Costing the Earth

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Factual: Science & Nature: Nature & Environment

Fresh ideas from the sharpest minds working toward a cleaner, greener planet

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Costing the Earth: Wild Highway

Wild Highway

BBC Radio 4 - Costing the Earth, Wild Highway

For 20 years conservationists have been trying to build a wildlife corridor across Europe.

20 years ago a group of conservationists decided to create a wildlife corridor along the old Iron Curtain.  Mary Ann-Ochota travels from Finland to Albania to gauge their success.

Running 12500km from the Arctic Circle to the borders of Greece, the European Greenbelt is one of the most ambitious conservation schemes ever devised.  The idea was to use the no man's land of the Iron Curtain that divided Communist East from Capitalist West as a wildlife corridor to allow rare and endangered species to travel unimpeded across the continent.

On the 20th anniversary of the Greenbelt, the writer and anthropologist, Mary-Ann Ochota takes to the road, from the industrialised peat bogs of Finland through the Baltic states and Germany's dying forests to the peasant farms of the southern Balkans.  The wildlife of these borderlands is rich and varied but the conservationists feel that they're battling forces bigger than those that created the Iron Curtain in the first place.

Producer: Alasdair Cross

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