On the surface, the ancestral rainforest territory of the Wampis people of north-eastern Peru bears little resemblance to the English county of Herefordshire. Yet the areas are inextricably linked, thanks to the grit of a small group of Herefordshire residents who raised £110,000 to protect a patch of the Amazon that is at least the size of their county.
Positive News subscribers Sue and Jeremy Bugler set up The Size of Herefordshire in 2015 out of a desire to protect one of the most biodiverse areas on the planet, while raising awareness of deforestation and the climate crisis close to home. They were inspired by The Size of Wales, an environmental charity founded as an antidote to repeated media use of “‘the size of Wales” ’ as a unit to measure the destruction of natural habitats.
“We thought that was a good idea,” says Jeremy, a former environment journalist turned farmer. “Herefordshire is only 220,000 hectares, around a 10th of the size of Wales, so we thought that was a target we could manage.”
