S2:E11 Merlin Hanbury-Tenison @ The Great Garden Show

n this episode, we welcome conservationist, writer and campaigner Merlin Hanbury-Tenison for a moving and wide-ranging conversation about Britain’s forgotten temperate rainforests.

Recorded as part of The Great Garden Show 2026, Merlin reflects on his work at Cabilla on Bodmin Moor, the healing power of ancient woodland, and the urgent need to restore and protect one of the UK’s rarest habitats.

From rainforest restoration and regenerative land stewardship to the deep connection between nature, wellbeing and belonging, this inspiring episode invites us to look again at the landscapes around us — and to imagine a wilder, richer and more hopeful future.

The Newt Podcast is created by the team at The Newt in Somerset and produced by Harry Coade at Sound Matters. If you enjoyed this episode, follow The Newt Podcast to enjoy more walks and talks across the estate, or better still become a Newt Member to visit our estate yourself, stay the night, or shop The Newt online. 

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Transcript

Arthur Cole 0:21

Welcome back to the Newt Podcast with me, Arthur Cole. Join us for a walk through the estate with our invited guests to the backdrop of the Somerset landscape and its wildlife residence. Welcome to this special episode recorded live at the Great Garden Show earlier in May. We bring you a fascinating conversation with explorer, conservationist, author, and friend of the show, Merlin Hanbury Tennyson. Merlin is a passionate advocate for Britain's temperate rainforests, one of our most endangered and overlooked ecosystems. Through his work with the Thousand Year Trust, he is leading efforts to restore and protect these remarkable landscapes for future generations. But Merlin's story is also a deeply personal one. In this conversation, he speaks candidly about his experiences of trauma and recovery, sharing how he navigated severe PTSD following military service and found healing through nature, community, and purpose. At the heart of our discussion is his acclaimed memoir, Our Oak and Bones, a powerful account of resilience, family, landscape, and renewal. We explore the profound connections between human well-being and the natural world. And why restoring our relationship with nature may be more important than ever. Recorded in front of a live audience at the Great Garden Show, this is an inspiring and thought-provoking conversation about courage, conservation, and the enduring power of the British landscape. Let's jump straight into it.

SPEAKER_01 2:37

I love the idea that it would be a kindness for an author to sign their books. It's um every author's nightmare that there might be an unsigned book out there somewhere. So I'd be delighted to sign anything that anybody has: body parts or books or whatever it may be. Thank you so much, Arthur and the team from the Newt for inviting me back here today. And also thank you from Tina from Windstones. As Arthur said, any book you buy, whether it's Harriet's beautiful book or my book or JK Rowling's latest book, whatever it may be, buy it from your local independent bookstore, please. Jeff Bezos does not need another phallically shaped rocket ship to go to the moon. We need to support our local bookshops wherever we can. It's such a beautiful place here at the Newt, but thank you for coming and giving up some time to listen to some of us talk about our books on this subject. I hope it is time well spent and that you leave feeling that it was uh an interesting session. So, as Arthur mentioned, I'm here to talk about my book, Our Oak and Bones, and I'm gonna chat for about 30 minutes, perhaps a little bit a little bit over that. And I'll I'll sort of split my talk down to three areas. Now, the subtitle of my book is Reviving a Family, a Farm and Britain's Ancient Rainforests. And I'll speak broadly on those three subjects. A little bit about the mental health benefits of these rainforest habitats. It was lovely to catch the end of Harriet's talk where she was talking a bit about these volatile organic compounds and how they can impact our physiology and psychology. Um, and then a little bit about farming in the UK, an issue that I know the newt sort of sits at the heart of in how, as we move into a new farming landscape, a new subsidy landscape, we can look to restore nature a bit more. And then also about our ancient rainforests, which have been such a much misunderstood and forgotten habitat. I used to always ask people at the start of a talk for a show of hands for anybody who didn't know we had rainforests in the UK. And if people were being honest, it used to be about 80 to 90% of people who put their hands up, many of them looking at me like I was completely mad and making things up. And it's been really lovely over the last few years, as more books have come out on the subjects, more documentaries have made on the subject been made on the subject, that that number has reduced and reduced to the point that I think most people now seem to be familiar with the idea that Britain is a rainforest island and we are a rainforest people who live upon it. And I that my big mission is to help people to remember that and to remember that we once had these wonderful, romantic, folkloric temperate rainforests that ranged across our western uplands, and that we could very well have them again if we just put our shoulders against the wheel. And I am very lucky that I was born and brought up on in a temperate rainforest on Bodman Moor, where I woke up this morning at five o'clock as my three-year-old clambered onto my face. Um if I start to slur my words, I do apologize. But um I grew up here on this valley on the southwestern edge of Bodman Moor, which is the Kabilla Valley, and it's a 240-acre upland hill farm, which is about one-third woodland or temperate rainforest as we now know it. But that as I grew up, it was just referred to as ancient woodland. And then about two-thirds, about 160 acres of grade four agricultural grazing land, which is what much of our uplands across the UK, our farming areas, are categorized as. And this is often very poor farmland that can only really be used for sheep farming and perhaps a little bit of cattle as well. Um, but I spent my childhood down in this valley, down in the forest, swimming in the river, playing amongst the trees, building tree houses and climbing up into the canopy, and felt very lucky to have grown up in this beautiful setting. When I was 18 and left school, I went and joined the British Army, and I felt very lucky to have joined the military at a time when our military were getting quite busy overseas. It was in the early noughties, and we just decided to embark on what subsequently turned out to be quite illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But as a young soldier, I was very keen to get out there and deploy on these. And I found myself quite quickly on three combat tours of Afghanistan in quite quick succession from 2006 through to 2011. And it was on the first of these, in fact, the same day that that photograph was taken, that I was blown up by a Taliban roadside bomb in Hellman Province, just near the town of Sangin. And I remember being told, we went through a very basic mental health first aid training as young, when we when we all joined the army. And I remember being told if you if you went through some sort of incident that was traumatic and might result in a mental health challenge later in life, that it can take up to 10 years from the incident to starting to struggle and to feel that incident manifest in your body and in your mind. And I remember as a very young, very naive and probably quite arrogant army officer thinking, um, don't be ridiculous. If if something happens to me and I'm gonna struggle, then I'll know immediately, at least within a week, within a month at the outside. And for me, it was almost 10 years to the day from being blown up in Afghanistan. I was blown up in early 2007, and it was in 2017 that I'd left the army and I was working in London, and I had a I suffered from a mental health breakdown and was diagnosed with complex PTSD, much of it related to that incident, but also I don't want to detract from I think the impacts that have happened to many young people, people of all ages, working in busy, corporate, urban settings who also struggle with their mental health as well. Um, and I was extremely fortunate to be able to return to that valley, to be able to return to that ancient woodland, that forest, and begin to feel myself start to return to who I once was and be able to build a picture of who I might be from then on, living with a mental health condition, living with PTSD. And at about the same time as this, my wife Lizzie and I were just starting to try to start a family, and she was going through a number of problems which are far too common and I think far too little discussed still. And she had a number of quite traumatic late-stage miscarriages. And for her, being able to retreat back down into that valley, lie in the river, um was a real source of healing and restoration for her as well. And then a year or two after this, when uh my wife and I had decided to, well, we we were moving back to the farm and trying to figure out how to make a life there. My father, who was an 83-year-old explorer living with us at the time, who'd farmed that upland area for 60 years at this point, um, was a very early uh diagnosis of COVID-19. So in March, late February, early March 2020, he was diagnosed with COVID-19, and uh the paramedics turned up dressed like astronauts, if we all remember from that time during COVID, and they whisked him off to Plymouth Hospital, and he was given a very low chance of survival, about a 10% chance of survival, because at his age, in his mid-80s, with his lungs filling with fluid and his blood oxygen level at a very low point, the doctors were very honest with us and said, look, he it's very unlikely he will pull through this. But they said they were gonna sedate him and put him into an induced coma for a week to see if they could help him pull through. And eventually he had a tube put down his throat and was put into an induced coma for seven weeks. Um, his lungs filled completely with fluid, he had secondary infections across his body, his kidneys stopped working and failed, and the doctors became ever more pessimistic. They're not allowed to tell you that someone is definitely going to die, but they told us everything that you can tell someone up to that point. And we made our peace with the fact we were never going to be able to come and say goodbye to him. They then said that the best thing to do at this point would be to switch off the machines, pull the tube out from his throat, uh, and take him off the medication and to let him slip away. And so they did this and he began to wake up. And a doctor phoned us and said, Frankly, this is quite miraculous. We weren't expecting him to, we were just expecting him to die. And he began to wake up and they said, But you must be aware of what this means. It doesn't mean he's going to return to his former strength. He's been in a coma for seven weeks, he's 83 years old, he's had very severe COVID. He's going to be in hospital for at least six months, he'll probably have severe cognitive impairment for for the rest of his life, definitely severe physical impairment, probably be in a wheelchair, maybe bedbound, and need round the clock care. Uh they then phoned us up three days later and asked if we would come and collect him because he was getting quite irritating. He kept he kept rolling out of bed and pulling all the tubes out of his arms and insisting he wanted to go home. So we brought him home and we plonked him back down here in the rain in the in the ancient woodland in the rainforest and uh left him there for a couple of months to heal. And he became obsessed with the idea that he wanted to um commission a healing garden for our local hospital, Trellisk, down in Cornwall, because he was taken to Plymouth Hospital over the border in England, which to us in Cornwall is a huge insult. And uh he wanted to be taken to Truro Hospital, but it doesn't have the same facilities, and most importantly, it doesn't have a garden where ICU intensive care patients can be taken when they're still in an induced coma. And he put down being put into a healing garden as a big part of his healing. And so he decided he was going to climb Cornwall's highest point, Brown Willie, five months after coming back from COVID and raise money to build a healing garden in Truro's Hospital, Trellisk. And he trained hard down in the rainforest. And five months after coming home, he climbed Brown Willie unsupported and raised £150,000, which built a healing garden at Trellisk, which now has its own ICU garden, which is available to intensive care patients even now. And this was, even though this was back in 2020, he's currently training to row from Oxford to London next month as he just celebrated his 90th birthday. So he's a great example. Age is only a number, and you can be really, really stubborn and not die. Um, and he's he's doing very well. But it was also at about this time. We had these three wonderful healing stories: my own, my wife Lizzie's, and my father's, and it led me down an obsessive path of trying to establish what it was about this particular habitat, what it was about our valley that made it quite so healing and quite so special. And it was at about this time in the early 2020s that people started to refer to this term British rainforests. Now, I'd always known that our woodland was very old. I'd been told it was ancient woodland, and I didn't really know as a layperson, I'm not a tree expert or a dendrologist or an ecologist. I didn't really know what ancient woodland meant. I just assumed it meant it was very old. Now we call it in the UK anything ancient woodland, which has been around since the year 1600. So if it's 400 years old or older, then it's an ancient woodland. But it's ridiculous in some ways when you think that the majority of the trees in an ancient woodland are oak trees, trees that have the ability to live for a thousand years, and we are saying to a 400-year-old woodland that it is ancient. It's like saying to a room full of 20-year-olds that they're all OAPs. It doesn't bear any ecological relevance. But we knew that this woodland was at least 400 years old. And I then found the doomsday records from 1086 and the mapping for every 50 to 100 years after that, which were able to show that not only was the forest 400 years old, but it went way back to 1086, and actually we had a thousand years of continual growth, death, and regrowth. And it was at this point that I started to work with a wonderful team of soil scientists at the Eden Project who came and did a paleobotanical peat core survey where they get a giant corkscrew and they screw it down into the ground and they bring it up and they look at the pollen record at every millimeter and they can see what the land usage has been like for a long period of history. And these are these are proper scientists, they're not um they're not just amateurs like me. And so I kept pestering them to give me their findings, and they were really trying to crunch the science and crunch the data, and they wouldn't give me their findings until they were absolutely specific. And after about four months, I slightly lost my temper with them, and I said, Look, uh, Mark, the head scientist, I said, Look, I really need to know is this forest a thousand years old? Is it 1100 years old? Might it be 1,200 years old? And he lost his temper with me and he said, Fine, Merlin, I'll I'll tell you all I can tell you right now. I wanted to be far more specific with my data, I wanted to be more granular, but all I can tell you at the moment is that this forest is at least 3,664 years old, give or take 29 years. I said, Mark, that will do. And he said, actually, it's probably far older, but that's as deep as our cora would go. You can probably confidently say that you have 4,000 years of continuous growth, death, and recycling within this forest, which makes it one of the oldest forested habitats, certainly in the southwest of the UK, probably from here down to Land's End, if not across England and Cornwall in total. And then about this time, people started talking about Atlantic temperate rainforests. And I love to remind people that even if you weren't familiar with British rainforests as a term, you will know them from the stories from our childhood, because these are Geoffrey of Monmouth's Arthurian legends where knights would meet to do battle. They are the Mabinogian for any Welsh cousins. Um, Lewis Carroll's Jabwocky or Tolkien's Fangorn Forest, where Ents would roam from glade to glade at night. These are our oldest and most elegaic and story-filled habitats. Um, but they also have a distinct scientific aspect or designation to them. So to be a temperate rainforest, firstly, it all has to be native trees. And we're very bad at the UK at identifying species as being native or non-native. If you go to country, other island nations like New Zealand, Australia, or Japan, they're very objective around what has been introduced by humans because we thought it was pretty or we wanted to hunt it, and what evolved within this habitat. Um, that's very important in island habitats that we identify what is native and what is non-native. And everything within a temperate rainforest needs to have evolved here. So a lot of oak, hazel, Rowan, willow, hawthorn, and holly, species like that. But then you also need to receive a very high level of rainfall to be designated as a rainforest. It needs to have at least 1400 millimetres a year, and that can't all fall within one very close monsoon season. It needs to fall a little bit in every month of the year. And for anyone who's had their summer holidays in Cornwall, you'll know we're blessed with rain pretty much every day, certainly every week. So you have these very wet, very dank, um sort of mystical um native woodlands. And what that helps to provide moisture for is these epiphytes. All of these photographs were taken uh by me at Kabilla, and you get these wonderful examples of Uznea lichens and these terrific epiphytes is really just a term for any plants that don't use the soil to grow, and then it grows up high in the canopies. You have mosses, polypody ferns, liverworts, pennyworts, all these wonderful things that grow up high. And whilst this is a photograph of a hazel tree, in a single oak, you can have up to 600 species living at any one time. So these trees are not simply a tree standing in a forest. They're whole cities, communities fizzing, buzzing, thriving. And along with these epiphytes, oh yeah, counterintuitive, the wrong way. Along with these epiphytes, you also get terrific fungal life within these rainforests. It's not necessarily a designator of a temperate rainforest, but generally, because they're very old habitats, it comes hand in hand with very high levels of different mushroom species and often a very high density of um mycelial network beneath the soil. And I'm sure many of you will have heard of these mycorrhizal or mycelial networks that connect all the trees together. Harriet was talking about this in her talk about how trees have this ability to communicate. If they are attacked by an insect, they can tell the other trees around them to deploy their own sort of insecticide to um to protect themselves. And in these ancient temperate rainforests, especially at Kabila, where it's particularly old, we have such a deep diversity of trees, but a connection between the trees, our mycelial network, is of such a high density that if you imagine we've cut down over 98% of our ancient woodland in the UK, so most of the woodland you walk through, you're walking through a big patch of mud with 10,000 trees all growing out of the ground. But when you walk through a 4,000-year-old temperate rainforest like Kabilla, you're actually walking over a giant mushroom with 10,000 fingers all pointed up in the air, all in constant communication and collaboration. So they become these wonderfully resilient and collegiate environments that are all working together in harmony. And I think our ability to see nature as much based upon its um its native providence and its age, as well as its diversity and its um its integration, is an important next step for the way that we view the natural world in the UK. But these habitats are not only important because they're very beautiful, but they're also have certain quite distinct scientific properties that the more work that we've been doing through my charity, the Thousand Year Trust, which I'll come to talk about in a little bit, we've begun to realize that there's a very important elements to them as well. So at a time of climate crisis, where every climate target that is being set is then being broken quite quickly afterwards. Almost nothing that we can restore within the UK sequesters more carbon dioxide more effectively than our Atlantic temperate rainforest. These trees are all in such close proximity, but also the the abundance of the epiphytes within the canopy are also all busy sequestering carbon, sucking it out of the atmosphere, channeling it down the roots of the trees or the trunks of the trees into the root system where the mycelial network locks it as a wonderful carbon store beneath the forest. These habitats become wonderful carbon stores. We are also the second most nature-depleted country in Europe, much to our shame. Malta is the winner. An island that is 85% developed, is the most nature-depleted country in Europe. We're second, a formerly rainforested island. And nothing returns the biodiversity abundance, the ecosystem integrity and health more effectively than these Atlantic temperate rainforests. They're our best tool in the fight against the decline in the natural world. But what has always aligned most closely with me, and I hope will be the same for some of you, is they're also the most effective habitat we have for the mental health and well-being of the humans who spend time amongst them and under their canopy. So as these rainforests photosynthesize, they suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, they pump out oxygen, but they lace this oxygen with volatile organic compounds called terpenes and phytoncides that, as we humans breed them in, have a remarkable impact upon our physiology. So spending just 30 minutes in a rainforest like Kabila, and your cortisol level drops, your main stress hormone, to a level that can still be measured up to two weeks later, they boost kidney function, improve our immune system response, and help to move us from our sympathetic nervous state, our fight or flight, that we evolved to spend very small amounts of time in, and now, because of the pressures of the modern world, often end up spending large amounts of our time living within, and they help move us into our parasympathetic, our rest and digest, our state of homeostasis. So I believe that at a point where we are suffering from a mental health pandemic in the Western world, biodiversity and natural habitat collapse across all areas, and runaway climate change, these temperate rainforests potentially could form the basis of a weapon that fights all of these issues with equal efficacy. So, this is a map of the UK about 3,000 years ago, what it would have looked like. So, about 3,000 years ago, about 20% of our islands would have been a temperate rainforest landscape. And landscape is a very important term within this because it wouldn't have been a closed canopy rainforest. This idea that a squirrel used to be able to run from Land Zenter John O'Groats has been pretty effectively debunked. We never had a closed canopy forest across the UK. But what we would have had is rainforest landscapes. These are areas which would have been mosaics and patchworks, all of which the UK would have been, but where the paramount habitat would have been temperate rainforests. And that would have run all the way from Stornaway on the Isle of Lewis, down through the Western Highlands, past places like Maleg, Fort William and Oban, down through Cumbria and the Lake District, and then that western belt of Wales from Anglesey to Aberistworth down to Pembrokeshire, and then in the southwest, places like Exmoor, Dartmoor, Bodmanmoor, the Lizard, and West Penwith. And what we've moved to from 3,000 years ago is this as our rainforest landscape to this. We've gone down to about 0.4% of the UK from 20%. So we've lost about 98-99% of our Atlantic temperate rainforest. And whilst to us humans, 3,000 years might seem like an extremely long amount of time and no longer really a relevant timeline, you must remember that's only three generations of an oak tree. So it's a very short period of time when you think about it from nature's evolutionary timelines. Now the reason we've lost so much of our temperate rainforest really comes down to three reasons. The first one is us humans. We are, as always, the main culprits. So in exactly the same way that at the moment in places like Brazil, subsistence farmers are being encouraged to move into pristine tropical rainforests and hack them back using slash and burn agriculture techniques to make very poor pasture land for non-native species like cattle, which really bear no place within the trophic system of South America. So over the last 3,000 years, subsistence or farmers in general, pioneer farmers, were encouraged to move out into our temperate rainforest landscapes and hack back the wealthy wet oak woodlands that we would have had across our uplands and turn it into very poor pasture land, which nowadays predominantly just supports sheep. So we were the ones who originally cut them down, but there are now a number of factors that maintain the destruction across our uplands that we currently see. One of these being the deer. Now we have six different deer species in the UK. Four of them are non-native. These are all exotics. That's fallow, seeker, muntjack, and Chinese water deer. All of these were brought in by humans because we thought they were pretty or we wanted to hunt them. We have two native varieties, that's red deer and roe deer, and they belong within our woodlands. They are absolutely an important part of these rainforest habitats. But just to take one of these species, the roe deer, as an example, the Forestry Commission believed that the carrying capacity of the UK, the healthier number of roe deer we should have on the mainland, is about 350,000 animals, and that we currently have about 1.4 million roaming through our woodlands. And to a roe deer, a young oak sapling, just like I've managed to get this photo of one actually eating one, a young oak sapling is like a Freche just lying on the forest floor. And the roe deer will just come through, tie their napkin around their neck, and hoover them up. And they have no impetus to keep moving, to be nervous, to not eat their fill, which is how they would have evolved to just eat a little bit and keep moving because there would have been wolves, lynx, bear, even eagle owls that would have threatened roe deer populations. Now they can just roam freely and eat to their heart's content and then reproduce as often as they like and have as many offspring as they like, which then also create the same problem. So it's compounding year on year. And with red deer, the issue is the same in Scotland. Nature Scott released a report last year, or I think it was in 2024 actually, that the healthy number of red deer in the Highlands of Scotland to enable native woodland restoration is two deer per square kilometre, and that we currently have an average of 20 deer per square kilometre across the highlands, 10 times the amount that will allow the regeneration of native woodland. So deer are a big issue, and we we really need to have a national conversation about how we bring their numbers back into a healthier balance with nature. And the other is the sheep, and this photograph again is at Kabila. Um there's our rainforest in the background. And when I took Kabila over about 10 years ago, every field was filled with sheep, and and this has been the advice that farmers have been given for about two to three thousand years is if you take over land in the uplands of the UK, if there is any woodland, I spoke to many agricultural advisors and farm consultants, and they all had exactly the same advice. And that advice was the first thing you need to do to make this rather small, 240-acre farm profitable, is cut down all of that rubbish woodland. That stuff is very inconvenient. Get rid of those trees, and you'll have more land that you can put sheep on, more space to grow meat, to grow wool, and maybe you could turn a profitable financial model on your farm. And not only did that seem morally wrong to me, but if you remember, I was having these conversations in 2017, 2018, just when I'd moved back to the farm. Um, this was the period where we'd voted to leave the European Union in 2016, but we didn't actually leave until 2020. So we were in this sort of no man's land of um the subsidy system and the bureaucracy surrounding farming. And it was quite clear that things were about to change. So I started to look more closely at actually the financial and ecological impacts of sheep farming on this landscape. So the first thing to establish was where we have sheep across the UK. This is a sheep density map. Um, this is a brilliant map of the UK, which shows that all the stories about the Welsh really are true. They do love their sheep, as do the Lancastrians, the uh the York people in Yorkshire, down in the southwest. And the Sardinians, strangely, seem to love sheep as well. And these are all island environments, and as I mentioned before, most island habitats are very objective, very on the money about what evolved within that area and what didn't. And things that didn't tend to evolve within an island landscape often have negative ecological impacts. But sheep are about as ubiquitous in the west of the UK as any creature. Every postcard you see of Cornwall or of Wales or of Cumbria definitely has a sheep on it, or at least it should. But when we actually compare where sheep currently are in the UK in Europe with where they evolved, this is the evolutionary range of Ovisaris, the original sheep. It is a Mesopotamian, Persian, Turkish, and Balkan animal, a scrubland and desert-dwelling creature that about 4,000 years ago was traded along the old Silk Road routes and established in our uplands. And so again, whilst 4,000 years may feel like a very long time, from evolution's perspective, it's actually a drop in the ocean. So we've been bringing a non-native species into the UK for 4,000 years and establishing them on the uplands. Although, as any sheep farmer will tell you, a sheep's favorite activity and hobby is establishing new and innovative ways to die in any month of the year. They are. And that is one of the reasons for that is because they don't come from this landscape. They've evolved to reside in a desert, which is why sheep have hard, narrow hooves that compact the soil and make it like a hard concrete, so we get a lot more water runoff and floods downstream when you have sheep in the uplands, because they have hooves designed for deserts, not soft upland soil. They have voracious appetites, which is what you need if you evolve in a desert. So you always eat whatever you can, whenever you can. And that's why they eat everything down to a golf course like stubble, and their manure is not evolved for our types of soil, which is why often it doesn't fertilize the soil but makes it quite toxic. So we have a non-native species, but that's okay, because we also farm things like llamas and ostriches in the UK, and it doesn't matter that we're farming a non-native as long as it is financially viable and a part of our food security system. These are the two points that are important. So I began to look a bit more closely, and I promise there aren't any tests at the end of this, but I began to look more closely at our farm subsidy system in the UK. So this is in 2018, as I was doing this research, what the farm subsidies that the European Union were paying into the UK looked like. So the common agricultural policy was a huge fund that Europe paid to British farmers every year. And down in the southwest, where I was based, £450 million every year was being passed to farmers in the southwest, predominantly to sheep farmers on the uplands, just to keep them farming in the same kind of model and method as they had been farming for years past. And it was known at this point in 2018 that all of these subsidies would be ceasing once we had left the European Union, and they have now broadly ceased. At the same time, I found this interesting report from the Financial Times, which shows different types of farming in the UK and how much of the profit or the turnover of those farms is uh non-subsidy related, that's the dark blue, and how much of it is subsidies that was paid by Brussels to these farmers to top up the type of farming they were doing to make it viable, and that's the light blue. And as you can see, for many types of farming, like poultry farming, it's actually very a very profitable industry. That's why the River Y has no life in it now, because it makes a lot of money to have chicken farms. But there are certain types of farming, grazing livestock on the uplands predominantly, which actually it doesn't make any money at all. All the money being put in is debt or uh cost, and the only thing that makes it profitable was the subsidy. And I found a report from the NFU at this time that showed that the average Upland Hill farmer on Bob and Moor and Dartmoor was taking between 85 and 92% of their annual income from European subsidies. Nine-tenths of what every farmer on Bob and Moor and Dartmoor was earning was a handout from Brussels just to keep them farming in that way. And when you compare that to the fact that we use 22% of UK farmland for sheep farming, and it provides less than 1% of our calories as a nation, this is not a staple within our food security system. It's not a profitable way to provide an economy or a community in rural areas, and it's also very ecologically destructive. At that point, it felt like cutting down all the trees at Kabila and stocking the fields with sheep might not either be the best ecological route or the best financial route either. So when we moved down, we tried something different. We took all the stock off the land, allowed the grass and the bracken to grow up, and established a number of cabins so that we could bring people onto the land who could benefit in exactly the same way that Lizzie, my father, and I had benefited from this incredible ancient rainforest in the valley. So we wanted to work with veterans' groups who were suffering from PTSD. We formed a partnership with the NHS, who sent nurses down who were all suffering from stress and burnout post-COVID. And we worked with corporate groups and professionals who would come down on wellness experiences. And we based it all around doing three-day-long experiences within the rainforest in an old cattle barn where people could do movement practices like yoga and pilates and somatic therapy, um, sound therapy, breath work, cold water immersion, Wim Hof, and forest bathing. And to this day, to the well, to the end of last season, we'd held 168 of these three-day retreats and had about 4,000 guests come and stay in the Kabila Rainforest. And I base everything that we do on what I call the tear rate, which is the positive emotional outpouring that people have while they're staying. And we run at about a 65% tear rate of people who break down in tears while they're staying in the valley, especially the veterans' groups, all these Roughty Tufty soldiers who turn up not wanting to share what makes them feel sad. And two days later they're all in the fetal position crying. And I won't, I think that a um a good outcome would be if I can raise the bar on that to about 80% of people having a positive emotional outpouring and breaking down. I won't stop till we got to that level. But the the retreat business that we founded, Cavilla Cornwall, that was just the way to bring humans into that space. The next step was to figure out how we also heal these habitats at the same time. Because I was very aware that we have a very binary approach in the UK. We tend to view nature as either being for people, like National Trust properties or other sorts of sites that you can go and visit where paths are tarmacked over and every nature is cut back, and we say this is a space for people, and we sacrifice nature, or we view it as being for nature, and that's what often rewilding projects do, where they will fence off large areas of wilderness and say, this isn't for humans, this is for nature. We're going to let nature thrive here, and humans have to stay out. And I think both of these approaches get it slightly wrong. I think there are ways in which we can restore the natural world whilst also welcoming and increasing the number of people who come into it and educating them about it while they're there. So about four years ago, I founded our charity, the Thousand Year Trust, and we are the only charity in the UK which is solely dedicated to the restoration and research of our Atlantic temperate rainforest, this vitally important habitat that is so little understood and so little studied. And we are headquartered on my farm on Bob Memor. So as I mentioned before, this is the valley we saw the photographs of at the start. You can see on the left the red circle surrounding it, and on the right, the boundary of the farm with the ancient 4,000-year-old rainforest at its heart. And this is where every farm advisor was saying to me when I took the farm over the best way you can turn this into a profitable farm would be to cut down all of this inconvenient woodland in the valley and make more fields to put more sheep on. And what we're trying to do at Kabila is flip that model on its head, fly in the face of 2,000 years of farm advice, which is always about removing trees, especially woodland, and actually look to see if we can improve the farm business model whilst also bringing back the rainforest upon it. So this is a 50-year animation of what it will look like. And not only have we planted and we have to this stage re-established 100,000 trees across the land, all in a rainforest formation of mixed native deciduous woodland, but we've also put in place this system of glades and rides that runs through it. And I call this the reticulated python eating a hundred hamsters, because this system of glades means that you can put a mob-grazing, native breed herd of cattle, ponies, and pigs through this system, and all of the livestock benefits because we have this very strange model in the UK where we think of grazing land as being big fields with no trees and large animals, and we think of woodland as being lots of trees and no large animals, and actually all of our native domesticated livestock evolved within these rainforest environments. So when you put cattle amongst a rainforest, they benefit, they get shade in the summer, shelter in the winter, additional forage throughout the year. The animals are healthier, the meat is of a higher quality, they need fewer inputs and less veterinary care. But also the trees benefit because they get the brashing, the grazing, the browsing, the dominance displays, the dust bowling, the coppicing, and the manure, which assist them as well. But also, the thing that always excites ecologists isn't actually a single habitat like savanna land or grassland or peatland or woodland. What really excites ecologists is what they call the edge habitats. It's where you transition from one type of habitat into another because these edge habitats are where all the activity happens within nature. It's all the pollination, the predation, the interaction between different species. And by creating this system of glades and rides, we've turned a farm that has a seven-kilometer perimeter into a farm with 28 kilometers of edge. And that just slingshots the opportunity for nature to be able to improve, benefit, and grow in diversity and resilience. And then alongside that system, by putting in place a carbon capture scheme and a biodiversity net gain scheme, it makes a far more diversified and resilient farm business model than we had before. And as a 240-acre farm, the average size of a farm in the UK is 210 acres. So we sit slap bang in that average size. This isn't some grandiose, vast rewilding project which is not accessible to the average farmer. This is the kind of business model that your average Upland Hill farmer, who is really struggling financially at the moment, they have the second highest suicide rate of any industry in the UK, and the average farmer is 62 years old. It is an aging population of very hardworking but really struggling people. This helps to show how you can transition to a different way of farming and actually work less and make more money and keep your family and your family on the farm. This is what Kabila looks like at the moment. Tens of thousands of plastic tree tubes with lots of trees growing over. I begged the forestry commission to let me use my celial tree tubes which rot down into the ground and feed the trees, or uh even woolen tree tubes which use the off-cuts of the wool. Because most wool in the UK at the moment is either buried or burned. It costs £1.30 to shear a sheep and you get paid 25p for the fleece. So most farmers burn or bury their wool. But the forestry commission was adamant, only plastic would do. And uh so there's gonna be a lot to pick up one day. So we and and we're now working with 16 of our neighbouring landowners across Bobman, moreover, an area of about 7,000 acres to implement this same model with all of them on a landscape-scale approach. So Kabilla is this small site, really is just a blueprint or a case study which can then emulate out across a larger landscape to show how we can do that at scale. But the final thing I want to talk about, two minutes before I hand over and see if anyone would like to ask any questions, is um the thing that I've subsequently become hugely obsessed about, the thing that our charity is completely focused on, is if I said to anyone in this room the word rainforest, in your mind you'd immediately be taken, probably to either an Asenborough documentary that you'd seen about the Amazon, or if you've traveled out to places like Costa Rica or Belize to somewhere that you may have been in a tropical rainforest. Very few of us, when you say the word rainforest, will be taken to our British temperate rainforest. And that's very sad to me. And I want to try and figure out why we we know tropical rainforests so well and we don't really know temperate rainforests at all, even though we in the UK are a rainforest people who live on a rainforest island, but we think of other rainforests when someone uses that word. And the reason for this is because of the amount, the weight, the wealth of scientific research which has been done in the world's tropical rainforests. For the last hundred years, scientists have been lifting up the rug of tropical rainforests and really studying what makes them special, unlocking the rainforest code. There are probably 10,000 scientists today in tropical rainforests around the world conducting multi-year, multidisciplinary, cutting-edge important research. And that research filters into government policy, laws, funding, and school curriculums, which is why every child between the age of 8 and 80, or any person between 8 and 80 who's had a formal education knows about tropical rainforests. If you are a young conservation scientist and you want to have a career in rainforest research, you're almost certainly going to do that in tropical rainforest. And that makes sense. There are so much more of them. But there are also hundreds of universities with courses dedicated to tropical rainforest. There are dozens of research institutes that provide millions of pounds of funding every year to tropical rainforest research. And I think most importantly, there are dozens of field stations, sites where, as a young scientist, you can go to Belize, Costa Rica, Peru, Bolivia, Borneo, the Congo, and you can join these groups, be mentored by experienced professors, contribute to peer-reviewed papers, shift government policy, influence school curriculums, and burnish your career. If you want to study temperate rainforests, British rainforests, there isn't a single university course offering that opportunity. There isn't a single research institute providing funding towards that work, and there isn't a single field station where you can do that work. Which is why, if you look at the, I don't know if people can see this from the back, but if you look at the balance between tropical rainforest research and temperate rainforest research, it's it's pitiful. You know, there's in the last few years sort of 12,000 peer-reviewed papers on tropical rainforests, less than less than a hundred. I mean, I think there were there were 20 in 2023 papers on temperate rainforests. We're not studying this habitat, and the reason we're not studying it because there's nowhere that people can get into them to study them. So we are building at Kabila through the Thousand Year Trust, Europe's first Atlantic Temperate Rainforest research field station, a place where scientists, academics, professors, journalists, even the occasional well-behaved politician, can come and stay within a 4,000-year-old Atlantic temperate rainforest, one of the finest habitats the UK has ever known, and conduct this kind of research in order to unlock what makes these habitats quite so special. Provide the data, beat politicians over the head with the data until they have to plot pass laws to protect this habitat, until they have to get it in all of our social psyches and our cultural psyches so that we can bring these habitats back across our uplands. And um we have a uh a funding campaign at the moment. I need to raise an awful lot of money this year. So if any of you know anybody with money to burn, uh this research station is a very good place to put it. And I hope that, and I will, it will be built by this time next year. We've already broken ground last month, and uh it's a really exciting project. And I hope that through this work, through providing opportunities for scientists to study our temperate rainforests, we might enter into an age where when we view these landscapes, these upland landscapes, that many of us will have grown up thinking are as natural and native as it comes, we'll realize that actually much of this, not that long ago, used to look like that. And maybe not all of it should be turned back, but maybe there's a space for both. And if we did return more of it to this, we could have a better impact on climate change, a better impact on biodiversity, and more spaces for all of us to spend time in beautiful nature and heal ourselves as well. Thank you very much.

Arthur Cole 44:15

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