, but, you know, things like beavers are really not only possible in there, but very doable. You know, we have the Ealing Beaver Project in London, where I went there earlier this summer, and there's beavers wandering around next to a McDonald's, and next to a main road in this enclosure, that's perfectly happy. But there's this massive mama beaver, who keeps coming right into the public area, because she needs more food. And she's like, sitting there, chewing on a branch next to people, smoking a joint on a bench. It's like, it's real, you realise how intermingled we can be. And it's totally possible for a city of people just to be like, on their lunch break, having a sandwich in a bit of this nature reserve, and, you know, seeing beavers, you know, going about their business. And that's maybe how it should be.

Joe Reeve

Yeah.

Paul Powlesland

And, yeah. And there's lots of other stuff as well around, you know, getting lots of different forms of habitat back from sort of, probably not caves themselves, but like cave replacements for bats. Not tunnel. Not a tunnel. Not a tunnel. Oh, come on, give me a hundred million. I can make a great bat tunnel for you.

Joe Reeve

Does such a thing exist?

Paul Powlesland

Yeah.

Joe Reeve

This is meat to the LFG crowd.

Paul Powlesland

And, yeah, ponds and wetlands, really important. And again, a lot of this stuff, we can really get a win-win, double bubble from it. You know, we can have, we need to have this reservoir for the water security of the city, but that reservoir could be one of the biggest wetlands, nature reserves in East Anglia. We need to have more water retention, both for stopping storm runoff, but also to, again, help water soak in the city and help water resilience. We can have ponds and marshes throughout the city, and not just as part of nature reserves. What if instead of having fences, we had more ditches and things like that, and streams marking boundaries. And that actually, the ditches or moats is sort of a repeating motif in the region. Yeah. So there's these moated farmhouses. And actually, I think it'd be amazing to have developments that kind of lend into that. And you have, imagine going home to your block of flats and it's surrounded by a moat. Yeah. Yeah. And that, and that would actually be good on lots of levels. It would be beautiful. It's a practical way of marking a boundary, actually probably better than barbed wire fencing to get across in many ways. And also it's good for nature, good for water resilience, good for storm runoff, all these things. And I just, when I was writing this report, I just over and over again, kept coming up with these win-wins. Like, wow, we could just do this slightly differently. We can, we can have it, we can have it all. The goal is to build stuff that's good for nature, not just. Yeah. But ultimately, but ultimately the truth of the world is that what is good for nature is in the long term, ultimately good for us. It's only not seen that way because we have a very short term system that prize, it's certain human values, particularly, you know, certain money making things, particularly over like long term sustainability. But actually, like, it's not good for anyone to have floods or drought or live in an ugly nature-denuded place. Yeah. And it's perfectly possible to have homes that are, yeah, beautiful, nature rich and also resilient because we've built nature in from the very start. Yeah.

Joe Reeve

So, let's maybe move on quickly to the city itself. So, we talked about living, humans and nature living together. We sort of talked about the nature reserve, which is mostly for nature. So, how does nature, how do nature and humans live together in the city area that is sort of mostly for the humans?

Paul Powlesland

Yeah. Again, one of the things I sort of wanted to do from the start was to avoid what I would call the nature donut, which is the idea that we would have this kind of nature rich reserve around the edge of the city and then just go and build like a typical kind of concrete brick thing in the middle and have no nature. And just basically rely on the nature reserve to do all the heavy lifting for nature in the city, I think would be a massive mistake for a number of reasons. Partially because it's unnecessary, partially because it would increase that edge effect. So, if you just have this nature reserve and then like an ordinary thing with like, you know, fence and patios going right up to it, then loads that nature reserve would not be that rich for nature because you've got that edge effect there. And so we need to basically meld the city into nature better. And I was again, very impressed that you agreed when I wrote the report that we should be aiming for the city as a whole to be the standard of BNG plus 10%. So biodiversity net gain, what's there currently plus 10% without including the nature reserve. So I think that's more than possible. Actually, I think we could be aimed for higher than 10% because there are so many of these win-wins to be, to be gained. And that's, that in itself is radical. It was normally what a developer would do is they just go and build a piece of shit that's not very good for nature at all. And then go, oh, we've offset that either on this bit of the site or even worse, like a hundred miles away. I've got some credits. And actually what's amazing about Forest City, you're not even saying, oh, we're not going to offset this to elsewhere in the country. You're not even saying we're not, we're going to offset this within the city area itself via the nature reserve. It's that actually we're going to be radical. And we think it is possible by being imaginative and groundbreaking. To have all of this human utility whilst also having stuff in nature too.

Joe Reeve

So what do you think that might look like then within the city? For someone going about their daily life in, you know, they're at home, they're going to the office and back. They're not necessarily going to the nature reserve or even near the edge of the nature reserve. What do you imagine that might look like in terms of nature?

Paul Powlesland

So I think the key thing is to ensure that wherever, wherever there is a human usage, to think imaginatively about how we can have nature uses there at the same time in a way that doesn't interfere with the human usage. And sometimes often we'll actually make it better. So I mentioned earlier about this idea of this moated, moated flats or whatever, that will be beautiful for humans, a selling point and good for security and good for nature and good for all that kind of stuff. Similarly for roads and anywhere where humans need to pass underneath, we should be aiming to have native trees there that nature can use at the same time, because then you're both using it. You know, it's almost like a tunnel, isn't it? The humans are going about their business absolutely fine underneath the trees and the birds and the insects are also perfectly happily up there doing their thing as well. Similarly, parks and things, we can ensure that humans are able to use it for leisure whilst also using it for nature, the reservoir, as I said before, using that as a wetlands. And also it's in the design of the buildings and things like that, which we haven't done in detail yet. But what I would propose is that there is a kind of, we work out a base level of ecological value that each site must have. But how you decide to do that is up to you. So you could do vertical green walls, but actually a lot of the time they're quite expensive, I think. And actually you might be better off just putting your fence or wall into a hedge. And actually that provides a lot of value as well. Or green roofs, or turning paved areas into grassland, or whatever it might be. But there's a lot you can do. I mean, there's a lot of imaginative stuff out there about how we can incorporate nature into our actual building. And I think it's very exciting to imagine how it could be done. And done at scale as well. Done at scale. And just imagine a city that looked like that rather than the kind of usual dross that we're served. Yeah.

Joe Reeve

Yeah. And we're not even talking about solar punk here. It's not like trees growing out of concrete buildings and things.

Paul Powlesland

Yeah, some would be nice.

Joe Reeve

Some, some. Yeah. Skyscrapers with trees draping down the side.

Paul Powlesland

Yeah. And again, there's also natural materials uses. There's amazing stuff going on. Load bearing stone skyscrapers, which are obviously much better for the environment and look better, I think, than concrete and that kind of stuff. Yeah.

Joe Reeve

Okay. And then moving maybe out slightly from the city itself, if we're looking at the surrounding area, obviously there's, there's a nature impact there as well. If you've suddenly got this big nature reserve, England, as you said, England's largest contiguous land-based nature reserve. What does that mean for the rest of the region? Maybe the other local towns and villages nearby, but then also the whole country as a whole.

Paul Powlesland

Yeah. So I think it's important to incorporate the nature restoration improvement into the wider area. I haven't worked, again, it worked out exactly how far that would be, maybe a 10, 15, 20 mile radius in the center of the city. And that's because there's, there is a law of diminishing returns on nature. Actually with the nature reserve, a lot of it, we don't have to spend huge amounts of money, just like bringing it back, just rewilding it and letting nature do what it will, will solve a lot of it. And developers often do this. They'll often say, oh, well, we've destroyed all this nature, but we're going to spend lots of money on this kind of fancy, expensive thing. That actually isn't often that good for nature. What I would call nature bling. Right. What you might call the bat tunnel. Yeah. A bat tunnel, fish disco. Yeah. Yeah. Although, I mean, those are, they're a bit debatable actually because they have, you know, it's just the kind of, this, like putting up a shitty bat box in a park basically a lot of the time, or like some lame intervention that isn't actually the help, a bee hotel or whatever it is. And actually in terms of money spent, you'd be better off doing much more basic restoration in surrounding areas like Haverhill or Newmarket to help them make their towns more nature rich in their surroundings and the farmland around it more nature rich than just putting up another bat box in the center of Forest City because, you know, we have all this nature funding. And then there's, I think a need for a landscape scale restoration project to link this in with the rest of the landscape. Again, haven't really decided what that is, but something like you could do a, fens to sea project that restores Fenland on the north, uh, west side of the city where it reaches the fens through the city and then down, uh, the stour towards the sea, like a whole corridor that supports nature restoration efforts along there. And then finally, the wider, the wider country one is interesting. And I only came to it as I was, or the wider system, because I only came to it as I was getting towards the end of the report. And I was suddenly thinking like, throughout this, we're talking about how do we move beyond the idea of not damaging nature to actually proactively helping to restore nature. And I realized one of the biggest footprints of this is going to be the actual building of the city. And indeed some of my critics online, when I've been involved in forest cities where you can get the building materials is you're going to chop down forests and that kind of stuff. And so I began to think about that as I actually, can we procure some of the materials and systems for the city in a way that actually benefits nature? And actually, I think we need to think about that. So again, moving beyond sustainability for wood, there are tens of thousands of hectares in the UK of what's called plantation on ancient woodland, where we basically took ancient woodland sites and soil, and planted these awful pine plantations on them in the 1950s through to 70s. And actually one of the best things we could do for nature in this country was restore all of them to ancient woodland. But actually we're sort of blocked on doing that a lot of the time because there isn't much of a market for this pine. It's kind of crappy pine. It needs to be processed properly to actually be able to use it. Ideal for cross laminated timber skyscrapers, for instance. And I know this myself because I co-own an ancient woodland in Sussex and we wanted to almost get rid of the pine for free and we couldn't barely find a market for it. And we finally got it felled this week. So we've restored 11 acres of ancient woodland. But imagine if one effect of Forest City could be rolling that out around the country. And actually it could be one of the most profound impacts because you'd actually be doing not just the 12,000 acre nature reserve, but potentially restoring tens of thousands of hectares of other woodland around the country. And at the same time, getting all this wonderful material to build a city with. It goes way beyond sustainability. And what we need for that is a market for it, but also the systems, the processing mills, the factories to make that happen. If that kind of chain, supply chain could be set up before a city, that could have a profound impact. But also thinking about things like if we're getting stone to build stone skyscrapers, how do we get that in a way that doesn't damage existing land? Like they want to build a quarry on an ancient woodland in Oak and Wood down in Kent. But we could land that's already degraded. We could take the stone there and then use that process, then turn that into a nature reserve as well, like turn a quarry into a lake or that kind of thing. So I think there's lots to be thought about there too.

Joe Reeve

Amazing. Actually, one thing you mentioned that I just want to touch on a little bit more before we wrap up. You mentioned some of your critics online. And interestingly, obviously, the sort of maybe pro-development crowd, and you have clashed a lot, but usually, like you say, you've been a more traditional ally of the NIMBYs and the environmental lobby. Who are these people that suddenly, after you came out and started working on this nature stuff on Forest City, what are the critics sort of saying? What are the criticisms you've been receiving?

Paul Powlesland

It's effectively that there is no way that building on Greenfield could ever be good for nature, effectively. And it has actually made me realise that, and I think you've covered this in an article too, is that I think it's actually, I think the divide into NIMBYs and YIMBYs is actually very simplistic. And both sides actually have quite a few different strands to them. I was going to say, is the NIMBYs more keen? I don't really know, actually. I think maybe I just don't know it as well. And actually, what I've noticed in people that are labelled NIMBYs, there's hugely different strands involved there. And one of the key differentials is people who are pro-nature. And I really do want to say this. A lot of the people who are labelled NIMBYs are actually not. They're not just against building. They're against the needless destruction of nature and really inappropriate and crappy development of what your lot is that currently. But there are also people who use nature as a kind of cloak for the fact they don't want the countryside to change. They want the countryside they grew up in in their youth, which is frankly an industrialised, a lot of the time, nature-poor place. And even if it were to result in nature being improved, they wouldn't want it because they don't want the countryside to change. And they're kind of open. They want openness. They want farming. They want openness. They don't want lots of people living in the countryside and changing their way of life. And I can see why they might think that. I mean, I don't agree with it personally. I can see why they might think that. But I think what annoys me about it is when they then wrap themselves in the kind of cloak of nature defenders when you present to them evidence that actually, no, this would result in an increase in nature. For instance, to get away from Forest City, I have a riverbank out in the countryside on the River Medway. And there's a 100-acre industrial agricultural field next to me. And I've sort of done the maths on it. I've looked very closely. I've observed it over all seasons over 10 years. And clearly, the best thing you could do for both nature and housing in there, and it's right next to a village. Obviously, the worst thing you could do to build like a massive housing development over all of it, that would be very damaging. But actually, along the edge of the village, you could easily put in 30 eco homes and use the profits from that to basically take the rest of the field, which is kind of marginal agricultural production out of production and turn it into a permanently covenanted nature reserve on the rest of the, say, 80, 90 acres of the field. And absolutely, I think you could prove with evidence that we're better for nature. But some people don't want it because they just don't want that open field to not be an open field anymore. They don't actually want nature. They just want a field.

Joe Reeve

And the nature reserve then, the plan for that is not just that it's a nature reserve, that there are some legal requirements for it to be to a certain level.

Paul Powlesland

Yeah, exactly. I mean, as I said throughout this, I've been really impressed by the way that Forest City has come in good faith to actually genuinely, I think, improve nature and not just as greenwash, but also, I think, as someone who has been in a lot of situations where I've been representing nature and kind of been screwed over, I want to make that legally binding. And obviously not, you know, because also this is a long-term project. At some point, the current people involved in it won't be involved in it anymore. We need to ensure that these are, you know, really embedded from the start in a way that is legally proper. And so whatever way the city is set up in terms of governance, whether it's an act of parliament or if it's through individual covenants to basically include this idea that there are standards of ecological richness and integrity that nature reserve must achieve. Also, because we can't do it overnight. It's not going to become perfect overnight. But actually, to be honest, the example of places like Knepp shows that you can do it quicker than you would think. But yeah, within, say, five years, it must get to the level of a local nature reserve. Within 10 years, national nature reserve. Within 20 years, SSI standard of nature. That kind of thing. So SSSI is a site of special scientific interest. So one of our highest protection for sites of nature for our rarest and most important sites. And I genuinely believe that that nature reserve, if done well, could become pretty much all of it SSSI standard within that time quite easily, if it was properly rewilded. I think it's also good to note the idea of how we could use the nature reserve to create a different relationship with those who care for it and to move away from what I term the contractor model, which is where you have charities or councils that manage an area of land. They basically bring in a contractor in a white van who has no relationship with it. They're told to do X thing for X amount of money and they do it and often do it badly. And they've got no ongoing relationship with the place. And so I would want to have like a group of people who are the guardians or the carers of that nature reserve and ideally live within it. So if there are buildings or properties within that nature reserve that they could live there in the nature reserve that they're caring for and they don't just do ad hoc tasks. They're there living it as a carer of that place, which kind of replicates what I do on the Roding. You know, I live in a marsh beside the river. I see the river every day. I live the river. I'm a part of it. And I know that that fundamentally has affected how I've cared for it. I would never have been doing the level of detail or frankly, obsessiveness that I've got into with the Roding if I weren't living there. I just wouldn't. Yeah. It's part of that. And so imagine a group of dozens or hundreds of maybe particularly young people, particularly maybe young people who didn't have much connection to nature before who were like brought into this idea of becoming guardians of this place and becoming its rangers, its carers, its stewards. I think that's something very potentially quite beautiful there.

Joe Reeve

So that might be a nice way to sort of end the episode is if you're interested in becoming a guardian for nature, then Paul is the man to talk to and he maybe come come and help him with some river.

Paul Powlesland

Yeah. River clearing. Also get involved yourself, like find your own nature and start doing it is often the best way it will teach you. But also I'd say actually, given the people who might be listening to this podcast, I'd also say that rights of nature and this idea of representing nature and decision making can go into any system. So whatever it is you're working, if it's banking or development or whatever it is, there's a way of representing nature and balancing nature's interests with the work you're doing. So have a good think about how you might be able to do that and to take this approach because it's not just the right thing to do in the long run. It will actually, I think, improve whatever area you're working in.

Joe Reeve

As I'd hope you'd say that this report has been Forest City. Like, do you think if we follow this report, it would be Forest City would be a better place than if we didn't?

Paul Powlesland

Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it would just be magical. When I was writing the report and I was imagining, just having this vision of what this could actually look like on the ground, and I imagine this neighbourhood, the neighbourhood we've spoken about, which is just right near the centre of the city where there's a lot of nature reserves, and actually they surround the way the woodlands are. They kind of have created almost pockets of urban development set in amongst a nature reserve, which would be the potential upscale neighbourhood with stone skyscrapers. Imagine getting the tram home along this tree-lined street from the centre of the city to your home and then walking through the nature reserve and coming to your stone apartment block and having dinner overlooking the beaver lodge as they come out in dusk. Sounds dreamy. Yeah, right? It's what a magical place to live that could be. And far more magical than almost any other form of city or modern development that I've seen proposed. And I think, to me, the nature stuff in particular, I think, will speak to people's sense of imagination and wonder with the city, more than just the economics or the sensibleness of building new homes and having places people to live, which is important. I think the nature stuff is what is going to make people's souls soar a little bit in this.

Joe Reeve

Yeah, I agree. I think that's a beautiful way to end the episode. So thank you so much.