´óÏó´«Ã½

Simon explores the wild and rugged coast of Cumbria and learns how central the county is to many of the challenges facing Britain.

The Lake District National Park includes a beautiful stretch of Cumbria’s coast, where rare natterjack toads inhabit a spectacular sand dune landscape. But this rugged wilderness sits in the shadows of Sellafield, the most hazardous industrial site in western Europe, which is home to hundreds of aging and disused nuclear facilities - including the largest single stockpile of plutonium on the planet.

At a brand new training facility, Simon meets members of the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, an elite unit of armed police that is the UK’s first line of defence against an attack at a nuclear site. He is also given rare access to Sellafield’s aging facilities and some of the men and women tasked with clearing and securing over half a century of Britain’s nuclear waste.

Further down the coast, Simon heads out to sea to visit a much less controversial part of Cumbria’s ‘Energy Coast’ – the second biggest offshore wind farm on earth. But greener energy alone won’t reduce carbon emissions enough to prevent global warming. Vast areas of the Lake District are boggy peatlands. Peat is dense, wet organic matter that stores enormous quantities of carbon. Simon heads up into the fells above Coniston to see a large project that is aiming to prevent the release of carbon from peatlands, reversing this process to restore the land to its former boggy glory.

At the end of his travels through Cumbria, Simon meets James Rebanks, a shepherd and bestselling author who believes that farming could be the solution to many of our national problems, from the loss of wildlife to climate change. His vision of ‘regenerative farming’, where farmers work with the natural world to produce food, is increasingly seen as one answer to the decline of rural communities and the degradation of the natural world.