Peter Smith

Researching the writings of Grey Owl (Archibald Belaney) has been a passion of many for over 25 years. I recently gave a talk on the subject. A previous recording of the talk is available here: Grey Owls Legacy & Attenborough's Dream..   His work reveals a man who was profoundly ahead of his time. While he never used the modern terms "ecosystem services" or "rewilding," his work is filled with eloquent, precise, and passionate descriptions of these very concepts. He observed and articulated the beaver's role as an ecosystem engineer and the intrinsic value of wild processes long before science had formalised them into the concepts accepted today. 1. On the Beaver's Role in Hydrological Regulation, Flood and Drought Prevention This is a direct description of the ecosystem service of water storage and flow regulation. From Pilgrims of the Wild (1935): "The beaver is a natural conservationist, the only animal that practices it. He stores water, ...

  The Beaver's Call: How Grey Owl Ignited the Attenboroughs' Lifelong Mission In the annals of conservation, certain moments of inspiration shine like beacons. One such moment occurred in the 1930s, when two young boys from Leicester, David and Richard Attenborough, were taken by their father to a public lecture. The speaker, a tall, striking figure in full buckskins, was the conservationist known as Grey Owl. This single evening would weave a thread that connects a Canadian wilderness, the birth of British broadcasting, and the modern rewilding movement in the UK. The Enchantment in Leicester Grey Owl, born Archibald Belaney in England, had reinvented himself as a First Nations advocate and had become a global sensation. His message was urgent and new: that the beaver, then trapped to the brink of extinction for its fur, was not merely an animal but the very "engineer of the wilderness." He didn't just describe beavers; he described their function. He spoke of ho...

Scotland ’s recent announcement to raise over £100 million through private investment while abandoning grants for nature restoration projects , as reported by The Guardian , may at first glance seem a bold and progressive step towards environmental conservation. In reality, it risks becoming yet another mechanism to enrich the affluent while burdening future generations with insurmountable costs. Many conservationists rightly point to the destruction wrought by commercial forestry—stripping valuable habitats such as peat bogs , releasing vast amounts of CO₂ from our soils into the atmosphere, and accelerating climate change—as the main culprit. These are indeed symptoms of the perverse incentives embedded within our current economy and regulatory landscape. But the issue runs far deeper than mismanaged forestry or carbon leakage. At its core, this policy is a textbook case of rent-seeking . It invites speculative finance—much of it from American institutions —to carve up our natural ...