Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1997, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a naturalist. His love of plants and animals is as emotional as it is scientific.

It's the relationship between man and nature which fascinates him.

And he's equally at home writing about nightingales and their ability

to keep loneliness and anxiety at bay as he is compiling his flora Britannica, a huge

encyclopedia of the native plants of England, Scotland and Wales.

Born in 1941, he still lives in the same house in which he was brought up.

From there he writes and observes,

the demands of the supermarkets he thinks are poisoning our land

and we urgently need a new ministry to regulate food quality. Man should try to control a

little less, he says, and like the beaver nibble and potter a little more. He says and like the beaver nibble and potter a little more.

He is Richard maybe.

Richard, we take the attitude of course that we, man are our supreme, we're in charge and that we should manage that relationship, our

relationship with nature. That's not how you see it, is it? No, so it's not. I think

that we've taken this particularly arrogant position for rather too long.

The position that's personified, if you like, in the word of steward, the assumption that

we are not just in charge, but that we know best about how the natural world should regulate itself

and certainly I think most of my life both in what I enjoy experiencing about the natural world

and what I try to write about it is concerned with giving nature a bit of a free hand of actually rejoicing in the kind of creativity that it can provide.

Do you mean like the deep greens in the states who believe in totally hands off, just let it do what it does?

Not entirely like then, no, because I think that human beings are part of the natural world,

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