Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast. We are the charity and think tank dedicated to achieving ambitious leadership for the environment.

I'm Alice Stafford, communications officer here at Green Alliance. Today, I'm joined by Molly Easton,

co-director and Leila Mapember, engagement lead, both from Young Wilders, a youth-led

non-profit focused on accelerating UK nature recovery and centering young people in the process.

Young Wilders manage youth-led nature recovery projects and a creative program of events

focused on upskilling and energising the next generation of environmental stewards across England and Wales.

Rewilding is a growing movement in the UK and internationally.

As we face accelerating biodiversity loss and habitat degradation,

it offers us a long-term, ambitious approach to ecological recovery.

Molly and Layla come to this chat today to share

their insights on youth-led environmental action, making nature recovery more inclusive, and how grassroots

work can influence broader policy change. Molly and Leila, thanks for coming on to the podcast

to speak with me today. I wanted to start off with a really simple question, which is how would you explain rewilding to someone who's never come across the term? And what does it actually look like in practice on the ground? Yeah, I'm happy to take the charge on this. If you've never heard the term rewilding and you Google it for the first time,

you'll probably come across the kind of large scale rewilding projects like Yellowstone in America

or NEP wildland in Sussex, where we actually do some work. And these ones are all about,

they involve kind of restoring large tracts of land until nature can really take care of

itself. So within that, it's about restoring habitats and reintroducing and restoring natural

processes and where appropriate potentially missing species like the beaver or pigs, where

these animals can create extraordinary habitats on their own and they're often kind of seen as ecosystem

engineers. So beavers are incredibly good at creating wetland habitats, for example. Obviously that's

quite large scale. So a kind of rewilding and its purest form does need scale. It needs enough space to

allow nature to drive the changes. And that can come from single land holdings or where landowners work together

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