‘If lockdown has taught us anything, it’s the value of the green belt’

Walker, woodsman and storyteller Ray Mears is hoping the world will get greener – and friendlier – when All This Is Over…

“We need to find ways to keep the momentum going. We will have to put a lot of energy into rebuilding in the right way. And I think we definitely need to be more careful about how we choose our leaders.” (He is especially critical of US President Donald Trump, who has prioritised American heavy industry at the expense of the green agenda, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who has approved massive deforestation projects in the Amazon. “Those countries don’t have proper presidents,” he says.)

But he’s optimistic that in Britain’s case, the country has at least remembered what the green belt is.

“It’s a generations-old protection for green spaces at the edges of our towns, and in recent times it has been heavily threatened by development,” he says.

“But in this period, people have come to treasure their access to these spaces. I think the green belt has helped us to retain our sanity. So I do hope people will have an increased interest in protecting it from now on.”

It was Ray’s own encounters with the wildlife on his doorstep that began his lifelong passion for nature. As a child growing up in Surrey, he was left breathless by Gerald Durrell’s TV programme The Amateur Naturalist, and went scampering into the woods of the North Downs to track down whatever wildlife he could find.

“The TV was the inspiration, but the going out and seeing it myself was the important bit,” he says.

“You can watch amazing TV footage of a leopard making a kill, but I don’t think that compares at all to the experience of being out in a wood and seeing a fern unfurl in front of you.”

To him, the process of developing