School of Sustainability

Ham Fen's beavers walk free after twenty-three years behind a fence

This autumn, staff and volunteers at Kent Wildlife Trust took down the fence around Ham Fen Nature Reserve and let the beavers out. The animals have lived inside an enclosure on the reserve since 2003; from now on they can range beyond it, damming, digging and coppicing across the wider East Kent landscape under a wild licence. It is a small physical act - a barrier removed by hand - that closes a project older than some of the people unbolting it.

The whole thing started with an access problem. Ham Fen is one of Kent's last scraps of fenland, and the wet, soft ground made conventional restoration machinery difficult and expensive to use in such conditions. In 2000 the Trust, working with the Wildwood Trust, began exploring whether beavers could do the job instead, and in 2003 a colony of Eurasian beavers was released into the enclosure - the first beaver reintroduction ever attempted in Britain.

Inside the fence, the beavers did what was asked of them. Their dams raised water levels and helped restore areas of peat fen; their felling and coppicing opened up a shifting patchwork of open water, wetland, scrub and young woodland, and fenland wildlife moved in. John Wilson, the Trust's East Coast Warden, who has watched the project for years, called the results "remarkable". The enclosure became one of the key pieces of evidence that beavers could be tolerated, and useful, in an English landscape.

What changed is the paperwork, not the animals. In February 2025 the government began allowing licensed releases into the wild, including letting established enclosure populations transition to free-living ones where a management plan exists. Ham Fen's colony qualified. The hope is that free movement will bring better genetic mixing and a more resilient population across the catchment - the River Stour, close by, already holds England's largest wild beaver population.

The Trust is not romantic about what happens next. A partnership with Beaver Trust, South East Rivers Trust, a local farmer cluster and Natural England is working with more than 250 landowners and farmers on the practical frictions of living alongside beavers, building on an advisory group running since 2019. Beavers were hunted out of Britain in the sixteenth century; getting them back has taken twenty-six years and counting, most of it spent on people rather than animals.

Beaver Trust · Kent Wildlife Trust · Read the source

A river made ready, then several thousand small sturgeon

On 18 September, on the bank of the Ina at Goleniów in north-west Poland, several hundred people turned up to put fish in the water. Schoolchildren, anglers and pensioners watched as fifteen larger juvenile Atlantic sturgeon and several thousand smaller ones, each about fifteen centimetres long, were released into the river. It was the first such release on the Polish side of the Oder Delta, after earlier ones across the border in Germany.

Sturgeon once ran up the Baltic's tributaries in numbers. They vanished from the region during the twentieth century, taken apart piece by piece: overfished, then shut out of their spawning grounds by straightened, embanked and dammed rivers, then poisoned by pollution. What is left of the animal sounds invented - armour in five rows of bony plates, whisker-like barbels for finding food on the riverbed, a lifespan measured in decades, a weight that can pass 350 kilograms.

The fish released in September had been prepared with unusual care. Their larvae came from Germany, where the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and a Mecklenburg-Vorpommern research institute oversaw hatching. Rearing happened at the Polish Anglers Union's fish farm in Goleniów, in tanks fed with water from the Wiśniówka, a tributary of the Ina itself, on natural food only - so the fish entered the river already accustomed to its chemistry and its diet.

The Ina was chosen because it is ready. Rewilding Oder Delta and local partners have spent years taking out migration barriers, restoring spawning grounds and rewetting riverside land, reconnecting the delta's rivers to the Stettin Lagoon and the Baltic beyond. Sturgeon are demanding tenants - they need free-flowing, oxygen-rich water - which is precisely why they were chosen. A river that suits a sturgeon suits salmon, eels and almost everything else.

September's release is a beginning on a long clock. The partners plan more than 20,000 young sturgeon in 2027, and eventually as many as 100,000 a year. Even then, nobody will know quickly whether it has worked: a fish that lives for many decades takes its time about proving a population self-sustaining.

Rewilding Europe · Read the source

Four volunteers, two polytunnels and a field brought back to life

Charlie Whale arrived at the Centre for Alternative Technology with three others - Jem, Radhika and Hannah - and no gentle induction. The gardens staff, Nick, Kait and Veronica, had been without residential winter volunteers for some time, and the 2026 growing season had big ambitions attached to it. The four hit the ground running, and a year later, as they prepared to leave, Charlie wrote down what had actually been done.

Much of it was heavy and unglamorous. The beds in the two polytunnels were rebuilt and refilled with the site's own food-waste compost, leaf mould and garden compost, with the added chore of sieving out slate - CAT sits in a disused quarry, so the stone never stops coming. Roger's Field and the Whole Home Allotment were brought back into cultivation, helped by CAT students on volunteer weekends. The harvest - grapes, squashes, borlotti beans and much chard - mostly fed volunteers, visitors and students.

Some of the year's work will not pay back for a while. A twelve-metre asparagus trench went in, alongside thirty globe artichoke plants - crops that future volunteers, not these ones, will be picking. Seed was saved from the tomato crop for the same reason. Under Nick's guidance the four also learned to work coppiced hazel and willow into hurdles, baskets, plant supports and pea-stick fences, using rods cut by the woodlands team. Charlie's verdict on that skill is blunt: never buy another bamboo cane.

Behind all of it sat the twice-weekly round of food waste through the composting systems, the weeding and hoeing, the watering through dry spells, the flowers for the café tables - the jobs that keep a garden functioning day in and day out. A second crew, Emma and three others, spent the same year bringing a coppice plot called Hazel Hollow back into management after a long period without it. CAT has run on volunteer labour for over fifty years; each cohort inherits what the last one planted.

Centre for Alternative Technology · Read the source

Five Fixing Factories and a Lottery grant about to shrink

The money problem comes first, so it may as well open the story. A large share of what it costs to run the Restart Project's five Fixing Factories comes from a single National Lottery Community Action Fund grant, and from May next year that grant is cut back hard. The organisation's response is not a rescue plan but a request for introductions, sent out to everyone who has ever passed through its doors.

What that money currently buys is five neighbourhood repair rooms across London, each one run by and for the patch it sits in. Thousands of local people have taken part since the network grew, and most report feeling more rooted in their area afterwards - Ester, who volunteers, is offered as one story among many. Every year the factories return hundreds of electrical items to service, which means less material heading to waste, less carbon embodied in replacements, and households keeping cash they would otherwise have spent on new kit.

None of this existed before August 2022, when the first factory opened with its organisers excited and slightly apprehensive about whether the idea would hold up in practice. Arthur, who wrote the funding announcement, has led the programme for nearly a year and came to the post from managing the workshop at the Hackney site - the project tends to promote from its own benches. The belief now is that a permanent repair space is a model other towns could copy.

So the net has been cast wide. Waste firms with social-value obligations in their contracts, funders after visible circular-economy work, councils that might host sessions or open a factory of their own, technology businesses interested in scaling - and, failing all that, any friend, relative, neighbour or colleague of a supporter who could make a single useful introduction. The three years since 2022 answered the easy question. People show up to fix things. The unanswered one is who pays the rent on the room.

The Restart Project · Read the source