[Music Playing] Dave: This is Shaping Places, a new podcast from The Conduit and The Crown Estate. Each episode, we meet the people helping to shape the world around us and ask them to reflect on the places that have shaped them. From community leaders and entrepreneurs to activists and policy makers, we hear how they're improving everyday life in their communities and beyond, and explore the experiences that drive their mission. I'm your host, Dave Erasmus, speaker, coach, and thinker. I'm joined by my co-host, Matt Mason, Head of Innovation and Skills at The Crown Estate. Follow Shaping Places wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss an episode. Our guest today is Sean McCormack, a self-confessed nature nerd on a mission to reignite our passion for wildlife. After six years as a clinical vet, Sean left the profession burnt out and searching for something more connected to his first love, the natural world. In 2016, he founded the Ealing Wildlife Group, which has grown into a thriving community of over 7,000 members, rolling out projects from pond restorations to the reintroduction of Britain's smallest native rodent, the harvest mouse. From Irish fields and childhood fox dens to London suburbs, now home to beavers for the first time in 400 years, Sean's journey shows how grassroots action can transform both landscapes and communities. Today, we'll hear how he caught the nature bug, why local groups matter, and what it takes to give wildlife a place in our cities. Welcome. Sean: Thanks for asking me in. It's good to see you again. Dave: It's been a while, a while since we were trying not to vomit on the seas, the Irish Sea going up to COP, was it three years ago? Sean: COP26, yeah. Cabin fever, I learned the meaning of that phrase. Dave: Well, that's a story for another day, but I'm really pleased to see you again, and I'm really excited to be exploring your whole world today in a way that we probably didn't get to do whilst we were navigating those seas. Sean: Excited to be here. Dave: And so, it's a special one for you Matt, as well, isn't it? Because Mr. Sean is an Ealing man, which we'll find all about, but that's also your home turf. Matt: Sean's responsible for one of my favourite parts of the local area in the Paradise Field's Nature Reserve and the beavers that we've got back in London for the first time in 400 years. Dave: So, we were dead chuff to make this happen today. But before we get into all that, take us way back when; where does Sean McCormack come from? Where did this all begin? Sean: I'm Irish, if you haven't noticed from my accent. So, I know I haven't been in Ealing all my days. I grew up in County Kilkenny and County Cork, and then moved to Dublin when I was about 12. So, I was just fascinated with nature and wildlife my entire life and didn't grow up in the countryside, grew up kind of suburbia really. Had cousins and relations in the country that I used to go visit in the summertime. But basically, while other kids were into sport or computer games and things, I was out trying to find nature wherever I lived. Had a quite outdoorsy childhood and just turning over rocks and looking at bugs and collecting frogs pond and doing all that good outdoorsy stuff. Dave: But you gloss over that, like that's sort of obvious, but do you think that was intrinsic? Do you think you just were wired that way? Do you think you had seen somebody else doing it? Sean: Yeah, that's a good point. I think there's an element of genetics and culture involved in that. I think certainly not my parents' generation, but my grandparents' generation came from the land from small farm kind of backgrounds, and they were very good gardeners. Whenever we visited my grandparents, I had that affinity towards nature, which was I think intrinsic. And then with my grandparents, I learned how to grow things, and they gave me little cuttings or plants to go home with. So, there was definitely a nurturing of that interest that was already there. Dave: It's interesting because I'm predominantly from Wales, moved to Surrey when I was four or five with my parents, and I had the same experience with my grandparents, that they showed me things in their gardens. My parents weren't really doing much with their garden, it was just a bit of grass. I donÕt know if you had that as well, Matt, but maybe there's something special about grandchildren and grandparents, and the time and the philosophy that they almost embody in their gardens and what they are able to teach you and send you away with. But I've not really thought about that much before. Did you have that as well? Matt: Definitely. I think my mom became a really keen gardener when she retired, but obviously your grandparents already retired. They're already in that phase of their life where they may be spending the majority of their time doing the things that they're passionate about rather than working. So, yeah, I have similar memories of my grandparents introducing me to plants and walking through the woods, pointing out bird songs and all of those kind of things. Sean: Do you think they were more connected in their childhoods to nature and the land? Like we've only recently I think, become quite a detached society from that. I was just reading on the way in the GCSE and natural history has just been announced and the government are going to bring it through. And it's like that was an attempt by campaigners for the last 10 years to try and reconnect children with nature in the natural world because we've disconnected from it. Dave: Well, in my life, I think it was that generational thing of disconnection, but also the dislocation of my family moving. I think you get a little ex council house in a new place, you donÕt know anyone, you donÕt know where the garden centre is, you're not embedded in literally, so you're not going to have time. It takes time to mature a garden and express your philosophy through the garden. But I'm interested, was it mainly aesthetic? Was it beautiful flowers that you were seeing or was it growing potatoes? Was it about design? What were they expressing to you growing up in their garden? Sean: I think it was more for me the fascination with living creatures. So, actually plants kind of came second, I ended up working in a garden centre, and ended up working as a garden designer to pay my bills through vet school. But actually, it was animals first and it was the accessible things. So, I couldn't go out bird watching age four or go to far-flung places and find amazing wildlife. I was just turning over logs and rocks and gathering up wood lice and centipedes and beetles and discovering all the tiny little micro creatures living on my doorstep. And then finding a pond with frogs spun in and bringing some home and growing tadpoles and growing tadpoles into frogs. It had incredible evolution in miniature basically. It was like a tiny, little squiggly creature turning into this incredible vertebrate animal that hops around. Dave: So, take us on from there then. You start in the garden, you get in that curiosity, what evolved for you next? Did you stay in the suburbs? Sean: We moved around a bit with my dad's job. He kind of climbed the ladder in insurance, and we moved from one place to the next and we settled in Cork, and we lived on the outskirts of town in a little housing estate of maybe 15 houses, and it bordered onto a dairy farm. And I had a best friend David, and we used to go out all the time, and there was an area of kind of rough ground and kind of uncultivated farmland in front of us. We used to call it the field, and our house faced the field. And it was a mixture of scrub and brambles and trees, and it was just a wild corner of the farm that wasn't cultivated. So, we'd go up the field, and we would discover things and we'd be out until it got dark in summer evenings, finding wildlife and creatures, and then going and exploring and probably causing mischief on the farm as well. But the field I think, that was definitely something in my childhood that really shaped me and really kind of gave me an outlet to go and discover all of the birds and plants and bugs and animals there. And I think one of the very early memories of this fascination and oh my God like, you can have wildlife right there in front of you that's doing incredible things, was a family of foxes moved into a den and we could see that den from our kitchen window. And I remember getting up early on a weekend morning, we were going driving down country to some relatives to visit for the weekend. And I remember my dad calling all of us up out of bed, ÒCome up, come up to the kitchen quick,Ó and the fox cubs were coming out of the den and playing in front of the den at six in the morning. And I remember just that moment of absolute wonder and joy that these wild animals are living right in front of us on our doorstep. And then I think this could be the romantic memory of the story, but I think the year after, the field got bulldozed and more housing development, it went from 15 houses to 30 odd houses in the development, and the field was gone. And that was devastating, that was probably my first encounter with just how destructive we are and just how little nature matters sometimes kind of went development and money is on the table, really. Dave: Bring us up from there to the Sean that we see before us. Sean: I think every adult in my life, like when neighbours came around or when relatives visited and they'd be asking me what I was up to, and I'd be waxing lyrical about the latest insect I found in a jam jar or whatever, they kind of were a little bit fascinated with that level of interest. So, they always said like, ÒWhat do you want to be when you grow up?Ó And I only knew two animal related jobs when I was a kid. I said, ÒI'm either going to be a zookeeper or a vet.Ó And the response almost every time to that was, ÒOh, it's very difficult to become a vet.Ó And my response as a stubborn little kid that I was, was, ÒI'll become a vet. I'll show you.Ó So, I kind of had that sort of track already mapped out for my entire life, I'm going to become a vet. So, I ended up, long story short, going the long way round doing animal science in a degree over in Essex. Came over to the UK, did animal science and then went back to Dublin to become a vet on the graduate entry program. And then my first job I was a zoo vet, so it kind of combined the two, wildlife and veterinary medicine. Dave: You showed them adults, didn't you? Sean: Yeah. I showed you sacrificing my entire 20s studying two degrees. Dave: But then the vet journey, you had a moment didn't you, where you sort of, it came to a head for you, and you've evolved your life and career once again. So, maybe you could draw us into that moment because I think that's fascinating. You spend your whole life bit between your teeth trying to achieve something, you show them adults, and then maybe beyond that point you realize, ÒOh, I need something more.Ó Sean: It might not be what I thought. Dave: Exactly. Tell us about that a bit. Sean: I'll tell a story actually, which I found quite shocking on my first day of vet school was one of the senior lecturers telling us as first year, first day of entry to vet school, ÒYou guys are the cream of the crop in Ireland to be on this course. You're very intelligent, you're wonderfully talented, you're going to make amazing pillars of societyÓ and all this stuff. And really blowing a lot of smoke up these kids behind and I just thought that's not healthy messaging, that's setting people up for some really strange expectations and bit of self-importance, and maybe setting them up for failure. So, I had a bit of a hesitant view and maybe a more rounded view of the whole course as I went through. And I knew actually that veterinary medicine has one of the highest rates, the highest rate of suicide of any profession. When I got into vet practice and started working as a normal clinical vet, the whole system is set up really quite strangely for vets and vets welfare, because you're working flat out very, very long hours. You're socially isolated even from your colleagues because you are behind the consultation room door with the member of the public and you're on this cycle of every 10 minutes someone new is coming in with a problem and your patient can't speak to you, and there's no NHS for your patients, so you're having to charge people for your services. And finances get tricky when you're dealing with pets and people's value on pet care and wanting human medical care for their animal. But it costs thousands of pounds to perform human grade medicine on an animal. It doesn't matter if it's an animal or if it's a human. So, it's kind of a bit of a perfect storm in terms of mental health crisis and things. So, I found myself after being in my third practice, I just found myself being quite burnt out and a bit jaded about, ÒIs this what I want to do for the rest of my life? Is this what I worked towards?Ó From going from a love of nature and the amazing planet we live on and all the incredible ecology and food webs and relationships, to going into a very micro level, almost like firefighting job for a lot of animals that we've bred, that we've sort of designed with inherent health problems. And I was getting the blame or getting the stress from the owner thinking you're charging me this and you're charging me that, and I was kind of thinking I can't afford a dog. I'm working my butt off long hours, I don't see my friends, I'm knackered all the time, I'm on call all the time, and I hate what we've done to certain pedigree dogs, but I'm firefighting it and I feel totally out of control. There's certain things that I completely, fundamentally disagree with and feel very passionately about, but I have no control over it, so it's causing me grief, it's causing me pain. And I started to get stomach problems, and I remember going into the doctor with a sick stomach and he teased it out of me. He knew from clinical life what it's like and he's, ÒHow are you getting on with your clients and how are you getting on with your colleagues?Ó And I started crying in the doctor's office and he said, ÒThis isn't a stomach problem, this is a head problem. I'm going to sign you off with stress.Ó And I was like, ÒI can't, I can't.Ó So, I got signed off with stress for two weeks and the sky didn't fall down, the practice kept going without me. And it just gave me a bit of thinking time, and I decided just to hand in my notice and see what happened, and I actually went back to garden design. So, I'd been working as a garden designer and a gardener during my vet school to pay my bills and a bit of beer money and all the rest as a student. I said, do you know what, I'm going to take a break from vetting for a while and just see what comes back to me and see what I really want to do. And I set up Reeve, started my garden design business, did two big garden designs. All of my garden designs have wildlife and sustainability woven into them, and that was for a whole summer, basically, I was outside in nature. I think I had a realization at that point in time that I needed to be working on a bigger level. Not with the micro, single dog with a health problem behind a closed door in a room with no windows for the rest of my days until I retire. I need to be outside, I need to be working on nature on a bigger picture. And the clincher to change it or the catalyst to kind of change things for me was I bought a camera. I won a voucher from a veterinary magazine competition survey thing, and I won a camera and I started going out in Ealing and realizing after living there for seven years probably, ÒOh there's green space here.Ó I don't live in a bustling metropolis, I live in a suburb really zone three of London, and there's loads of green space and there's loads of nature here that I didn't realize and never had a chance to dip into, but the camera got me to do that. And just kind of by coincidence, the lady who I did the first wildlife garden for, tagged me on a Facebook post where there was a journalist asking about bats in the Hanwell Viaduct (you know that Matt). And I started talking about bats and people were kind of fascinated, and it came to someone saying, ÒYou should do a bat walk.Ó And I kind of looked into it, how could I do a bat walk? I'd need to get a bat detector to listen to their calls. And I asked on the same group, if I was to buy a bat detector and would people A, be interested in coming on a bat walk this summer, and B, would they donate a pound or two towards the cost of a bat detector, and over 400 people said yes, and that was the inception of Ealing Wildlife Group. Matt: It is interesting in Ireland you're talking about living in suburbia and you moved to the ultimate suburb in London. I think Ealing has since Victorian Times been known as the queen of suburbs. Sean: Queen of suburbs, yeah. Matt: And it is an incredibly green, leafy area, but it also is an area that hasn't always done as much as it could to support nature in that green space. So, it might be interesting for you to talk a bit about your kind of experience of nature in this London suburb, and how it led into you thinking why I should do something about reintroducing some of these species. Sean: What I saw in Ealing, I suppose when I started exploring and the camera being the kind of prompt for that was that we had this green spine running through the entire borough, which is the Brent River Park. The Brent River kind of has this connected green corridor and there's all these green spaces off it. And we live in a world where population's on the rise and this housing crisis and things. And I started to see that bit by bit, those little green spaces were getting chipped away. There's another housing development here, there's towers kind of going up. And although there was a lot of joy in discovering kind of the amount of nature there, and I set up the Ealing Wildlife Group as a Facebook group to run a few bat walks, that was it. There was no other intention behind it. And it's grown into a monster as I describe it as my second full-time job that doesn't pay the bills. And then I think later on, started to join the dots and go, ÒActually, we can't just enjoy the bird song and go out on a bat walk every now and again, we have to actually protect these spaces.Ó So, we did work very closely with the council parks team for example, and we started doing kind of hands-on community volunteer led conservation projects. We got people down to say, ÒRight, we're going to clear out this pond and improve the habitat for newts, who wants to come?Ó And 20 people came down on a Saturday morning, and got stuck in in their waders and wellies digging out this pond. And actually, that action, really local action was something that built with time. And then we could go with a petition or with a kind of objection to the council and say, ÒWe've seen your proposal for this site, could you not adjust it or could you do something here, or could you mitigate for some of the problems you're going to cause because this is an area where we found brown long-eared bats, for example.Ó So, I think, involving people from the start and making it their project, that is the philosophy we've had all along at Ealing Wildlife Group and probably why it's quite successful. It's not a stuffy natural history society led by seven elderly white men who are absolutely encyclopaedias on Botanica, Britain. It's people who have various interests and knowledge, and we definitely have the nerdy spider experts in our group, and we have the bird aficionados and we have people with encyclopaedic knowledge, but there's no stupid questions and we never talk down to people. But the community buy-in stuff, we've definitely realized that that is a good model. And the harvest mouse reintroduction project that we did is a perfect example of that where I was thinking about doing it for a long time and my friend Emma, who runs forest school in Ealing, she said, ÒJust get people to sponsor our harvest mouse. Just raise the money with crowdfunding.Ó And I thought, ÒYeah, that's a genius idea actually.Ó And we said we want to reintroduce this lost species back to Ealing, it's in a gorgeous, little charismatic mammal, which always helps with fundraising. But we said, ÒSponsor your own Ealing harvest mouse for 10 pounds and then you'll be invited on one of the releases.Ó So, we launched a crowdfunder aiming for two and a half thousand pounds to buy an initial round of mice and start a captive breeding program. And we raised it in 48 hours because families of five said, ÒWe'll take five mice, here's 50 quid.Ó And everyone got behind that, and we reached much different demographics with that sort of community led this is owned by you, you can get involved, you can physically reintroduce a species to our borough's green spaces, and actually showing people that they can get involved in something. It's not exclusive membership only or you need to be an expert. You can come with your family and your 3-year-old, and we'll put a mouse in your three-year-old's hand and let them reintroduce in the wild and have that wow fox cubs moment that I had, that inspired my journey. Dave: It's amazing. I think that's what your big response on Facebook to me indicates as an outsider that there was a ripe culture, but nobody actively leading on this kind of thing so that the answer was yes when the request is put out, a big emphatic- Sean: 400 yeses, exactly. Matt: I want to get onto talking about the beavers. Dave: I knew that was coming. Matt: There is a connection because I think one of the other things that the council have been doing recently and actually have been doing for a long time is looking at land use in the borough as well. So, Ealing Borough is home to (I've never counted) an insane number of golf courses from incredibly exclusive golf courses through to kind of public golf courses, which has been a benefit in some way because it's protected land from development over the years. But we don't need that many golf courses and golf courses are intensive in terms of maintenance, and they don't do a great job of housing natural species and things. And so, one of the things that the council have done recently is taken a golf course out of service that was a council owned golf course and turned it into a new park called Pear Tree Park. But that is also I think the history of the Paradise Fields area, which is where you do a lot of your work as well, right? Sean: Yes. Yeah. Once upon a time, Paradise Fields was a golf course, then immediately grassland and sports pitches. And in the year 2000 a big retail park was built next door, Westway Cross, and has mitigation for the amount of hard landscaping and the potential flood effects that that retail park would create. They turned Paradise Fields over into a wetland flood mitigation project. So, they dug out a large lagoon and various scrapes and ponds and planted up a large area of reed bed to try and improve water quality, and they kind of let it go and they stepped off it for 20 odd years. A lot of willow trees seeded in, the place rewilded effectively, and for a while, did mitigate for flooding. But in recent times, the area downstream around Greenford station, Tube Station on the central line, huge hotspot for flooding in the winter. We were talking behind the scenes about reintroducing water vaults. So, climbing the rodent ladder from our little harvest mouse. And I said, I think rather than Ealing reintroducing water voles, we should think about beavers first because beavers are the keystone species for water voles and all of the other aquatic life that exists in a beaver wetland. And we started that little kind of thought process and it grew and grew, and we floated it with the public and people laughed and said as if we'd ever have beavers in Ealing. And we went to the council, and we said, ÒLook, beavers can do all of the things that you're planning for Paradise Fields, but they can do it certainly cheaper, more sustainably and gently on the planet, and probably more effectively than you're planning on doing. So, how about we put a proposal to Natural England to put in a beaver enclosure trial and see what beavers can do at Paradise Fields because they'll also improve the habitat for water voles if we're going to reintroduce the end line.Ó And the really lucky fact was that the head of parks in Ealing is a guy called Chris Welsh and he's Canadian. And we said, ÒChris, we want to bring beavers back to Paradise Fields,Ó and he said, ÒOkay.Ó So, we got over that hurdle very, very quickly. He was all aboard the beaver train being a Canadian. So, yeah, we have brought them back there with three objectives. One is to look at their impact on an urban river catchment and see if they can be a tool for flood mitigation and drought mitigation in summer. One is to look at the habitat and biodiversity improvements with the potential to reintroduce waterfalls down the line. And third, probably the most important thing was to engage urban communities with nature and green and blue space, and rewilding and seeing nature based solutions being a part of urban life as well, and it's been fantastically successful on all three counts so far. Dave: Again, I'm just trying to extract little reflections from what you're saying because there's so much in there. And bear with me on this one because it's a bit of a long road, but I'm so struck by the power of your storytelling by showing them that it's a cheaper solution to use beavers. You're understanding the market dynamics and the framework we need to get to as a society is where it's cheaper to have a regenerative relationship with nature than an extractive one. But the framework isn't there yet, but yet you've found a specific case study there where you are able to try and show that the value equation, the monetary equation works better to have a regenerative solution than an extractive or sort of dilapidating one and I just think that's really powerful. And I wonder if that's partly because of your kind of Celtic roots because I think a lot of the English have really lost their indigenousness through all the occupations that have happened. And I find that in the Welsh and the Irish, there's a much stronger storytelling capability to get deep into the value, the pure value in the middle of the story that actually opens people up or changes minds and stuff. And I'm just really struck by your talent of doing that, and how that alone basically has helped produce or set off these things as an artist really that have captured the hearts and minds and made difference. Sean: I mean, some might call it manipulation. I try and find what's at the heart of people's hesitance on this topic or why are people so angry or just passionate about something, how can I bring them around to my way of thinking that we're living in a crisis, we're living in multiple crisis, and we have to turn things around; we have to do things differently, we have to be gentler on the land, we have to put ourselves alongside nature instead of pitting ourselves against it all the time. Matt: You mentioned that the Paradise Fields is next to this retail park and it would be interesting to hear about how those two things sit next to each other kind of physically, do they make good neighbours? Sean: We constantly said, it started this project when we were proposing it that beavers are not a wilderness species. We only associate them as a wilderness species. I associated them as wilderness species because the books I had read growing up, beavers were in Russia and Alaska and Canada and the fur trade and that's because we pushed them to the brink of extinction because we harvested them. Their pelts were extremely valuable to us, we used their meat and their gland secretions, and we pushed them to the brink of extinction. So, yes, they were a wilderness species, but we lived alongside them. And we said to natural England basically on this project, it does sound bonkers, we get that, we get your hesitancy, but beavers are back in Britain now. There's been 25 years of releasing beavers in a legal way, controlled way, and there's been beaver bombing or as I like to call it, fly tipping charismatic mammals out into the countryside. But beavers are back and there's thought to be 2 or 3000 wild, free-living beavers in the UK now. We said there's beavers in Kent, there's beavers in Oxfordshire, it's only a matter of time before beavers are back in Greater London. Let's learn how to live alongside them now in a controlled way so that we can welcome them back for all of the benefits that they bring down the line when they start to show up of their own accord. Dave: If someone's listening to this and they've always been a bit curious about turning over rocks and they think they might live in a place where there's a bit of human spirit there, but not a lot going on with nature stuff, what would you encourage them to do, following, listening to this? What were the first thing, the simple thing that they could try? Sean: I think first, see if there are any other groups doing things and involving volunteers, and getting out and doing something. Because the power of volunteering, even if it's just a couple of hours on a Saturday morning, it's not just that you're doing something good for nature, it's that you're connecting with people who also care. And I suffer badly with eco anxiety as I think we probably all do. Just the act of getting out with people who want to do good really, really helps you to connect. And we can't control things on a global level, but we can get involved on a local level. So, I think, see if there's anything out there. If there's not anything out there, maybe put a post out on social media like I did and say, ÒDoes anyone want to do something?Ó And see what builds from there. Dave: I wonder if that's something of an antidote to the feeling you were having when you were in the vet room and not able to do what you wanted to do in this environment. You are finding that remedy as well. Sean: Absolutely. I mean, the Beaver Project is a brilliant example. It's volunteer-led. I manage the Beaver Project as a license holder. I manage it through WhatsApp groups. It's dedicated lists of volunteers who are coming in doing fence patrols and there's a dedicated team doing water quality monitoring. We found the tribes and given them the ownership to say, ÒCome and get involved and do it selves,Ó and yeah, that's been really, really exciting to see. Dave: Amazing. And as we come into land, I'd love to just pause for a second and just sort of fuel up the imagination station a little bit and think, okay, if the country kind of went, ÒHey Sean, come to the head of the table. How do you want the country to be? What can we learn from Ealing? What do you think we really need to see shaping our places in the future?Ó Sean: I think (and this can be seen as kind of like hippie dippy thinking or whatever) the fundamental thing that would change a lot of this is if we all took a breather and analysed what we do and how we behave, and basically took a step back from consumption for consumptionÕs sake. Spend less energy, buy fewer things, let's get a little less materialistic and consumptive and destructive. Like do we need that? Do we need to fill our houses with stuff? Do we need to constantly chase the newest technology and product and brand? Just try and disconnect a little bit and live a bit more sustainably and get some connection back to the land So, you hear the kind of cliched things of like, ÒShop from local food producers and da, da, da.Ó Some people can't afford to do that. There's some class and social justice issues involved in telling people to live more sustainably. But I think on a blanket approach, if we all just said, ÒDo I need to buy that thing? Do I need to go to that place?Ó And if it's not going to your local farmer's market and buying organic food (which is expensive), it might be going once a week to the local community farm and getting stuck in and growing some vegetables with people, or volunteering a few hours for the local food growing place that is supporting people with mental health, or coming and digging out a new pond with Ealing Wildlife Group. Just getting that sense of slowness and connection, finding your village. So, I think just that reflection of slowing down our consumptive western world lives would make a huge difference. Dave: And like you said on the fields in Ealing, taking our foot off the gas on the mower, taking our foot off the gas of life as well. Sean: Of life, yeah. Just consume less and do less, spend less energy and reconnect. Matt: It's easy to talk about what we should be doing as communities and as places, and it's hard to sometimes understand how to do it. And I think you've told a really good story of how to (using very simple tools) get people together to work on something and achieve something that has had a real impact. And I think at a place level, there's a lot that other places around the country can learn from that. You don't have to have huge public consultations and sometimes, it's just crowdfunding of a bat sensor that can start something going. Dave: I find that incredibly empowering and encouraging. Is there anything you want to share that we haven't addressed whilst we've got the time to together? Sean: I think there's no better therapy in this mad world than coming beaver watching at Paradise Field. So, if people do want to come along, just look at theealingbeaverproject.com, book a beaver tour, and also watch the film Beavers in Paradise, which tells that journey to getting beavers back. Dave: Thank you so much for coming and talking with us on Shaping Places. My mind's been exploding the whole time. It's great to see your face again. Sean: I can see you twitching over in the corner. Dave: Yeah, I'm like, God, I said I just wouldn't say anything, I'd leave it to Matt, but I can't stop myself. Which is always a good sign that it's teaming full of life just as all the projects are. Well, all power to your elbow, and I hope to see you very soon. Sean: Thank you. Come down to see the farm. Dave: Yeah, look forward to it. Sean: Thanks, guys. Dave: Take care. [Music Playing] That's the end of our first episode of Shaping Places from The Conduit and The Crown Estate. Plenty more conversations to come, so follow the show wherever you get your podcasts. For any links or resources mentioned, check the show notes in your podcast app. I'm Dave Erasmus with Matt Mason. We record at The Conduit in London. Take care of yourselves and look after each other. 1