Mary-Ann Ochota is a broadcaster, anthropologist, and writer known for her work on Time Team and books on archaeology and the British landscape.
“Archaeology is ultimately about people – the stories of people in the past and how they lived their lives.”
Mary-Ann discusses her visits to Chernobyl, British henges and the Australian Simpson Desert; exploring themes of resilience and environmental recovery.
“One of the big misconceptions is that archaeology is just about digging things up.”
She shares insights on ancient British sites and the broader implications of sustainable development and access to nature. We discuss her role as president of the Countryside Charity and her thoughts on the future of rural development are highlighted, along with her creative writing process and advice for connecting with nature.
“We’re all living on top of layers of history, whether we realise it or not.”
Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Video above or on Youtube.
Contents
00:31 Exploring Chernobyl's Impact
04:59 The Resilience of Nature
05:55 Adventures in the Simpson Desert
13:56 Ancient Sites in the UK
17:10 Access to Nature and Social Barriers
31:56 The Ridgeway National Trail
38:33 Exploring the Purpose of Henges
39:29 Ancient Feasts and Food Waste
40:15 Reevaluating Ancient Civilizations
44:32 Imagination and Environmental Crisis
47:53 Balancing Hope and Realism
50:06 Writing Process and Creative Challenges
01:04:24 Sustainable Development and Land Use
01:11:32 Life Advice
Transcript (This is AI assisted, so mistakes are possible)
Ben: Okay, great. Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to the brilliant Mary-Ann Ochota. Mary-Ann is a broadcaster, anthropologist, writer, and adventurer. You might know her from Time Team or her books on archeology and the British landscape. She's a passionate advocate for the countryside and explorer of the world's hidden histories.
Mary-Ann, welcome.
Mary-Ann: Thank you very much for having me. It is genuinely a great privilege.
Ben: Thinking about your adventures, you've been to Chernobyl and I think also to the city of Piya. What struck you most about your visit to Chernobyl and how perhaps it might influence our views of resilience and environmental recovery, and anything about the abandoned city, which really struck you?
Mary-Ann: It was such a strange place, Ben, I think I went with, so we were making a documentary for National Geographic. Oh no. Was it Discovery? I should really know, shouldn't I? And it was about Chernobyl 30 years on and how the impact of the nuclear disaster at the nuclear power station that had impacted not just the people and the environment, but also the wildlife.
And so I think I had gone with a certain set of preconceptions about what a kind of nuclear holocaust landscape might look like. But actually you get there and the immediate presentation of this landscape is that it's beautiful, rural, there's loads of wildlife. And it feels. Lovely. And we had training before we went because we were going to be going to areas of the exclusion zone that tourists don't normally get to go to.
And so you have to take additional precautions. And the person who was training us is ex-army. He was part of the army teams who would go into civil disaster zones or war zones to make safe, the chemical, the nuclear and any kind of pot potential biological warfare threats.
So the other, members of civilian and military teams could then go in safely to help restore power or rebuild the road or reach victims of the violence or whatever. It was set at field hospitals. So his was the advanced team who had to deal with the stuff. And he said basically in this kind of scenario, it's not a live war zone.
There's not, dismembered corpses strewn across the road. You're not gonna find some kind of quivering wreck of a survivor in the bombed out shell of a house. It's the silent threat that is really easy to forget. Because it's the dust. It is just the dust that you will inhale that will be on your skin that has a half life of thousands of years of radioactive contaminant.
And you won't feel any different. You're not gonna start coughing up blood, you eyes aren't gonna burst. It's just the silent killer that will in 20 years time, you get cancer and maybe you wouldn't have if you hadn't taken the precautions that you do. And that was the thing that really struck me, that the notion of how we perceive risk is often so aesthetic.
The aesthetic of what things look like, what a scary or dangerous thing looks like versus what actually is truly a risk was the thing that, that struck me. And that you have to be conscious in your vigilance. Because otherwise you just become really quickly complacent. There was one point where filming days are really long and we'd been filming in the forest because we were filming with a team of scientists who were investigating the impact on the kind of the woodland rodents.
So things like little voles and little mice that live naturally in that kind of birch woodland that has grown up around all the villages because for 30 years people haven't been cutting down trees. They haven't been cultivating fields, their gardens where all these houses used to be. And nature is regenerated and it's impacted by the nuclear contamination, but it grows anyway.
And the thing about investigating the impacts on things like door mice and vols and little mice is that because they reproduce so quickly, you've got 30 generations of impact. Whereas obviously if you're looking at humans, you've got the children of the people who were evacuated. So when you're looking at the impact on genetic inheritance, the impact on how mutations have affected populations, things like that, you're not looking at a zombie mouse with, five ears, but you're looking at really subtle little changes.
Ben: That's fascinating. I, looking at the pictures, it also just struck me. How resilient nature is or, little animals and things and how they come back.
Mary-Ann: Nature runs. And I think, that's one of the amazing things about talking about Rewilding.
Even in a kind of pop a kind of a landscape like the uk, which is very densely populated, 70% of the land masses farmed, but you actually go give it a little chance and it bursts back into life. And actually that's one of the kind of things that you have to remember that what we are doing is maintaining suppression of certain types of habitat and what the kind of the, what happens if you look at places like Chernobyl, which are far from ideal conditions for real restoration of nature, but in other ways really great because you've entirely taken away the human pressure on those landscapes.
And you go what happens now?
Ben: On the other end of the spectrum, I think you've been to the Simpson Desert in Australia, and that's somewhere which is super remote and harsh. And yet maybe that recalls something about the resilience of humans over time. What did you learn about the Simpson Desert? And I guess that was more ancient cultures, but the ability of humans to adapt to where we are?
Mary-Ann: Yeah, I think there's many opportunities that I've had around the world and in back at home in the UK where the thing that really strikes you is the ability for people and communities to, like you say find new ways of coping with threats, coping with challenge and harm. So the Simpson Desert is.
An extraordinary place. It's the largest, it's quite a niche kind of claim to fame. It's the largest parallel dune desert in the world. So imagine kind of Lawrence of Arabia. You've got those big sweeping dunes that are like waves of sand. The Simpson Desert doesn't really look like that. It was ex, again, expecting something different to what I then saw.
The Simpson Desert is lower, it's a bit grayer in lots of parts. And these sand dunes are quite big. Not massive, maybe 10 meters high. And they run in parallel lines for literally hundreds of kilometers before petering out and then starting again. And a lot of the desert is very kind of scrubby.
There is vegetation there and it's sorry, Simpson Desert. It's ugly little scrabbly bushes. When rain comes, which is rare, but does happen, it bursts into life and all of a sudden for a few weeks you've got this, these carpets of wild flowers. And then what happens is that the water will be held in basically kind of clay pans where naturally the sediment has formed at a kind of a base a slightly less permeable base.
So everywhere else, the water dissipates very quickly. It evaporates off because you're in a desert, it's hot, and it's very dry. But on these clay pans, it holds water for a little while. And then all these different animals and birds and plants burst into life and you've got this real extraordinary cyclic.
Rhythm of life in these desert ecosystems that is completely alien to someone who lives in temperate, rainy Britain, where the cycle for us is seasonal. It's every year and today, for example, I walk the kids to school and you could smell spring in the air. And I really love that experience of kind of feeling my animal, self responding to that.
But in the Simpson Desert, some of these cycles don't happen. And there is a cycle that happens annually where you've got the hot summer season where it gets up to 50 degrees centigrade and no one goes into the desert. And then the winter season, where, for example, expedition groups like ours can go if you carry all your water with you.
But some of the cycles run on generational human generation length. So 20, 30 years you'll get these seasonal cycles and you've got, what you end up with is species that kind of, their range shrinks back to these refuge little refuges where they can just clinging on through the really harsh seasons year after year.
And then there's another rainfall event, and then they spread out again, and then you they circle back to these refuges, which are really biodiverse and really precious. Because if you lose a refuge, then you lose. Thousands of literally thousands of species from plants to invertebrates to the slightly bigger animals.
And then of course you've got the desert specialists who can cope, big eared little mice and funny little lizards with big fat tails that store moisture. But it's an amazing, it's an amazing habitat to walk across. So we were walking and we had camels carrying our water and kits, so there's no permanent sources of water in the desert because these clay pans are very temporary seasonal.
And the people who used to live there the PE people, native indigenous to that area were the won kru. And they would go into the desert, they'd live on the desert fringes, and then they would go into the desert when conditions were suitable. And they were doing a number of things fishing, for example, in these clay pans.
Where did the fish come from? Nobody. The biologists know, but it feels like they spring from nowhere. And the one kru had these wells effectively where you, they create a kind of a natural clay pan, very low down, and then it gets filled with sand, but it holds enough water. So then when you get to a well, you can dig it, dig out the native well, and you will get literally a, kind of a cup's worth of water at a time.
But because you are. That kind of generationally inherited knowledge of how to survive in these landscapes. That's enough. That will keep you going. And then you can walk another 20 miles to the next native. If you miss the you're screwed. That's it. You're done. But so you don't miss, and you walk at night often.
You walk in, the kind of muscular times, dusk and dawn. Or sometimes through the night just to cover the distance to get to the next
Ben: and I assume that the wells are about one day's walk away from one another.
Mary-Ann: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And the thing that was always.
Confusing to the the white colonists who were turning up with horses and with a canoe or a boat strapped to a horse that would then promptly drop down dead after a few days because the conditions were just horrific and horses can't survive walking on that kind of sand.
They started to import camels. So camels aren't native to Australia. There's thousands of them now, and they're a kind of a problem. But. Camels could cope. But the thing that they didn't understand was how the people could have coped. And they just thought they, they must have been living like animals and actually go no.
It's incredibly sophisticated knowledge that just cannot be underestimated. And actually what you see as well as these chains of native wells that are, like you say about a day's walk between one to the other are stands of this particular plant called Pitchie (or Pituri). Which has the same kind of volatile chemicals as tobacco.
So you can chew it and it gives you a bit of a high. And Pitchie was traded up and down north, south pretty much across most of the continent of Australia. And other things like shells, feathers this Pitchie, various kind of types of pigment, all sorts of, precious and specific commodities were traded up and down these long networks between different groups of people who had different languages different cultural ways, but had some kind of commonalities.
And so what you'll find is in what feels like. Genuinely, the middle of nowhere is a picture stand a stand of these bushes. But you can see that it's been cut and copies by human hands. It's growing in a different way. Now, I wouldn't have been able to see that, but in our expedition team, we were traveling with botanists who were like, I see it and point out, can you see where these cuts have been made?
That isn't na, that isn't natural. This isn't naturally how the bush would grow. And so basically what you're doing is pruning them so that when you come back the following season, there's more picture to harvest that you can then carry out and trade, strike even get high.
Ben: Yeah. Did you try any?
Mary-Ann: I didn't. No.
You have to dry it and then ferment it.
Ben: Bad reactions, maybe not thing to try for the first time in that.
Mary-Ann: Never tried a cigarette. I managed to skip that phase of being a teenager. So I feel like maybe Pitchie (or Pituri) would've been the thing to get you through break.
Break the seal. Yeah, exactly.
Ben: It strikes me that there was such sophisticated ancient knowledge and also these cultures, which obviously the colonialists went and destroyed, but coming back closer to home how many ancient. UK sites have you visited? How many of these hinges have you been to?
Because you've I'm pretty sure you've visited Stonehenge and you've written about Avery. You've written about Kane as well. I'm not sure I've got pronounced that correctly. But what do you think is going on with the UK hinges? Are you fond of the kind of astronomy type ideas about why the Henges were about and what do you think about some of these ancient sites in Britain?
Mary-Ann: Britain is just the best for like really weird old stuff. I think that's the thing, Ben that's. Links lots of my work. So for example the trip in Chernobyl, not only were we looking at this, the wildlife, but also meeting people who wanted to come back. For example the one Canaro people still exist despite all the horrific and brutal treatment and the kind of cultural genocide.
People still go to the desert now. They live outta the desert, but they do still go bush and people in the uk I think we sometimes massively. Take for granted the fact that we live in this landscape that has been permanently inhabited since last ice age. So like 11, 12, almost 12,000 years ago.
And every single generation has made its mark in the landscape because, feels so remote. So you look at Stonehenge and the first circle the wider circle, not the kind of massive stones in the middle, but the kind of wider earth work. That was established about 3000 BC about 5,000 years ago.
Avery a little bit later, four and a half thousand years ago, probably callanish, like you say, up in the Hebrides, amazing. If you want to go and visit weird, cool archeology that's a bit off the beaten track, I'd say go to the Outer Hebrides or to Orny both sets of Scottish Islands.
One on the west coast, one off the east coast. But we've got thousands of them, and some of them have souvenir programs and tickets and gates and whatnot, like Stonehenge. And then some of them are, all you need to do is to bother to go and find one basically. And if you have the ability to go into the field, literally a field and find them, then honestly I think you'll be repaid tenfold a thousand fold with the kind of the joy of exploring being a landscape detective.
But even if you don't have access or the ability to get into the middle of a muddy field. The resources that we have now, the tools that we have online to look at aerial photographs, to look at LIDAR scans of kind of the land the land forms to get all these records that have been digitized.
You can do some fantastic armchair landscape spotting as well. Yeah, what it's, they're brilliant. I love them because one of, there's so many why's that are still unanswered.
Ben: Yeah. I just really mysterious and, you can go to places like the Simpson Desert to get that, but you could get it much closer to home.
I've noted a lot of your work on access to nature and access to places like this. I'm quite an urban boy and when I speak to some of my urban friends, there is this sense here in London or maybe in the UK that the countryside perhaps is for an elite.
You need to be rich. Aristocrats have a lot of land. Maybe city people or even explorers aren't so welcome. We have this issue maybe with access and pathways and knowledge and the like. And I had earlier on the podcast I. Her nickname's Al who also has a lot of work on terms of access to nature and things like that.
And it seems to me that there's a perception that there's a bit of a challenge and there's a little bit of argument around this. I'd be interested to know what you advocate for and where you think the kind of challenges and opportunities are in terms of getting access to nature and things.
'cause like you say, some of these things, you just need to know where they are and it's essentially free and, or should be and they should perhaps not be. Some, as much of debate around this as there is
Mary-Ann: yeah. Realities of barriers to access to our countryside more broadly, but as well as the landscape heritage cannot be underestimated.
It is really easy for me to say they're free. You should just go. But actually think about what that represents and all the stacked. Privileges and assumptions that is based on, which is that I have access to a car. I have money for fuel, I have a spare pair of shoes so that if my feet and get muddy or wet, I have something else to put on.
I've got the I've got access to laundry facilities in my home. I don't need to take all my kit to a laundre. I've got a waterproof coat that works and waterproof trousers. I've got layering. I've got a ruck sack. I've got enough free time to be able to go. I've got enough money to stop at a cafe perhaps and buy a sandwich and a cup of coffee.
I've got don't have a physical disability to consider so that if I'm parking up in some random car park and there's one toilet block, I don't need to go, oh, hang on a minute. There's no disabled blue. I. Mixed race. My mum is Indian and my dad is Polish. I think in some circumstances I'm perceived as a person of color and in other circumstances I'm white enough, I'm white passing.
I think it makes a big difference when you are able-bodied and you are wearing Gore-Tex, that people nod at you and go, oh yeah, she's the right kind of person to be here. She looks like she probably knows what she's doing. But I've spoken to people who, have, oh I know loads of people who've faced really explicit, horrific racism.
The gang of friends who went walking. And there was one place to go to the toilet, which was a pub. And in, as they went through this village and one of the guys is practicing Muslim and he didn't want to go into the pub. So he sat outside while his mates went in to, to go to the loo.
And someone who's standing outside, one of the locals, I guess having a cigarette said, oh, you leaving the terrorist outside then are you? And it's just horrific. There's a guy called Sam Ascar who runs a guiding company called Summit Special. He works a lot with people from the global majority, guiding them on kind of walks, increasing community capacity and confidence to get in the outdoors because if you are walking with a group who you have a, an affinity with, you don't feel so exposed, you don't feel unsafe.
And they get death threats. They get death threats for taking over the countryside, inverted commas. And it is genuinely appalling to see how hard it is for some people to simply be in the countryside. And often we think of, um, racism and poverty and access to public transport and stuff like that as urban issues.
We are a majority urban. Society. Most of us live in towns and cities, but we cannot forget that the rural communities are, need to be economically viable. They need to be culturally diverse. They need to be able to have access to affordable homes and, sustainable transport. And I think one of the things that when we forget that or overlook it or assume that it's probably fine because actually it's all aristocrats and people, leaning over five bar fences gates, chewing straw.
That actually you create the perfect conditions for a rise in populism as much as anything. And we do a kind of massive injustice to all those communities if we don't take seriously. There needs to be. Economically viable, diverse, exciting, entrepreneurial communities in exactly the same way that we look at Leeds or Manchester or London and go, of course you need to create opportunities for business development and investment and green power and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Name all the things that are important. If you don't go and how does that work in the rural hinterlands, then we've absolutely missed a trick and we are doing a huge disservice to literally millions of people in our nation. Yeah.
Ben: Because I think, although we're majority urban might be 70 30 or maybe even 60 40, so that's Yes.
A minority, but 30% is still a really large absolute number.
Mary-Ann: I think it's come to the fore quite a little bit more than usual that because, we've seen tractors surrounding the House of Commons as farmers protest things like changes to inheritance tax. But the kind of the, the dissociation the kind of divorce that we have, most of us from how our food is produced and who is doing that, who is actually managing this land and in what ways and how much of a say do we have about that?
Um, it's a real problem. Our complacency or kind of feeling like, oh, that's nothing to do with us is part of the problem because we. Just offer an un unequal and unhealthy share of power to just a certain handful of people who may well be happy to say, don't worry. We're custodians and stewards of this land.
Don't you worry your little urban heads about it. And you go, hang on a minute, hang on a minute. Who is that benefiting? And the answer is not the nation and not social justice. So I'm a big fan of access reform, partly to challenge that hegemony of power because it is unequal and we've forgotten what we've lost.
Because of enclosures of common land, because of effectively people being pushed to urban areas because of a depopulation of rural places we think that's how it's always been. We forgotten that, not that many generations ago the, countryside areas were much more populated and you'd have, 12, 15 people working on a farm.
Whereas now it's incredibly lonely and isolating. 'cause you've got one farmer struggling away with a bunch of machinery, but also untethered from the fabric of society. And that's not good for either, either side of that equation.
Ben: So you are recently president of the Countryside charity, is that it?
The role president? Yes. So I can see this is gonna be one of your priorities. Is there anything else you'd like to highlight as what you are thinking? And then maybe you can roll it into, so if you did have. One or two or three policy asks what would they be? Some might be a little bit more simpler around access reform, which don't seem perhaps as tricky.
We might get onto what sustainable development might be, which might be a little bit more tricky. Yeah. But access and yeah. What other things you're thinking and policy recommendations in the uk or even broadly, you can take on the world if you'd like.
Mary-Ann: You would be surprised at how tricky access reform is a kind of first thought you're like it's not that hard.
And it turns out there is a lot of vested interest pushing back. So there's the situation as it stands at the moment in Scotland, so literally head over the border and you have a default of access as a member of the public, you can go pretty much anywhere on both land and water.
As long as you do it responsibly. So you can go hiking across any field or mountain or hill. You can go swimming in a lock, you can launch a canoe, you can wild camp. You can light fires again, as long as you're doing it responsibly. A little campfire. You can ride a bike, ride a horse. You can't go into kind of private land, so someone's garden or like a kind of work yard or a farm yard.
You can't trample crops. You can't disturb livestock, but you can, for example, walk along a field margin, find your way across the landscape. And the essence of this Scottish outdoor access code is that there's a default of access, a right of access. Except where there's obvious exemptions where it would not be responsible for you to, for example, walk across this wildflower meadow, walk through this herd of cows where it would really disturb them.
You have to, it's on you to behave responsibly and to educate yourself on what responsible access looks like. In England and Wales, we don't have that. We have a default of exclusion with certain access permissions. So we have about 140,000 kilometers of footpaths and bridleways, which Scotland tends, doesn't really have, it doesn't have the footpath network that we in England and Wales have.
And it's not to be underestimated. That footpath network is pretty awesome and really quite extraordinary in compared to other places in the world. And we have open access on, particular types of land. Now it's weird because it's an ecological designation. So it's for example, unimproved grazing and you're like what the heck is that?
I don't know what that is. Or unimproved, grassland. But most of it is moland mountains and heath, which inevitably isn't really where most of the people are. It's up and away. It's things parts of the Pete district, it's parts of the late district. It is parts of places like the South Downs National Park, but I.
Any other bits of it, you have to stick to a footpath or a bridal path, or a byway or you are not allowed to be there and you would if you were walking across a different kind of field. Then it's the, it's an act of civil trespass. It's a civil offense. And I'm a huge supporter. And on that open access land, you can only walk.
That's the only thing you can do. Or you could stop and bird watch or you can rock climb, but you cannot, for example, ride a bike, ride a horse. You can't camp and you can't swim, for example. The rights of access to water in England and Wales are like pretty terrible. I think something like 3% of waterways have rights of access.
Then landowners can, through their large s give you permissive access. They can say, we'll allow you to walk along this path to reach the river, but they can withdraw that permissive access at any point. There's no controls over what kind of thing that access looks like. So they could put styles in, they could make it really narrow.
They could put barbed wire. They could say, you can only come on every second Thursday of February and that's it. Or just say, we've decided not to now, so you can't come anymore. And I would really support a change in access in England and Wales that defaults in very similar ways to Scotland to say, actually, let's have a right of access to the land with sensible exceptions rather than the other way.
And the reason is twofold. The first is that it would create more access for more people close to where they live, which we all know. The evidence is stacked up that is good for our health and that is good for our mental health, our wellbeing, our social cohesion and resilience. But also really good therefore for productivity, for keeping people in work, keeping people economically active, reducing costs to the health service and social care services.
All this stuff is the return on investment is fast as soon as you've got viable green. Access. People just are better. They're more, okay. So that's one thing that you actually just increase access for people and you still need things like car parking and litter bins and styles, or not styles, gates, sorry, don't have styles 'cause they're really terrible for access, but accessible gates.
People will want paths as well. Not everyone wants to try and, plunge their way across a river or kind of try and tread down the kind of the scratchy brambly edge of a field side. Some people want to do that, but some people will want to path. But the other thing, the reason that I think access reform is really important and why it would create a kind of a real step change that is important in so many ways beyond just being able to go for a walk or a bike ride.
It changes our relationship with the landscape and it changes that sense of ownership and belonging and responsibility to one, which is, this is also my place. This isn't private property where I am here either under duress or with permission that can be withdrawn at any moment. This becomes a right, and with that right becomes a profound responsibility that this is my land too.
It's my responsibility, it's my duty to understand it better, to care for it and perform. There's a campaign group, the right to, and they call it wild service, which is also the name of a type of tree, the service tree. But fundamentally it becomes about a reciprocal relationship with the land and with nature.
Not one where you go as a consumer to use it recreationally and then you withdraw yourself back to where you came from where you rightfully belong, which is in a town somewhere, but actually this is land that is ours and that it feeds that much deeper essential relationship, which at heart acknowledges that we are part of nature and that we need nature and to care for nature is an act of service, but also an act that fulfills us profoundly.
Ben: So it leans away from it being a transactional money thing to stewardship and thinking about the long term and our relationship with the land and everything. I think that absolutely. Yeah. That's really fascinating and I. I hadn't also picked up until I was reading about your work that I think you are patron of the Witch Way National Trail and I discovered I didn't know anything about this trail and it's really ancient.
What drew you to that and what should people know about this trail?
Mary-Ann: The Ridgeway National Trail. It's one of 16 different national trails around the uk, which are designated in the same way under law. They're designated in the same way as national parks and national landscapes. Things like the High wheel or the Rocha Hills or the Lake districts, or the Peak District or south Downs National Park.
So these national trails are supposed to be jewels in the crown that really celebrate the the most iconic or culturally specific or unique in terms of the, the ecology of our landscapes. So things like the Pennine Way the walk along the Hadrian's wall the walk along offers Dyke on the England Wales border.
They're all national trails and the Richway National Trail has this kind of nickname as Britain's Old Road. And the National Trail section of it runs from Ivanhoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire just north of London, to Overton Hill, which is basically Avery in Wilshire. And it's about 87. It is 87 miles long, so if you wanted to walk it you could walk it in I guess a week or so.
A lot of people, some people but you can walk like little sections of it. And parts of it are the kind of Western half, the Wiltshire Northwest Downs end of it is accessible for horse riders and people on bikes as well. It's mostly bridleways, whereas the bit that goes through the Chiltons, the Chilton Hills is mostly footpaths, so you can't take a bike or a horse there.
And it's. It's remarkable. It follows the chalk escarpment that kind of runs, um, from northeast, basically the wash in Norfolk in East Anglia, down to kind of line Regis in Dset across that kind of bottom corner of the kind of UK mainland. And it follows the high ground. So you get really distinctive set of species of wildlife because the specialize with this chalk grassland.
But you also go past so many extraordinary archeological monuments that just are mind blowing. It's a really beautiful walk. And because it's chalk where the path is, it's exposed. And so you are literally following this really clear, distinctive white line through the landscape. And, it's inspired.
Lots of artists people like Eric Rubius who painted these landscapes where you've got this line of white that cuts through arching up and over these kind of rolling hills. And sometimes even though you are in really the most populated corner of Britain when you're up on the redway, you can, it can just be you, skylarks and some hares.
And it's really beautiful given that it's so close to so many towns and cities. It's it's quite a remarkable place.
Ben: That sounds amazing. So I have two teenage You should go. Teenage. Should we go? Yeah. I have two teenage urban boys, so this is definitely would be one on our list.
But is there a anywhere you'd recommend, I guess I'm London centric to that, but if we're to go anywhere in the uk. Where would you say we should go and have a visit or have a little adventure?
Mary-Ann: Why not start? Let's start on the Ridgeway. There's a really cool bit of a walk where you can walk from no, hang on.
Let's scrap that. So I'm a big fan of Avery Stone Circle. I Okay. Think it's better than Stonehenge. Sorry. It's better than Stonehenge. Sorry. Stonehenge. Partly because you can get up close and personal to the stone Stonehenge. You have to stay on the path and just like squint to see the thing and you're like, oh, is that it?
It's a bit small. It is impressive. Fine. But it's not cool. It's not viscerally amazing. Yeah. So going to Avery and you can hug these absolutely enormous, like tons and tons of stone and kind of wonder, genuinely marvel at the construction of the biggest Henge in Europe. It's a super henge.
It's so big. It's got a village in the middle of it. And then you've got these various stone alignments. You've got circles within circles. You've got these huge earthwork banks. You've got a Stone Avenue that leads out of the village. And if you walk up the Stone Avenue, a carry on for a. A kilometer and a half carry on for about a kilometer and a half.
So not too bad. Even for people who don't love walking, walk slightly up a hill and you get to a place called West Kennett Long Barrow, which is from about five and a half thousand years old. It's an old to from the late stone age, and you can go inside the spooky tomb and you can literally sit inside a prehistoric tomb that is older than the great pyramid of Giza.
Wow. And it's literally just you and a footpath and you can wander in and and it's it's on you to explore, which I think
Ben: I'm definitely gonna, I think we're gonna try and get there this year. And I suppose there's a whole ancient community complex around this, or was it more just a religious pilgrimage site?
Mary-Ann: Such a good question. Ben Avery is obviously. Really important. We don't know quite how it was used, but it certainly, it has ceremonial proportions. One of the really interesting things actually about lots of different Henge monuments. So Stonehenge is officially a hege because of a tiny earthwork way further out than the kind of big stones that you see.
And a hege is it's got a coming from the outside, it's got a bank of earth and then a ditch. So the ditch is on the inside of the circle. That's officially what makes something a henge as opposed to, if you think about like defensive earthworks around a castle, you would have the ditch on the outside and then a much bigger bank on the inside.
'cause you're trying to stop people from getting in. So they have to get down the ditch and then they have an even higher climb to get over the bank of earth with a wall on top or what have you. Whereas a hinge from the prehistoric period. So in the late stone age and the Bronze Age, what you end up, what you have as a kind of theme is that you've got the earthwork on the outside, you've got a bank and then a ditch on the inside.
So it's more like it's containing something on the inside rather than preventing something from coming in from the out or. Maybe the bank is for sitting on or standing on. So you can see what's happening inside the circle. So it focuses attention into the circle. And so one of the thinking, one of the kind of theories of how these henges might have been used is that they are communal gathering places where dispersed communities can come together to.
Either bear witness to some kind of important ceremony, or maybe it's a place where you go for particular processions or occasions, perhaps seasonal. Again, seasonal times that kind of mark the end of harvest or mid-winter or the kind of effectively like a brilliant knees up in the middle of summer where, you know, people hook up, you make trade deals, marriage arrangements, everyone gets wasted.
You have a big pig, barbecue, whatever it is, which we find at Dorrington Walls, which is a site near Stonehenge. They were just massively keen on pork barbecue. So much so that they throw carcasses away that have lots of meat on them still. And we can tell that because all the bones are still articulated.
So you know that the kind of the flesh and some of the tendons and stuff. So we think of the stone age as everyone kind of scrambling for a final, tiny hazelnut to stave off starvation. But actually they were doing well enough that they were feeding their pigs apples and honey, we can tell 'cause the pigs have rotten teeth.
They've been fed such sweet diets to sweeten the meat probably.
Ben: And they had lots of food waste as well then, or at least at times. And had food waste. Yeah.
Mary-Ann: Yeah, exactly. So this kind of conspicuous consumption.
Ben: And maybe had these, ritual performances and things, it really strikes me that these ancient civilizations, or even not so ancient, were just so much more sophisticated than my kind of lay interpretation was.
And actually a lot of the techniques and skills, some of which we couldn't even replicate today and have no idea what was going on, but also that civiliz what we might consider civilization or these techniques happened a lot earlier than it would seem, I dunno, I'm gonna pronounce this correctly from the Turkish site, but Ger Beckley Pepe, I think that's how you talk about that.
Yeah. Yeah. It seems that is ancient and they were doing things so far before we thought that humans started doing these type of things, and that might then apply to everywhere else in, in the world we're thinking. I dunno what you think about that or what kind of this, thinking about how it should change our view around what.
Ancient humanity has been doing and what we've been doing all of this time,
Mary-Ann: I I think you're right recently and in with increasing frequency, we have dating techniques that are more accurate. You used to be able to say, oh, it was somewhere between 12,000 BC and 8,000 bc, but we're not actually quite sure.
Whereas now we've got techniques that can really hone down dates or you can get a kind of sample from a particular type of artifact or biological residue. That means that we can get just a lot more information without destroying the thing in the process. But yeah, basically. Most frequently the thing that we thought first happened in 4,000 bc then you suddenly get dates.
For example, Quebec tepi this really extraordinary kind of ceremonial complex where there's evidence of early agriculture there's evidence of narrative storytelling in these kind of carved panels. And you just think. Oh, we need to recon, reconfigure that. There's even like way deeper in the past, we've got evidence of Neanderthals, for example creating a rock art making shapes of hand prints creating ceremonial structures.
This amazing super weird site in France where they found Stites arranged in a circle deep into a cave system far beyond the kind of natural light. And the only people who were around at the time were homo Neanderthal lenses, not homo sapiens, not us. And so you go, oh, we need to reconsider them.
That they weren't knuckle dragging idiots. They were. Sophisticated, creative capable of that kind of abstract thought. So quite regularly the kind of list of criteria that we use as human exceptionalism. Oh we are the only animals who do language. We're the only animals who create art.
And you go oh. No. It turns out Neal did that too. Oh. It turns out that, whales use vocalizations that distinctly identify different individuals, which you might otherwise call a name, for example. Yeah. You are right. They're not sitting around the whale equivalent of a campier telling stories about, the gods and monsters as far as we know.
But we constantly underestimate both other. Species and we constantly underestimate the humans who came before us. I think that's the one that's the, I think that should be on the list of human criteria. We're just rude and exceptionalist
Ben: regularly. And maybe I dunno whether it's this, I guess you could almost say it's a slack of imagination, but I was reading a lot about, and observed, for instance octopus.
So this is almost like ancient. And for as far as we can tell they might have their own culture, their own humor, their own sort of society. But it's so other, so alien. We can't imagine it. And we don't have their language, but it, they might go we can't understand your language.
Imagine if you could trade with octopus or speak with ants. Ants we could do so much for ants and ants could do for us if we could treat them on a level, but obviously it's not there. It's a little bit science fiction.
Mary-Ann: Yeah. But you are right. I think we. You think who, who loses when we have that failure of imagination or failure of curiosity?
And I think sometimes it's not because we can't work it out, it's because the impact of acknowledging the sentience or the importance or the integrity of that particular organism would profoundly force implications and changes in the way that we act, that we take for granted that put our needs first.
But fundamentally, we are, facing climatic Armageddon and a massive crisis in biodiversity collapse. And so business as usual is. Clearly not working. And because we're short term, it's that failure of imagination. And because we've got so much kind of vested interest in, for some of us, often the people who are pulling the levers of power and money where money goes they have enough vested interest in maintaining some version of status quo.
But it doesn't serve us, not as a species, not for the majority of us, in fact of the kind of 8 billion humans on the planet, and certainly not for the broader spectrum of non-human kin or other than more than human. If you want other than human.
Ben: Yeah. Maybe it's this failure of imagination, like you say, and vested interest from a minority.
Ben: Willful blindness.
Mary-Ann: It's interesting to contemplate what, don't, the thing that history teaches us is that we don't learn from history, but the same mindset of kind of dominion and fundamentally an exploit, an exploitative relationship, I think is ones that, you can see writ through with our relationship with the natural world, but also written through with cultures around the world through colonial and imperialist.
We've basically got that same imperialist mindset and we've we can point at the harm and say, oh, there's a thing that happened that wasn't great for some people except, maybe others. Yeah. They go, the railways were fantastic for India, well done us. And they should say thank you. The kind of the flip side of that is that if we perpetuate and continue and keep feeding those uncritical, unpro, ways of shaping how we understand the world, then we continue to cause the same harms.
Ben: Yeah. So I will put a glimmer of silver lining in that we seem to very slowly, much too slowly and much too painfully do achieve small bits of progress. So we went from slavery to women's rights, minority rights, disability rights, but.
Still more to go on all of those really to, to some extent and really slow. But they did come in. But I, I have a a thing within disability. It's why is that being so slow for it and continues to be so slow? But, when you look at it over human generations, at least you can see there is some, although I don't understand why we can't do it quicker for some of these things because they are only human made constructs, which we are disassembling and reassembling.
But there, there is a sliver of that. I do think we, we have made progress, but it does seem to be so slow on that.
Mary-Ann: Yeah, I think, yeah, I think you are right.
Ben: I only mention it because I, because when I speak about with this, my son I don't want him to give up hope as well because sometimes if you feel you can't do anything, then you end up not doing anything.
On the one hand, you don't want to you don't want to negate the scale of the problem or the challenge and the bad stuff that we do. On the other hand, you don't want to think that, oh if this is the case, then we're always powerless and we might as well give up.
So you've gotta got this weird balance of where you are in advocacy of we've gotta hope for the best, but we're also planning for the worst type of thing.
Mary-Ann: Yeah. And I think that idea of hope not being optimist, it doesn't need to be about optimism, it needs to be about a commitment to continuing the change.
Even though it's hard, even though there's no guarantee that you will succeed, the endeavor itself is of value and should not be ducked. I think the other thing is you are absolutely right. It's really easy for us to be pessimistic and go, oh, isn't things, aren't things terrible?
And they do feel admittedly quite terrible at the moment. And all those gains that I thought to some extent we had down there was consensus that this was a good thing. Now feel like they're at renewed risk of going backwards, particularly with the Trump presidency in to a kind of a lesser extent with, for example disability cuts announced by the kind of labor government in the uk.
You go, hang on a minute. What the things that we took perhaps were a bit complacent and took for granted. We thought we'd won that war and we could move on or won that battle and could move on. I think we need to potentially keep reasserting, the value and the why which is exhausting to say no.
It's important that, disabled people have every opportunity to live fulfilled lives. Whether they're the working, getting people into work or whether you are unable to work, you still deserve to live a fulfilled and, coherent life that has that is, beyond mere survival.
I, you think didn't the Victorians decide that was probably appropriate? Didn't we wasn't that, didn't we beat women's suffrage as a kind of concept?
Ben: Yeah. Settled that a while ago. I'm interested in your creative and writing process, 'cause you do all of this traveling and broadcasting and storytelling. You are a brilliant presenter, but you've also written all of these amazing books. I asked Cisco a number of people, and there's no right answers, but I'm always really fascinating.
Do you write in Burst? You keep notes, do you keep a little drawing pad where you are as well? Do you do it in weeks at a time or every day? How do you like to write and how's your process?
Mary-Ann: Oh, it's such a pertinent question at the minute, Ben. I have a very long overdue writing project, apologies to Mike at Pan Macmillan and it is coming who's my editor?
So I have two small children, one's six and one's three. And that has massively impacted my ability to, I think, go with what feels like the natural rhythm of my writing and creativity because it has to be shoehorned in between all of life and the kind of caring responsibilities.
Naturally left to my own kind of will. I would write from the afternoon into the evening in long days. I'm like more plotty, shyer horse than I am sprinting thoroughbred for sure. It takes me a long time to percolate and settle and faff about, and then I start to slowly get into the writing.
So I find that actually to get. Proper big bits of writing done. I basically have to leave my family and go and stay. I go and stay in a youth hostel where there's very little else to do, apart from going for a walk or sitting and writing. Those are my two permitted activities or go for a run or something like that.
Because otherwise I just end up, I don't know, I'm just making spaghetti bolognese and then putting the washing on. And then by the time the kids are in bed, you're just like, oh, I'm tired now. So working in short bursts does not work for me. It does for like adminy stuff, but like the big brain work, I need hours and hours on end.
And probably days upon days where you build up that momentum I'm definitely,
Ben: Do you edit as you go or do you put it all out and then edit? Afterwards, which you need your buildup of days.
Mary-Ann: Yeah, I try not to. My husband, Joe Craig is a, an author. He writes children's books fiction and I write nonfiction.
So the kind of, the activities are slightly different, but there are elements which are the same, which is and many years ago, I actually overheard him giving advice to a youngster who was saying, oh, I want to write stories. What, what do I do? And he said, basically, imagine that the writer and the editor are two separate people.
You can't do both jobs at once. So write first, edit second, because otherwise you get stuck trying to perfect before you've created, get it down in some kind of messy draft. The first draft is always shit. Make peace with that. That is part of the process. You don't need to show that to anyone, but you also want to turn off the critic in your brain so it doesn't get in the way of, you don't want someone standing over your shoulder going, that's a terrible, clunky sentence, right?
Or that's not the right word. Or, cool, you are not as bright as you thought you were, are you? You don't want any of that. Hush, hush, go away, make a cup of tea, annoying critic, editor person, and you just get it down with no judgment. And then you do the next stage, and then the next stage, and then another stage.
And that's where you can be a bit more critical and move stuff around. I've just started using Scrivener. Yeah. As a software. I was attempting to write this book that I'm working on at the moment, which is a history of our species, but short and very readable. It covers Quebec, Lee Tapi, in fact and Neandertals.
I was really struggling with a Word document of such a long manuscript that kind of has so many aspects that relate to one another. So I gave Scrivener a go, which I found very helpful because it also has the functionality where you can just make everything else go black, literally go black, and you've just got words and you don't get distracted 'cause it it looks and feels like words.
So you're not faffing with a really complex bit of software.
Ben: A decent amount of, screenwriters actually in some playwrights use a kind of Scrivener type thing. I use although I haven't done a long piece for a while, and I'm not sure I quite have the space around 'cause of children's things.
The post-it note strategy, which was the kind of analog version of a kind of scrivener. So when you have a scene or a little chapter, but also, or even something which would only be two or three paragraphs worse, and you have the heading, but you're not quite sure where you place it and you don't want to lose it.
You have it, but you also wanna go, oh, you know what, it's no good being in the middle, in the first third. It actually has to go all the way into the middle third somewhere. And you rearrange those or you realize you know what? That's no good. So you just pair up the post-it note and put it somewhere else.
Mary-Ann: Yeah. Yeah. That, that feeling of having no, nothing is sacred when you're editing. And you might have spent hours, days trying to get a thing. Clear or sorted, and then you go to review it and you're like, Ugh, I don't need it. Yeah. It shouldn't be here. Doesn't fit. Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't fit. But I'm a very paper-based person.
I like still use a paper diary, for example. I do try and get some of it online and I've, what I tend to do, I dunno why I do this, but I tend to create like email drafts to myself. So I use my drafts folder on Outlook to get down a kind of, like you say, a line or a link or a something.
Just again, because I'm, I I'm. I don't madly, I don't enjoy spending time interfacing with technology. I'd much rather be digging a hole outdoors or doing something in the naturey outdoor space. So the thing that even though it's clunky and doesn't quite do the job, it does the job well enough with less kind of mental friction.
Ben: Yeah. Yeah. My, my wife Anish actually does that quite a lot and she's she's writing in a kind of nonfiction narrative sense as, as well, but I'm always really worried. It's oh no, it's gonna, you're gonna lose it in drafts or yeah, but it's somewhere where you don't lose it and things.
But yeah, no, that, that does happen. That's what happen. Write and things. Yeah. I don't, if it does work to me joke. Yeah.
Mary-Ann: I yeah. I should, the kind should is always a terrible, it's, it is never that useful in any bit of life, but as a writer as well. I should be more organized.
Ben: Creative messiness though I'm really in favor of it, that actually it sometimes means you get linkages and ideas that you wouldn't otherwise if you are too rigid and rigid in form. Maybe that's just an excuse, but I do think it's, I, yeah, I do think it's true. Think
Mary-Ann: that's, yeah, I think that's very true and I think I'm, I dunno if it's a kind of stage of life or it's an age thing.
But I'm definitely less bought in to the idea of efficiency and kind of high output productivity now. Yes. Because a, it's not very sustainable. You burn out, but also because the, it is really easy, isn't it? In our kind of, in, in the world in which we live to feel like that's where your value as a person lies.
And it's really. Helpful, I think to sometimes just go, but why are you doing that? Yeah. What value does it value in perceived in a much broader sense, rather than, are you gonna earn money? Are you gonna earn lots of money or no money? You actually go, look, what does this add to your obituary for argument's sake?
Or by, creating some sense of positive legacy, not in an egotistical way, but in a kind of, have you left the world a better place? Yeah. And if you weren't that, ah,
Ben: riffing back to our idea of stewardship earlier. Yeah. And I do think it's almost in all things like big or small or personal or organizational, that the offset to efficiency.
There's trade offs in everything. Tell us, the economists say the offset of efficiency is less resiliency. And you see that to the extent that you make things just in time or one supply line really cheaply because this is really efficient.
Mary-Ann: Yeah.
Ben: You are much less resilient as a person, as a system, as an organization, as when something goes wrong and something always goes wrong.
If you have a single supply line really efficient, your supply line is disrupted, you have no more business. And so actually this is a lesson I think I take sometimes from nature. Nature has a lot of redundancy, which actually is resiliency in some ways. It's efficient in some ways it seems mysteriously inefficient, but it's not inefficient in this operational sense.
It's because it's building these other things other things around it.
Mary-Ann: Exactly. Yeah. And it determine, it depends on the timescale that you're perceiving as well. Yes. Like how big is the perceived, what are the parameters of your project? Inverted comm, and you're right, yeah. The idea of kind of redundancy or inefficiency being bad and you go, actually, if you reconsider, maybe that's the most important thing.
I was struck, I was chatting to a a youngster I know the other day who's 12 years old and was talking about doing duke of Edinburgh Award and how it wasn't really of value anymore unless you do your gold, duke of Edinburgh, the bronze and the silver, everyone's got them, so they're not really worth anything.
And it really struck me that for that youngster in their kind of social circle and their education circle. It was perceived as, what is the product, what is the output rather than process or what you might get from it By doing community service, by learning skills to go hiking and read a map by learning about a different project in a kind of follow your own nose, Montessori indulge your own learning and curiosity.
And I thought, oh no, what we're failing our youngsters.
Ben: This is exactly your point about the transactional nature of some of these items within nature. And to roll, lean back that obviously the majority of the value is not in your little gold, bronze, or silver certificate. Yeah, the majority of the value has to be in the experience and everything, but if you're only doing it for the certificate, then obviously you lose everything.
Anyway. Last couple of questions for you. Would be current and future projects, and then we might also tip into kind of any advice, thoughts you have, but maybe yeah. Current or future projects that you would like to highlight.
Mary-Ann: So the big current project is this book about humans, which I, I started writing a number of years ago and then put down basically because having very small children fries your brain, it turns out whilst also trying to keep all the other plates spinning.
So it's back up and running now and hopefully we'll get finished. I'll finish writing in that in the next few months. Basically, it's a short, super readable history of our existence as a species as really complex, socially, elaborate people, creatures, animals from the species that first started walking on two legs, so about three and a half million years ago.
To now to how our, that inheritance might shape how we respond to future challenges. But all readable and all quite sure. So not as thick as some books written on this subject. The idea is if you're a quick reader, you should be able to read it in a day. Excellent. That's my plan. Turns out writing short is harder than you think.
You think, oh, just dash it off. Nah, it turns out it's taking me longer to write a short book than it did.
Ben: Yeah, it there isn't that aphorism. I'm not sure who, is it maybe a tribute to. Is it Oscar Wilde or maybe Mark Twain? Something like, I'm sorry, this letter is so long I didn't have long enough to make it shorter or something like this.
Mary-Ann: exactly. I endorse that sentiment. It's exactly right. Yeah. Because you have to boil it down. Condense, yeah.
Ben: It Takes longer, but you not lose most of the meaning and everything that you want to say. Exactly.
Mary-Ann: Exactly. So that's taking up a big chunk of time. The other thing is as you mentioned before my role as president of CPRE, the countryside charity, there's so much stuff that's coming our way in terms of land use frameworks, in terms of energy infrastructure and build out of kind of grid new homes.
The government have committed to one and a half million new homes in, within five years, probably unachievable. But how you go about doing that, even in the kind of steps towards that, there's a way of doing it well, and there's a way of doing it that will cause really great harm and actually just make loads of money for the mass house builders, but not deliver affordable housing, social justice or protection of the natural environment.
So there's lots of stuff coming to CPRE that we feel passionately about, want to advocate strongly for drive policy influence. But also I think my perspective as president, like the public facing, person who shunters on in public about this stuff is to make sure, or to invite more people into the conversation and for people to go, actually this isn't a niche thing about boring planning. This is actually about how our country looks, how it operate. Our lives. Our lives. Yeah. And in the kind of same way that people say, oh I'm not, I don't really do politics.
And you go, of course you do politics 'cause you eat and you drive on roads and you live in a home and you think about what the future might look like for you or for your family or for your loved ones or for your job, of course you do politics. And so I think that I feel the same about everybody should, does countryside issues.
Whether you live in a high rise in the middle of the London Docklands or you live in a kind of rural cottage in the middle of Rutland. It doesn't matter. It matters to us. It. These things impact all of us, and we should all have a say. Yeah we need to grow our ecological literacy and confidence to, to speak out on these issues.
Ben: Yeah. I should have asked you about sustainable development in. Rural Britain or even Britain o overall. So maybe I'll sneak one in because there's this debate very live, particularly within England, around sustainable development, solar panels, local communities and maybe around this green belt.
So I've been to bits of the green belt and some bits of the green belt are really horrid, but some bits of the green belt are really lovely and it's this really difficult, this is this balance that we have that, we have got needs and we also want to protect. We also need to develop, but not lose but not lose.
What's really valuable about the past, and I see this in reading some of your books around some of the sites that we have or like this old wooden church and the like, the by. Able to incorporate some of the, now with the past, you actually keep the past alive and that's what people did in the past.
And then sometimes if you ossify something like when the green belt was set up, it might've been fit for purpose, then it might not be fit for purpose now, but how do we save the bits that we want whilst not letting it over? So that's a massive, huge question on the sustainable development, maybe seen through the green belt, but I don't know if you had wanted to share a couple of thoughts on that.
Mary-Ann: Sure. So the thing about the green belt is it's a planning designation. It was set up to prevent urban sprawl. So when it first got set up it was in response to development that was really ad hoc. Basically, you'd have a kind of a trunk road coming out of a town and developers would buy up the land and then they were building houses along the full length of these roads and then building out either side.
So then towns would get merged. And if you. Allow that to continue and you let the kind of the economic driver just push where development happens without a kind of strategic plan, you end up with Los Angeles where you can literally like just sit in a traffic jam for a day and not get anywhere.
Or drive and drive and drive and drive and drive, and you're still driving through suburbia and it's all car dependent and it's none of it is sustainable. And you go where is your food coming from? Where is your fresh produce coming in? How in particularly pertinent to us now in 2025 looking forwards, how are we going to mitigate for flood events?
If everything is built up how are we going to protect from heating within urban environments? If you don't have any green canopy cover, if you don't have areas nearby that provide biodiversity what happens to all these systems that are absolutely on their knees? Because we have undermined their what we were talking about before, we've undermined their redundancy.
You go, oh, we don't need this scrubby hedge row. We'll put more houses, or we'll put a car park here, or we'll build a factory or a data center. Or we'll expand the dual carriageway to a four lane motorway. That means that people can get to wherever they're going, or in a car individually, one single person in each of those gas guzzling cars or electricity guzzling cars.
Doesn't really matter what it's being fueled on. That's where we're going to invest time and money. But it's also where investing land and land is finite. Once you've used it up, you can't earth more up out of the sea. And the Royal Society did some modeling and said, and this was for the previous government, this government have even more commitments to what land they're using and for what.
But the previous government, the previous Tory government all their commitments for land, if you met each of those commitments for farming, for building, for energy infrastructure you would need, we would need a piece of land twice the size of whales to meet all the commitments unless you stack up benefits so that as it's called multifunctional land use.
So actually one of the ways to do it is to, for example, instead of having a solar farm here and a food production farm here, and a carpark there, why not put the solar panels as a canopy over the carpark and then actually you retain land for. Maybe it's wildlife restoration, maybe it's more food production, maybe the land that is being allocated for food production or protected for food production that's already being farmed.
How can we farm that in a way that is nature friendly and regenerative? Bearing in mind that I think, we throw around these terms like sustainable farming or regenerative farming, and you go what's the opposite? It's unsustainable and degenerative. Who's voting for that? And the only people voting for that are the people who either can't see what the alternative looks and feels and how it pays, or people who are profiting from the system as it stands.
In the short term because in the long term we all lose when, all of Carlisle is underwater. When there's massive supply chain shocks, when you go to Tesco's and you go, where are all the apples? And you go, the apples aren't here because there are no pollinators anymore. And you go, shit, can we get them from Senegal then?
And you go, no, 'cause they're screwed as well. Yeah so land is finite. I think fundamentally land is finite, so we have to use it really carefully. And up until now, the vast majority of us haven't really thought about it and haven't really had a say in how it's used. So I think the one thing I'd say is that we need to be really smart about how we use this finite resource.
And the other thing is that we need to ensure that democracy and democratic input is really strong and protected in that system of deciding and decision making fundamentally. The kind of that bottom line, which is democracy isn't about putting a tick in a box every five years. It's about having a meaningful say about things that shape our lives on an ongoing basis, in a way that you are both knowledgeable enough and empowered enough to have a meaningful input into the process, and then that input is taken into the consideration and the output.
You can see how your input impacted on the final outcome. As opposed to people going to public consultations, feeling like they're really impassioned in terms of what they're arguing for or what they're saying. Have you thought about this or we're worried about this, and they it feels like a kind of a paper exercise where someone's nodding why bother having them
Mary-Ann: If entirely disregarded because that's again, where you feed the rise of populism. People who feel like they're not invested in the systems of power and they go screw you. I'm gonna vote for those other crazies who are saying, we'll give you what you want. Yeah.
Ben: Strong democratic processes and much better thinking about.
Land use. Okay. That sounds pretty good. There you go. Yeah.
Mary-Ann: If we could last, if we sort that out that Yeah. Yeah. Then
Ben: that you can think, oh, I had a great time as president. Okay. Last question then is, do you have any advice for people, maybe these are people who want to do more with nature or maybe it's your amazing career of being both anthropologist and into broadcasting and in, into creative arts or any overall life advice that you would like to give listeners?
Mary-Ann: Oh. Oh, such a loaded question. Okay. Two. I'll go two things thing number one, career advice, particularly for youngsters, but actually I think probably relevant to everybody. And I have to remind myself, I give myself this advice too, which is that it doesn't all need to be part of a big plan. Say yes to stuff, follow your curiosity.
See where it leads be open to the journey rather than the transactional output. And in terms of connecting to nature, don't feel like it needs to be big or once in a lifetime. Or exotic or remote or expensive. It can literally be, we started Gorilla gardening, the patch of land at the end of our street.
And I live in suburbia just outside London. And it had some really scrubby bushes that maybe the council would've come and laid at the start of the season. But actually me and a couple of neighbors went, hang on let's try and do something with that little patch of land. We haven't got permission, but I contacted the local garden center and said, we're doing some community gardening.
Can you help us? So they gave us some vouchers to spend on plants, wildlife friendly plants. We've got some seeds that we're all pulling propagating on our window sills that we'll plant out when the little fellas are a little bit bigger and, and honestly the combination of social connection, investing in your place, people walking past going, oh, hello, what are you doing?
And just starting little conversations. It's lifted the whole feeling of what matters and that you find common ground with people that you might otherwise not have an opportunity to chat to or not feel like you are allowed to stop and talk to them. And actually the outcome is that we have a nicer environment for the people and a nicer environment for wildlife.
And we've made friends with each other. Yeah. So yeah, start small. Doesn't need to be expensive, doesn't need to be time consuming. Go for a walk and stop and use all five senses. What can you smell? What can you hear? Feel something, find a funny little bit of moss or a bubbly brick look. Notice the lichens growing on, or the mosses growing on the side of a tree or the side of a brick wall, or whatever it is.
Notice where the birds fly and where they don't fly. And don't forget to breathe.
Ben: Yeah. Oh, that sounds excellent. So follow your curiosity. And for nature, it can be small things. Yeah. So I remember we go mud larking down the river Thames or even just walking on the river, Thames Beach right in the middle of London it seems.
Yeah. But then you're transported far away and yeah. Through these small things
Mary-Ann: Or beyond yourself. Yeah.
Ben: Great. On that, Mary-Ann, thank you very much.
Mary-Ann: Thank you for having me.