It's a good question. So you might think I'd be anti eating insects, but actually the rearing insects must breeding them to eat them isn't such a silly idea. They're much more efficient to turning stuff we can't eat into some - they're actually really nutritious for us humans. So yeah, basically in principle. The only problem is that I just don't really like eating them, but maybe I could get used to it if I had to.

That is a frustrating situation. So I think it really would make a difference if enough of us made our gardens more wildlife friendly. I don't know the figures for Denmark, but in the UK there are 22 million private gardens and they cover an area of 400,000 hectares of land. In my ideal world, it wouldn't just be the gardens, we'd have the parks and the cemeteries and the road verges and so on all being managed for nature as well and that is enough to really help. But the bigger picture of course is that farmland covers a much bigger area than gardens, and we can't kind of ignore that bigger issue of the negative impact of farming on biodiversity.

This is a tricky one. I bet some beekeepers here are about to stone me. A lot of people think keeping bees, taking up beekeeping is a positive step. They've heard that the bees are in trouble and they think that if they therefore start keeping honey bees, that's gonna help. It's a bit like someone saying I've heard the birds are in trouble, so I've decided to keep chickens. They’re completely different. It’s a domestic animal, honeybees, and there is clear evidence that if you have a lot of hives in one place they compete with wild pollinators, so you have fewer wild pollinators because there's less food. And also, the honey bees usually have diseases which spread out into wild bees. So I'm not saying we should get rid of honey bees. I actually love honey. They're important pollinators. But we should be wary of having too many honeybees in the wrong place. Places like nature reserves should be for wild bees I think, not for a domesticated animal.

Obviously, about the loss of species, we tend to focus on extinctions because they're so final and depressing. But actually, probably the more important issue in the insect world and perhaps more generally is that it's the loss of abundance. So there just aren't enough insects left to support the populations of the things that eat them and to pollinate the plants and so on. So that species that used to be common becoming scarce. They are not gonna be extinct, but there are a lot fewer of them. And we don't really know what the overall scale of the decline has been for insects but for the vertebrate world there's a pretty good estimate that the World Wildlife Fund have come up with that we have lost about 70%. In terms of numbers of individuals across all wild vertebrates the population has fallen globally by about 70% since 1970. So since I was five years old, we've lost more than 2/3 of all the wild animals on our planet. That's pretty terrifying. So I think actually it's the loss of abundance that is the bigger issue.

So, we don't really know. There are no long-term studies of insect populations going back before 1976 and that's really unusual. Most studies like the German study I mentioned that started in 1989, so that decline that I described, we've pretty certain that wildlife declines must have started much earlier. The industrialization of agriculture is a big driver and that started certainly in the 1940s, probably well before that in fact. So the German study is probably measuring the tail end of a much bigger decline which is a pretty terrifying thought. But we actually really have no way of going back in time and knowing exactly how abundant insects were 50 years ago or 100 years ago. Jens: In your book you're describing that unfortunately there has been no interest in counting insects before recently. This is strange actually. Dave: and people just don’t pay much attention to them. They are too small. They kind of go fly below our radar.

I know one of the criticisms of rewilding is that some projects, and the famous one in the Netherlands, Oostvaardersplassen, they allow animals to starve to death. And in the absence of predators like wolfs, then when it comes to autumn, it is quite common to see animals die in the project, which seams unesseserary cruel. At Knepp they call the surplus animals. In a sense its almost kind of extent to farming, but a way of farming that supports biodiversity. I think it is important not to create conditions where animals will suffer in the name of rewilding.

I only briefly mention this, but a very large number of dogs and cats people do treat them most commonly with a drop on the back of their neck, those treatments that I mentioned. But you can get a pill you feed to your dog or cat in their food which makes them toxic to flees. Is that better? So it has the advantage that the outside side of the animal isn’t covered in toxin that can be washed off, that can go into rivers and get onto bedding and so on. But it does mean that the animals pooh is full of insecticide instead, which isn’t great, that’s gonna poisen the dung beetles, that try to feed on that. So there hasn’t really been a thourough investigation that evaluate the relative merits of one or the other. I would say the main message I would wish I could get to everybody in the world: is don't use these things if your dog doesn't have fleas. Most dogs and cats most of the time don't have fleas at all so your vet is just exploiting you and selling you something you don't need. Sorry vets if there are any here but really I really don't think it's necessary to treat animals prophylactically. It would be like us all taking antibiotics to prevent getting ill - it's a really dumb idea.

yes I think it's the honest truth. I know this is offensive to livestock farmers but the reality is that eating meat - the meat has a much bigger, massively bigger, environmental footprint than the vegetable alternatives and we could greatly reduce the impact of agriculture on the planet if we all just ate less meat it's really simple.

That's an interesting question and one that's not received much attention until recently. We do know that lights can be harmful to nocturnal insects. That there're attracted, things like moths are attracted to lights and they fly round and round in circles and bash themselves to death, which is not good. But also more concerning I think is this recent evidence that lights at night can disrupt the life cycle the timing of the life cycle of insects so for example if there are lights on in the winter they think the day length is longer and therefore they emerge from hibernation thinking it's spring when actually it's still the middle of winter which can be catastrophic for insects. So it's sadly yet another of the many pressures that insects face.

Well I wish I had to be honest.I would. Like, I was ignorant. It was relatively recently that I started studying for the impacts of pesticides, actually about 12 years ago. Up until then I believed all of the rubbish that we're told about pesticides. I believed that glyphosate (roundup) was safe to use as a herbicide in my garden. I was told it disappeared as soon as it touched the soil and that it was completely non-toxic to people. That's what we're told over and over again, but once I started reading and doing research on pesticides it quickly became obvious to me that actually most of this was nonsense and these things are really harmful to us, to soil organisms, to nature and so I stopped using them. Better late than never is all I can say.

Ja altså det råd jeg har hørt, det er at du skal slå græs i begyndelsen af maj. Så tager du pippet fra de der hundegræs og draphavre og hvad de hedder de der grimme vækster. Og så tager du simpelthen pippet fra dem så de ikke skyder igen og så får blomsterne en chance. Det gør de rent faktisk i, jeg tror det er Rudersdal Kommune som princip. Jeg har prøvet det derhjemme og får min kommune til at gøre det ved mit, langs mine marker ikke, og det så nogenlunde ud. Jens: så det gælder om at fjerne noget biomasse før blomsterne, begynder at blomstre? Kjeld: ja, det gælder om at kappe hovedet af de der græsser, så de styrer sig. Problemet er jo at græsserne vokser så voldsomt op, fordi det hele er så næringsberiget at de kvæler de små blomster. Men kan du få dem til at lade være med det, så får blomsterne en chance. Jens: og fjerne det man slår ikke? Kjeld: jo selvfølgelig.

Den er 1415 hektar stor og der er offentlig adgang. Der går en offentlig vej igennem og man må færdes i overensstemmelse med naturfredningsloven på eksisterende veje og stier men Sofie er jo ikke dum overhovedet ikke, hun er faktisk ret smart fordi midtvejs på den der offentlige vej der har hun lavet en parkeringsplads så har hun bygget et tårn, et temmelig højt tårn og så har hun lavet sådan et borde bænke sæt så 98% af alle de besøgende, de kører ind, stiller bilen på den der p-plads, maser sig op i tårnet altså de er totalt udmattede, for det er altså rigtig højt og der er ikke nogen elevator. Og så går de ned igen og drikker deres kaffe og så kører de hjem, og så har de haft en vidunderlig oplevelse i naturen. Ja jeg siger det med sådan et lille twist, men det er jo ret smart fordi resten af Klelund ligger sådan nogenlunde uberørt hen. Hun har fået lov at afspærre 1/3 af hensyn til ulvene. Det er det område hvor de ligesom bor men ellers er der offentlig adgang. Jens: så 1/3 er der ikke offentlig adgang til? Kjeld: ja. Jens: jeg kender nogen der så ulve oppe fra hendes tårn så man kan få fine oplevelser.

Det er for tidligt at svare på. Jeg prøvede at undersøge her for nylig om de der laver solcelleparkerne - og det kunne I andre måske også gøre ved at gå hjem og spørge jeres kommune - har de tilladt dem at sprøjte mellem solcellerne eller er de tvunget til at vedligeholde vegetationen manuelt eller ved hjælp af får og hvis det sidste er tilfældet, der er ikke nogen regel, men der er nogle kommuner der skriver det ind i tilladelsen. Altså de får simpelthen tinglyst i blandt andet Svendborg kommune at her må man ikke bruge pesticider og hvis det bliver overholdt så er der jo ingen tvivl om det. At det i hvert fald, og at jeg siger sådan det er ikke noget af det vi bliver enige om i dag, at alting er bedre end byg. Så ja er svaret. Det vil i hvert fald ikke skade.