Elliot Newton did a sports science degree because nobody at school told him conservation was a career you could actually have. After some time driving ambulances for the South East Ambulance Service he returned to Imperial in his mid-twenties for a master's in conservation science. It was there that he met Lucas and the two of them founded Citizen Zoo.
Wildlife isn’t always found in wild places. Sometimes it can be found in those areas where we least expect it, such as a derelict retail car park in Ealing with an underpass nobody wanted to walk through. Here we take a look at the transformation that happened when five beavers that had been causing chaos on a Scottish farm were moved in.
Greenford Station, next to the site, flooded every year for over a decade. Since the beavers arrived three years ago, it hasn't flooded once. The council had previously costed a formal engineering fix at over a million pounds. The beavers did it for a fraction of that, with added flood alleviation, drought resilience and cleaner water as a bonus.
Kirsty and Elliot talk through why 84% of the UK lives in cities, and why rewilding has to happen where people actually live rather than far away places they occasionally visit. They get into how beavers build the dams and wetlands that turn single sites into habitat for birds, bats and invertebrates, and about the site's equivalent in Berlin, where over a hundred beaver territories have re-colonised the city on their own.
They also cover the numbers behind the Ealing Beaver Project, with more than 6,000 people engaged in physical activities on site in five months alone, as well as the UK's first urban beaver officer. It’s also the only fully publicly accessible beaver enclosure in the country, located in such a way that schoolchildren now walk through it on their way to class.
As Elliot puts it, we're in charge of designing our urban environment. We can make a conscious choice to have more nature in our cities.
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