Vegan Land Movement with Gina Bates

[00:00:05] Mariann Sullivan: I'm so happy to have you. And listeners, please forgive us if the sound is a little off, because Gina lives very far north in the UK, from what I understand.

And I really want to get into the area that you live in. But first of all, let's get into the basics. Can you tell us what the Vegan Land Movement is and just the overview of what it does?

[00:00:23] Gina Bates: I'll try and keep it as short as possible. A few years ago I had the option of buying a sheep farm here in the Scottish Highlands.

I went for it and I bought out this sheep farm and then I thought, I'm going to create a veganic farm. And all the sheep obviously went with the previous owner. And I went to the crofters commission to try and get some sort of help regarding funding to create grown nut orchards and things like that.

And there was no funding and no help. I then heard a program on the Radio 4 here, which is, you know, is quite a well listened to radio station, about how the far right were funding themselves. It was really shocking. You know, people were posting hate from their garages and raising tens of thousands of pounds, from just posting hate stuff.

So, I thought, well, that's an idea. I'll look into a crowdfunding to create this alternative, veganic farm, which is what we obviously want to create. And so, we created a vegan only crowdfunding platform, and I funded my first nut orchards here. I've got 300 hybrid hob nuts, and I'm growing walnuts now. I'm also growing apples, all veganically, so no animal manures or anything. And then, from that, came sort of another idea in my mind, was that, hang on a minute, you know, I was on social media, I joined Twitter, and there was loads of moaning and loads of graphic footage being sent to each other and how horrific it is.

And occasionally we'd pick up somebody who hadn't seen the footage and thought, well, you know, I'll go vegan now. But there were few and far between. And what I realized was that actually there's no real alternatives being created to land use. So I got talking to some friends that I'd met on Twitter and we decided to come up with this idea of a vegan land movement. So that based on the crowdfunding idea that, you know, there are literally millions of vegans, and what if we all just donated one pound a month? So based on this awful program I heard about the far right, this group were literally getting pound donations to fund their hate trip, and I thought, what if all the vegans just donated a pound a month?

We could be buying out dairy farms every single month, and sort of creating sanctuaries, creating alternatives to land use. So, we floated this idea on Twitter, and a plot of land came up for sale in Somerset, which is the biggest dairy area in the UK. It's just wall to wall dairy farms.

And it was only a small area of grazing land, three and a half acres, so it wasn't very big. And we posted it on social media, and it went crazy. People were donating from all over the world, quite a few w Americans, a chap in Manila who was a tree planter, a vegan tree planter in Manila, donated 3, 000 pounds. And before we know it, we had the money to go to the auction. We actually lost that first auction, because it was all over social media.

There were farmers getting involved, and we suspect that these farmers ganged up and outbid us in the auction because this plot actually ended up going for double what it's worth. So we were a bit bruised and upset about that, but there was this sort of consensus on Twitter to actually go to the next auction with the money that we'd raised and to do it by stealth.

So this is what we did. We secretly went to the next auction and we won really easily. So we bought this first plot. That was in 2020. , And then it's just taken off from there really. It's not taken off as much as we hoped. We're fundraising now for the 6th plot.

But there is a momentum. We've got subscribers now. We've just built a new website. It's moving forward, but realistically more than millions of vegans out there, we should be buying these areas and large farms every single month and rewilding.

[00:04:27] Mariann Sullivan: That'll be the next step. It seems to me that you've done an enormous amount considering that you just started with this idea and it grew very organically, so to speak. So it seems like you've done a lot, but I agree. I would love to see it much bigger.

So you say you've done it so far with five properties. Were they all dairy farms?

[00:04:47] Gina Bates: Yep, they're all dairy grazing. In fact, the third area we went for was destined to be a chicken unit. It wasn't going to be a huge chicken unit, but this particular area of land, it was only another small plot of about four acres, had planning permission for a chicken unit for 20,000 chickens.

There were two chicken farmers that were interested in this third plot, so we couldn't publicize this at all on social media because, once again, the farmers, I mean, we've been really attacked by farmers on social media because, obviously, they see us as a threat in taking their land away from them.

So this chicken unit plot... I mean, we were determined to block this chicken unit, so a couple of bigger donors came on board. And we did sort of plan in lots of groups on social media, the private vegan campaign groups. So we posted it in those groups and before we knew it we had enough money to go to the auction for the chicken unit piece of land and we won.

So we blocked a chicken unit and stopped all those birds being brutally farmed, and all the subsequent pollution that would come from that farm as well. I mean, the other thing about chicken units is, probably some of your listeners are aware, is that they always start with these little small units, like this was a 20, 000 birds a year unit, and then before you know it, they've expanded to 200, 000 birds.

[00:06:17] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. What happens to the parcels after you buy them? What happens next?

[00:06:21] Gina Bates: Well, what happens next? So we insure the land. We go out of our way to actually protect it as much as we can.

And then we plant trees. So, in this particular area, there are lots of endangered species in Somerset itself, where the land is, because it's just grazing as far as you can see. We take these parcels, we plant native saplings because we would just let them rewild naturally, but we can't really do that here, we need to help give it a helping hand because there are no tree species that are depositing their seeds nearby, because it's just literally miles and miles of grazing.

So we are planting native trees. On the area that was going to be a chicken unit, because it's actually not far from a village, we decided there to only half rewild that, and on the other half to plant a community orchard. So we've planted sort of, I think about 30 or 40 different trees at the moment, apples, plums, green gauges, and things like that to create a food source for later on. So we thought that because it was going to create awful food in the form of these poor chickens, wouldn't it be lovely to create a lovely veganic community orchard that will produce food?

So on that plot there's, about a third of it is an orchard and the other two thirds, we're letting that rewild.

[00:07:48] Mariann Sullivan: saw on your website, though I only found out about your new website, I think just this morning, so I'm not that familiar with it, and it looks fabulous, but on the older website, I saw this statement that you're rewilding is in accord with eco vegan principles.

Can you tell us a little bit about what that means?

[00:08:04] Gina Bates: Well, for me, it's about protecting all species. We get so many messages saying, can I come and camp if I donate? Can I walk my dog there? And things like that. It's kind of, we're trying to get people to join these dots.

So the ethical vegan principles when it comes to land use, so obviously we don't use any fertilizers, pesticides or anything like that. Everything has to be organic. We have to look at every single creature and species. Everything has the same importance whether it's a tiny fly, or a hedgehog, or a, you know, a rabbit, a deer, everything has to be given a chance to live in harmony. So, for me, it's about embracing the whole of life.

When you look at these plots of land now... on the new site, we just put a species counts area on that new site. We've sort of updated and added all the spreadsheets of how much it's rewilded since the first set of counts that we did 2022. Last year it had jumped a phase in rewilding. So now we've got breeding mammals and breeding birds on these plots, and it's so overwhelming to see life returning.

Yeah, so we've got to protect that land. It's not about humans. Obviously, we all benefit. We need to let go of the idea that this is about us.

The vegan land movement is really not about us, even though we want it to be a movement of like minded people that all come together to help protect the environment, protect species, and create, sort of, oases where species can flourish. Not so we can go in, camp, or do whatever we want in there, but for the species on their own.

[00:09:50] Mariann Sullivan: How do you make sure, just from a legal viewpoint, like, if somebody was donating, and they want to be sure that this land is protected forever, not just, you know, for as long as you're alive, or this organization is functioning, they want it to be protected forever, and I assume you do as well. How do you make sure of that?

[00:10:07] Gina Bates: We were legally advised to become a community interest.

[00:10:11] Mariann Sullivan: I saw that on your website and it didn't sound familiar to me.

[00:10:14] Gina Bates: So, there were two, we looked at becoming a charity. Charities really are a minefield, we could all get voted off and stuff like that. So, we were legally advised to become a community interest. Within this particular structure, there's something called an asset lock. So in this case, the asset is the land, and it protects the asset from human gain, because it's a community, and it's about community. We wrote a constitution, weaving into the system of the asset lock, that this wasn't just about human communities. Community interest companies are set up by small communities to do, you know, maybe a community lot scheme or something like that.

So it's sort of human based, but we were able to weave in non human communities being protected into our constitution. If you come to any of our four plots of land now, it is a whole universe for species you see, suddenly, that has moved in and made any particular plot their home, is a whole universe to that species.

And so we wove into our whole structure that it was about protecting non human communities. And the asset lock means that none of us humans, we can't suddenly think, Oh, we've had enough of this, let's cash it all in and run off with the money. We can't do that!

We're all volunteers, if for some reason we all had to suddenly stop doing this, then all the land has to pass over to another organization doing the same thing, has to be sent to either a charity who's gonna protect it in perpetuity or another community interest company.

And at the moment, we've chosen Surge Activism. We had to name somebody who would then take up the battle, if you like, to carry these plots of land forward. In the UK, the Crown, our Royal family, literally does own all the land, so if they wanted to put a motorway, we would have fight against that. So there are powers that we can fight against.

[00:12:19] Mariann Sullivan: Here as well, you can't sew up every possible thing that's going to happen. But you can put a lot of limitations on what can happen to land even when you're gone and you're no longer in charge.

And what you're saying really indicates that if people want to do this in other countries, you have to look into the particular laws of that jurisdiction and make sure that you tie that land up as well as you can in perpetuity. Which it sounds like what you're trying to do.

And I would recommend that, is it your constitution that you call it? That list of principles? For anybody who's interested in doing this, it seems like a very, very useful place to start in trying to limit what can be done with the land. Your idea is so big, even though you say you've started small, which is true. And it sounded like from what you were saying, all the land you've bought so far is in Somerset, and the idea is very big, and yet what we're all fighting is so big.

Animal agriculture is just so enormous. Why do you feel it's important to plan this whole alternative way of looking at the world when we're so far away from that?

[00:13:22] Gina Bates: There's a great quote, and it's on the website, it's by Buckminster Fuller, and it says something like, we don't change the system by fighting against the existing reality, we change the system by creating an alternative reality to make the system look obsolete.

I love this quote, I I've just paraphrased it, but I really love it, because basically what it says is that if we create something that shows that the other system doesn't work, then that is more likely to create change. And this is what I'm doing here on my 80 acres here, which I'm growing nut trees. It was a sheep and cattle farm, and it was completely barren, grazed bald, with no wildlife.

Now it's an oasis in the middle of grazing. It's wall to wall grazing here of sheep and cattle. So my croft is now, croft is a sort of highland farm, my farm is an oasis for wildlife. it's absolutely come alive in the last couple of years. So I'm creating an alternative. And already people start to slow down when they pass, you can see people slow down and look. My farm is full of butterflies, birds, and nobody else's farm is. It's early days, it's only five years, but within ten or twenty years time, my nut orchards and my fruit orchards will be producing a viable crop.

[00:14:50] Mariann Sullivan: Now, just for people to understand, your farm is your farm, or your croft, but that's not a word that I'm familiar with, is yours, and that's very far north in Scotland, right?

And the land that the Vegan Land Movement is buying is much further south, and these are separate, even though they're very related in some ways, theoretically, they're separate things.

[00:15:12] Gina Bates: They're completely separate things. I think what's happened with my purchase of this farm here, which is my own separate, was it enabled me to think about what was needed, with land use.

So, I mean the picture I have in my mind, this is what I wanted to happen, was that we would go on to social media, we would say, look, you know, here's a dairy farm, there was one that came up for sale last year, it was 250 acres, it was a dairy farm. All been refurbished, but didn't have the cows or anything there.

And they were selling it as a dairy farm and it was a million pounds.

And I look on social media and there's vegans on there with half a million followers. And I think, well look, you know, this isn't rocket science. All it takes is for all the vegans to turn around. They're all facing the other way at the moment. It feels like it's all about protest and marching and, you know, don't do this, try and do this, and trying to get somebody else to do the work.

But if we all suddenly turned around, bought that dairy farm, and created something else with it, like a, it could be a mushroom growing unit, or a vertical, you know, vegetable growing unit, anything we could actually create, if we all work together to do so. And the other thing I always say to people as well, is that imagine if you woke up tomorrow and all the animal exploitation had ended, and suddenly everybody was vegan.

What would we need to do?

[00:16:43] Mariann Sullivan: I love that.

[00:16:43] Gina Bates: We couldn't just say, we couldn't just sit there going, oh well, that's that then. What we would need to do is create these alternative solutions. So why are we not creating them now? You know,, there's a few sort of veganic farms, there's a quite famous guy here called Ian Tollpost who's got a veganic farm and I think he's got something like 20 acres.

And he grows loads of vegetables, feeds, you know, about 100 people or whatever it is a year. But it's not been scaled up, there's not enough of this going on. So it's these small little pockets of people that are creating alternative things, but we're running out of time. You know, we are seriously running out of time, and species are running out of time far faster than we are, you know. One in six species in the UK are facing extinction. You know, across the world, species are becoming extinct before they've been discovered.. Yeah, so if, if, If everything stopped, all the world that we hated, all that horrible, ugly part of existence disappeared tomorrow, we would have to create these alternatives.

And I think that's what's missing. It's really missing to show examples.

[00:18:01] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, how the world could be.

Yeah, I love the thought. I mean, I think it's so hard sometimes to have a vision, even of, you know, the world going vegan or anything, because we're so far away from it. But it's so important to have that vision, even if it doesn't feel possible a lot of the time. You mentioned like, we're running out of time and that is true. How do you make sense of the fact that nobody seems to notice that?

[00:18:25] Gina Bates: I don't know. I don't know. Because I think I, on my down days, I mean I live really remotely and it's been a real challenge for me because I came from London and I was sort of, you know, suited and booted and you know, earning loads of money in London.

I cared, but I kind of didn't know who I was and then I moved into the wilderness and then I had to find myself. I don't think people realize, you know, the extent of the damage that's happening. I'm anti plastic, so I did a bit of research recently about plastic, and obviously we hear about the, Pacific garbage patch, and this sort of pollution element of microplastic in plankton, and, you know, it's just really, really scary.

And obviously people talk about these tipping points where the ecosystems start to unravel. In ecological circles it's called the Great Unravelling. And it's like a jumper, you know, you keep pulling at the threads and all along the whole thing just disintegrates. And I think that this is where we're at.

We're in a position if we don't act now and turn this around... in my down days, I actually think there's no hope because humans are unfortunately very selfish. They want to eat strawberries on Christmas day.

They want to have pancakes. They want to have all these things shipped in from the other side of the planet. And the amount of waste, I mean, you know, if you look at how much just you and I, or everybody who's listening to this, just what the amount of waste that we have to deal with.

Whether it's plastic around our food or, you know, that stuff, where does it go? I don't think people pay that much attention. They send it off for somebody else to deal with it. And I think that's, that's the problem, the main problem in life, is that someone else is going to deal with the mess that we make.

And the Vegan Land Movement is about not waiting for somebody else to deal with it. It's about actually trying to deal with it ourselves. So if we all mobilize to actually work and deal with these problems ourselves, what difference could we make?

[00:20:38] Mariann Sullivan: Going from the globall to the very specific, tell us a little bit about what does happen, when one of these parcels is allowed to go wild, and I know you don't exactly manage them, but you must manage them a little bit and try to make sure that things stay safe there. So, what do you have to do to keep an eye on them, to fix things that might go wrong, and, and what happens? Who arrives, and what do they do there?

[00:21:02] Gina Bates: Oh, we visit a couple of times a year. Three, sometimes four times a year. So we go down, once we've bought the parcel of land, we go and have a look at it and decide what species of tree would be good to plant there. We are very, very selective of the native trees that we plant. So we've got quite a good connection with specialists in that field.

We select the species, we also select species that have relationships to each other, and we select species that can help benefit the other species that are facing extinction. So, for example, the little arboreal hazel doormouse that we feature on our website is critically endangered in the UK.

So, it's the only arboreal dormouse that lives in the UK, and basically if you have a woodland with the hazel dormouse living in it, they are known as bio indicator species, so they let you know that actually that's a flourishing ecosystem. So they're a really important species, in so many different ways.

So, we are planting food sources to encourage that mouse.

[00:22:12] Mariann Sullivan: So, can I just interrupt you for a second? When you say you select species, you're talking about species of plants? Or do you also introduce animals?

[00:22:20] Gina Bates: No, we don't introduce animals.

[00:22:21] Mariann Sullivan: You just wait for the animals to arrive?

[00:22:24] Gina Bates: Yes, we wait. It's going to be obviously a long process, but we were actually very, very, overwhelmed last summer when we went back to the first plot because, as I said earlier, it moved from the first stage of rewilding, which is all insects and butterflies and things hopping about, a few birds.

But when we went last year to survey the site, it had moved to the second stage, which was breeding mammals, so there were voles breeding, and there were also birds breeding as well. So it had rewilded that much more. You couldn't walk into most of it, it was up to our shoulders, We also saw adders, snakes, which, you know, to have reptiles moving in as well. It was, It was really incredible to see this leap of species. And I think it's 20 or 30 different animals we saw, and countless different plants have moved in.

Once we've got the land, we go and have a look at to see, we look at soil type, and we then start selecting the native tree species that we think benefit the land. So we arrange where we get those donated. And we do a little plant. We plant those and we create glades. We try and behave like nature.

Nothing's regimented, we just go random and create groups of trees. And glade areas, open areas, so it's sort of very random and then we just monitor their growth and the growth of species.

So in July this year,we've got a team m of volunteers that are going to join us and we will record the species again and see what other animals have arrived. I mean as far as management's concerned, there's nothing, uh, management's sort of a word that I don't like. Sorry

I don't like it very much because it's sort of, it's anthropocentric, you know, that we feel like we have to manage something when, if you just leave it... if all the humans just died out tomorrow, what would happen? The land would just do what it does. Nature would grow where it wants to grow, and recover in its own way.

In a world where humans didn't exist, there would be no invasive species or anything, because they're just things that humans label onto life. And so we don't go in and cut anything down or move anything. We're just letting nature do what it wants to. Nature decides, basically.

[00:24:47] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, that's really interesting because I mean, I feel like that's probably fairly controversial within the world of rewilding. I mean, not to like, to totally manage it, but the whole invasive species thing. And I'm not talking about animal invasive species, more about plants. You know, because it's said that the insects don't like the non native species, and so you should add native species, and it does really end up being a huge management issue, and you have found that you can kind of just let it take care of itself? Except for you seem to be very strong on adding native trees, but other than that, you feel like you can leave the land kind of up to itself, and you still get the insects to come in?

[00:25:26] Gina Bates: Yeah, I mean, if there was a something that was going across the land nearby that was an invasive species, then I don't know what we'd do to tackle that. Because at the moment we are selecting only native species. We would never plant non native species on the land at all. So whether a non native comes in on a seed somewhere, you know, that's something that potentially could happen, but we're just letting the land just rewild. I mean, to go into one of those plots that's up to your shoulders , you know, with vegetation, suddenly you find a a three inch high you know, plant that's not native would be a bit like finding a needling haystack. So, and so many plants are non native anyway. We're definitely not worried about non native species at the moment.

What we're trying to do is create habitats. So the habitat is dictated by species that are locally in that area. So the grazing fields all around these plots, they will have things like buttercups and daisies, dandelions and common species like that flourish on our plots, actually.

[00:26:35] Mariann Sullivan: I mean, I totally hear you because you can, like, people can become crazy about it, but I have to say that my tiny, tiny little backyard is completely full of buttercups and dandelions, which here are not native species.

So it kind of depends on where you live, which are the ones that are approved and which aren't, and I find it hard to strike that balance between not getting fanatic about it, you know, recognizing that non native species aren't necessarily evil and, and just watching them sometimes completely take over.

[00:27:10] Gina Bates: Yeah, I mean it depends on if bees and pollinators love them.

[00:27:14] Mariann Sullivan: Exactly, finding out which ones they're okay with and which ones they really just ignore.

[00:27:20] Gina Bates: Yeah, and also I think it's time that we stop playing God, you know.

[00:27:24] Mariann Sullivan: Exactly, yeah.

[00:27:26] Gina Bates: We've got to stop playing God, and we've got to just give nature a chance, and let nature recover.

I've been sort of surrounded by nature all of my life, and the one thing that I can honestly say, hand on heart, is that nature knows best. It knows more than we know, it's not a cerebral knowledge like we have. It's not studied knowledge.

It's just, it is just nature and it just is. And I think that's the thing that, if we let go of our control over it, that's what's needed. To let go of our control. I mean, you know, the amount of, times people have asked me about, will you go in and cut things down? Will you mow the grass?

Yeah,

[00:28:09] Mariann Sullivan: yeah.

[00:28:10] Gina Bates: And you just think, hang on a minute. No, you know, we need to just leave spaces. When I was a child, I grew up in a very, sort of, rough area and there was a bit of wasteland that was behind a, pub, a bar, and it was really, you could hardly get into it. It was so wild. And for me, it was like, it was magic, because it it was teeming with life, and nobody went in, big wire, barbed wire, fencing around it, but we found a hole in the fence,

[00:28:40] Mariann Sullivan: and,

[00:28:41] Gina Bates: and climbed through.

I used to climb a huge tree in there, and just stay up there and watch the, little caterpillars and everything. And that is now gone. And it was bulldozed over many, many years ago, which was very upsetting.

And, I was about seven or eight years old at the time. I can remember this sort of, um, complexity, how nature had just grabbed this last little area of land. It was a tiny little area. Um, but I think, Looking back at that and then visiting the Vegan Land Movement plots, it's the same thing. It's like, whoosh, you know, there's suddenly life.

[00:29:19] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. It's unbelievable. It really is.

[00:29:21] Gina Bates: And it's, and it's beautiful to see.

I think that's the thing that I can't put across people. When you look at the numbers of animals that are farmed, which is like 80 billion or 80 to 100 billion animals a year, and then you look at the wild species that have been wiped out, the individuals of wild species that have been wiped out to make way for that 80 to 100 billion, there are no numbers for those wild species that have been wiped out.

And the reason, there's two reasons why there's no numbers, because they're unseen, is the first thing. And the second thing is because those numbers are unfathomable. They are in the trillions upon trillions of individuals that have been wiped out. And just the first plot that we bought, which was three and a half acres, which is the one who's gone back to being, breeding mammals and birds, if you were to go in and flatten that plot, cut it all down for it to be a grazing field, you would be wiping out trillions, in just that plot, you would be wiping out trillions of creatures, you know, some of them are tiny.

And then, we've got a friend who's coming to help us this year who's, a soil expert, we want to look underground as well in these plots. Because the other thing that people don't understand or realize is there's more life under the soil than there is above.

Sort of going off on a slight tangent here, with my nut orchards that I planted here on my farm, last year I had a vine weevil infestation. And the reason I've got a vine weevil infestation infestation is because there aren't any nematodes in the soil eating the vine weevil grubs, so there is an imbalance.

Because of what happens with massive expansive grazing is that the soil life dies as well, and that's why fertilizer and all that stuff has to be put onto fields. to grow crops because the soil is dead. So we're having some readings done this year, if all goes to plan, to see how much soil life is.

So if you were to wipe out all that new growth that's happened on that plot, then you don't only kill all the animals that are living and thriving, you also then start diminishing all the life under the soil. These are the things that we need to kind of see.

[00:31:43] Mariann Sullivan: I mean, that's a small plot of land really involving, as you said, trillions of lives, if you look close enough. So what is your big vision for the Vegan Land Movement? To spread this, so it's not three acres and five acres, which are incredibly powerful. But I know that your ambitions are greater than that. You said that you thought it would be bigger than it is already.

But it does seem to be growing. And do you want to grow worldwide? Like, do you see this as an organic movement? Or do you see yourself as being in charge of this very worldwide movement? It seems like it would get very complicated. Or should everybody just go out and do this on their own?

[00:32:23] Gina Bates: Yes.

I think that this is the thing that... I mean, you've heard of the World Wildlife Fund, there's a kind of a version in practically every country. And like Greenpeace, you know, all these organizations they have, Greenpeace America, Greenpeace UK.

[00:32:38] Mariann Sullivan: Right.

[00:32:38] Gina Bates: I would love if the Vegan Land Movement idea gets taken up in every single country. It needs to. It has to. If we have any chance of saving species and creating the world that we want, we have to create it. You know, it's not about just walking up and down with a banner saying, save species or end suffering or whatever.

We have to create it because of the time element. Because we're facing, you know, this massive existential threat of climate change and ecological impacts. That is happening. So if we don't actually do it, and we wait for somebody else to do it.

I mean, that's the thing, I think that everybody has to turn around and say, Right, let's just create the world that we want, we can do it.

And I think that's what's needed, a belief that we can, you know, a belief that we actually have the power to do so. And I think what we've done, I mean, I think we've got about 25 or 26 acres in five plots. biggest one is a 10 acre field, it's just amazing being there last summer.

We had this, it's almost like an out of body weird, wonderful experience because there's all these grazing plots all the way around this ten acre field. And we were there recording species and suddenly there were hundreds of swifts all flying above the plot and it's obviously because of all the insects that were living there.

[00:34:11] Mariann Sullivan: Right.

[00:34:11] Gina Bates: So we had these beautiful birds all moving in to this plot. They weren't on, above the grazing plots, they were above our plot. It's just seeing something like that, and seeing how easy it is for nature to return, because it's so resilient. We all see it, as we walk down the sidewalk, you'll see something trying to grow through a crack in the pavement. It's so resilient, and if we gave it a chance, and gave it space, then I think we could save the day.

But it means mobilization, it's not waiting for somebody else to do it. And I think that's where we're going wrong. Yes, we still have to pressure government. But I think, as a community, I tried to find out how many vegans there are in the world. My last little bit of research was only between 20 million and 50 million, which is a lot of people. And, we could collectively grow something where we create these alternatives.

[00:35:13] Mariann Sullivan: There are other rewilding organizations, obviously some big ones, and why is it so important that this be done from a vegan perspective? What makes it special and, you know, particularly powerful for vegans?

[00:35:26] Gina Bates: Because it's about all life. There's one here, it's sort of heralded as a really good rewilding project called Knepp. It's an estate, and they've got long bought cattle in there.

[00:35:38] Mariann Sullivan: Oh God. Well, that's ridiculous.

[00:35:40] Gina Bates: Yeah, so there's all this regenerative stuff and then there's hunting and so they're not vegan. They are, you know, still producing what they call regenerative or sustainable steaks.

So with the vegan aspect is obviously that it's every, every single little living thing.

[00:35:58] Mariann Sullivan: Is all the land that you buy, are you committed to only taking land out of what would otherwise presumably go to animal agriculture?

[00:36:06] Gina Bates: Yes, because animal agriculture, I don't know whether it's the same over there.

When you look at the amount of land, I think 75 percent of land could be given back to nature if we ended animal agriculture. You know, when you look at all the deforestation that's been caused.

I drive from Scotland down to the south, and it's just grazing the whole way down.

[00:36:27] Mariann Sullivan: It's not just the grazing. It's like every single, when you go anywhere in the country here, it's soybeans and corn, soybeans and corn, soybeans and corn, that's all anybody's growing and it's all to be fed to animals.

[00:36:39] Gina Bates: Yes, exactly. So that, and then they've got more pesticides and fertilizers on soy and corn that is grown for lot-fed farmed animals because it's filtered through them, so I think the regulations are different.

It's obscene, it's just obscene. So, the land, for me, it's the very root of the system. Everything is about the land. So if we take away the land, so they cannot use it then it limits the farmed animals, it limits the suffering, and it's a win for all life, it's a win on so many levels.

It's a win to sort of limit the suffering. It's a win for the animals that are facing extinction, it's a win for the climate, and it's a win for us, you know, it's a win, it's a win for the whole of life to remove land from animal agriculture.

[00:37:30] Mariann Sullivan: Absolutely. I mean, the land, the land is all there is, I mean, it's all of our home.

[00:37:36] Gina Bates: Exactly, and it's the land that's being polluted. You know, the exploitation is the very root of it, and I keep saying that till I'm blue in the face, but unfortunately, I think there's some sort of, a lot of thought joining that needs to be going on.

Do you have the Extinction Rebellion thing going on over there?

[00:37:57] Mariann Sullivan: You know, most I hear about Extinction Rebellion specifically is from the UK., it does exist here, but I think it's much more active there.

[00:38:06] Gina Bates: I went to, there Huge Extinction Rebellion gathering in London, in 2019. So, I went down, I was going to visit my mum, who was nearby, so I decided to go in for one of the days, and I ended up staying there for the whole week, like camping on the streets of London.

There were 12, 000 people that had disrupted the whole of London, but nearly everybody I met was not vegan.

[00:38:31] Mariann Sullivan: Huh, unbelievable.

[00:38:32] Gina Bates: So this is the thing, it's just like, how are you not vegan when, you know, livestock, farmed animals, all this methane, so there is a really, shocking to me, a lack of dot joining with all of it. And it's the same with some of the vegan products that are being produced that have got palm oil in.

Palm oil isn't vegan, it can't be vegan, because it's responsible for absolute decimation of forests, which is killing so many creatures. So, you know, palm oil is really awful. So everything I buy, I look at, you know, to trace its provenance, try and find out where it's coming from, you know, is it responsible for habitat loss or, child labour, all sorts of stuff that's going on out there to produce something that ends up on the Western table, branded as vegan.

You know, so I think that's where the whole of vegan ethics has to fit in.

[00:39:27] Mariann Sullivan: But I also think that, like, ethical purchasing is important, but it's not doing something proactive the way the Vegan Land Movement is. It's not saving land.

It's not creating habitat. So it's a piece of the puzzle, but, I think that, your big vision for doing something that can start small but can grow to save the planet however unlikely that may be. And on our bad days, we feel it's very unlikely, but still, it has that vision. Whereas ethical purchasing, you know, it's really important, but it's not the same as the kind of hope that you can get from doing something so positive that even if you don't save the world, you have saved and given a good life to those animals who are living on that land.

And, that's a great deal to hang on to. So, I'm so grateful for what you're doing and to find out about it today. I want to ask you a few more questions, which I'll ask you on our bonus segment, But I just want to thank you so much for sharing all of this with us today.

And, I really hope that everybody listening will look at your brand new, very fancy website and find out more about your work.

[00:40:33] Gina Bates: Thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. I was, I was quite nervous because it was, a huge distance and for somebody to actually want to talk about it and to actually see a vision.

It just means so much, because we're always so many steps removed from everything, aren't we? So by doing what we've done, we can see the lives that are saved. We can hear them, you know, they're actually singing in our ears.

It's just really beautiful. If you were ever over here, I will take you there. And you would see it first hand, it's overwhelming.

[00:41:10] Mariann Sullivan: Well, that would truly be lovely. Thank you, Gina.

[00:41:13] Gina Bates: Thank you so much.