Tony Juniper on parrots, princes and environmental protection

January 20, 2026·29 min·1 clip

The Spix’s macaw went from “the last one in the world” to wild breeding after a captive programme.

1. The Life Scientific speaks with Tony Juniper about parrots, princes, climate law, and Natural England. 2. Tony Juniper is the guest, Jim Al-Khalili is the host, and Juniper matters because he has worked in field conservation, campaigning, and government advice. 3. The episode asks how one environmentalist moved from birdwatching and rainforest fieldwork to shaping British nature policy. 4. Juniper says he sees the world with “terror and sadness” and “a huge amount of optimism” because climate change is happening with “unprecedented” speed and scale. 5. He says Natural England’s new five-year strategy links ecosystem recovery, pollution reduction, climate change, habitat expansion, public health, and food and water security. 6. Juniper rejects the idea that nature protection and human wellbeing are opposites, calling that an “either-or analysis.” 7. He says political pressure and global insecurity have pushed environmental commitment aside, even though nature is “essential national infrastructure.” 8. Juniper traces his birding obsession to childhood in Cowley, where he roamed for wildlife near Oxford. 9. He says his father worked in a factory after service in North Africa, Sicily, and the Battle of Cassino, while his mother was a waitress. 10. He describes his year at Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir au Quat’ Saisons, washing dishes, preparing vegetables, and cycling to Oxford’s covered market for fish. 11. Juniper says he took psychology so he could apply for Bristol University’s animal behaviour course, which linked psychology, zoology, and Darwinian science. 12. He recalls a serious Vespa crash near Oxford that left him in the John Radcliffe Hospital for the whole summer. 13. Juniper says the South Oxfordshire Countryside Education Trust took five- to eleven-year-olds into beech woodlands, grasslands, and Thames-side wetlands to build contact with nature. 14. He says schoolchildren today are spending more time on laptops and less time outside, which changes how they connect with the natural world. 15. Juniper explains that the Spix’s macaw was first described in 1817 by Johann Baptist von Spix and later became a species BirdLife International thought might already be extinct. 16. He says his team in north-eastern Brazil found one wild bird, identified the place where von Spix had found it in 1817, and later saw captive-bred birds return to breed in the wild. 17. Juniper describes the Big Ask campaign, launched with Radiohead’s Tom York in 2005, as the push for Britain’s first Climate Change Act, enacted in 2008. 18. He says the current climate consensus is shakier than before, while floods in Sumatra and historic flooding in Saudi Arabia show the costs of delay. 19. The interview is direct, reflective, and policy-heavy, with long answers that move between personal memory and institutional decisions. 20. Listeners interested in conservation, climate policy, and British environmental politics will get the most from this conversation.

As heard by us

A measured portrait of how fieldwork, activism, and policy come together in one conservation career.

Tony Juniper's path is told plainly, from rainforest fieldwork to British environmental policy. The strongest passages stay close to the ground: one parrot, found in the same patch of Brazil where it was first described in 1817, then carried through a breeding programme that…

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You follow one environmentalist from the Brazilian rainforest to the corridors of policy.

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