Inside the Big Issue: Grab life by the horns

As we head into an uncertain New Year, meet the people (and bison) who are making a positive difference to those around them and the wider world. One such person is Hannah Mackins.

Each and every day Mackins clocks in to work, she must set out into an ancient woodland in Kent and attempt to find a herd of bison. This is a legal requirement.

Some days, the GPS trackers on the bison work and it is a simple task. But the thick forest often jams up the signal, so Mackins goes back to basics. If she finds dung with flies, it has been there for an hour or so. She’s learned to tell how old a footprint is. Should it come to it, there are always the sounds of branches crackling and breaking.

“Sometimes you will just find us in the woods, stood on a tree stump, hands around our ears, just listening,” she says. It’s probably fair to assume Mackins is never met with boredom when she tells people at parties what she does for a living: She’s a bison ranger at a pioneering project in the Wilder Blean woods, run by the Kent Wildlife Trust and the Wildwood Trust, which has reintroduced wild bison to the UK.

Part of a growing rewilding movement in the UK, the project released bison into the woods near Canterbury in 2022. As of January 2024, the UK’s plans on meeting legally binding biodiversity targets were “largely off track”. Could Bison help get us back on track?

Buy a copy of the Big Issue to find out. Happy New Year!

What else is in this week’s issue?

Look for surprises in the stars

“We are looking for surprises: objects that we may not have thought to look for before.”

If we’re not able to save the world, maybe some other lifeform can. Brian Rogers is a DPhil student in astrophysics at the University of Oxford. He is part of a new machine-learning project that’s helping us try to find out who exists beyond the Milky Way.

Letter to my Younger Self: Best of 2024

In Big Issue each week, we ask famous figures to look back and share words of wisdom with their younger selves. The interviews are always revealing, inspiring, hopeful and heartening. Here are some highlights from the last 12 months.

Come aboard the RRS Sir David Attenborough

As you read this, the Royal Research Ship Sir David Attenborough is somewhere in the Southern Ocean conducting scientifi c research about the impact of climate change at the extremes of the earth. Neets Buttle is now training to work on deck. She tells us what it’s like to be a member of the crew – from curious penguins to epic snowball fights.

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