How Nature Heals People, Rainforests & Conservation — with Merlin Hanbury-Tenison

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Arthur: Merlin, Hamburg, tenon, it's such a pleasure to have you on the Collect Institute of Ideas. Listeners, today we're gonna be talking about a few themes namely nature how it serves people, the environment, and Merlin. You beautifully share so many personal ways in which your life has been connected to nature.

I know your father. A great explorer and ahead of his time on being a conservationist. Really excited to have you on today. Busy man. You're running this health retreat, K Cornwall this wonderful health retreat in Cornwall, which I highly recommend listeners to check out and you, you founded the thousand year trust.

With the ambitious and exciting mission of tripling the rainforest size within 30 years in the uk. But then also written our Open Bones which is a memoir around grief, nature, and healing Merlin. There are there are [00:01:00] thousands of things we could talk about today what we're gonna try and do is unplug around your unique insight and how that can help people.

We'd love to hear today to start off around the relationship between nature and how it can heal people.

Merlin: Thank you for that lovely introduction, Arthur, and it's huge honor to be on your podcast. So thank you so much for inviting me on. As you say, my wife Lizzie and I founded Cabilla Cornwall down here on Bob and Moore. We founded the Thousand Year Trust, which I now run our charity.

And my book A Bones came out last year and is released next week in paperback, which is exciting. 'cause that's often when you see a real pickup in people reading it. Because I always feel very bad asking people to pay 22 pounds for a hardback book, but less bad asking 'em to pay 11 pounds for a paperback.

I'm hoping that will really help as well. And it's interesting the connection between people and nature. So when I sat down to Rise our Open Bones I worked really hard to. Assume that no one would ever read it. I think that's, it's something that I consider to be a really important element of the writing process [00:02:00] is putting yourself in a mindset where you're just writing to get the words out there and to put down what you consider to be an important.

Or a relevant narrative. 'Cause if you start thinking about, your your publishers are very keen for you to consider who you are writing for, who your audience is. But if you start obsessing about your audience and who you hope might read the book, then you start second guessing what you might write.

And it, I think it removes some of the honesty from the writing. I wrote our bones. Having brainwashed myself into believing that no one would ever read it. And and it's now sold a little over 9,000 copies. And that's before the payback comes out, which is hugely humbling but also extremely exciting.

And you suddenly realize that as soon as you've published that book, the words that you put down are no longer within your control. They're out there. And it's my favorite thing when people write to me and say that the book has touched them or that it's helped them through a dark period or that they've really resonated with it which people are doing more and more because it's really important that we start to consider more and more how humans and nature are inherently connected.

It's actually I think we need to move [00:03:00] away from this conversation of talking about humans and nature because when we're. Very clear about explaining to people that humans are a part of nature, not apart from nature. We live in this kind of geo Judeo-Christian prison of being told that we are separate to the natural world.

The whole precept or concept of many monotheistic religions is that humans are built in the image of a god, a sky, God, and that we are placed in dominion over nature. And that means that we are not a part of nature. We are, its overlord. And I think that really sets the foundations of a loss of. Of the challenges we currently face today around climate change and ecosystem and biodiversity collapse and just our lack of respect for the natural world.

Just when you see litter when you're walking around it, it's, I think there's, that all comes back to this idea that we are not a part of this landscape and not a part of this planet. All the other animals are, all the other mammals are even, all the other primates are, they're a part of nature, but we sit apart and as we start to.

Unpick that, and I hope move into a new phase of understanding that humans are a part of nature, not apart from [00:04:00] it. The first thing that comes with that I think, is stop stopping talking about conversations of how nature benefits humans and how humans can sit alongside nature. We are within it. We are within that web of life.

It's like saying how do you consider your leg or your kidneys or your liver? We are a part of this planet and it's a part of us. And the more we begin to live that narrative the more we'll realize that things like climate change and ecosystem collapse are an existential and a personal issue, not just one that we read about in the news and then, go back to doom scrolling and stop worrying about so I that's I think kind of the start point of nature and humans.

Arthur: And specifically, you suffered from. PTSD from being the military and talked historically about, what nature's done to heal on that journey. Can you give us an insight into your experiences the amazing setup that you have at Cabilla and how you've seen that.

There are some statistics, for example, that you've [00:05:00] laid out in terms of. How it can affect people from spending time in nature.

Merlin: Yeah. And I, and again, I think that goes back to that earlier point, which is, it is not about how nature makes us it's about how being outside of a natural environment makes us unwell. And it's a, seems like a small kind of almost a somatic sort of, a linguistic kind of trick.

But if you flip that on its head, so instead of saying. We are humans. We live in cities. When you go into nature, you can boost your health. It's about saying, we are humans. We come from the natural world. We are a rainforest creature. When we put ourselves in cities we lower our physical and psychological health.

And for me, that's a very personal story. So I was in the military for about eight years and did three tours in Afghanistan. And on the first of those was blown up by a Taliban roadside bomb. And I remember being told at the time that it might be up to 10 years. After a traumatic incident that you would start to feel any negative impacts from that any psychological issues.

And I remember at the time thinking that seems ridiculous. If there's, if something has happened to me, I will know within an hour or within a [00:06:00] week or within a month at the outside that I'm, that I have something I need to work through. And it was almost 10 years to the day after. Being blown up in Afghanistan that I I had a mental health breakdown and was diagnosed with Complex PTSD, but at the time I was working for a big four management consultancy in in the heart of London.

And so I'm also very clear to point out that I don't think we love binary answers to complex problems. We love to go, oh, you were blown up in a roadside bomb. You now have PTSD, that's two and two equaling four. That's very simple actually. It's a much more complex picture than that. Yes, there were elements of.

Of things that happened to me in Afghanistan that contributed towards moments of poor mental health that I've had. But I think just as much of a contributing factor was living and working in the heart of London and earning extremely fast-paced and busy environment with very little support and psychological safety and and very little nature surrounding me to help me to be well.

And so I think there's elements of many things that feed into it. We can very easily compare physical and psychological health in [00:07:00] a a helpful way. So if you suffer from a bad back or a trapped nerve, there might be one thing that made that happen, but it's likely to be a whole series of contributing factors.

Your posture the job you have, an injury you suffer.

Arthur: Why relationship ends why businesses fail, such an interesting theme.

Merlin: But, sorry. I keep going off on tangents on your questions. You asked me more about the setup we have here at cabilla. Yeah, I was really lucky that when I had a a breakdown in 2017 that I grew up on this. This small Upland hill farm on Bobman Moore in Cornwall, which is it's a 240 acre farm right up in the middle of Bobman Moore.

And it's about one third ancient woodland. It was, all we knew at the time was it was being referred to as ancient woodland. I didn't really know what that term meant. I'm sure many of your listeners weren't really have thought about that either, because why would you? But I'd grown up being told it was ancient woodland.

And so that was about 70 to 75 acres of ancient woodland and then about a. A hundred and forty five, a hundred fifty acres of grade four grazing [00:08:00] land, traditional upland hill farming, the kind of sheep farming that you, everyone will be familiar with from Wales and Dartmore and Bob Andmore and the West Highlands and Cumbia, places like that.

And I was very lucky to be able to come home and heal in this valley. And I noticed I was spending all my time not on the grazing land, but in the woodland and feeling much more restored and much better. So it lent me down a pathway of. Of starting to study what it was about this habitat that made it so special.

And first I started to figure out what ancient woodland was, and I found that in the UK we call ancient Woodland, anything that's been around since before the year 1600. So if it's 400 years old or older, it's in inverted commas, ancient and to a human that might feel very ancient. If you met a 400 year old person, they're probably a vampire and they're very ancient.

But actually when you think that our paramount. Native deciduous woodland tree in the UK is the Oak and Oaks have the ability to live for a thousand years. These are a thousand year creatures, and we're saying to woodlands full of oak trees that can live for a [00:09:00] thousand years, that once they hit 400 years old, they're ancient.

It's like us telling a 20-year-old that there are no ap. It just, there's no ecological kind of reality or, or basis at all. But then we found the doomsday records from 10 86 that showed that this woodland had been extent, and then we had mapping every a hundred or 200 years that showed that it hadn't been cut down in the intervening period.

So we had a thousand years of uninterrupted growth, death, and regrowth within this valley, which is beginning to become quite rare. There aren't many woodlands yet. We've cut down 98% of our ancient woodland in the uk. At the end of the first World War, we went down to only 4.5% tree cover. In, in, in the British Isles, which is.

Terrifyingly small. We're now up at about 14%. But when you think that the average in Europe is about 33%, we are a very deforested island or set of islands. So we knew that this woodland had been around for a thousand years. And then I started to work with an amazing team of soil scientists at the Eden Project who did a long form paleo botanical peat core survey across the valley where they were able to put this [00:10:00] big corkscrew into the ground and look at the soil at every millimeter and identify what the land usage had been like for a long period of time.

And they were able to show that the forest is actually at least 4,000 years old, which makes it one of the oldest forests or in the in, in the west of England, if not in England. And it was at about this time that people started to use this term Atlantic temperate rainforest, which was one that I wasn't familiar with and many people still aren't.

When we think of rainforest, we tend to think of tropical rainforest and that makes sense. 'cause there's a huge amount of tropical rainforest that remains between the tropicals of cancer and Capricorn. And it's a hugely important habitat. We've cut down about 50% of it, but there's still a lot that remains and it's the longest of the planet.

But we've cut down about 99% of our Atlantic temperate rainforest, which was a belt of incredible habitat that ran all the way from Bergen in southwest Norway down to Bragga in northern Portugal. So that whole belt of western Europe, and this slice we have at Cabilla is a little example of that.

And [00:11:00] the Woodland Trust recently did an assessment of all of the. Temperate Rainforest in the Southwest and they grade them on a level of one to nine, one being in a very poor condition and nine being in a very healthy condition. And the Cabilla rainforest is the only level nine rainforest west of Bristol.

So it's in a really healthy condition. And then we started to work with more universities, places like the University of Exeter, Plymouth the Eden Project, Urich Loughborough Falmouth, and do these studies on this habitat to, to start to identify what it is that really makes them special.

Arthur: you bring vulnerable people to Camilla. Tell us about what you've seen in terms of nature and how it changed people.

Merlin: The first thing that Lizzie and I began to identify was that the, not only was farming on the uplands, no, no longer gonna be a profitable way to try and make a living on this land, especially on small farms. But it was also doing a lot of damage. So the way that we farm sheep in the UK is often quite ecosystem damaging.

And so we removed the stock and then we looked at a different business model for farm diversification. So we [00:12:00] built our business, Cabilla Cornwall, which is a wellness retreat center in the heart of the farm in some converted barns with some cabins surrounding it. And we began to bring in groups like veterans suffering from P-T-S-D-N-H-S, nurses suffering from stress and burnout, which post COVID was a real issue.

Professionals from the corporate environment who needed to get away. And we did three day retreats where we brought in a range of highly skilled practitioners in things like yoga and Pilates and somatic therapy breath work, sound therapy, cold water immersion, and we put people through a sort of three day package of.

Of healing. And to this day, we've done 168 of these retreats, had about 4,000 people come through, and I try and judge everything we do based upon what I call the tier rate, which is the positive emotional outpouring that people have while they're staying. And we run at about a 65% tier rate of people who break down in tears when they're in the valley.

I'm trying to get that up to 80%. That's the marker I think will be a marker of success, but it's, and we have a lot of people who come back and a lot of who get in touch and say how life changing it's been and. [00:13:00] And I think that there's a huge, it's almost like a shock factor when you go from being in a state of your your sympathetic nervous state, your fight or flight, which most of us spend far too long in, we evolved this state of adrenaline pumping, cortisol raising autoimmune state for very fractional moments of time when we're running away from a lion or a tiger or a bear.

And we now 'cause of urban environments and the state of urban living and corporate life end up spending far longer than our bodies evolved. In these states, which can really learn to burn out and lead to burnout, stress and fatigue. And I, I think when you bring people down to such a peaceful environment, they're almost, their body's almost shocked into a state of homeostasis and parasympathetic nervous state, which is a beautiful thing to witness.

Arthur: And, there was this, a stat that you mentioned around how you exposure in, an environment of nature can change your body even after three weeks

Merlin: Yeah. Just spending 30 minutes in a, in an old growth native deciduous forest, like the [00:14:00] temperate rainforest that we have. Your cortisol level drops to a level that can still be measured up to two weeks later. So it, even if you go back to living in a busy urban environment, it's still, the impact lasts for two weeks.

They've I mean there are increasingly more studies, but one of the things we are really working on here is to increase that science. Around research into cancer patients where with people with very early stage cancer, they've seen their t killer rates increase and the growth of tumors reduce from being in old growth forest environments like this.

There's a, there's lots of studies or increasingly studies not enough into things like attention spans into memory retention, into all sorts of things which are improved. The sense of awe is the most important one, but also depression and mental health. So both the physical and the psychological, which of course, we are learning that the barrier between what is physical and what is psychological is becoming ever increasingly blurred.

Your gut health impacts your mental health. Your posture can impact your, your, the way your brain functions. There's all kinds of crossovers. And these [00:15:00] these ancient environments really benefit us in a whole myriad of ways.

Arthur: And can you give us an understanding as to the difference between being in an ancient environment versus let's say a walkin in a park

Merlin: I'm lucky that I get to be, I get to be incredibly one track minded when it comes to habitat restoration that I am focused on Atlantic temperate rainforest, and. And those tend to be ancient environments. They don't have to be, you can have young temperate rainforest, but the ancient ones have an incredible amount of interconnectivity and equilibrium as a result.

And the real difference, and this is something that we, is one of our failings as humans, is we are very focused on our five sense. So the things that we can see, smell, taste, touch, and if we can't perceive it in those five senses we struggle to attribute value to something. Now, walking through a young woodland, and most of our woodland in the UK was cut down in the sort of from the mid 17 hundreds till the mid 19 hundreds, because that was when we were really expanding our empire.

And to build a single ship [00:16:00] of the lion would take 6,000 mature oak trees. So these ancient woodlands would be. Absolutely decimated to produce ships. And then when ships became metal, it was for things like mining, props the butts of machine guns and rifles when we were fighting warfare house building fuel and all of these sorts of things.

So our woodland's been really smashed, which means the majority of the woodland you walk through in the UK now will be probably less than 200 years old. The Forestry Commission was founded in, at the end of the First World War, I think in 1919 to reti the uk, which is why we see so many forestry blocks with Sitka Spruce and Douglas Pine things, which are non-native to the uk, but they're quick growing softwood varieties and they give us our planking and our wood chip and our pellets because they were planted on lots of deforested areas that would formally have been oak and hazel and Rowan, and willow and birch, and all the art sort of native woodland varieties.

And the real difference when you walk through these habitats is what's beneath our feet, what we can't perceive, and. More and more studies are being done into mycelial fungus and microrisal networks. When you think that there are three [00:17:00] kingdoms of life, there is there's the animal kingdom, there's the plant kingdom, there's the fungal kingdom.

And we spend a lot of energy and attention on the animal kingdom and the plaque kingdom. And we've discovered them. Yeah not all of them, but the majority of these species across the planet, mycologist. Think that we're, we've discovered about 4% of the fungal species or named 4% of the fungal species on the planet.

So there's, and it's an extremely vast and diverse kingdom of species and the mycelial fungus that sits beneath the soil especially and is quite slow growing. So it tends to be an older growth forest creates this connectivity in this connective network called the wood wide web, this connective tissue that holds these forests together and can pass resources, can pass.

Pheromones can pass electrical signals between the different trees, which allows them to operate less as a load of islands within. A newly planted area and as one cohesive organism. And so in the same way that now that more and more campaigners are working for things like rivers to be given rights in the way that people have rights, and New Zealand's being the real [00:18:00] leader on this, that lots of rivers in New Zealand now and more in, in the West as well are suddenly being given rights where if they're polluted, that is that's an assault.

It's the same for old growth forests. So the easiest way to think about it is if you walk through a 100, 200 year old woodland, you're walking over a big patch of mud with 10,000 trees, plants in the ground. If you walk through a 4,000 year old rainforest, you're walking over one giant mushroom with 10,000 fingers all pointed up in the air, all in constant communication, collaboration, and adjustment.

And it makes a much more. Resilient habitat. And a good example of that is what happened last month in storm Goretti. We've just had 40 days of rain straight here on Bob Moore. It's been very wet. And we've had some high winds and I have neighbors and people I know who've lost all the trees on, in their gardens or around them on their street.

The whole streets have been flattened. We didn't lose a single tree in the rainforest because they all function together. And that gives it more flex and more resilience.

Arthur: Thanks so much for explaining that so beautifully the complexity and the [00:19:00] different layers and highlighting how there's so much we don't know. Now tree hugging, quite literally hugging a tree gets a bit of talk these days and also, grounding. Can you tell us a bit about that and your exposure to both practices?

Merlin: Yeah, I think as you say, the what? We don't know. Is so much more than what we do know. And I am always fascinated at the arrogance of humans of thinking that we understand a species or a habitat or a some sort of function within the natural world completely. And I'm a big believer that we will never understand anything in the natural world completely.

And that's not our place. It's not our job. We are one species within it. And we can get a certain level of understanding, which can be useful for us as humans, but to claim that we have total understanding of how something functions. Is madness and to go to things like grounding and and tree hugging or forest bathing.

At the moment we have a level of perceived knowledge and that only goes so far. And a good example is is the mycelial network I was just mentioning. Dr. [00:20:00] Susan Simard, who is a great hero of mine and a scientist at the University of British Columbia. And she, in the nineties, started to discover that trees were connected by these microrisal networks and the entire scientific community.

Laughter her out of every laboratory in every lecture room. And she was thrown out into the cold for a good decade until it began to be shown that not only was her research relevant and accurate, but it was only the tip of the iceberg and the connection went far deeper. Than she had initially postulated.

And I think that's a good example of when it comes to things like grounding forest bathing, nature connection, spending time amongst these ancient species. We currently sit here and we think of ourselves as distinct from them and separate from them as humans. But our skin is a partially permeable membrane.

When we breathe things in, we put these terpenes and fight in size that these trees secrete these volatile organic compounds into our bodies. Our bodies recycle every four years. We are, we, every part of you will be a part of the natural world within four years, and every part of the natural world will have become a part of [00:21:00] you within four years.

So we are doing this constant transition and shift, and the idea that actually spending time in ways that our ancestors, ways that we evolve. Within the natural world might benefit us physically and psychologically has a lot of strong basis behind it. So I think we need to be more open-minded. We need to do more research and we just need to trust also that nature often has the answer, that we don't have the capacity to fully understand.

Arthur: We're gonna do a quick plugin to Unplugged, which I know you've done a collaboration with. What a phenomenal platform. And for listeners that haven't come across it, it's basically a network of I would describe them as cabins in the nature where you can book them for. Good value considering what you get.

And , you've got a few at your site

Merlin: We've got one. I'd like to have

Arthur: Okay. One, one with a sauna.

Merlin: Yeah, it's the Elsa cabin. It was there, it only went in April last year, and it was their second bestselling cabin last year. They're very proud of that. And yeah, no, they're a great team at Unplugged. I think they've done amazing work to not just create [00:22:00] platforms these cabins where people can stay off-grid.

And so the whole point is when you turn up, there's a box that you can put your, anything with a microchip in it, your phone, your smartwatch, your iPad into, and you lock it. And that's a really important physical barrier because then you spend the time that you're in that cabin if it's two or three days reading and actually enjoying being in the company of whoever you've gone there with.

Or if you've gone alone, just being away from your screens because these supercomputers that we carry around on our wrist in our pockets, they are trillions of dollars worth of money has gone into. Making them as addictive as possible. It's when you think of the things that we usually associate with addiction, things like heroin and, other and smoking and alcohol, these just happen to be addictive.

And then organizations have capitalized upon that to, to create an industry. Whereas the iPhones that we all carry around with us have been specifically designed and the research, r and d process has gone into. Making them completely addictive. And so putting a physical barrier between them really helps.

But I think what Unplugged are doing really well [00:23:00] isn't just providing the opportunity for people to stay in beautiful nature and get off their screens, but the education that they're doing around highlighting the research around how our brains change when removed from technology and how it can improve us and make us better people.

Arthur: So fascinating. And some people, have to be in a, in an urban environment for obvious reasons. How do you see there being a solution for people? How can people adopt to be with nature in a more healthy way?

Merlin: I, again, I think it comes down to I'm always railing against the binary way that we try and solve problems as humans. We like to think of it as A or B. And we talk at the moment, our politicians talk at the moment about. Urban and rural as the as though there is the rural world and the urban world.

And I think this is a huge misnomer that we, everything in the world is on a spectrum, is on a range. There is extreme urban, if you live in Canary Wharf where you won't see a green thing for miles around [00:24:00] then, that's really urban. If you live in, I dunno, somewhere in a, in a.

A town which is relatively urban, but has good access to nature and good access to parks, then that's the middle ground. And again, if you live in a village or a rural area which is near to an urban environment, then you are just the other side of that line. And then you could live as we do in the middle of absolute nowhere where there's miles before your nearest neighbor.

And that's really remote. And I think we need to stop thinking of these things in terms of urban and rural, and we need to start working to make our urban environments. More nature integrated town planners now, I think it's very exciting that they don't talk about planting trees and cities. They talk about integrating residential areas amongst forests which is a much better way of flipping that on its head.

So rather than going, okay, here's where we're gonna put the streets and the drainage and the shopping areas and the commerce areas and the, the residential areas, and then we'll grow some trees. It's saying, actually let's look at areas of nature because we have to provide more areas for people to live as our population expands, but understand how we can [00:25:00] integrate human living environments into nature-based environments, which means that so suddenly you're then going is it urban or is it rural?

And those concepts are blown off their heads. But I think to go to a simpler answer to your question around people who do live in cities or towns and how they can get out into nature more I'm a huge believer in. In the volunteer networks that are our large NGOs, our large charities have, so we have four.

The four biggest charities in the UK are the National Trust, the Wildlife Trust Networks the Woodland Trust, and the RSPB. These are everywhere. Every town, every city, every county has representation from those four charities and they all run volunteering programs. And the volunteering programs are push, not pull.

So the more we ask for volunteering programs, the more they are. Responsible for putting those on. So it doesn't matter if you don't have a car or a driving license, it doesn't matter if you live in the middle of a city and there's very bad public transport. There will be a charity that offers volunteering opportunities on the weekend where you can get out [00:26:00] because a key part of health within nature isn't just being in nature, is participating in the natural world.

And what these volunteering opportunities do is they mean that you go out and you help to. Plant trees or remove non-native species or just at least get your hands dirty. And that's really important because it's easy to walk through a park with your phone out getting content for TikTok, but that's not really doing the work.

The work is when you are coming home and you're, you've got mud under your nails and you're feeling a bit cold and wet because you've actually been in nature. And that's when people really start to notice the change.

Arthur: . Interesting. There must be more studies needed in terms of understanding, as you say, the complexity of how our time in nature impacts us. But also, that can look so different depending on your actual experience.

Merlin: and we need to focus on both. We need to focus on how it impacts us, but also how it impacts the natural world. Because what we shouldn't be doing is spending time in nature to benefit humans in a way that damages. Other elements of the natural world, which is often what we do. So we'll pave [00:27:00] over areas and we'll put in yeah, handy handrails and stuff so that people can benefit.

But when we put up fences, we prevent the migration of many larger mammals. Even in the uk, things like badges and foxes their movement will be prevented by putting in lots of fences, fencing off areas, getting parks where, we can stop people coming in and out without paying a ticket. And I think we need to focus more on how we get people into the natural world.

In a way that also benefits the natural world.

Arthur: I can see you've got a plant behind you. For those that live in flats, obviously, as you rightly point out if you live in a city, there are often green spaces, et cetera, et cetera. Are you a believer in plants in a home? Changing how we feel?

Merlin: We are allowed to live on this planet because of photosynthesis. It is the most important element, as as famously said, we, for all of our technology, all of our. Frontal cortexes and our innovation in our digital world, we survive because 'cause of six inches of soil and the fact that it [00:28:00] rains and and that will always continue to be the case.

And the more we can surround ourselves with plants the better and and the healthier the world around us will be.

Arthur: And , you've got this amazing mission to change the amount of rainforest in the uk. Tell us about how that's going.

Merlin: So the thousand Year Trust is the only charity in the UK solely dedicated to Atlantic temperate rainforests, and we're not a land own charity. We don't aspire to make that change by buying up lots of land and planting trees, because I think the most important thing is to protect rural communities and the rural economy, which has been battered so badly over the last 50 or 60 years.

The villages and towns around us here are shells of what they once were because they used to be such a vibrant agricultural economy, which is now almost, it's a ghost of its form of self. So I think that I'm not in favor of charities buying up land chucking people off and bringing nature in.

I, again, going back to my point earlier, that we are a very much a part of that living landscape and therefore we need to [00:29:00] find ways with our growing population of integrating humans into these landscapes and making sure that when you return rainforest to an area, you provide more jobs than were in that area before.

I think that's really important and more opportunities for people to access beautiful nature. We shouldn't be fencing it off and saying it. It's it's, not for humans, it's for nature. I think that's totally wrong. For me, it all comes down to research it. It's and that's my obsession is the scientific element to this.

So everybody and I'm sure all of your listeners, anyone who's between the ages of eight and 80, who's had any form of education, we'll know about tropical rainforest, we'll know about the Amazon rainforest and we'll know what a vital, vibrant, and. And important habitat. It is. And that it's the lungs of the planet.

And we know this because we are all taught it at school. All of our politicians know it. There are many laws being passed to protect these habitats and to try and stop the illegal logging and the legal logging that happens and the slash and burn agriculture that happens in these habitats as well.

And yet very few people are fully aware. That Britain was once a rainforest [00:30:00] island and that we are a rainforest people who live upon that island. Because we've cut down 98 to 99% of our Atlantic temperate rainforest, and we did it over the last 3000 years. So it's a much longer term problem. So what really engages me, so we did 20 MSC dissertations and six PhD thesis last year in the cabilla rainforest with the different universities, the UK ris that we.

Partner with all of these amazing universities and institutions and I, and it's the most important work because when, what we don't see is the trickle down effect of peer reviewed science being produced is that it turns into white papers that turns into government policy, that turns into laws and funding that turns into school curriculums.

So if you are a young the conservation scientist just starting off on your career and you want to have a career in rainforest research, you're almost certainly gonna do that in tropical rainforest research, which makes sense because. There's a lot more tropical rainforest around the world, but there are also hundreds of universities with dedicated courses to tropical rainforest research.

There are dozens of research institutes that provide [00:31:00] millions and millions of pounds of funding every year to tropical rainforest research. And there are also, I think most importantly. Lots of opportunities because there are dozens of research stations around the planet in places like Costa Rica and Peru, and the Amazon and the Congo Basin and Borneo Malaysia, where as a young scientist, you can travel to a tropical rainforest and join a multi-year multidisciplinary research team, contribute to peer reviewed papers burnish your career and create that impact on government policy, school curriculums, and societal opinion.

If you want to be a part of researching and restoring Atlantic temperate rainforest, as we do. In Western Europe, there is a single university course that focuses on that habitat. There isn't a single research institute that provides funding towards it, and there isn't a single research station where you can go and actually.

Do that work, which means this habitat is starved of the attention it needs from the scientific community, the research that would be produced by that scientific community and the impact that would have upon politicians and and the school curriculum, which means that [00:32:00] no one knows about British rainforest and no one cares and no one loves them because no one knows them and no one's saving them because no one.

Them. So what we are doing here, and the 2026 is our big year for this, is we are building on Bob and Moore, Europe's first Atlantic temperate rainforest research field station. A place where scientists, academics, researchers, journalists, maybe even the occasional well-behaved politician will be able to come.

Two, an Atlantic temperate rainforest, a 4,000 year old one, and conduct that really vital research to get these habitats back on the agenda. And that, I believe, is the lever that will allow us to triple the size of them. Because if all of the landow organizations, the big ones like the MOD, the Forestry Commission, the National Trust, the Woodland Trust, you organizations that own tens, hundreds, even over a million acres of.

Of land, see the science and see the funding coming down from government and the protection from government. They all restore that habitat and that is how we triple the size of it.

Arthur: And you've got the funding for this research[00:33:00]

Merlin: we are, that, that is my work for 2026 is finding the funding. We have a crowdfunder that's live at the moment. And we're looking for grant bodies and charities to provide the grants for it and people like National Lottery Heritage Fund and the People's Postcode Lottery. So we're going out to every channel we can and hoping the UKRI UK Research Institutes will provide funding as well.

We got some of the funding and we're, we broke ground in December and the main build starts in April of 2026. But and it will be built it'll be finished in early 2027. But no, we have a lot of funding that we need to gather.

Arthur: How much you need.

Merlin: At the moment we need a little, about six to 700,000 pounds remaining so if any of your any of your listeners know, any friendly millionaires, even better billionaires, that would be, I'm all ears.

Arthur: But and in terms of hitting that, it, is it a million acres that you want in the UK to be rainforests,

Merlin: to see a million acres turn back to Rainforest. So it used to be about 20% of the uk, which was about six to 7 million. Or no, sorry, double that. It's about 70 million in the uk so it'd been about 30 to 14 million. I'd like to see it return to a million [00:34:00] acres. It's currently down at around 300,000, but these numbers are very arbitrary.

The reality is. Temperate rainforest again, we like to say, oh, that's a rainforest. And that isn't, there's, again, there's a shifting scale of the health of these habitats. There are many rainforests across the Western Celtic Belt of the uk, which are rainforest, but are in a very poor condition.

'cause they're full of eroded rums and gray squirrels and beach trees, and they're dying, they're suffocating. And those need as much attention as newly planted areas. So there are many of our rainforests that need need life support and

Arthur: And can anywhere become a rainforest, in theory in the

Merlin: You need high rainfall. The, as with tropical rainforest, the clues in the names you need at least 1400 millimeters of rainfall a year, and it needs to fall across the year. It can't all fall in one big monsoon season, so you need a little bit of rain every month, and that's because of the epiphytes that grow up in the canopy.

So these rainforests are really defined by their high level of epiphytes, and that's things like lichen. Mosses, poly pody, ferns, all of the things growing up in the canopy, which is why oak trees are so wonderful in rainforest because the oak can hold so much life living upon it. You can have up [00:35:00]to 600 different species living on a single oak tree, and so they make this layered effect.

So you can't look at a rainforest and say, oh, it's a rainforest because it's got oak in it, or because it's got hazel in it. It's a rainforest because you have life living upon life. Also, desynthesizing. All holding space and all providing that huge biodiversity abundance.

That's what makes them so special, and they need rain for that. So it's these high rainfall areas, which is why we tend to see them in places like the Western Highlands, cumbia, Western Wales, and the Southwest, because we get our rain off the Atlantic and it gets quite wet down here.

Arthur: You are a working farm, is that correct as well?

Merlin: We were a working farm. Up until recently we've taken the livestock off to reestablish the trees. We will be bringing the livestock back on. So we're a working farm that's having a bit of a pool. Was.

Arthur: Looking at it, in the most simple terms, and apologies for the oversimplification, but I mean from the outset, farming, you directionally has focused on economies of scale. alper, are there some interesting facts [00:36:00] or beliefs you have around making the point towards us being able to provide economically for these rural farming communities, but also having the sort of productivity requirements that we need whilst protecting the land and being sustainable.

Merlin: That's a really big subject. Efficiency has effectively become the god of capitalism. This is what we're always, and this is why everyone's so excited about ai is people just say, oh it'll make us more efficient. And you go, okay how much efficiency is too much efficiency?

Because what if you look at the agricultural sector, it's a good example of what happens when you really worship. So when my father took this farm over in 1960, it employed eight people full time. When I took it over, it employed one person seasonally. So one person of half the year. And that's what efficiency looks like.

You go, we're getting more efficient. The, this machine is bigger. This machine does work that humans were doing before this crop, it grows, more effectively without human, without humans needing to be involved. This livestock, these animals have been bred to be hardier to be.

Easier to manage and [00:37:00] all you're really doing is removing jobs, which is great for the end user because it reduces prices. And it's great for the owners of businesses because it means they're employing fewer people, so it reduces their costs. But it's terrible for a functioning economy where what we really need to do is provide employment opportunities for all working age people that, that's fundamentally the job of society is to make sure that there are enough jobs within that society for the people who live there, along with defense and and other issues.

But, so I everyone seems to just assume that efficiency is a really good thing, but sometimes it's actually not such a good thing because yes, we all can buy a chicken for a pound and a, pack of steaks for two pounds 50, but but the end result of that is that there are no jobs and there's no opportunity.

And so yeah, this is something that the common agricultural policy really. Did to the uk. And we have this wonderful opportunity moment now that we've left it. And when we talk about food security, which is always an issue that people bring up and it's used usually to shut. Yeah. The two things that are often used to shut these conversations down are how we feed ourselves if we plant more trees.

And what about cultural identity? And [00:38:00] cultural identity is a very short term thing. We're shifting baseline syndrome that we all suffer from as humans Usually goes back, maybe if we're bold as far as our grandparents or our great-grandparents. But when you think in terms of an oak lifespan, actually we should be viewing our cultural identity to be a much longer arc of time.

But food security is also. An issue that we use as a shibboleth to close down conversations. We use 22% of UK farmland for sheep farming. It provides less than 1% of our calories. , No one is using lamb or mu as a staple. Food, it is an occasional, it's a luxury. People generally use at Easter and maybe a little bit.

Throughout the year is a treat when they go to the pub. But very few people view lamb and mutton as a staple food. What we want in this country, what people actually mean when they say food security is they want choice, security. We provide, we produce 58% of our food. In-house in the uk, which is a lot better than most countries in Europe, many countries around the world actually, because, we we are a very productive landscape.

And the 42% that we [00:39:00] import from overseas, much of that is avocados and bananas and strawberries in December and blueberries in February. It's food that we want, not necessarily food that we desperately need. If it comes down to a an issue of whether actually it's food security or food choice.

What most of us want is to be able to walk into a supermarket and choose whatever we wanna eat, whenever we want to eat it, any day of the week. And go, actually, I'm gonna have a corner tonight and I'm gonna have a pizza the next night and I'm gonna have a, I don't know, a lasagna the night after that.

That's what we think of when we think of food security. That's not food security, that's choice security. It's the ability to have whatever we want, whenever we want it, and we need to start asking difficult questions, which are, is it possible to have a healthily functioning ecosystem and have completely unfettered choice?

Over what we eat when there are 70 million people living in the UK and 8 billion people living on the planet. Or do we actually need to be a little bit more mature? I'd argue in terms of going we need to start eating seasonally and we need to start eating locally. And we also need to start putting a third of all the food that's grown in the UK into landfill, which is what currently [00:40:00] happens.

And governments need to support people to eat healthily because the obesity, the fact that 64% of people in the UK are. Overweight and obese is because prices are suppressed on unhealthy food through subsidies and prices are inflated on the food. We should be helping people to eat because there's no subsidies on them.

And we need to be supporting people to eat healthfully making time and educational opportunities for them to do that and making it harder for people to eat junk. Which is currently so heavily subsidized that people are becoming unhealthy because of the mechanisms we've put in place to force them to.

So I think when you unpick all of those issues, when we start growing the things that are native to an area, when we start eating seasonally, we stop wasting everything into landfill and we start educating people to eat a healthy calorific amount of healthy food. Then you would unlock so much land, which is currently being misused for nature restoration activities and for future based, innovate innovative farming practices.

Even just moving from sheep to cattle on these [00:41:00] landscapes allows the regeneration of woodland. Sheep is a totally non-native creature to the uk and as a result it's quite ecosystem damaging. It will eat any SAP that starts to grow up, whereas native breed cattle like Highlands or Dexter's or Galloways will work far better within a wood pasture landscape.

So these are some of the things that I think we can do and actually BOL our food security whilst restoring ecosystem health.

Arthur: Clearly some complications there who is to you? Someone who has so much capacity and already is perhaps moving us directionally and towards a more sustainable way of living in the UK or on, on a global level that you think should get more attention.

Merlin: I'd encourage everyone to look at Henry Dimbleby's book Ravenous, which was it absolutely explains this issue. Extremely effectively. He was asked by Boris Johnson's government to write a national food strategy When he wrote it, the government didn't like it because it basically meant having to change a lot of laws and reduce subsidies in certain areas and increase them in [00:42:00] others, reduce the amount of sugar that we eat and increase the seasonality and health of the food that we eat.

So they buried the strategy that he wrote. So he just took it and repackaged it into a book that's become a bestseller called Ravenous. Which blows this entire issue open. So I'd massively recommend that I'd recommend Gabe Brown's dirt to Soil. That's that's an American book about the regenerative farming and mob grazing and silver pasture movement.

A lot of that's happening here in the UK now. There's a lot of great books about regenerative agriculture and actually. We view farming as something which is inevitably going to damage the natural world. But actually most farmers love nature and the natural world more than anybody and are the best stewards of that landscape.

But farmers are also people who are very financially strapped and therefore have to do whatever the governance society is encouraging them to do. That's what the subsidy system does. It basically steers the agricultural community into certain practices. And the, it's really important as we look at things like regen, agriculture.

No-till kind of agriculture methods like that only using native species. [00:43:00] That's. That we can help farmers to make those transitions so that they become more financially resilient and aren't being punished for doing the right thing, which is what currently happens. That's why we have a Rewilding movement, because Rewilding is seen as the outliers.

It's the, it's people who are doing stuff which might not actually make any money, but it's, they see it as being good for the natural world. All farmers should be. Farming in a way which is good for nature, but they'll only do that if the government helps them to do that. The main people who have the ability to make this change and it's a depressingly, horrible thing to have to say, but it's politicians and we do not have the politicians we deserve right now.

And that doesn't matter whether what party they're in, why would anybody become a member of Parliament right now when they are so hated and overworked and I believe underpaid for the work that we expect them to do, which is leading our nation at a very difficult time. And we need politicians to be aware of these issues.

And right now they aren't because they're. Too busy fighting, something else, which just seems totally [00:44:00] irrelevant compared to some of these existential issues that they should be focused on. But it's important that everybody remembers and I'm always keen to highlight this, that our politicians work for us.

We vote them in, and we can then influence what they do when they are in. In Parliament or in government, depending on how senior they are, if you write a letter to your mp, they have to reply. If they get 50 letters on an issue, they really have to pay attention. And if they get a thousand letters on an issue they have to start actually really making sure it becomes a law or that funding models change.

And so I would encourage everybody to rub their politicians' faces in it and make sure that these issues are front of their agendas.

Arthur: Looking at it, you are a bit of an out, an outlier in the sense of being such a kind of forward thinking, so actively involved in, pushing for sustainability. And so was your father, where did he get this passion from? Is your passion directly from him

Merlin: I think most of it probably is. I write about a lot in my book. It's dedicated to my [00:45:00]father and a lot of it is about him and about his relationship with me. And he still lives with us. He turns 90 in a couple of months. We are we are heading out to the rainforest of Borneo to celebrate his birthday, which is a place where he.

Been many times and ran along still the longest and largest expedition that the raw geographical society ever launched back in 1977 and 1978, where they spent 15 months in the rainforest of Sak with I think 120 scientists. And they were just, unlocking the rainforest code. It was really the first expedition that demonstrated scientifically how important tropical rainforests are.

And they were discovering dozens of new species every day which were really important to our understanding of how. Our planet functioned, and we still only understand less than 1% of how our planet functions. But expeditions like that did a huge amount of work for it. I don't, I'd be interested to hear what he would say about where his passion for this came from.

He's come from a, not just a different generation, but in many ways several generations back. He was born before the Second World War, remembers the second World War, and we don't have enough people in our society who [00:46:00] remember. The horrible wars like that anymore, which is why we're barreling towards potentially the next one, which is a terrifying thing.

But he has a wonderful optimism. He's had a, in many ways a very charmed life, but in many ways a very a very troubled life. Many horrible things have happened to him, and I've never seen him complain. I've never seen him be downhearted about it. He's a man of optimism and hope. And what I try and think of and do every day with the work that we are doing here around Temperate Rainforest is bring similar or my own levels of optimism and hope, and it's why I called it the thousand Year Trust for our charity, because I think one of the problems we have is that we view these issues under human timeframes and political and corporate timeframes.

We say, all right, can we fix. Climate change by 2030. And no, we can't, of course we can't. That's a drop in the ocean on a geological or even an ecological timescale. It's only interesting on an anthropological timescale. And we need to start being a bit bolder in our thinking. 'cause if you imagine the uk, let's say [00:47:00] in a thousand years time I have no doubt in my mind that the British Isles in a thousand years time will have a lot more nature.

Humans who live on the British Isles will live in harmony with nature. We'll have beavers on every river, probably wolves wolf packs, roaming across certain areas, links in the forest, eagle, owls in the skies. A lot of the nature we've lost will have returned and and the humans who live here will be healthier and happier and more in harmony with natural world.

I think that what we have right now is a choice for how we get from 2026 to 30 26, that thousand year timeline, and one option, the one that we're currently on the tracks we're currently careering along. Looks a lot like a Mad Max movie. It involves lots of leather and souped up diesel engines and cannibalism and warfare and deserts and horribleness, and that lasts for a few hundred years.

And then we start to grow up and realize that we will only live in harmony with this planet when we start respecting it. The other option, which I think we still have the chance to get on, is one where we start behaving now and we, it's gonna be difficult for the next few [00:48:00] decades because the lag effect of the climate change that we've already brought about over the last few hundred, even a thousand years, still has to play out.

Even if we all started treating the planet with respect now, we're still gonna see impacts for the next few decades, if not the next century. But we can make that change now and live in harmony with nature and still get to the same end point. That's the important thing. The end point's the same in a thousand years time, we are still in that wonderful bucolic setting of living in harmony with nature.

The choice we have is how we get from A to B. Is it fighting against the natural world or is it working in partnership with it? And if we choose to work in partnership with it, it's harder in the short term, but it will be more beneficial in the long term.

Arthur: Monon, thank you. We're gonna jump to the quick file questions. Now. Three things you get joy from.

Merlin: My daughters, I have a five and a 3-year-old who are complete terrorists, but they bring joy to me every day. The rainforest at cabilla every time I go in there it never ceases to amaze me. And writing, being able to actually have the time to sit down and I'm about to start working on the next book, which is a huge excitement for [00:49:00] me.

Arthur: A mantra you want to embrace now would be.

Merlin: I'm gonna steal from Margaret Mead for that one who famously said, never doubt that a small number of committed and thoughtful citizens cannot create change in the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has. And if we, and I say that to myself every morning, along with Jane Goodall's mantra who sadly passed last year, that we all make an impact on the planet every day when we wake up.

We choose whether that is a positive impact or a negative impact. And I think those two things, if we just, channel them a little bit more, then, there's 8 billion of us. Yeah, we can make good change and we can make bad change.

Arthur: One unusual thing that gives you pleasure.

Merlin: Unusual thing that gives me pleasure.

My beavers, they're beavers that we have in the valley here at Cabilla have just returned after being away for a couple of years. And and there is nothing that gives me more pleasure than going down and sitting on the riverbank in the evening and watching the beavers busily building dams. They're the most beautiful creature we've ever had in the British Isles.[00:50:00]

Wonderful to see them coming

Arthur: Please send a photo. We'd love to, we'd love to post that. A favorite book, film, or artist that isn't obvious.

Merlin: Arnold Schwarzenegger. I'm a huge fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger and his work. He was the most successful athlete in his category of the 20th century, the highest paid actor of the 20th century, and one of the top politicians on the planet. I think he's often seen as some meathead muscle man.

Actually he got there from quite humble beginnings with nothing but self-belief and determination and optimism. And everyone told him he was gonna fail at all three of these things. He wasn't gonna be a bodybuilder, he wasn't gonna be an act, he wasn't gonna be a politician. He believed and he made it happen.

And I think that if we brought a little bit more of that thinking and his recent book be useful, I'd recommend to anybody that's got the same publishers as mine. And it's a brilliant guide for life.

Arthur: Thank you so much today. It's been a pleasure.

Merlin: Thank you, Arthur.