Merlin and Robin Hanbury-Tenison

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Finally, people are genuinely accepting that climate change is real and is the biggest catastrophe facing the world. And if we don't do something about that, we are all going down to hell in a handcart. And the exciting thing is that people are recognizing that the indigenous people are actually the ones who got it right, and we, with our greed, have actually got it wrong. And we need to listen to each other. [00:00:23] Speaker B: Hello, I'm Annabelle Heseltine. I'm a journalist and broadcaster, and you're very welcome to the seventh episode of Hope Springs. Today I'm chatting with Robin and his son Merlin Hanbury Tennyson, who have dedicated their lives to rainforests as well as the people living amongst them, whether it's the people of South America and Borneo or on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall where they live. Passionate and indefatigable rock. Robin Hanbri Tennyson, obe, has been described as an explorer with a conscience, leading over 30 expeditions, including the Royal Geographic's largest ever with 115 scientists, to Borneo. In 1977, the founder and former president of Survival International won an RGS Gold Medal for his campaigning for the rights of indigenous people and tropical rainforests. He's authored over 25 books and survived five weeks in a coma with COVID Merlin is a veteran of three tours in Afghanistan. In 2016, after a mental breakdown, he returned with his wife Lizzie to Cornwall to heal, unaware at the time that his family home was surrounded by rainforest, albeit an Atlantic temperate one. The story of how and why Merlin created the Thousand Year Trust to protect them is beautifully told by him in Our Oaken Bones, published in March. It is a moving book about nature and her power to restore and heal trauma. I visited them earlier this year and sitting with them in the forest, I began our conversation by asking Merlin to tell me the story behind its name. [00:02:21] Speaker C: We're sitting at Kabyla, which is an ancient Cornish word. A lot of people think of these Cornish terms as starting with tre, pol or pen. There's an old saying, trey, pol and pen spell the names of Cornish men. But there are many Cornish words and place names which perhaps are not as recognizable. And Cornish is one of these ancient Celtic languages. My daughters are actually taught it at a primary school because a little bit like the Welsh resurgence, Cornwall is bringing back its language and its culture. And Kibila means land of the woollen cloak. And when William the Conqueror came over in 1066 and conquered the British Isles, Cornwall was still a Celtic nation. And when they did their census, the Doomsday Census, in 1086. They found that there were about 160 ancient farms across Cornwall that all had a duty they had to do for the King. And the duty of Cabilla, the land of the woollen cloak, was whenever the King passed from England into Cornwall, because we are not in England when we sit here. Of course not. The steward of Cabilla would have to take their finest sheep and shear it and weave a fine woolen cloak that they would present to the King at the border to keep them warm, safe and dry from the occasional rain that we suffer on this peninsula stuck out into the Atlantic. And so when Lizzie, my wife, and I started our business here, Kibila, Cornwall, which is a retreat centre that brings veterans with pto, people from the NHS suffering stress and burnout, people suffering many of the mental health challenges that we felt over the last few years and have healed from in this valley. We really wanted to imbue it with that culture and that idea that when you stay here, you are wrapped in the warm woolen cloak of Kabila and you're in a very safe space for processing whatever people bring when they come here. [00:04:00] Speaker D: So let's go back a little bit to Robin. You were 23 years old. You had, I think, already three expeditions or long journeys. What possessed you, age 23, to decide to buy a 300 acre farm in Cornwall? [00:04:17] Speaker A: Well, I inherited a farm in East Anglia, which has nothing to do with my family, but it was my inheritance and I didn't want to live in East Anglia. I knew that England really only becomes nice and clean and habitable when you're about 200 miles west of London. I'd already realized that. So I was looking for somewhere to live. And when I was sent this place, this farm, I instantly fell in love. Something happened. It was a coup de food. I just went up on the moors, looked out over the woods and the moors and thought, this is where I can live. It changed so much, this place. When I started, I took over lock, stock and barrel from the previous owner. And it was a wonderful mixed farm with eight people actually making a living from it. And as a result, the biodiversity was very rich because there were all the different things. We had coveys of partridges, we had hares, none of which have been seen for years here, because gradually it's gone back to being what most of the other farms around here are still, which is cattle and sheep and nothing else. [00:05:19] Speaker D: So you were very aware of that back in 1960. [00:05:22] Speaker A: I wasn't aware of it to begin with at all, but I was aware of what a wonderful environment it was and how rich. And gradually, because of European subsidies and the pressure on farmers to specialize and to concentrate on monoculture, we went with the flow and got rid of all the other activities and ended up just with cattle and sheep, which is the traditional thing to do on Bob Memor. And then into my life came, in the mid-70s, an extraordinary character, a New Zealander called Hugh Fullerton Smith, known to everyone as Pancho, who was full of good ideas. And the first thing we tried was goats, Angora goats. There was a South Sea bubble about Mohow. Some people may remember back in the 70s, when everybody thought mohaw was the most wonderful product and everybody wanted to have it, and it comes from angora goats. And then, of course, the bubble was going to burst, and it did, and we managed to get out of it without losing everything. And then we went into Red Deer, which was going to work, and we had wonderful export arrangement with New Zealand until something called mad cow disease came along. And the protocol of being able to export to New Zealand went. So that was killed. Then we had wild boar. We brought in 30 wild boar from Russia. They were proper wild boar. They were twice as big as the French sanglier. I mean, they were big things. And we had 30 of them and got built up to 450. And that was brilliant. We were selling exclusive purveyors to Fortnum and Mason and selling direct to people. And it was a wonderful scheme which was almost making money when along came foot and mouth and that folded. So now we were back to cattle and sheep the old traditional way and have a tenant doing that. And that was the farm that I handed over to Merl with an annual income of 10,000 a year and no prospect of ever making it into anything more clever, which he has managed to do. [00:07:09] Speaker D: Shall we talk about Atlantic temperate rainforests, please, and what they are? Let's start with how is it different with a tropical rainforest? Because most people know about tropical rainforests, but even my mother, when I said about temperatures, do you mean we've got rainforests here? So please tell me more. [00:07:25] Speaker C: It's still my favorite question to ask people whenever I'm speaking to a group is how many people didn't realize that. That Britain has rainforests and is a rainforest island. And when I started Talking about it three or four years ago, about 80% of people would look at me like I'd gone completely mad and that I was making things up. But about 3,000 years ago, 20% of the UK was a rainforest landscape. So that's everything down the west of our of our island, from Stornoway on the Isle of Lewes, all down the Western Highlands past Fort William and Oban, down through Cumbria in the Lake District, and then along that western ridge of Wales from Anglesey to Aberystwyth to Pembrokeshire and then the southwest, the upland areas of Exmoor, Dartmoor, Bodminmoor, the Lizard and Westpanwyth. And I like to remind people that even if we didn't know the term rainforest until quite recently, we all know them from the stories of our childhood. Because whether it's Arthurian knights meeting to do battle in woodland glades, or Tolkien's Ents in Fangorn Forest, roaming from moonlit forest to moonlit forest, or the jab walkie whiffling through tulge woods, or for any Welsh people, the Mabinogion, these are all set in temperate rainforests, so they're very much a part of our heart. But I think they're also extremely important from a logical and a rational perspective. They are a pinnacle habitat in the UK for a number of different ecosystem services. So nothing that we can restore and expand in Britain does more for sequestering carbon dioxide and locking it into the soil than Atlantic temperate rainforest. It sequesters more CO2 than anything else. We are in the most nature depleted country in Europe now. Nothing restores biodiversity and all of the many, many creatures, both fauna and flora, that used to roam and grow across the UK than temperate rainforest. They are a bubbling, fizzing riot of life in a very compacted space. But I think most importantly, they're also our most important habitat for the mental health and well being of the humans who spend time amongst them. When these habitats photosynthesize, they don't just pump out oxygen from their leaves, they lace that oxygen with these volatile organic compounds called terpenes and phytoncides, which when you breathe them in as a visitor to these habitats, your cortisol level drops, so your main stress hormone. And some studies show that in just 30 minutes in a native wet woodland or temperate rainforest environment, your cortisol will drop to a level that can still be measured up to two weeks later. But I suppose to go back to your original question of what are they? Because I slightly skipped that bit, they are our native woodland and I think in an island it's very important. We're very blind to this. I sat in a panel the other day with a wonderful ecologist from the Australian Wildlife Service and she was making the point that in Australia they're Very comfortable with looking at the species they have there and identifying whether they evolved there or whether they didn't. Whereas in the UK we seem to have lost the ability to do that. In rainforests, it is all native plants and native animals. They have a high level of rainfall, at least 1400 millimeters a year, split across the year. And the most important thing is the epiphytes, which are any plants that don't use the soil to grow. So lichens, mosses, polypody, ferns, liverworts, pennyworts, all of these wonderful epiphytes and bryophytes that grow up in the canopy, which make them these extremely romantic kind of festooned habitats, Like a bit like Avatar is the shortcut way of explaining it. [00:10:40] Speaker D: But they're just green. They're cloaked in green, aren't they? And they're dangling green and they're shooting green and it goes in all these different directions. [00:10:48] Speaker C: The comparison I love to draw between tropical and temperate rainforests, with my father having spent his career in the tropical variety, is that tropical rainforests are hugely important in studying and there's so much of them left, as opposed to temperate rainforests, but they're generally evergreen, which means that if you go into a tropical rainforest in January, in April or in October, you walk into a very similar habitat. The wonderful and I think very special thing about temperate rainforests is that they are, they have 52 different faces every week. That you go into an Atlantic temperate rainforest, you walk into a different habitat. In January, there isn't a leaf to be seen, it's all lichens just covering the trunks and the branches. In April, it's wall to wall bluebells. In August it's thick, thick green and just busy with life. By the time we get to October, it's copper brown as everything started to get ready for the autumn fall. And then the mushrooms start to come out and you have this constant change and I think that's so beautiful. [00:11:43] Speaker D: I mean, I think we've got to put this in context. There was 20% of England or the British Isles that was covered in these rainforests and now we're down to 0.4%, is that correct? [00:11:53] Speaker C: Yes. I mean, less than a percent, probably less than half a percent. We have. And my hope, my dream, my passion is that we have reached the nadir, is that this is that handbrake turn moment and we don't drop any lower because we are at that perishingly small amount left that if we don't do something now for our Children, our children's children's generation. They will only be a memory. [00:12:14] Speaker D: And of course, you only discovered or actually realised and gave it a name as a temperate rainforest. I believe in 2019, when some people came here. You had absolutely no idea, Robin, when you came here, that there was a temperate rainforest. [00:12:27] Speaker A: The only thing I can take credit for is that I didn't listen to the agricultural advisors who advised me to bulldoze it all down and get rid of it as. As useless land and try and make a bit of useful agricultural land out of it. And I did that purely for sentimental reasons. I said, I love these woods, I'm not having them done. But I grew up in a very similar environment in Ireland and this whole business about the tulgeiness of the woods resonates very strongly with me. And it's wonderful to be here. [00:12:54] Speaker D: And you have seen again and again, whether it's in South America or in Borneo, the devastation wrought by cutting down these beautiful forests and the fact that the land is not that good afterwards and it gets leached. Perhaps you'd like to tell me a little bit more about what you saw in the past and what you've both seen when you've gone back there together, father and son. [00:13:16] Speaker A: When I first crossed South America at its whitiest point in 1958, I went 6,000 miles of which 4,000 miles had not been crossed by anybody else, and went right through the edge of the tropical rainforest and the edge of their other habitat. And half of that rainforest is now gone. Literally half of this enormous biggest rainforest in the world since I first crossed it. And that is devastating to look at. I've been back several times and you see these areas which have been cleared and a straight line to the horizon of forest on one side and moonscape of soy plantations on the other, which completely bears the land. There's no trees left at all. And what was that for? Feedlots, for cattle in North America. So cattle are largely responsible for the destruction of the rainforest in a rather roundabout way. And I've seen that both in Brazil and South America, and particularly also in Borneo. When I was leading my expedition, there is this, the 1977 with all our scientists. 95% of the lowland rainforest in Borneo was intact. And today 5% is left. The rest, if you fly over it, instead of flying over ceaseless, wonderful rainforest, you fly over rows and rows of straight lines of palm oil, which is used in everything practically, that we eat. [00:14:40] Speaker D: It's heartbreaking, isn't it? And it's counterproductive and stupid, because what we're actually doing is cutting down one of the greatest sources of healing and repair. But, Merlin, I'd like to go back to you, because when you left London, you came home seeking to heal. You had done three tours in Afghanistan, and I think you also found London quite challenging, too. Would you like to tell me a bit more and about Morag? [00:15:10] Speaker C: About Morag? Oh, God, absolutely. No, I mean, it's a very. When you say you spent time in Afghanistan, people often think how awful that must have been. But actually, I felt extremely privileged and lucky to serve as a soldier at a time when there was a war going on that I could be involved with. Every soldier hopes that they will serve at a time when they can deploy overseas and be involved in an operation. [00:15:35] Speaker D: It was 9 11, wasn't it, that propelled you into the army in the first place? [00:15:39] Speaker C: Yes. I was 16 when I remember, seeing as I'm sure everybody who is old enough will remember the moment those planes crashed into the Twin Towers. And that very much put me on a course to join in the military. And then I went to Afghanistan every year between 2007 and 2011, which was a very busy time for Western forces that were in that country. And I felt very lucky to be there. And it was fascinating and in many ways very enjoyable. I was a young man as a tank commander, and Morag was what my vehicle crew called our very small light tank. It was a Scimitar, which beautiful little things. They're out of service now. They were far too old even then. [00:16:16] Speaker D: And you actually talk about making connections with Taliban. Perhaps you could talk just a bit more about that, because that's a connection with people. You may not like or agree with them, but you have to work with them. [00:16:28] Speaker C: Yeah. The thing I found very interesting is very few soldiers have that luxury and that privilege of actually meeting their adversary. And it was on my third tour, when I was working in an intelligence role in Kandahar, that I was working with members of the Taliban every day. And you really started to understand what their motivations were and what makes them tick. And I found that fascinating because I think every country, when they're at war, wants to make out their adversary to be evil or malicious in some way. And it's only when you start to speak to them, you realize the mirror is being shone right back at you. And so I had some very good friends in the Taliban at the time who I felt that I understood and in many ways could empathize with. And we sat on two sides of very opposing Philosophies, but that certainly focused the mind as well. [00:17:12] Speaker A: There's a rather nice bit of synergy that's just occurred to me, which is that before I went on my South American expedition in 1957, I spent quite a lot of time in Afghanistan on my way out to Ceylon a month or so, traveling in the interior and having a wonderful time. It was a golden era. Everybody was very nice to us. We had such hospitality and such wonderful relationships with the Afghan people that when Merlin was posted out there, I was full of idealistic dreams. And I said, of course you'll be playing bush, qazi and polo and things with them. And it wasn't like it really, but I mean, there's an odd little synergy there, like with our rainforest story. [00:17:50] Speaker D: Well, I was about to say, and I thought you were going to talk about how you have made incredible connection with indigenous people. And we will go back, we'll go back to your friendships there, but I'd like to go back to. We were talking about why you came back to Kabila. [00:18:07] Speaker C: So I remember as a 21 year old, just before deploying on my first tour of Afghanistan, I did a course about mental health, a short course in the military. And I remember the one thing that was told in that course that I remember was that it can take up to 10 years for the effects of post traumatic stress disaster disorder or the impact of a traumatic experience to really affect a person. And as a very arrogant 21 year old, I remember thinking how absolutely ridiculous. If something happens and it's going to traumatize me, I'll know within a week, at least, if not immediately. And I remember the first time that we were ambushed and shot at afterwards, as we regrouped in the desert, sort of giving that sort of temperature test in my mind and going, no, no, I'm fine, brilliant. I'm absolutely fine. I'm not going to suffer in any way. And it was then later in that tour that my vehicle was blown up in a large roadside bomb and Morag was completely destroyed. And amazingly my crew and I were able to walk away and weren't badly injured. And I was very proud that that hadn't traumatized me either. [00:19:04] Speaker D: And you vividly described in your book, I mean, how first of all, you're trained to check yourselves for holes, whether you've lost limbs, and then you check because you can't hear anything, you can't see anything, you're blinded and you feel your friends or your colleagues to check that you're all alright. It's beautifully written and I really sort of understood the heat and the extraordinary sense of this comradeship that you had. [00:19:29] Speaker C: No, thank you. And I think that it's that muscle memory that really kicks in and is what keeps soldiers alive. And that, for me, was very much what kept us all going in those moments. And then, yeah, I did two more tours in Afghanistan and then eventually I left the army and got married and went to live and work in London and was working in a corporate environment. And I think it's. It's important to note that I don't attribute the fact that I was then later diagnosed with complex PTSD and had a mental breakdown entirely to experiences in the military, because I think those can be quite exclusionary because not many people have had those experiences. I think as much of it was triggered and contributed to by that corporate lifestyle which many people are being forced into. There's a term for wild animals that are put in captivity. When polar bears or tigers or pandas are taken out of their natural setting and put into small enclosures, they begin to demonstrate aggression or they eat poorly or they defer themselves. And we call it zoocosis. And there is only one mammal that we don't use the term zoocosis for, and that's humans. Even though we have taken ourselves out of the setting we evolved in and put ourselves in these small enclosures, often in very unnatural settings. And it's creating a mental health pandemic and an obesity pandemic. And I think I was as affected by that as much as. And I, of course, grew up living in a rainforest here. So for me, it was even more jarring and shocking. And that really affected me as well, commuting every day into Canary Wharf to go into the corporate grind. And yet those two things combined resulted in me suffering with quite poor mental health and getting the clinical assistance that was recommended, but also spending a lot of time back here in the valley and feeling so lucky and fortunate that I had this valley to retreat to and to heal in and to hide in. And it was really that along with everything that my wife Lizzie went through, which for us just also talk about. [00:21:20] Speaker D: That, because that is again, you know, losing two babies. [00:21:25] Speaker C: Yes. More. [00:21:26] Speaker D: And the second pregnancy, the first pregnancy was late term, hugely painful. So you were healing together. [00:21:34] Speaker C: We were. And I feel very, you know, these are. It's very much Lizzie's pain and Lizzie's story, and I don't want to in any way sort of co opt it to my own because it's very personal to her, but she was also working very high pressured jobs in London. We were trying to start a family and she had had two miscarriages in the early stages of when we were trying to start a family. And this is a subject which I think is far too little spoken about. It's amazing how when a lady has suffered a miscarriage and does share it, how many people that you know will say, oh, I had a miscarriage or I had two miscarriages, or. And it's incredible how common it is, but how little discussed it is. And I think that's a sort of a social shibboleth that needs to be broken open. And so Lizzie's done amazing work talking about that and sharing something very personal and sensitive to her. But also after our first child was born, she suffered quite bad postnatal anxiety and depression, which is another issue that is far too little discussed. And the rainforest was a very healing and safe place for her during that time. [00:22:35] Speaker D: I think I was struck by how you describe walking in the rainforest and then asking the question of why it was that you were starting to feel better. So you didn't just take it, oh, this is lovely, we're feeling a bit better. You actually went to the next stage and you started to ask questions, which in a way is the beginning of the retreat that you set up here. And also the Thousand Year Trust, which we will talk about a bit later. But what did happen in 2019? [00:23:04] Speaker C: So I think as Lizzie and I were both having wonderful healing experiences, and then later in 2020, when my father was recovering from very bad Covid and using the rainforest as a healer for him as well, we did start to ask these questions and try and understand more about what it was that made this habitat particularly special. Now, we'd known, as my father says, that he'd known it was a very special habitat, a very old habitat, one that needed protecting, but we didn't know a huge amount about it. And that's when I started to reach out to different groups that were out there. So first it was the Ancient Tree Forum, who are a wonderful eclectic group of sort of tree avengers. And they were the ones who were able to categorically show that this forest has been around since 1086, at least, because they've got the doomsday records and that's very rare. We've cut down 98% of our ancient woodland in the UK and we call in the UK anything ancient woodland which is 400 years old. Now, in oak woods, where an oak tree can live for a thousand years, 400 years is still a toddler to the trees that live within it. And what that means is that the ground beneath the trees, the soil and the organic matter and the mycelium and the incredible wood wide web and the motherboard of life that facilitates communication between trees is very partial in these younger woodlands. So we knew it was a thousand years old. We then started working with Eden Project, who sent in some soil scientists who did a paleobotanical peat core survey, where they basically get a giant corkscrew and screw it deep down into the soil. And it was them who were able to give us even more detail. And I always laughed at Mark Nason, who's a wonderful man, and that was the head soil scientist at Eden. It took him ages to send me the results of his survey and he said he didn't want to send them to me because he was still conducting further analysis and wanted to be more specific in terms of the dates. And eventually I insisted. And after he'd insisted back and I'd insisted and eventually I won, he said, look, I really wanted to be more specific, but we can tell you that this forest is at least 3,664 years old, give or take 29 years, which was just specific enough for me. And so we know it's a very old habitat. And that was what really got us thinking about how we could not only be a part of protecting, restoring and expanding it, but also bringing more people into it so they could benefit from it, but also benefit it. Because I think that's what we often miss in the UK is people go into nature and often nature suffers or they don't go into nature, and then the natural world is given space to heal and repair and we need to walk that tightrope of allowing both things to happen. [00:25:31] Speaker D: Can we go back to what we can learn from, from forest and woodland and the healing properties? Because it's something which we really need to value, not just here, but everywhere in the world. [00:25:40] Speaker C: Yes. And I think it's the really exciting next step. And this is why I'm always trying to remind people that in the UK we are a rainforest people living on a rainforest island, because we will only truly fall in love with and protect these habitats if we understand how much they benefit us as well. And Japan is a great example because there, since the 1980s, they've done a lot of very good scientific research into how healing these native habitats can be in the uk. So little has been done. And that's the big focus of our charity, is establishing what it is about these rainforests, that makes them not only so special, but so worthy of being protected and expanded. [00:26:18] Speaker D: It's interesting that the NHS now are beginning to sort of prescribe nature and to recognize nature as a healer. So the whole thing around retreat, I mean, there was a huge number of retreats being open up in the UK and given that 57% of people now live in cities and we have this big problem with a disconnect, so this way of offering nature in a different way is only going to get more and more important. I believe the prediction for people living in cities is going to increase by another 10% in the next 10 years. [00:26:54] Speaker C: I mean, absolutely. And you know, I very much think that, especially looking at my father's career in more in the tropics and my focus here in the uk, we've spent a century as the west wagging our fingers into the tropical regions and saying, don't kill your megafauna, don't kill your apex predators, don't cut down all your trees when we have already killed all our megafauna, killed all our apex predators and cut down nearly all of our trees. And I think there's this wonderful opportunity, opportunity now for us to fix our own backyard and become a good case study for how nature can be restored and stop dictating to others until we've actually repaired things here and we can use the mental health and physiological benefits of these native habitats as a catalyst to do that. [00:27:38] Speaker D: Robin, you will admit that even before COVID you were a bit skeptical about the healing powers of nature. And then, and then you were one of the first people to get Covid really badly and you were in a five week induced coma. And would you like to tell me about what that was like and how you started to heal afterwards? [00:27:59] Speaker A: I was very ill. It is deeply boring being in hospital and five weeks in a coma was horrible, except that they were giving me very strong hallucinogenic drugs which livened up life. But they couldn't get me out of the coma. And it just happened that the hospital I was in, Derriford in Plymouth, was the first hospital with a healing garden attached to an intensive care unit. And I was only the second person to be wheeled into it. And I woke up and luckily a nurse was filming me at the time and saw me through my tracheostomy tube. Groom out. I'm going to live. As I woke up, which was marvelous moment and I remember it very clearly and it did was a manifest case of the healing power of nature. I have no doubt about that. It was nature that got me out of it. But I was incredibly weak when I came out. And the question everybody asks an old explorer always is, what are you going to do next? What's your next challenge? And Llewellyn came up with the wonderful idea of saying, well, it's a month for every week you're in intensive care to get well again. I've been five weeks. So five months from now, why don't you climb Brown Willie at Cornwall's highest mountain? And so we did that. And we did it in order to raise money so that Cornwall should also have a healing garden and that we have finally brought about. [00:29:14] Speaker D: Merlin writes about what it meant for you to climb Brown Willie. And I have to say, by the time you got to the top, I was crying. It was the way that the community came out. Your family was there, but it wasn't just that. It was the people that came. And I think community and love is an integral theme of your book, Merlin, and it's an integral theme of what is happening here. But I think the community started with the friendships that you had back in the 70s and 60s, and in particular with one man. Please, will you give me his name again? [00:29:54] Speaker A: Nyapun. [00:29:55] Speaker D: How much did Nyapun influence what you did out there and what you learned? What did you learn? [00:30:02] Speaker A: Well, I've been extraordinarily lucky in my life and my travels in meeting so many amazing indigenous people accidentally, very often, and then later, when traveling for survival, deliberately finding how people were coping with contact with civilization. And there's this wonderful bond that you get with people which I'm lucky enough to be able to have, which involves, I think, one of the core human abilities, which is hospitality. If I'm in their place and not throwing my weight around. I've had such generosity and hospitality and genuine affection cross culturally with people from a totally different background who have totally different awareness of the world around them, but who somehow you can bond with and become very friendly to. And the greatest of all was my friend Nyapun, who was a Penan hunter gatherer in Borneo and living with his two wives and 10 children and having no association with the outside world at all, just traveling in the forest and on the expedition. He came out and we met and he. He took me to meet his family, who'd never seen a European before and who became my family. And I became very close to them and to him. And we went on lots of patrols together, not much language in common, but this wonderful human bond of love, genuine love and affection and mutual respect. That we had for each other right up until he died a couple of years ago. And Merlin's also been out to see him with me and was known as Little Nyapun because he came out first when he was 14. [00:31:42] Speaker D: But you also had connections too, didn't you, with Nixie? [00:31:46] Speaker C: Nishi. Yeah, Nishi, which again is through survival and through my father and Nishi, who's a wonderful man of a similar age to me with the Yawanawa tribe in western Brazil. And he's a very. An amazing man also a very talented painter, a very talented artist and a good friend. [00:32:04] Speaker D: There was a wonderful description in your book about going out hunting with him. And I couldn't help thinking, very experienced veteran of three tours in Afghanistan, you would have known too well the dangers of that gun. In fact, you talk about it, but you also talk about the jaguar that helped you find your way home. [00:32:25] Speaker C: Well, you know, Nishi lives within a tropical rainforest and knows it very well. He. He's not. I would probably think that he'd be very comfortable if he were sitting here to agree. Not a brilliant hunter, but he's an enthusiastic amateur. And so being out in the forest, very far from anywhere in the tropical rainforest, it does become quite an intimidating environment quite quickly. And we got very lost. And, you know, Nishi certainly was more passionate about the idea that it was the jaguar who led us back to the path. I think we were exceptionally lucky to find our way back path and not end up wandering around the Peruvian, Brazilian border for the next month. [00:33:01] Speaker A: You saw its paw prints? [00:33:02] Speaker C: We did. We saw very recent paw prints that had just happened in the sand. And a lot of. We saw. I mean, it was a wonderful experience and I look forward to going back and visiting him again. [00:33:13] Speaker D: Back in about 2000, I was in Yellowstone park when it was the time of the wolf reintroductions and there were bears out there. And there was a wonderful guy called Jim Halfpenny who was the wolf tracker. And he took me out and he said, annabelle, before you leave, you have to go out into Yellowstone on your own. And he said, you have to experience what it's like to be. Not to be top of the food chain. And it was absolutely terrifying. And I think that this is a very important lesson and something that you did talk about as a result of that and how we need to respect nature and we need to understand that we are a part of nature and not apart from nature and that nature has a lot to offer us. And I would love to both of you to talk to me about how you feel about that. [00:33:59] Speaker C: And it's something that I'm very passionate about because we've made nature in Britain so sanitized. I often have this conversation with guests at Kabila who are scared of going into the rainforest. Especially sometimes we go in at night to look at the stars or the moon or just to experience being in a rainforest in under starlight. And people are very afraid of being in a forest and we've indoctrinated our children and ourselves. Everything scary happens in the forest. The witch lives there, the wolf lives there. It's where the monsters and the jab walkie live and all of the orcs and the terrible stories we tell children, the gruffalo, they all live in the forest. And so when it's only natural that we're afraid of it, but we are the most scary thing in the uk we might, if, if you're very unlucky, you might be bitten by an adder but that's a. It's not going to likely to kill you. And what we have done consistently over the last few thousand years is we've de rainforested the UK is we've removed that landscape of fear at every stage. So now it is, it's a giant, giant play park. And Yellowstone is such a wonderful example of this with their wolfree introductions and everything that did to deer populations. Not by killing all the deer but just by making the deer a little bit more anxious and making them stay away from the riverbanks a bit more and graze a little bit bit differently. And bringing a bit of that back is a way to restore the natural world. [00:35:11] Speaker D: And of course in the rainforests they understand nature in a way that we have even haven't even started. [00:35:17] Speaker C: Well, you're very, you're very brave. You've never been afraid in tropical rainforests. [00:35:20] Speaker A: Aha. But my life being terrified. But this rings so many bells with me because I grew up in a wonderful place in Ireland, wooded and laked and I was a much youngest child. My mother, totally irresponsible, allowed me to live steeping alone and then row back ashore. So I have from very early youth a kind of affinity with forests and being alone in them and being aware of the magic of the forests. I like wildlife and being alone and had a miserable time at school because I didn't really like anybody. But then when I started exploring again I discovered this affinity with the strange people one was meeting all over the world in Southeast Asia and Africa and South America. Been incredibly lucky to have met so many wonderful people. And felt this important cross cultural relationship that one can develop. And I've been very lucky in having that. And it's wonderful to see it all coming together now with what Merlin's doing. [00:36:19] Speaker D: So let's go back to Kabila and what you're doing here. Now, Merlin, would you like to tell me about the retreat, about the work you're doing to restore the temperate rainforest and what are your hopes? [00:36:34] Speaker A: Sure. [00:36:34] Speaker C: So, as my father mentioned at the start, it's a 300 acre farm, which is about 100 acres of Atlantic temperate rainforest and about 200 acres of upland grazing land. And what we've been doing there on the land over the last five years is starting to transition it into more of a nature positive agroforestry system. So we don't want to stop producing food, we don't want to take land out of farming, but we do want to restore rainforest. So we're planting and re establishing about 100,000 trees across the farm to triple the size of that rainforest. But to put it back into what it would have originally been, which is a mob grazing agroforestry system that has native breed cattle and pigs and horses moving through the rainforest, helping it as they drop their manure, as they graze and browse in different ways. And this is a blueprint for other farmers and landowners on the uplands. But very much alongside that is the ecotourism side, which is Kibila, Cornwall, and that's a retreat centre focused on bringing veterans with ptsd, nurses from the NHS with stress and burnout, people from cities who need to detox and escape into nature. And we've been doing this now, Lizzie and I, for three years and we've brought a huge number of groups here. The ones that we're both most proud of are the NHS nurses who come here, who all turn up and you can see the tension and the stress in their bodies. And then as they go into the rainforest and settle on the tour and breathe, the tears begin and everybody around a circle will all just release and cry. And the same with the military groups, they're even more bottled up because it's not good, still not good in military settings generally to share these emotions. So they'll turn up and everyone will have their arms firmly crossed and they'll say, no, I'm fine, I don't have anything I really want to talk about. And then by the end of three days, they've all had those wonderful, beautiful releases where they. They cry and they become like children again and they feel restored and rebuilt and reinvigorated. And that's the work we really wanted to do. But alongside that, I realized, because originally when we set it up, I wanted all that restoration work on the land to be being done by the business and we would use our any profits that we made to do that. Of course, profits have been a challenging thing to make at the moment, so it was really hard to try and do any of that restoration work at the same time. So, two years ago, we founded our charity, the Thousand Year Trust, which is the only charity in the UK that have temperate rainforests in our charitable purpose, who are dedicated to this habitat. And our big focus is around the research side of things. If you want to make your career in Atlantic temperate rainforest, there is not a single university, research institute or research station, and this starves the habitat of the attention it needs to actually influence government policy, because until we influence government policy about this habitat, we'll never protect and save it. So we are building here in the rainforest at Kibila, Europe's first Atlantic temperate rainforest research station, which will be a place where scientists, academics, researchers, policymakers can come and be a part of conducting the vital scientific research that is needed to demonstrate quite how positive Atlantic temperate rainforests are for carbon sequestration, biodiversity abundance and human mental and physical health. And when, as that is established and as that work is done, we will then be able to see our rainforest return across our uplands, because their value will be. Will be shown quantifiably and you'll be able to. [00:39:49] Speaker D: I mean, you talked about new farmers have come in and are starting to do the mob grazing. [00:39:54] Speaker A: Yes. [00:39:55] Speaker D: And so you're inspiring and it's literally happening because. [00:39:57] Speaker C: Well, I wouldn't say I'm inspiring. I mean, the. One of the farmers I talk about in the book is a young man called Ben Thomas, and he is an absolute trailblazer. I sit at his feet and learn from him in terms of soil health and agricultural innovation. He's incredible. And then there are amazing people like Sarah Langford, who's written the beautiful book Rooted, which talks about this farming revolution that's happening and everything happening at Groundswell. I certainly wouldn't claim to be in any way a leader of that, but it's wonderful that there are people doing this great work and making these changes. Five years ago, when we started talking about this, all of our neighbours just thought we were mad. Now we have a collaborative cluster of 20 different farmers across Bob and Moor and 7,000 acres, all dedicated to restoring nature, and a part of that being Atlantic temporary rainforest. So it is, it's wonderful seeing the times change. [00:40:49] Speaker D: You talk about the farming paradox, how it is farmers who have the solution, but it's farmers who, in the past, this is not to cast any blame, but you know, the process of farming was destructive to the environment and actually I think you believe that now there is a way for it to be constructed. [00:41:07] Speaker C: I do. I think farmers are some of the hardest working and the brightest people in this country, but they will do what the government tells them to do because that is how the agricultural system works. 75% of the UK is a farmed environment. There is a large government subsidy scheme which is there to nudge farmers into certain practices which have been in many ways destructive to areas of the natural world. Now the new subsidy systems are encouraging people to farm in a different way and we're seeing really hard working and bright farmers pick that up and run. [00:41:38] Speaker D: With it, which is very exciting. We're going to talk about COP26, because you were sent there as an observer, weren't you? [00:41:45] Speaker A: Well, it's an extraordinary cop, the one in Glasgow a few years ago, because it was the first time that indigenous knowledge was one of the four criteria for it all, which made it much more interesting for me. And an awful lot of indigenous people went there. So that when you looked over the heads of the crowds in the sanctum in the middle, where the important grown up stuff was going on with these conferences and meetings and so on, there were always some feather headdresses to be seen in the back because people would come from all over and were talking. So it played a very significant part in it. But there was an amazing dissonance which really bothered me there, which was between the actual important goings on in the blue zone in the middle, where for all the greenwashing and the corruption and the cynicism of the governments and the big organizations who were represented there, it was like a big agricultural show in many ways. And although one was very cynical about much of it, something was happening, treaties were being made and something was going on. Meanwhile, outside, all my friends also a lot of indigenous people who come represented the demonstrations outside and they were so negative about it all because they were saying the whole thing is almost nihilistic, the world is coming to an end. And there was a terrible despair about it all. I just wanted to keep knocking heads together and say, for heaven's sake, let's get on and do something about it. But I just want people to get together and talk about it and it's not Happening as fast as one would like and probably not in time to save the world. [00:43:15] Speaker D: That's a very depressing thought. Do you think we're giving leaders enough of a chance? Do you think we can support leaders better? [00:43:22] Speaker A: Well, I think we're too caught up in the short termism of one's own preoccupations. The silver lining of COVID was that a lot of people got to go into nature, go for walks, and actually feel the therapy we've been talking about. And the other good thing is that finally people are genuinely accepting that climate change is real and is the biggest catastrophe facing the world. And if we don't do something about that, we are all going down to hell in a handcuff. And the exciting thing is that people are recognizing that the indigenous people of whom we've been talking about are actually the ones who got it right. And we, with our greed and desire for growth and more and more of less and less, have actually got it wrong. And we need to listen to each. [00:44:05] Speaker D: Other, and we should have listened to each other back in the 1960s. So we were talking last night about the blueprint and what the ecologists was writing. Of course, that's part of Resurgence and back in the 60s and 70s and it was all laid out and we just didn't listen. [00:44:23] Speaker A: Extraordinary. I've been looking back at that quite a lot recently. My dear friend Teddy Goldsmith, who started the whole green ecology movement, really the whole green movement globally started here in Cornwall. I'm very proud to be able to say that, that we were part of it. And reading back for the Blueprint for Survival, which was an extraordinary document which he and Robert Allen, my first director of survival, concocted in 1971. It went global. It sold 750,000 copies around the world. And it was the foundation of the whole global green movement. And it started here in cornwall and. [00:44:57] Speaker D: Nearly 50 years later after Survival International. That's a long way to have come, isn't it? [00:45:02] Speaker A: It is. And I've been so lucky to be in at the. Not because I'm particularly clever, but I just. I think it's happenstance that I have been at the heart of several movements which I believe will save the world, movements to recognize the complexity of our relationship with nature and the dangers that we face in exploiting nature to a destructive degree, which Teddy Goldsmith and the ecologist movement started way back 50 years ago. The recognition that indigenous people have an important role to play in understanding how all these things come about. And then the recognition which came about through my Big expedition in Borneo, where 115 scientists from every discipline imaginable actually analyzed the rainforest deeply for the first time and were quite significantly instrumental in starting the rainforest global movement. People all over the world now recognize that rainforests are important. And then the extraordinary coincidence that I now find myself in with Merlin doing the same thing for temperate rainforests. I mean, you couldn't make it up. [00:46:07] Speaker D: No, you couldn't. I like to end the podcast by asking people, what is your hope for the future? [00:46:14] Speaker A: My hope for the future is that people will listen, and they are beginning to listen. They know it's a story that goes right back through history, that people have known what the answer are and then have not done it. We now know that. Like knowing why you shouldn't cut rainforests down, but going on doing it, not listening, knowing that for climate change to work, we have to change our attitude towards nature and towards our relationship with this incredibly rich and diverse planet. Instead of going off on silly expeditions to outer space, which is a complete waste of time, I regard we want to get this planet right first before we should even consider something like that. And people are beginning to listen. And that is my hope. [00:46:56] Speaker D: Thank you. And Marin. [00:46:58] Speaker C: So the reason that we called the charity the Thousand Year Trust is because I want us to think about the world in a thousand years time. Because what we're doing now with restoring rainforest is setting conditions that will only really be at their full maturity and fruition in a thousand years. A young oak sapling growing now might be a big tree in the year 3024. And that's an incredible thing to think about because it's so far outside the horizon of our own imagination. And I know unequivocally that in a thousand years time there will be more rainforest in the uk. There will be the return of things like wolves and eagle owls and lynx and many of the species that we've lost. There'll be beavers on every river, there'll probably be far fewer humans, and we'll definitely have a closer connection to the natural world. I see us being at a junction point where there are two ways we can get there. We can either get there down the route we're currently going down, which involves a lot of misery and suffering and it looks a bit like films like Mad Max, which will be horrible. And then in a thousand years, everything will have reset and nature will probably have regained a bit of ascendancy. Or we can choose to march in step with the natural world and we can reduce our emissions, we can reduce our impact upon nature, we can learn and understand about it more and we can be a part of positive change, not negative change. And so my hope is that we make the choice to turn in that direction at this junction point and that we still end up at the same point. That's the key thing. In a thousand years time, we'll be at the same end point or the same moment in time. Let's get there with nature, not against it. [00:48:20] Speaker D: Thank you very much, Robin. Thank you very much, Merlin. And thank you, Kabila. I think I still said it wrong, but she's right here, isn't she? [00:48:29] Speaker C: She is. [00:48:30] Speaker A: Cheers. [00:48:39] Speaker B: If you enjoyed today's conversation, please leave us a review wherever you're listening and recommend this series to anyone who you think might enjoy it too. We will be back after the festive break on Tuesday 14 January with actor, activist and artist Jim Murray, whom some of you may have noticed at last month's March for Clean Water carrying a very large fish. This episode was produced by Pete Norton and brought to you by the Resurgence Trust, a movement, a magazine and a manifesto for hope. To find out more about their work, click the link in the show notes of this episode. I'm Annabelle Heseltine and thank you for listening to Hope Springs. [00:49:29] Speaker C: SA.