Julia Hailes MBE

Sustainability Pioneer

Wilding week 2 (Jul20)

The diggers are in their element The water meadow is now looking pretty earthy with very little water at all. The old mill pond has been drained to reveal a shallow muddy bottom – it turns out that it was pretty full of silt. If we’d left it for a few more years, it would […]

Wilding has started… (Jul20)

Yesterday, the diggers and dumpers arrived, along with the wonderful Andrew George and his fellow wilder, Lesley Malpas (Operation Future Hope). When I’ve mentioned wilding people imagine it means animals like badgers and beavers. Actually, the focus will be on bees, butterflies and birds, along with the wild flowers, hedgerows and trees that will attract […]

COVID 19 MAY BE THE BOILING FROG WE NEED (MAR20)

I remember referring to the boiling frogs analogy in speeches about 20 years ago.  Some of you may remember that it was used by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth to help us understand why the world is not doing enough to avert calamitous climate change. If you put a frog into a pan of […]

Going wild in Dorset (Sep19)

I’m tremendously excited about our new landscaping project… The central idea is wilding and I’m learning about what this means in practice. One concept I found rather appealing was to look at nettles and docks, which love fertile, agriculture land, as the bully boys. And we’re going to replace them with a myriad of other […]