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Real people share real stories of their dialogue with Nature. Hear how it feels to talk with animals, birds and landscape. Share the magic of cross species communication.
Created by award winning Nature writer and poet Estelle Phillips.
Instagram @estelle_writer44
TikTok @EstellePhillips
I am thrilled and honored to bring you Dale Vince OBE. In this podcast, Dale talks about his connection with nature and one crow in particular, veganism, farming, and hope for the future. Dale does a range of things, and they're all environmental. He runs a green energy company, Ecotricity, that he founded, and a football club, Forest Green Rovers. He makes diamonds from atmospheric carbon, windmills, and school dinners.
Estelle Phillips:He runs a ministry of eco education and built Britain's first electric car as well. Dale himself says he put the mental in environmental. I am so grateful to Dale for finding time for this podcast in his schedule. As you can hear, we recorded it in his office. The sound could be better, and that's on me.
Estelle Phillips:Dale's content is fantastic and important. I asked Dale how he first connected with nature. He said it started by being in it when he was a kid.
Dale Vince:We lived in the country outside of, a town, and, I spent my time, you know, walking or cycling to different places in the country. And my parents kept some animals. They kept them for food, unfortunately, which I came over here of a fairly young age and thought was wrong. But, yeah, mean, just by being in and amongst nature and and creatures.
Estelle Phillips:Can you remember anything about your early connections with nature?
Dale Vince:Yeah. Of course. Those things. There was a lot of nature around me and, you know, I there's a period of my younger life when I like to go standicaling.
Estelle Phillips:What's that?
Dale Vince:It was like fishing for standicals, sticklebacks and stuff like that with a with a net on a on a bamboo pole, you know, in a jar. But there was more than just fish in those dikes. There was all kinds of pond life, you know, and I learned about that. I used to spend, you know, my old day. I would just go there and, you know, explore and see what I could find, see what I could catch and have a look at.
Dale Vince:Always give it, you know, always release it. Yeah. I can remember doing that.
Estelle Phillips:Can you remember holding something in your hand and seeing the life in it?
Dale Vince:In a jar.
Estelle Phillips:In a jar? Yeah. What what what
Dale Vince:was it? I mean, I saw chicks as well because there's one point my parents had were hatching eggs into chicks. I don't know where they went, but probably they came to no good, but I saw chicks. And actually chicks from a partridge once, I think a mower in the field that scared the parent away of something. There was a was a nest of baby chicks.
Dale Vince:They didn't survive, but we tried to feed them. So, yeah, that kind of stuff. When I left home, I became a vegetarian straight away. And and I learned that if you went somewhere and, you know, you said you didn't wanna eat meat or something like that, people would take it personally against themselves, like an offense, like you were attacking their way of life, you know, that they had meat and stuff like that. There's still a little bit of that in the world, it was very stark back in the day.
Dale Vince:There's a kind of don't ask, don't tell kind of mentality, which I think we still have. I think it's the reason why we have these mad amounts of factory farms. We've never farmed more animals than we farm today, it's quite incredible. It's done intensely in indoor environments and we all kind of know that something's not right about it but we shut it out. There's a cognitive dissonance, even environmentalists, people I've hung out with, protesters and people like that, you know, put themselves in harm's way to campaign for the for, you know, for action on the climate and stuff like that.
Dale Vince:But they think it's okay to eat meat, and I'm like, what do you what do you do? Like the co founder of Exxon, they called Gail. I mean, we're friends, but we shared a platform of Remod. And we were, you know, merely getting along on the same page until she said, no I think we can still eat meat in a net zero future and I'm like wow, I mean that's not logical. But it's people in that circumstance that don't want to give something up find a way, a justification for how they can continue and the common one is that we just need to eat less meat but better quality, happier cows, organic ones, something that's been raised by a farmer that you know and therefore you can trace the provenance of something like that.
Dale Vince:These are all just excuses to continue doing something that's inherently bad. But I don't care if the world goes that way because it can only ever produce a tiny, tiny amount of meat like it used to. If you go back a hundred years, the amount of meat in our country was tiny compared to today because there were no factory farms. So the real campaign is actually to end factory farming and if that leaves people still growing the old cow here and there and eating it now and then, I don't think that's the end of the world. But it's not logical because cows in fields still emit methane, they still take habitats from wildlife and eating animals is bad for our own health as well as fighting the crisis in the NHS and the global wildlife crisis as well as the climate crisis.
Dale Vince:So our choice of what we eat is fundamental to all the big problems we face. It's the topic of my new book called The Cow in the Room.
Estelle Phillips:I saw the cow in reception.
Dale Vince:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. See, that's got pictures of badges and things like them. Point we're trying to make is normally you see a cow like that in a in a butcher environment and the the cuts of meat have got names on them.
Dale Vince:Mhmm. Where we're we're putting the identity of wildlife on them. Because if you eat this cow, what you're really eating is wildlife because we take so much land to grow the plants, to feed to animals and get diminishing returns on an incredible scale. We have taken all of the habitat from wildlife globally, if we all were plant based, I think Oxford produced a study about three years ago, if the world is plant based, we can give back 75% of all farmland to nature. In our country that represents half our entire land mass giving back to nature just by only growing plants to feed ourselves.
Dale Vince:This is incredible. It's how fundamental diet is in the decline of nature. It's not an accident. It's not it's not driven by the climate crisis. It's it's what we eat.
Dale Vince:We're eating nature out of house and home.
Estelle Phillips:And ironically, when I arrived the queue for your
Dale Vince:Yeah. Food.
Estelle Phillips:Yeah? Free kitchen. Yeah. Yeah. Free kitchen Thursdays.
Estelle Phillips:Mhmm. Everyone was saying that the queue was longer than ever. Yeah.
Dale Vince:This just gets popular and popular. But it's great food, it comes from our football club, that's where we make it, where we've been making great plant based food for more than ten years now, the near fifteen. So it's nice to have tied the two things together and actually to feed people. I wish I'd done it a long time ago, not in a regretful way, but when I think about it, think, oh, I could have done it a long time ago. It's super popular, but, you know, it's like that old the old thing about breaking bread with people sitting around the table and having a meal, you know, it it it allows people to bond and hundreds of people meet people I haven't met before Yeah.
Dale Vince:Downstairs bonding over some great food, which is lovely.
Estelle Phillips:Do do you happen to know what's in the burgers? Because I asked,
Dale Vince:but Is it burgers today?
Estelle Phillips:I think so.
Dale Vince:Yeah. Okay. We make those ourselves.
Estelle Phillips:What's in
Dale Vince:that? In the devil's kitchen and it's all plants. Yeah. The main protein is sourced from peas, you know, pea protein extract.
Estelle Phillips:Oh, okay.
Dale Vince:Shiitake mushrooms are the predominant flavor, I think, if that's the one. And it's a brilliant burger. It's the best I've ever had in my life of eating plants. I really like it. We we supply that food to schools.
Dale Vince:We're in something like 10,000 primary schools with burgers and balls. Our food is free of all the 13 food allergens and it's low salt and sap fat and no sugar. It's got no added nothings, the ingredient list is super simple, but it's really tasty and we make it ourselves just down the road.
Estelle Phillips:Well, it's certainly popular. Mhmm. Yep. Have you ever communed with nature?
Dale Vince:Yeah. But what do you mean by commune?
Estelle Phillips:A relationship or an exchange of understanding or a comfort or because, you know, one should not define nature by humans. Right? So the commune has to be on nature's terms. So have you ever thought that kind of magic?
Dale Vince:When I once saw a crow, I was might have been, I don't know, 15, I'm guessing. I'm maybe 14. Saw crow in a field. I wanna say limping, but it was limping with its wing. It had a broken wing, and so it was struggling to get about.
Dale Vince:And I chased it and picked it up. It it wasn't keen on being picked up. It pecked my hand.
Estelle Phillips:Did it? Was
Dale Vince:awkward. It talk to me. But but it came to understand that I meant it no harm. I took it back to where I lived and put it in a little shed and fed it to to help it recover. And then and then one day let it go.
Dale Vince:And it it flew into a nearby tree line, and it hung out there for weeks. And I would see it listen.
Estelle Phillips:Can you describe about how it felt when you picked it up and what the bird did at that moment? Because there must been a moment as you said of understanding. When did that understanding I
Dale Vince:think that came back. The bird pecked me.
Estelle Phillips:Did did did it help?
Dale Vince:I was afraid. No. It didn't hurt. It was it was a shock. But, you know, understood as well because in nature, you know, I mean, nothing comes to help you in nature.
Dale Vince:No. Right?
Estelle Phillips:But so you're, like, holding it how?
Dale Vince:Yeah. Like that.
Estelle Phillips:Yeah. Okay. So you're holding it as
Dale Vince:it wings in.
Estelle Phillips:Yes. Okay. Like a chicken.
Dale Vince:I guess.
Estelle Phillips:Yeah. And and then and then and what was it swiveling its head round
Dale Vince:and okay? Just like that. Just you know, just peck, peck, peck.
Estelle Phillips:On the top bit of your hand?
Dale Vince:Yeah. A finger like that. Something like that.
Estelle Phillips:What did you do when it pecked you?
Dale Vince:Oh, it was you know, nothing nothing particular. Just, you know, saw it, understood it, and carried on.
Estelle Phillips:So you carried it how far?
Dale Vince:Oh, it would have been a few 100 yards probably. Maybe, I would say, half a kilometer.
Estelle Phillips:Was it pecking you all that time?
Dale Vince:No. It stopped. And, you know, that's how understanding begin, isn't it, in a way? You know, I wasn't doing it. So it stopped.
Dale Vince:Probably, it stopped having as much fear and so as much immediate reaction that, you know, so it stopped paying me.
Estelle Phillips:And then what happened?
Dale Vince:So I took it back, put
Estelle Phillips:it in
Dale Vince:a little shed, fed it for a while. Don't know how long
Estelle Phillips:What did you feed it?
Dale Vince:Yeah. They were scraps of meat. Did it like them? Yeah. Yeah.
Dale Vince:They were because it's, you know, it's a it's a bird that eats carrings and all worms and stuff like that. Yeah. I remember seeing it, like, pick it up with with one claw. I mean, it looks cute to us when they do that, you know, pick pick it up and peck at it. It
Estelle Phillips:did that as if it was holding it.
Dale Vince:That's right. Yeah. That's why it looks cute to us, and
Estelle Phillips:then it
Dale Vince:was like, oh, that looks like human. Yeah. But are really, you know, I think, really interesting creatures.
Estelle Phillips:They are really lovely, but I'm interested in how you went from that point where you were feeding it to it recognizing and essentially, you definitely established a relationship, didn't you? Because then
Dale Vince:Yeah. I saw it every day.
Estelle Phillips:Yeah. Can you tell me about that? Because I've never experienced this with a bird.
Dale Vince:Oh, please. Yeah. I just, you know, went and fed it every day, and, you know, I guess at some point trust gets built, you know, if not understanding.
Estelle Phillips:I don't know if if I think I
Dale Vince:think creatures are quite quite basic, aren't they? They they need to eat. And, you know, when when that's satisfied, then I think, you know, the the fundamental drivers in life, that I mean, that's the big fundamental driver in life, think, apart from breathing probably, but it's about eating, isn't it? You can see that a little layer. Birds probably won't fly until they reach a certain body weight, and then they fly and eat, and then they don't fly.
Dale Vince:You know, it's a necessity thing. But, you know, it's like a dog or cat. You know, if you feed a pet, they that's it. That's all they want. And some companionship and stuff like that.
Dale Vince:You know, dogs are quite intelligent. Pigs are quite intelligent. I don't know how intelligent birds are. But, anyway, we had basic kind of understanding, and I let it go after I didn't know if it was a week or two or what it was. I can't remember.
Estelle Phillips:Did it swing get better then?
Dale Vince:It it it set, but it it set kind of slightly out of normal shape and so it had an odd gate and an odd look compared to a normal crow. It could fly though and it flew up into the tree line. I imagine it was relatively limited compared to what it was that might be why it hung out in the tree line or it might have been because you know it had become a little bit institutionalized. Who knows?
Estelle Phillips:There's no way that I would think that that crow in the tree was hanging out because his wing was I would think he was he was it a boy or a girl? You know? No. Don't know.
Dale Vince:Really, I mean, you know, my parents had dogs and cats and stuff like that and chickens and pigs and calves at one point. And and I think, you know, they bought them at an auction because these would be calves at that high level that would have been taken from their mothers in order to produce milk for dairy stuff. Mhmm. And and I think that what they were trying to do was to make money by buying these orphans at auction, raising them, and then selling them obviously to their bodies later on, which, you know, I learned often just always very wrong. It's just sort of like, you know, these cows have parents.
Dale Vince:They have brothers and sisters. I just imagined how I might feel if it was happening to, you know, my brother or or my one of my parents, you know what mean, being carved and chewed.
Estelle Phillips:It's such a dramatic difference in terms of how you're brought up. How did you come to that?
Dale Vince:Or that that view?
Estelle Phillips:What you've just described, yeah, about how would you feel because that's how I feel. How would you feel, brothers and sisters? How did you come to that day?
Dale Vince:I don't know. Like it, just like that. I just came. It's just like I looked at it and thought, you know, how would I feel? Can't tell you how I came to it, it just came.
Dale Vince:You know what I mean? Some thoughts just come, don't they? Most of them, in fact. You know, it wasn't like a thought process. It was a wow.
Dale Vince:And they have feelings. It's clear that animals have feelings. You can look in their eyes and you can see that, and you can see from their behavior they have feelings as well. And so they're not so dissimilar to us at all. They have faces.
Dale Vince:You can look in their eyes, Which, you know, some people would say is like the window to the soul. Right? Maybe it's true. But, you know, they have eyes like we have. Have mouths and noses and ears and lips, you know.
Dale Vince:They've got all the major organs. We have mammals in particular, not so much chickens, but even with a chicken, I learn learn later in life, some of the liberation, have something like 90% DNA in common with us, even a chicken. But when you look at a mammal, I mean, the parallels, the similarities, they're they're so strong. I mean, they have everything that we have. Right?
Dale Vince:They don't have fingers, they have all major organs. You know, the the cardiovascular system, the lungs, you know, all that kind of stuff. And, yeah, we're not that different, but but we treat them very differently. I think that one day, future generations will look back at, frankly, in particular, animal farming in general, and the abuse that we've heaped on animals. And they'll think it's shocking and unbelievable in the same way that we look back on slavery.
Estelle Phillips:That's exactly what I think.
Dale Vince:Yeah. So vegans are the new evolutionists. Right? With people saying, no. That's not
Estelle Phillips:right. Mhmm.
Dale Vince:You know? And, yeah, like the evolutionists of of the day, you know, we're we're we're kind of shattered down, you know, by hysterical people that that are either invested in the status quo or just find it shocking to contemplate something so radical. Do you know what mean? Because slavery was very normal back in the day. Yeah.
Dale Vince:I think future generals and good banks say that's an abhorrent thing that we did. I mean, there are a billion creatures right now living indoors in our country as part of the food chain. 1,000,000,000. Alright? We're a country of 60,000,000 people.
Dale Vince:If you this is subject of my book. If you go back to the end of the second world war, this where it all began. We invented artificial fertilizers, they didn't exist before, and pesticides, and industrial agriculture came with it, then factory farming came, and then if on you, a graph you looked at the rise of consumption of animal products, it does that. If you look at the decline of nature, it's on the opposite trajectory because we're increasingly taking land, you look at the rise of human health problems, cancers, diabetes, heart problems, that comes out, it tracks upwards. And then look a little bit behind the scenes or a little bit deeper, see the rise of big food, processed food, a report out two weeks ago said that processed food affects all the major organs in our bodies badly, it's causing diseases, this is processed food, not just animal products but processed food.
Dale Vince:And you know we're killing ourselves with a food choice that we didn't make one hundred years ago, seventy five years ago, it wasn't like that. We came out of the war, I think, with food anxiety because we'd been nearly starved, we had been starved, we nearly starved out as a country by Hitler. And, yeah, we we stumbled, I don't know if we stumbled into it, we created industrial agriculture and then leaned into it, you know, incredibly. We produce vastly more food than where we used to in our country than before and still Mhmm. I think 80% of our import 80% of our food is imported.
Dale Vince:But something like 70% of all the cereals we grow here we feed to animals. And if we didn't do that, just that one thing, we could feed 16,000,000 more people with the land that we have. We didn't feed cereals to animals, we just fed them to ourselves. So it's a crazy world of mad economics and diminishing returns and desperately bad impacts on wildlife and the environment, water pollution from factory farms is off the scale. The human health problem driving the climate crisis, I mean animal agriculture is almost the top driver of the climate crisis as we get energy under control and we make the transition in transport to electrification.
Dale Vince:Food is almost the last biggest thing standing, again that's why I'm focusing on my first book was about energy transport and food, the three of them together 80% of all carbon emissions, energy is almost solved now, we have 50% green on our grid, lots of the six countries of the world are at 100%, China's got more green energy than we have as a percentage on the grid, they're a nation of a billion people. We're a nation of 60,000,000. You know, this revolution is happening. Electrification and transport is underway, but we make this simple bad choice when it comes to food. Our governments are cowed by big food companies, they don't even us about the harmful health impacts of the simple foods that people eat.
Dale Vince:They like bacon, it's a class one carcinogen according to the World Health Organization alongside tobacco. Tobacco sits in a roller shutter cupboard. If you open it you'll see packets with no branding but just pictures of diseased organs and it shouts at you this is going to kill you. Bacon sits in a supermarket chiller. He's probably got an anthropomorphized face of a pig smiling at you on it.
Dale Vince:And everything shouts to you, okay, do we? No harm here. Alright?
Estelle Phillips:But the slavery thing took a long time, didn't it? Mhmm. How how do we get there?
Dale Vince:Understood. Yeah. So we're all different. And for some people well, we all have different triggers. And and for some people, animal welfare will be much lower down the list, and it would be quite hard to convince them that it's an issue, and we should be doing these harmful things.
Dale Vince:One answer is to show people because it's hidden from us, it's hidden from view, somebody else does it for us and then that's okay. But the other answer is to address it with facts and with communication. So in green energy, for example, we stopped a few years ago talking about 100% green on the grid here as a goal as being something about the climate crisis. And we started to talk about it as being something that would drive our energy bills down. We made an economic case for green energy rather than the climate case and that cuts through with more people.
Dale Vince:So one of the things we can do is make an economic case for eating plants not animals. Another thing we can make a human health case because some people will care more about that than animal welfare. We have human health, we have got wildlife and we have got animal welfare, but we have got an economic case as well to be made. We could be so much better off as a country if we change what we eat. I mean the human health impact on the NHS is enormous, that is another economic aspect.
Dale Vince:But in straight economic terms, we put £2,000,000,000 a year in supporting animal agriculture, this is uneconomic on its own terms. So think different arguments for different people, I think exposing the cruelty of animal agriculture is one thing and the pollution, we run an undercover team that are doing that quite successfully at the moment in salmon farming. And then it's just a matter of time, it's about information, it's about arguments and communication but I think an economic case usually trumps everything.
Estelle Phillips:Sadly I agree with you.
Dale Vince:It's okay, it doesn't have to be sad because we can take that and use it to our advantage. We can get what we want by making the case and we have to make the case that moves people and if they won't move because of our case we pick one that will move them. It's not sad.
Estelle Phillips:Well said Dale. Dale, thank you so much. It's been really been really wonderful and inspirational speaking with you. Well, hearing you speak. Yeah?
Dale Vince:No. Thank you. I mean, it was a conversation. Enjoyed it.
Estelle Phillips:Fantastic. Thank you. Subscribe to Nature Talks With Humans for more true stories of people communicating with animals, birds, and landscape. Follow me on Instagram at Estelle underscore writer forty four and TikTok at Estelle Phillips. Bye.