Britain’s arrogance about rewilding is preventing it from reintroducing long-lost predators, according to the financier and green campaigner Ben Goldsmith.
Goldsmith, who chairs the Conservative Environment Network, said that Britons had a “moral duty” to learn to live with animals, including wolves and lynxes, that were forced into extinction by their ancestors.
“Britain-wide, what’s with this British exceptionalism that we are somehow too grand and too civilised to rewild?” Goldsmith asked during a talk at the Hay Festival with the environmentalist Isabella Tree.
“Countries which are significantly poorer and more food-insecure than we are, we expect them to look after their wolves and their lions and their jaguars and all these other charismatic species, but when it comes to Britain — ‘no, no, no’. ”
