Rupert Isaacson: Thanks for joining us.
Welcome to Live Free, Ride Free.
I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of
The Horseboy and The Long Ride Home.
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So now let's jump in.
Welcome back to Live Free, ride Free.
I've got the legend, Robin Handbury Tenon and his son Merlin.
Today, if you don't know who Robin Handbury Tenon is, you might know
actually some of the work he's done.
But he's been a bit of a ance, squeeze a power behind many beneficial
effects on the planet and on peoples.
And it's very dear to my heart because those of you who know my story know that
I worked for a long time with Sun Bushman in the Kalahari, helping them get legal
title to their ancestral land after they'd been illegally evicted in Botswana.
And had it not been for the British organization, survival International.
Who we did all our British work through.
We did some of it in America, some of it in the uk.
There would have been nothing.
And the man behind Survival International who founded it is the
man sitting here, Robin Bury Tenison.
So I owe a great debt of gratitude.
But we all do.
And the reason is because the sand bushmen actually are common ancestors.
If they had disappeared off the planet, which they were in grave
danger of doing back in the early two thousands, that would be like
us losing touch with ourselves.
They are the original oldest culture on the planet.
And it's easy to kind of think roll your eyes at something like that,
but you don't miss it till it's gone.
And about every generation there are threats to people like this.
And a man like Robin.
You know, steps in and does something about it.
And so I'm very grateful to Mr.
Ry Tenon here.
And I'm very, very glad that his son Merlin is a chip off the old
block because he's doing something rather amazing for us all as well.
So that's my preamble.
Lads, would you tell us who you are, what you do, and why you do it?
Do you wanna kick off?
Yeah.
Age first.
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: I think age first.
Age first.
I think, well, the other side of my life, apart from the wonderful introduction
you gave me on, on background survival International, which I'm hugely proud
of, and which has done so much work in the field of indigenous people.
The other big thing I did was to lead the biggest scientific expedition
Britain ever mount to understand how the rainforests work in Borneo.
And I lived there for 15 months with a great group of scientists.
We cracked the rainforest code.
We worked out why you can have this lush rainforest going on what is effectively a
desert and why you shouldn't cut it down.
It didn't help.
It's cut it down so much over the last 40 years since the expedition.
And but my life had been much devoted to scientific research into
tropical rainforests, only to find the back on my little hill farm on
Bob Monroe, which me now runs, runs.
We had the last remnant, one of the last remnants of temperate rainforest, which
is just as rich and incredibly rare.
And so suddenly my focus, having been on tropical, is now all
about temperate rainforests, which Merlin will tell you about.
Rupert Isaacson: You said just now that you cracked the rainforest
code, I just get to, I get to Merlin a mo, but you can't say something
like that and not have me jump.
Okay.
What does that mean?
What, how do you crack a rainforest code?
What, what is the rainforest code?
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: Quite right to pick me up on that.
For a long time, people couldn't understand how this incredibly
rich and lush di biodiverse habitat could exist on something which is
effectively a desert because there's no soil under the reef forest.
There's no humus like we used to in Northern Europe.
Okay?
There's just about an inch of soil.
And when you cut the trees down of soil rushes away, and it becomes a desert.
How can that possibly happen?
And a lot of people were researching it, and the big thing we cracked was to find
out how it happens and what the, the story is that the nutrients are reabsorbed
almost instantly as they hit the ground by all the millis and centipedes.
And, and they get caught up in the rootlet systems and micro
are immediately back in the tree.
So the tree is containing all its nutrients and recycling them in itself.
And therefore, it's another reason apart from the many other reasons why
you shouldn't cut tropical rainforest down because you will create a desert.
I'm doing
Rupert Isaacson: Wow, this I didn't know because I would've assumed that any.
Forest that's anywhere in the world that's sat there for some
generations must be sitting on a massive layer of hummus, right?
Because leaves are falling, bark is falling, biomass is falling, right?
I mean, okay, I'm gonna return to this, but the question I'm gonna
return to, 'cause I don't, you know, we need to find out who Merlin is here.
But the question I'm gonna pick up is, why doesn't that happen in every forest?
Why is that specific to tropical rainforest?
'cause now I want to know, but Merlin, who are you and why are you here?
And what, what
do you do?
I.
Thank you so much for, for having me here Rupert.
And it's it's always challenging following my father 'cause he casts along shadow
and has done such amazing things.
But but it, but it's a huge pleasure and honor always to do these these
father son conversations together.
'cause he, it's wonderful to bounce off each other.
So I, I grew up here on this, this hill farm or Bob and Moore.
So I'm, we're both currently sitting on the, on the farm in
the, in the heart of Cornwall.
With my father going off on these exciting and in incredible expeditions
to far-flung tropical regions.
And when I was 19, I, I left and joined the army and it was at a
time when the military was, was very busy in the early two thousands.
And I subsequently went on three tours, three combat tours of
Afghanistan in quite quick succession.
And on one of these I was blown up in a, a roadside bomb by the Taliban
and was very fortunate to come away physically, almost unscathed.
And, and to continue an enjoyable military career before leaving the army to, to get
married and going and working in London.
And it was while working in London that I began to suffer
from quite poor mental health.
And, and some of that was experiences in, in the military especially being blown up,
coming back to haunt me in a form of PTSD.
But, but much of it was also related to, I think, what's far more recognizable
to most people, which is just the stresses and the pressure and the, in
many ways, unpleasantness of working in these fast-paced urban environments.
Mm-hmm.
And I was extremely lucky that I had cabilla this.
Gorgeous valley in the heart of Bob and Moore with this slice of Atlantic
temperate rainforest, a term that we weren't even that familiar with
at the time in the heart of it.
And I was able to retrieve into that space and come and hide down there and
heal down there and, and, and really fall in love, re fall in love 'cause it
had been the playground of my childhood.
But, but really begin to understand how important these habitats are.
And at the same time my wife Lizzie and I were trying to start a family and she
was going through problems which are, are all too common and far too little
understood and, and, and suffering from a, a couple of really traumatic miscarriages.
And she was using this valley as a place of healing for her.
And then a couple of years later, and I'm sure we, we may come onto
this, but my father got very, very severe COVID back in 2020 and was
sedated for seven weeks in hospital.
And we were told by the doctors that he was almost certainly gonna die
and wasn't gonna come back to us.
He was already in his mid eighties at that point.
He is extremely old.
And and we were told there was no way he was gonna come home and.
That boy immediately, sir.
Rupert Isaacson: And,
and he he, he did come home.
I mean, he is remarkable for his age though, and he, and he, he
healed within this forest as well.
And so we had these three stories of my personal psychological healing,
my wife Lizzie's, psychological and physical healing, and my father's
physical healing within this habitat.
And it set me on an obsessive path to not only bring more people into the
Atlantic temperate rainforest that we had at Cabilla Veterans with P ts d.
This is what Lizzie and I were obsessed about, bringing veterans with PTSD women
on their fertility journeys, nurses from the NHS, suffering from stress
and burnout, corporate professionals going through the same challenges
we've been going through, but also to elevate, highlight, restore,
and protect this habitat because.
The point that I really love here is that my father has made this point.
He just disappeared off screen.
I hope he is not upset coming down.
Exactly.
He's not upset with anything I've said.
But we, we all know whether you are eight or 80, we all know about how important
tropical rainforests are and how they are the lungs of the planet, and how
they are our most important habitats that are being degraded and deforested.
And the reason we know that is because of many, many expeditions that have been
run, but my father's ones especially, which have cracked the rainforest
code and shown us that the tropical rainforest, like the Amazon and Borneo
are the lungs of the planet and the most important habitat from a biodiversity
and a climate mitigation, and a a, a general planetary equilibrium perspective.
And so we all, when we hear the word rainforest, we think
of places like the Amazon.
We've forgotten that actually once Britain was a rainforest island, 20%
of the United Kingdom was a rainforest landscape just a few thousand years ago.
And my mission, my dream is to help to be a part of reminding everybody
that Britain is a rainforest island and we are a rainforest people.
And it should be as important to us as it is to the people of tropical
countries who have rainforest very much as a part of our culture.
And that is why we started our business, Camilla Cornwall, and our
charity of a thousand Year Trust and the work that we're doing now.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay, so I just want this, this podcast goes out
across the English speaking world.
So not everyone knows what Cornwall is, and not everybody knows what Bob Moore is.
And not everybody knows that there are temperate rainforests.
So just for the listeners, I want you to picture when you think of Lord of the
Rings and you see elves coming through the Misty Feny, mossy Bouldery, greeny.
Thing that's a temperate rainforest.
And the reason why it has that miasma is actually water that 'cause it's a
very, very high rainfall area where the UK sits juts out into the Atlantic and
sits in what's called the Gulf Stream because we're actually on a, on a, on a
latitude with kind of Northern Alaska.
And if it wasn't for that, we'd be shivering.
But no, we, we, we have this high rainfall.
Some people say it's rather gloomy and gray, but it's not dissimilar to the
Pacific Northwest in the US or British Columbia, coastal British Columbia.
So, so if you think about that, so if you've watched Vikings or
if you watch the Lord of the Rings and you, they went to temperate
rainforests and they filmed there.
So whether it was in New Zealand, whether it was in Canada for Vikings
and there are pockets of this still left in the uk and it's something
I've been aware of for a long time.
Because I used to, although I was brought up in.
Partly in London and partly in Leicestershire, which is on the
eastern side of the uk, which does not get that particular climate.
So North Sea climate gets scoured by the winds from Siberia, this western
Celtic side of the planet, which all the Celts got pushed into by the Romans.
So therefore, it has all the sort of mysterious mythology
and spirituality as well.
All kind of combine to this rather magical thing.
This magical thing is what you all are looking to revive and protect.
No.
That's absolutely right and you are, you're quite right.
Fand Forest is a temperate rainforest, Jeffrey of Monmouth Arthurian Legends,
the ma ian Lewis Carroll's jab walkie.
These are all set within temper rainforest.
These are rainforest myths.
We just weren't using that term.
And they are not only our most folkloric and, and allic habitats for that
reason, but they're also a pinnacle habitat for many scientific reasons.
So they are our most carbon sequestering habitat that we can restore and
plant territory to terres in the uk.
So they suck more CO2 outta the air than anything else at a
time of high climate challenge.
That's really important.
We're also in the uk, the most nature depleted country.
In Europe and, and temperate rainforest restore that biodiversity abundance,
which is so important and bring back that layering of life better
than anything else we can restore.
But I think most importantly, they are the best habitat that we have in the
UK for the mental health and wellbeing of humans who spend time amongst them.
And a lot of our science scientific research that we are doing here
is focused on that human element.
I think that's so important.
Rupert Isaacson: Alright, so you, Robin, let's go back to you.
You, you, you said that you'd cracked the tropical rainforest code, which
was that the trees are self-sustaining units that when they drop their
humus, the humus gets reabsorbed.
There's a re-uptake immediately.
So isn't humus layer, but this presumably is not the case in a temperate rainforest.
What's the difference?
Why do you have that in a tropical one?
Why do you not have that one in?
I'm sitting in Germany right now and I'm looking at it very large.
Beach forests.
Okay, so probably beach forests.
Yeah.
That I live in.
There's definitely a big humus layer there.
So what, what created this rainforest thing that's tropical that does not
have that humus layer, which, 'cause we know that humus also sequesters carbon.
No.
And then why does a temperate rainforest sequester so much carbon?
Why is it not the same thing just colder?
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: Well, you're not alone in, in, in
not understanding how it works.
And I had a wonderful occasion when I had take Margaret Thatcher then prime Minister
around a, a, a picture of artistic exhibition of paintings in the rainforest.
And we were looking at these wonderful paintings of rich, lush rainforest
for all intensity of life within it.
And she said to me, such a shame.
We have to cut that, all that down.
But then we said, we need the agricultural land.
I had wonderful opportunity of being able to say, rubbish prime minister, and
actually knowing what I was talking about.
And she looked a bit shocked and nearly handbagged me and said, what do you mean?
And I had to explain to her that tropical rainforests exist.
We now understand through recycling all the nutrients, instantly,
they never go into the soil.
Whereas temperate forests and agriculture generally in northern Europe and where
we have humus growing up, as you've just said, and there is a depth of humus up
to 4, 5, 6 feet in bends, but usually two or three feet in normal areas, you have
this humus and this soil from which is sustainable and on which the trees grow.
And so when you cut them down, you just park more and grow, they grow again.
It's a completely different cycle, temperate from tropical rainforest.
And that was what people really didn't understand.
And one of the reasons why there was such immense destruction of tropical rainforest
in the search fatigue and timbers.
Even though in the, in the old days, the bad old days or good days, you see it, the
colonialism, the, the people responsible used to recognize it in a sort of way.
And instead of, and you had a conservator of forests whose job
was to hand out timber concessions for only 1% of the area of time.
And then to allow it to naturally regrow, which we only had a 1% happen.
It was sustainable.
Nowadays it's greed and density of modern commerce in the far east and,
and South America and Africa, indeed.
The tropical rainforest is being destroyed all the time, and we are being
left with a, a dessert an eroded desert behind which is totally economically
and socially and biologically stupid.
Yeah.
But
there is there, there is a, a, a nice crossover and similarity between
the tragedy of what's happened in Tropical Rainforest and the tragedy
of what's happened in temperate rainforest, which is the introduction
of non-native grazing mammals.
And so many of, much of the Amazon rainforest has been cut down in
order to create space for cattle pasture and cattle grazing.
And, and the cow is a completely non-native creature to South America.
So these have been imported.
They don't fit within the trophic system.
They don't have natural predators, natural competitors and, and the
things that they forage on don't have a way of responding to them.
They do very unnatural things to the ground, which has been one of
the things that's really destroyed these tropical rainforest landscapes.
In the same way in Western Europe and in the UK in particular, much of our
temperate rainforest was cut down.
Longer ago, so two, three, 4,000 years ago.
Whereas in Brazil, it's been in the last few centuries in order to make space for
sheep, sheep grazing, which is really all that tends to happen on the uplands
once the temperate rainforests have gone.
And the sheep in exactly the same way that the cow is non-native to South America.
Sheep are entirely non-native to Western Europe.
They're a Mesopotamia and a a Persian import that was brought along Silk Road
roots four and a half thousand years ago.
And they are a very well evolved desert animal, which as a result
of being a desert animal, have very small hooves, which compact the soil.
When they step upon it, they're voracious appetites.
'cause when you live in a desert, you eat everything you can find
and their manure isn't beneficial to temperate rainforest soil.
So we've done a very similar thing by taking the trees away and
putting cattle in South America.
There's been the same effect in Western Europe by taking the
trees away and placing sheep in
Rupert Isaacson: Western Europe.
That's interesting.
I'm just, as you were saying, they're not native to Western Europe.
I'm just sort of going through, 'cause in, in this area of Germany I live in,
we have some muon, which is English.
English.
It's, you know, European wild sheep.
Up in the low mountain range that we live in here.
But yes they're sort of widely acknowledged to be a Mediterranean.
Yeah.
Wild species that was sort of naturalized here, perhaps by
the Romans or earlier, you know.
But, and I'm just trying to think of the cave walls of Lascoe and
those other Western European paleolithic rock art repositories.
And I'm just sort of going through in my mind, have I seen sheep on those?
We see horses, we see cows, we see bison, we see bears, we see wolves, we see lions.
Do we?
A few, a few,
few, few Woolie rhinos and straight tus elephants as well.
Right?
Right.
But, but no sheep.
But we don't, and, and it comes back and I'd never, I've never
Rupert Isaacson: stopped to think of that before.
And on our charity here, the thousand Year Trust, one of the reasons that
we came up with that name was because when I started talking about this
subject, people would go, well, hang on.
Sheep have been here for four and a half thousand years.
Surely that's long enough for them to be considered native or, or, or,
you know, part of the evolutionary system within this island.
But that is not the way evolution or Mother Nature works.
They, the human timelines that we feel comfortable working within five, 10,
a hundred years are completely out of.
Perspective with actually how natural systems function and work.
And so we have to have the, the, the appetite, the boldness, the objectivity
to be able to look in island landscapes.
And I've always entertained by the difference between places like New
Zealand and Australia and Te del Wago, other island habitats, where
the people who live there are very comfortable saying, this species evolved.
Here it is native, this species was introduced by humans, it is
non-native and therefore it should be either removed or suppressed.
In New Zealand, they were, they have competitions amongst schoolchildren to
bring in as many rats that they've killed, and they get a competition for the one
that's brought in the most in the uk.
If we did that with gray squirrels at schools you know, the, the tabloids
would hit the roof and, and everyone would be being fired from their jobs.
We, we, I think we have a real timidity in the UK about looking at the flora
and fauna that we have across our islands and saying actually that
that is non-native and therefore it might be being destructive and sheep.
A brilliant example of that, just like gray squirrels are and
things like rhododendron and, and in many places, beach trees.
Rupert Isaacson: Now of course, we've, we've built the beginnings
of the British Empire on wool.
Mm.
You know, the, the medieval period, as you know, we, we grew wool here in the uk.
Say, here I'm sitting in Germany, but, you know, sold it
to Flanders, the low countries.
It was then processed and went out, and that was the basis of the
prosperity upon which we built the next thing, which was to cut all the
ship forests down to make ships, oh, go and be pirates around the world.
And then they called that the British Empire.
Now that's gone, but we now have a bank instead, as we know which
causes people great stress.
And they go and then get their mental health back in your rainforest in, in
Cornwall, in the southwest of England.
But you guys have a large farm.
You're sitting up there on Bob Min Moore and Boman Moore.
For those who the listeners, what you need to understand is Cornwall,
actually, this is what you need to understand about Cornwall.
If you dunno the UK.
People and Cornwall talk like, ah, a little bit.
And Pirates talk like that too.
Why?
Because they come from Cornwall.
So Cornwall is the bit of southwest England that sticks
out furthest into the Atlantic.
So if you were going to be on a ship and get down and steal gold from the Spanish
ships coming back from the Caribbean back in the 16th century, probably
you came from that southwest corner of the UK around Portsmouth and then west
into Cornwall and it's smugglers and it's 'cause it's a rocky coastline.
You can hide things in caves and that's why we have the pirate accent.
So if you didn't know that, okay, and you'll hear it alive and well in
any pub in Cornwall, but Boman Moore, where Robin and Merlin are sitting is
a mountain spine, like a low mountain spine that runs along the center of
that peninsula and then it goes down basically to the coast on either side.
You guys are sitting up there.
Are you honest?
Are you saying that you are going to take your farm like the whole
thing just co you know, it's a couple of thousand acres or so.
Are you going to, are you gonna re rainforest that whole thing?
Like, you've already done it.
Is that what you're gonna do?
Are you doing So it's, it's a lot.
It's not that big.
It's a smaller farm.
It's it, it's, it's become smaller over the years.
Yeah.
And, and now it's about 250 acres.
And, but I find that very,
Rupert Isaacson: very exciting.
So you, you, you, the whole lot
sheep
Rupert Isaacson: gone.
Back to the break for us.
She gone and we've, we've reestablished a hundred thousand trees across the farm.
So few listeners, an acre is about the size of a football or a soccer pitch, so
that's 250 football pitches all stitched together and laid over this valley.
And the average size of a farm in the UK is about 220 acres.
Yeah.
So we are 250 acres, but a hundred acres of that, or about 85 acres of that is
already atlantic temperate rainforest.
So actually our farmable land is only 160 acres.
And the important thing about that is that there are many charismatic
and really exciting and innovative nature restoration Rewilding projects
in the uk, but they tend to be very, very large areas of land, three, four,
5,000, 20,000 acres up in the Highlands.
And they're often owned by people who are doing something quite philanthropic.
They have the resources and the funds to, to do something
quite high risk and innovative.
That doesn't necessarily make money because we have a, an average sized farm
in a very challenging farming environment.
What we do has to work.
EE ecologically and economically for the farmers that do it.
So what we are creating is a blueprint for a future of upland farming, which
transitions sheep popped green tarmac, which has very little biodiversity and
very little health and, and life and vitality, and also is very, very bad
for flooding and droughts downstream because it doesn't hold water in the
uplands very bad for soil climate, bad climate change, big rain event.
Yeah,
absolutely.
Very bad for water quality.
And we've plant, we've reestablished, we've planted 40,000
trees, we've got 60,000 coming back by natural colonization.
So it's a hundred thousand tree site.
We've turned that 165 acres back into a cadet rainforest that is establishing.
And the way, the reason we're doing that is to be able to show our neighbors and
other farmers around us that this is actually a better way to manage their
land, both ecologically and economically.
And, and that can turn much larger rows of land back into
temperate rainforest landscapes.
Rupert Isaacson: But what is the economics?
How would someone make money?
So for example, again, for the listeners who might not know farming in the uk
like farming in Europe and farming in many parts of the world is subsidized.
So if you come from an upland area, which is traditionally sheep farming,
as you say, you would get a certain subsidy from the government to,
you know, keep running your sheep.
And then in addition to that, you would obviously be selling some for meat and
some for wool, and blah, blah, blah.
And that's your livelihood.
How, how do you make money by turning it back to rainforest?
Because if it's not making money, people won't do it.
That's a great question.
And as my father well knows, having farmed up here for 50 years and tried
lots and lots of very innovative different types of farming, farming
in the uplands is not a, a profitable endeavor on, on an average sized farm.
And when, when I moved down, when my wife and I moved down about 10 years
ago, we looked at this very, very closely and ran all the numbers and tried to
understand how we could make a living and raise a family and do something
that was ecologically beneficial on this small patch of, of Moreland or Upland.
And we found, I found that the average Upland Hill farmer on Bob and
Moore and Dartmore currently takes between 85 and 92% of their annual
income from European subsidies.
This was when I was looking at this 10 years ago before we left, before Brexit.
Yeah.
Before Brexit, now that we've left the European Union, all of those
subsidies have been taken away.
They've solely, incrementally gone down until in 2027 they stopped completely.
And the British system that's replacing them is, is, is a fraction of the
generosity of what we, of what we were given before by the European Union.
The average age of a farm around here is in their mid sixties.
It has the second highest suicide rate of any job type in the uk.
The younger generation are not taking these farms on.
It is almost impossible to make a living.
So before I answer the question about how you make a living from upland
farming by reforesting, it's important to establish that as a baseline.
People are not making a living from this kind of farming at the moment.
So it's not outside.
Outside of the subsidies, right?
Yeah, outside of the subsidies.
So it's not like we're taking, you know, wildly profitable upland hill
farms and wrecking them into rainforest.
Actually, what we're doing is transferring them into an agroforestry model.
So we're still farming this land.
There'll be a native breed conservation grazing scheme of cattle and horses
and pigs that move through the rainforest because trees need large
animals, and large animals need trees.
And this is a very weird thing that we've done with farming in the UK
where we consider healthy farmland to be fields with no trees and large
animals and healthy woodland to be lots of trees with no large animals, when
actually they all evolved together.
Trees benefit from having animals rubbing against them and foraging
amongst, encompassing them.
And the animals benefit from the shade in the summer, the shelter in the winter,
and the additional forage that they get.
So we still have animals passing through it, or we will have there's
also now a very important financial model for farmers around, around
carbon sequestration and the carbon markets around biodiversity net gain.
And also with the work we do at Cabilla Cornel, where we've brought over 3000
people into the rainforest at Cabilla.
There are ecotourism opportunities, which I think is really the next moment for
the farmed landscape because there's such an inequality of access to wild spaces
for many people who live in the uk.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, let's talk about that because you guys both know, I mean,
you're landowners and not everybody is, and I did 20 years, I had a ranch in Texas
for 20 years, and one of the big issues there is there's no land access, right?
You, you either own it or you can't go on it.
I mean, you might have the odd neighbor who lets you take a walk
or ride your horse or something, and if you go on it, you get shot.
You definitely get shot.
Yeah.
And in fact, if they paint the top of the fence post purple, it means they'll
shoot on site and not challenge you.
So there's a lot of that, you know, and the sound of automatic fire at
the weekends and that sort of thing.
The UK actually does have, by comparison, really good access.
I know there's a, a debate that rages in the UK about, you know, we
don't have access to the countryside.
I actually call BS on that.
Because if, if, if you've ever lived in a place where you don't have that
kind of access, even Ireland, you don't really have that kind of access.
Yeah.
But in the UK there's a big network of footpaths and most of the open
hill areas you can kind of walk.
And let's face it, if you do walk on someone's land, you might get yelled
at, but you certainly won't get shot.
And if you're not a complete dick and like let your dog chase the sheep or something
and leave all the gates open, probably people are actually relatively tolerant.
If you were to, I'm going to throw this one at you Robin.
So let's say you evangelize Cornwall and Cornwall becomes one big temperate
rainforest up there on bottom mage.
I'd love to see because then I'm thinking I'm fantasizing about wolves and bears and
things like that coming back, which I dig.
'cause the wolves just came back to our area in Germany and it's
quite exciting how not all of those farmers can make the same money
from the same ecotourism outfit.
There's only so much glamping you can do.
Right.
So unless the entire population of London decamps, although I suppose in
some ways it does to the beaches what's the model for ensuring that there's.
A sort of a broader economic benefit, not dissimilar to the current subsidies,
because that, that's the obvious question, is, okay, you guys have put
in an infrastructure, you're very well connected, you, you know how to do these
things but your neighbor might not.
And then they might resent the fact that the business is coming to you.
How do you Yeah.
How do you, how do you democratize it so that it takes the, really
takes the place of the sheep?
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: Well, there actually are subsidies still, the
subsidy system has changed from being subsidizing land ownership or
production as it was under Brexit.
And there's a new thing called elms, environmental Land Management, which
encourages people who look after.
So it's, it's rewarding people.
Looking after nature rather than for exploiting it.
And are those
Rupert Isaacson: subsidies just quickly, are they, are they comparable to what
their people would currently get?
They, they're
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: not comparable, but they're there.
They're great.
Yeah.
And there are all sorts of other things that people can do.
I mean, I've been banging on about this for years.
I used to have a very feisty New Zealand partner who was, was really into
exploiting every kind of possible D of avenue on the farm, Bo Goats and Red Deer
and Wild Boa and all sorts of things.
And he was very into using the, the land to its maximum good
New Zealand Kiwi philosophy.
And we used to argue a lot about it.
And I would say this was 40, 50 years ago, I was saying to him the day
will come when you will be receiving more benefit from environmental land
management than you will from production.
And he would say, that's rubbish love.
And we had lovely discussions about all that.
It is happening.
And there is now so much awareness as Melon has been saying about the
beneficial attributes of proper landscape, of, of associating with
nature, both the mental and physical and, and pure enjoyment reasons.
And indeed a recognition of how over exploited we have been through
agricultural production of our land and how depleted we are in
wildlife and plants and insects.
I mean insects for example.
I dunno if you can remember it world or not.
Remember the days when we used to have things called little
buggers on the front of our cars.
Yeah.
Which were a little deflective things which removed huge numbers of insects
that otherwise built up on the windscreen.
Don't need those boy hardly ever get insects.
Insects have been catastrophic decline.
Mm-hmm.
So
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: there are many, many aspects why this whole new vision
of farming makes very good sense.
And, and I think you know, to to, to add to that, one of the potential
negatives of the European subsidy system that we've been in since the
early seventies in the UK is that it was very focused on food production.
And, and if you ask any farmer across most of the eu, but certainly in the
uk, what their job is, they'll say the job of a farmer is to feed the nation.
It is to produce food.
And actually, when you start to look at a little bit more closely at, at what
that looks like across the uk where we have all of these different topographies
and types of soil quality and and, and weather patterns, we produce 20% of our
food from 3% of the land in the uk and that's all in East Anglia, Lincolnshire,
you know, Norfolk, places like that.
We then use 22% of the uk, which is the Western reaches.
Or sheep production, which produces less than 1% of our food.
So we're doing something very strange.
We then, a third of our food goes into landfill and 40% of our land is exported.
So we, we we're, we're behaving quite strangely, and I believe that the
job of a land steward, or a farmer, or a landowner is multifaceted.
It is drought prevention, flood prevention, clean water, clean air, clean
soil, food production, timber production, beautiful places for people to spend time.
The problem is, at the moment, farmers are only paid for one or two
of those really just for producing food and maybe for producing timber.
We need to move to a system where actually, if we accept that farming will
always, or land management will always be subsidized, which it probably always
will because we have an expectation across the western world for a price of
food, which doesn't match the price of production or the cost of production.
So if we accept that farming will always need some form of subsidies, it
needs to be blended across all of the ecosystem benefits that land managers
and land stewards need to be providing.
And a big part of that is open access and public access.
A, in a managed and controlled way.
We've all seen places.
I remember.
When I was kind of a younger man that filmed the beach came out, and it was
so beautiful that everybody went to this one beach in Thailand and took
photographs of it, and it was destroyed.
And in the same way with the Instagram generation now, there are many beautiful
spots where when they become famous, everybody goes there to get a selfie,
and that spot becomes destroyed.
And we need to avoid that happening where the natural world is degraded
by completely unfettered open access.
And we've seen that with Westman's Wood near us on Dartmore, which is a temperate
rainforest that has been very badly damaged, but in the same way the days of
landowners rather like the Texan model being able to totally fence off their
land with purple stripes across the top of the post and keep out anybody.
I think those, those days are beyond us and, and people who manage land
need to move with the times and accept that we have an inequality of access.
From a mental health and a physical health perspective, we're living through a mental
health pandemic and an obesity pandemic.
We need to encourage and facilitate people from, especially from
inner city areas, having easy access to beautiful wild spaces.
That's gonna be part of the model of the future.
It has to be,
Rupert Isaacson: let's bring it down to money though.
So, I, let's say you, you guys are in a town hall meeting where
they're in Boman Town Hall and I'm doing one tonight at Jamaican.
Exactly.
I'm meeting lots of farmers tonight at Jamaica Inn and I'm gonna sit
there with my arms folded, right?
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
And and that expression with my mouth down and be like, you soft London bastards,
you know, coming here and telling us what to do, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Even though you've been there forever, you know, nonetheless, you know, we know
how things are in the countryside often.
Alright, now you've gotta sell me.
The two things which I could see selling me if I was a current
conservative farmer would be.
Three, well, three things really.
I think I'd want reassurance that there's money in it.
Beyond base subsistence, meaning that, and so then, would that be apart from
the subsidies for land stewardship, would that also be carbon sequestration
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: and biodiversity net gain?
Rupert Isaacson: As you know, if you followed any of my work, I'm
an autism dad and we have a whole career before this podcast in helping
people with neurodivergence, either who are professionals in the field.
Are you a therapist?
Are you a caregiver?
Are you a parent?
Or are you somebody with neurodivergence?
When my son, Rowan, was diagnosed with autism in 2004,
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autistic woman who's very famous, Dr.
Temple Grandin.
And she told me what to do.
And it's been working so amazingly for the last 20 years.
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If you would like to learn this cutting edge, neuroscience backed
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You can learn it online, you can learn it very, very simply.
It's almost laughably simple.
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Let yourself be mentored as I was by Dr.
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Go to this website, newtrailslearning.
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Let us know how it goes for you.
We really want to know.
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live their best life, to live free, ride free, see what happens.
Who would pay me for that?
So those, now, those are now on very well audited and accredited
marketplaces that they're creating.
So the main one in the UK for carbon is the woodland carbon
code, which is held by the forestry Commission, the government body.
And so you, you plant trees and you grow trees and you get an
independent assessment of the amount of carbon that's being sequestered.
And then those credits can be sold on a marketplace.
So it can be bought by anybody.
Rupert Isaacson: Could I, could I make a fairly decent living like that?
Similar to having say windmills on my land.
Well, you, I mean, bay going back to that point that you can't make a decent
living at the moment from sheep, right?
Anyway, you can make a better living from selling carbon.
And in the same way that you don't choose who you sell your sheep to, you
sell it to a supermarket who sell it to members of the public or consumers.
You sell your carbon, I who set price as well.
Yeah.
On a, who sell the price.
And you sell your carbon on a market, which sets the price,
and it is purchased by consumers.
Some of those will be businesses, some might be members of the general public.
So it's sort of a, it's a similar model and it's a bit nebulous.
And that's why where the challenge comes.
'cause many people will look at that and go, well, when you're
producing wool or lamb or milk, you can see what's being produced.
You can kind of, you can really, you understand.
A farmer grows lamb.
They sell the lamb, someone to lamb, it's a thing, goes to
a physical market, it's sold.
Whereas carbon and biodiversity are less tangible, but equally as important.
Rupert Isaacson: Right?
So how do I, let's say I'm a, I mean, I am.
Approaching Seniorness now.
So let's say I'm a conservatively minded senior farmer.
I don't know how to navigate those market.
You know, you, you, you, you, you've come up from the financial District
of London and you're talking a language I don't understand at
all, and now I feel threatened.
How are you gonna help me get it?
I can really envisage
Oh, money in my pocket, like, so that, that's exactly what our charity, so our
charity is a thousand year Trust that I, that I founded a couple of years
ago, which is Britain's only rainforest charity, the only charity dedicated to
the protection restoration expansion of Atlantic temperate Rainforest.
We're working in a number of different areas.
Our main focus is around scientific research, just like my father's work
in tropical Rainforest in the past.
But also a lot of it is around community engagement, stakeholder engagement,
and helping other farmers to join clusters and schemes, landscape
recovery schemes, which is a big
Rupert Isaacson: push British, but you said stakeholder there.
Right?
And I'm the, I'm the, I'm sitting there even as myself and I just went
communities, communities bringing together farmers and landowners
to say, how are you gonna help me?
Merlin?
I own this farm.
How are you gonna help me get that carbon money?
You need to hold my hand.
You need to take me.
So, so just talk, walk me through the process of how you'd do that.
I'm, I'm, I'm
intrigued.
So, so that's why we've done it here to create a blueprint site.
So what I can do is say that, come and see our farm.
Come and see Cabilla, come and have a walk around and see the trees that
we've planted, see how the landscape is changing, how as a result of introducing
things like beavers and bringing back some of the biodiversity, we're
seeing less flooding, less drought.
We're seeing more biodiversity, more inverses returning.
And then let's sit down and in a really basic way, using a
one pager blueprint document.
Look at who we introduce you to, who can help you.
Who are the tree planters?
Who are the government bodies that will provide you with the
grant funding to plant the trees?
Who are the people who come and assess you for their carbon credits?
And in exactly the same way that farmers, farmers are very bright people.
They have relationships with the buyers of supermarkets.
They can have relationships with the buyers.
On the carbon market, it's the same thing.
Someone,
Rupert Isaacson: someone's gotta make that.
No, I mean, no one, no one introduced me.
So I, I, yeah, I, I had to figure it out and in the, but,
but now I'm sitting here, I'm
Rupert Isaacson: used to leading parallel lies in parallel cultures.
Yeah, you are not, but now
I'm here to help them.
So I'm, I'm here my, the charity.
So are you basically,
Rupert Isaacson: that's what you do?
You, you help them?
Well, we're a charity, so we're not doing it for a fee.
We are saying, how can we bring together a community and help people to benefit
in the same way that we're trying to, and as innovators, it's not an easy
Rupert Isaacson: for us, but you act like a consultant.
You, you say, we will help you to.
Navigate this new rather confusing, as you said, ne nebulous market.
But
there are other amazing, there are amazing consultancies
out there doing exactly that.
And one of the things we would do is say, look, speed it down here.
You can say, speak to the forest for Cornwall, who are a Cornwall
council run group who are helping farmers to transition to
more of an agroforestry model.
Okay.
You can say, look, talk to.
Yeah.
There are many people out there, natural England, the Forestry Commission,
the Environment Agency, they're all trying the wildlife, I dunno, people
trying help farmers these people.
It's
Rupert Isaacson: now, it's good that you're telling me, 'cause now I can
begin to put together a mosaic, you see?
Yeah.
Rather than somebody saying, well, you've got to do something different.
Yes.
And that's what farmers have had in the past being told you are the enemy,
you are damaging the environment.
You need to do something different.
And farmers sit there in a really challenging environment and no
one works harder than a farmer.
You know, I see our neighbors who are still sheep, sheep farming
in a very serious way out at 3:00 AM every morning, picking up.
Dead lambs or, you know, helping lambs give birth or a different,
or shearing throughout the night.
And it's hard work.
And then to say to them, now you need to go and learn an entirely
different financial model to try and keep your family on the land.
It's not fair.
And there are more and more organizations setting up to help them, and we hope
to, we are one of those as well.
But it is a, it's gonna be a difficult moment of transition, but you've
gotta come back to that point as well of going of remembering that most
farmers are in their mid sixties.
They're looking to find an opportunity or an excuse to hand
over to the younger generation.
The younger generation don't want to go into a debt laden poor
profitability standard up hill farming.
The younger generation are going, okay, we, we'll take the land Landover,
but what are we gonna do on it?
Mm-hmm.
And we are there to say, here's an alternative and here's how you transition.
Got it.
Rupert Isaacson: Robin, I want to this one to you.
So the other, the other concern I would have as a, as a farmer
would be lifestyle and culture.
Sell me on if, if I, if I go over and give a portion, a significant portion of the
land over to this rainforest idea how do I
preserve my, the culture that, the way of life that is dear to me?
Because yes, I work very hard and yes, I'm in debt for this, but I also love it.
I love the upland.
I love the sound of the sheep.
I love the lambing.
I love it.
There's an emotional attachment as well, and we all know this, that, you know, I, I
partly come from a farming family as well.
It's not entirely a business thing.
It's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a love thing as well.
It's an emotional thing.
And the attachment to the land and the attachment to the land looking a certain
way because the, there's no question that, that the English countryside,
even if it's lacking biodiversity, is very, very aesthetically beautiful.
There's no question about that.
It's, it's an art.
Piece, really.
And I always feel that we, we mess with it at our peril.
I get very depressed when I see the, the solar panels covering fields or the
lines and lines of windmills because it's industrializing the landscape.
Even if it's in a good cause, it, it, my heart goes down.
It doesn't go up.
It's just the cold, hard fact.
So
sell it to us now, Robin.
How, how are you gonna preserve the aesthetic, the lifestyle, the, the culture
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: with the forest
on, on the case of wind turbines, they're a very emotive subject.
I got into a lot of trouble with them because I was president of the our local
conservation organization, which started by, I started it 60 years ago, doing all
sorts of opposing bad planning and so on.
Then they became obsessed because a lot of 'em were run by people who
come down from London living corn.
And, and the obsession about wind turbines became to, and all, all
the complaints they were making were all against wind turbines.
And I made the mistake of writing a paper telegraph saying that not all wind
turbines, I've got one here, we have one.
Can't really see it the middle very much.
And it's not a huge one, but it helps generate the deal of electricity.
And I dare to say that not all wooden turbines were bad.
And then I made a mistake of carrying on with the letter.
And so after all in the Middle Ages, every village in Britain had a windmill.
Objected to.
And I got sacked.
He rated,
Rupert Isaacson: I'm sure, yes.
That you could, could choose the, the stake on which they impaled you.
Yeah,
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: yeah.
Well, they're now all, all, all being very nice to them and say
We were wrong actually, because recognizing turbine have a part.
But, and of course, plannings come into it and they must be environmental friendly.
We also have an array of tape panels, which I put up about 20 years ago.
And they're invisible everywhere because I've strategically located
behind the, and see them many and they help to, to make us almost off grid.
But I do think that there is a dichotomy always, as there always is with planning
over where and when things should be.
And, and it upsets me to see whether a cultural lab, other panels there's
absolutely no reason why land, but underneath them can't be used effectively.
And I think this is a mistake making.
Cheap or geese, or wild flowers, or even as the Japanese are doing very effectively
now growing vegetable crops underneath panels, apparently we get because of
the reflected sunlight to actually get, generate a better fertility for garden.
So there are lots of things that could be happening.
It's, it's one of those balances that has to be made.
But even at the same time, you have access to good countryside around that.
Not necess, not necessarily that that woodland people can walk in.
That's a better balance.
It's, it's all going to change.
Countrysides gonna look different.
I suspect that offshore wind turbines people don't object as much
because they can't see them so much.
Yeah.
And there are other ways of I mean every, it just astonished me for quite a
long time that, that it is not law that every new building in the country has
to have its roots made of solar panels.
Yes.
Or the, the roads we drive on or not, they look just like slate and tile.
Yeah.
They didn't have to look like panels.
And I, I, I simply don't understand why that has not been made law,
because if every rooftop was generating power, wouldn't need panels all over.
Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely.
And, and we hope that, that, that day will come.
My neighbor actually just got his roof redone that way.
If you made it this far into the podcast, then I'm guessing you're somebody
that, like me, loves to read books about not just how people have achieved
self actualization, but particularly about the relationship with nature.
Spirituality, life, the universe, and everything.
And I'd like to draw your attention to my books.
If you would like to read the story of how we even arrived here, perhaps
you'd like to check out the two New York Times bestsellers, The Horseboy
and The Long Ride Home, and come on an adventure with us and see what engendered,
what started Live Free Ride Free.
And before we go back to the podcast, also check out The Healing
Land, which tells the story of.
My years spent in the Kalahari with the Sun, Bushmen, hunter gatherer people
there, and all that they taught me, and mentored me in, and all that I learned.
Come on that adventure with me.
But back to I'm a farmer and I want to be sure somehow that Cornwall,
the Cornwall I know and love won't disappear and my lifestyle is it.
So is it just as, as, is it something as similar as as simple
as saying, well, look, yeah.
Have some sheep just not that many.
You know, what, what is it?
Because I'm very I'm a sheep farmer.
I'm also attached to sheep.
I love sheep.
I, you know, I, I race horses, for example.
You know, I'm attached to them.
I love them.
I'm, it's, it's my thing, right?
So if you, I, I wouldn't want to give them up, but I
might to doing it differently, you know?
As we know, you know, sheep are completely ubiquitous across the west of the uk.
You see a postcard of Wales or of Devon or of the peak district or
of Cornwall, and it doesn't have sheep in it and something's wrong.
And, and, and I've been very keen always never to look backwards and never to say,
oh, well we should be more like it was 4,000 years ago or even 300 years ago.
We're not aiming for some golden age of, of a bucolic past that didn't
exist a sort of prolapse area in time.
It's about looking forward and actually saying how can we have, and
farmers have always been dynamic.
Any farmer who wants to freeze time and and keep doing what's
always been done has, has always been bark out the wrong tree.
That's not the way farmers be ha have ever behaved.
They've always wanted to evolve and be dynamic and agile and move with the times.
Yeah.
And they have to go with the markets.
And I, I, I don't think the job of any of us is to try and solve all of
the problems everywhere, all at once.
The market is doing that for us and, and we'll continue to.
Lamb is being less eaten.
Natural wool are being less worn.
And when people want to farm sheep in a, in a lower yield number as they used
to be, where they would be herded from pasture to pasture and they would be
moved constantly so that biodiversity could bounce back in a rotational system
I think that will of course continue.
Probably forever as far as the human perspective is concerned.
But the intensive type of farming that we do at the moment where large numbers
of any kind of livestock are pressed into small areas of space and given
a lot of artificial feed and then end up actually often being kept inside.
There was a fire a couple years ago in Texas where 18,000 cows
died in one fire on a farm.
'cause it's not a farm.
It's effectively a giant multi-story car park filled with cows that
are plugged in for the whole of their lives into machines.
And then when a fire broke out, there was no way to unplug these bovine cyborgs.
And they, and they all perished.
And the same thing happens in pig farms and increasingly in sheep farming as well.
And I just believe that the markets are going to, not just the markets,
but societal opinion and government policy are going to start shifting
people to different models of farming.
And as they do that, there is an opportunity for the resurgence
of our rainforest landscapes.
Rupert Isaacson: Sure.
So, okay, so now I think you actually answered my question there very well,
which is, some sheep, but not that many.
Which is, so therefore there's more opportunity to use the, and as we know,
you know, one of the reasons they put sheep on those marginal areas in the first
place is you can't really use it for Yeah.
Else unless it's trees.
So let's say now that we, we fast forward 30 years and the rainforest, your,
your rainforest trust is the thousand year trust has kind of done its job
in at least stage one and stage two.
And we are seeing a Cornwall that is effectively a, a secondary rainforest.
And we mentioned ecotourism.
So every single 250 acre farm is, is each one going to sort of have its own glamping
site and or are you going to have.
Is it going to go a little bit like those private game reserves in Africa, where
they operate almost as collectives and you could safari through, let's say,
you know, I, I stay at Cabilla because you guys have bison, you know, and
then I walk or I drive over to the next rainforest farm through a rainforest
path because they are bringing back all rocks and yeah, wolf, you know, and then
I get to see those and then I go over to the next one and they have links, you
know, and so therefore I'm on this sort of safari that you guys ought to some
degree pull the money from, but that you each have a little small lodge, you
know, on your land, which could operate at like a camping level or at a luxury
level depending on the, so I'm familiar with that 'cause my family did safari.
We actually ran a a quite remote lodge in Zimbabwe for many, many years.
And we did it on these multi budgett.
Thing.
So you'd ne we'd never get turned away.
If you just showed up with a tent, you could totally camp there really
cheaply, just come up and eat in the restaurant or eat, you know,
cook your own food, whatever.
If you wanted to come and spend a lot of money, great, we
could accommodate that as well.
And all of that money just was plowed back into the elephant conservation
that, that we were doing at the time and, and keeping the lads employed.
Are you looking at something like that?
Some sort of ecosystem, some sort of ecotourism, patchwork, which then the, so
the farms are making money from timber.
They're making money from carbon sequestration.
They're making money in this sort of patchwork way that people can move
through larger areas in eco safari thing.
And there's reintroduction of sort of megafauna, you know, what you,
is it looking like that?
What you've described is, is a, is a very beautiful model for the future.
And, and, and in all honesty, that's not that, that model that far out is not our
mission right now because that's I think that's a, that's a, a a wonderful example
of how it might work one day scare.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
But, but Cornwall and, and a lot of sort of southwest Wales and the,
the temperate rainforest zone, a lot of the economy in these areas
is already hospitality focused.
Yeah, that's true.
And tourism focused.
Cornwall has a big problem where you basically can draw around the
coast of Cornwall with a Sharpie.
And that is the economy at the moment because everybody goes to the beaches
of Cornwall because that's where they think of as being the places you go.
We're passionate about drawing people a little bit more inland to see some
of the beautiful inland Cornwall.
And, and I, and I also think that there's a really beautiful opportunity
for us to use some of the models that we see in the global south.
And, and bring them to the global north.
Yeah.
We've had this, this knowledge transfer and, and the same in the
scientific community for the last few hundred years where Western developed
in inverted commerce countries are telling underdeveloped countries
not to cut down their trees, not to kill all their megaphone, and
not to kill our apex predators long after we've already all done it.
And I think there's a time for humility around both nature conservation,
about where we sit back and go, actually, how is it done in Zimbabwe?
Where, when it is being done really well, how is it done in Sumatra?
How is it being done in Patagonia?
And learning and listening.
But I think alongside that, things like ecotourism, we
could learn from that as well.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
So, so Robin and I, I want get, I also don't want to get off this podcast
without talking about the crazy thing that you guys are going to do in, but
yeah, we haven't, we haven't thought about any that We'll get there.
We'll get there.
But Robin Survival International, I.
Was founded really so that we wouldn't lose indigenous wisdom effectively.
Right.
And you know, I learned, I learned so much from my, what did I learn from my
time with the Satan, with the Bushman?
It wasn't just about land management.
I learned lots about land management.
I learned lots about relationship with species.
I also learned about relationship with the supernatural.
I, I learned about healing technologies.
I learned about spiritual technology.
I, I learned about human happiness.
What I really learned about was parenting.
I observed that these people because they got so much unconditional love,
like so much in the hunter gatherer context, because they're not being raised
to be warriors that, so there wasn't this idea that we gotta toughen you up.
It was the opposite.
It was, let me just try to fulfill all your needs.
And then you'd see these people at about 16, they'd just kind of take a spear,
go into the bush, come back with the wildebeest, and then two years later
they'd go off down to Johannesburg, like go into the city and learn to
speak Zulu, English and Aans in like a year, just peer over somebody's shoulder
while they're messing with a vehicle.
And within six months they know how to be a diesel mechanic.
And then come back to the bush and be to, and I, I realize, oh my
gosh, oh my gosh, that the mental health of these people is so good.
This is how we're supposed to be.
And it starts with these things like co-sleeping and wearing your kid
on your body, because you wouldn't dream of putting your kid on the
other side of the hut because ness will come into your hut and take
your kid, and you won't even here.
So you, and it goes Sub-Zero at night.
There's no way you, you're gonna do that, you know?
Just be stupid.
So the, the practicality led to this.
Functionality was also a very compassionate community because
everything's about problem solving because you're not the top predator.
So rather than creating conflict, you had to always resolve conflict.
And for that you had a shaman or a healer standing at the center of
the community so that when the funky monkey shit happens in our funky monkey
brains there's some way of sort of washing the psychic dirty laundry.
And I realized, oh my gosh, oh my gosh.
You know, we, we moved so far from this and this is why we're all so messed up.
Now, we go to the rainforest, our temperate rainforest, the Celtic,
you know, Sylvan Lu flutes and chased me around the red maple, you know,
chaps with pointy ears and so on.
But it still comes outta the warrior culture.
All of the Celtic myths are about people being committing acts of atrocity to
each other and basically ripping each other's guts out and do being horrible.
You know,
do we have a chance?
When it comes to the rewilding of the land in this way, Robin, you've
been, you've been an advocate of you're one of my heroes.
You know, because we couldn't have done what we did in the Kalahari without you.
There's no way you provided that structure.
You now in an interesting position where we could rewild our western warrior
culture that juts out into, you know, the, the British Empire and the piracy
and all of that and the colonization, and which came on the back of just
the Iron Age warrior culture that came on the back of the Bronze Age warrior
culture that came on the back of the agricultural revolution that caused
all the shit in the first place.
And you guys are really at this cusp of reconnecting with our source
ecologically, but also culturally.
Dream a little.
What, what do you see as the, you know, I, I do, we have a chance to become
pre Celtic Bushman, like cheddar man.
Being nice to each other rather than shitty to each other.
And but still keeping our technological goodies somehow while rewilding back
to what produced us in the first place before it all went wrong.
Like, what are your thoughts on that?
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: I've always been a great believer in using the best of
technology as well as the best of natural living to combine together and get the
best of both worlds as an objective.
And wouldn't it be wonderful if, if we were able to reforest a proportion
of Britain, yet Nolan knows all the figure, but I mean, Britain is the
least forested country in Europe.
What is it?
13% and Oh yeah.
13, 14% in the UK can benefit 33% in in Europe, 8.5%
in Cornwall.
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: So if we just brought ourselves up to the European
average of, of doubling or troubling as far as the land of Britain, it
would begin to change a lot of the stuff you're talking about with because
there would be access to that lamb, which would give people the freedom to
start enjoying the sort of lifestyles that we all know are healthier.
I mean, both you and I have done a lot of long distance riding.
Will and I have written eight long distance rides, a thousand miles or so
around different countries in the world.
And I always say it is the ultimate way to experience the world because
you are riding on an intelligent animal and riding from wonderful countryside.
And Britain is very depleted on ride paths for various historical regions.
And wouldn't it be wonderful if, if, if one of the ways in which people
began to access the countryside was on a horse and being able to
have the economy as you touched on, of the local farms turning from.
Being purely short, being hospitable as well.
So to do the ride anywhere, in any direction and end up finding someone
where we could put horse up and stay for the night and move on through the woods.
And it, it is a glorious way.
We did it in we, we inaugurated pen I right away, which is right above
it runs now, runs all the way up the pens in the middle of Brooklyn.
Very poor farming lab for farmers.
Very, very little opportunity diversification.
And one of the things way back, this was 20, 25 years ago I was banging on about
then was that there's a huge opportunity for every farm in those remote penan
not so different upland to be able to be ready to facilitate visitors.
And if they, if it became a standard thing, it would be, they'd be putting
up different people every night and charge them a certain amount.
Bombing people effectively.
Yeah.
And local on the Camino route in northern Spain.
Absolutely.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: No, I'm, I'm, I'm with you.
You've actually just described Hessen where I live.
I can ride, I can get on my horse and if I see it, I can ride it.
It's, it's, I've never experienced this anywhere else.
There's this crazy tolerance here.
It's also not a fence landscape.
It's not really a livestock area, so it's either orchards
cropland or hay meadow or forest.
Right.
Go ahead.
Yeah, Melin.
I just, I just, because everything that you just said about your experiences
with the San and I, I say that I have a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old at the moment.
So Lizzie and I are going through that process of, of raising small
children and, and, and trying to figure out the best way to do it.
And we're actually reading an amazing book, which I'm sure you may well
be aware of, called hunt Gather, I think it's called Hunt Gather Parent.
Fantastic.
Which basically looks at people like San and, and other indigenous communities and
how they raise their children and tries to layer that onto a sort of a Western model
because we're, we're trying our hardest to do that because raising children in
a, in the western structure that we've created where both parents work and you
have all of these pressures and stresses and expectations to put them in their
own room as quickly as possible and make them strong and tough and ready for the
world is is really, really challenging.
So everything ize the
Rupert Isaacson: shit out them early and then Yeah, exactly.
And then later on, everything you say, I, I completely sit at your
feet and and, and completely.
Wanna time to talk to you about, because I agree with you and know knowledge on
this subject and something that, that I'm talking about a lot moment around again.
I have no doubt that the world that you describe will be the
world that we live in in 3025.
Because I'm an optimist and I'm positive, and, and, and I believe that we have the
ability as humans to do great things and wonderful things, and we make bad short
term decisions, but over the long term we do incredible things as a species.
In a thousand years, in the year 3025, I believe in the UK that
there will be a lot more rainforest.
There will probably be things like Lynx and wolf and and, and beaver.
And many of the species that we've lost will have come back, eagle, owls
and ospreys, and it'll be amazing.
There will probably be fewer people and those people will
live in much greater harmony.
Like yeah.
As you say, cheddar mount, I never wanna look backwards.
It's always about looking forwards and using technology.
And we've used drones here to plant many of our trees.
Mm.
We use no fence technology on, on some of the capital, which allows
us to have free ranging mob grazing, tightly knit herds without the need
for lots of fencing and barbed wire and horrible things that prevent the
normal migration of many native species.
And, and so I think we can use and leverage technology to create a
really bucolic future where we live in harmony with nature in a non-war and
non-confrontational, more of a hunter gather type way, but using technology and
still having all the benefits of modern medicine and dentistry and the things
we don't want to lose my big buck up.
Yeah.
On that.
Well, my, my, my big, my, the whole point that thing, I think the only.
Question we have as humans.
So we are currently in 2025 where a lot of things seem to be going wrong.
By 30 25, I believe a lot of things will have gone right.
We have two questions about or two options, how we get there.
One looks a lot like a Mad Max movie where we continue down our
path of ecological destruction.
It ends up with war, plague, famine, the four horsemen of the apocalypse,
as my father has written about.
Lots of leather, lots of cannibalism.
It sounds pretty horrible.
That goes on for a few centuries, and then we end up eventually reestablishing
our connection to Mother Nature and to the world as it needs to be connected
and learning from that indigenous wisdom that is the route that we are
currently on, and that is a horrible route that no one should want to be on.
The other option, which is harder, more difficult and and involves more
change from all of us at a personal level right now, is that we march in
step with Mother Nature and with, with the, the rainforest and all the other
pinnacle habitats around the planet.
And we get to that point in 2050 generations time, in a thousand years
time, where we're still at the same end state that we go down that warfare path,
but we've done it without all the trauma, the death, the killing, and all of the,
the things that are looking like they might be quite inevitable at the moment.
And I say that as a soldier who spent time in in the military and knows what it's
like when people go to war and know that there is no upside, there is no benefit.
And everything we're trying to do at our charity is set the
conditions for a wonderful, beautiful future in a thousand years time.
And it will be difficult to get there, but I do believe we can do it.
Rupert Isaacson: I think by putting your, your sights there, honestly, I
think we're gonna get there a lot sooner.
And if, if we look at the world when I was a boy, there was a lot of war.
Like, you know, I grew up mostly in the uk but our, our family was African, so
we were backing and forth and so on.
There was war in just about every country down there when I was a boy
and South Africa we had apartheid.
It's gone and all those countries, there's a few pockets of stuff, but
really the only big we have still going on is the Congo in that area.
Yes, the Sahel with its problems with the Jihads and that something,
but that was always there actually.
That was always there.
It was always a very violent zone and, in general, it seems, you know, it's,
it, it seems flippant to say this with Gaza and with Ukraine, but there's still
less war than there was on balance,
and it's amazing how unimaginative we can be as humans.
Mm-hmm.
And, and I've seen this with, with beavers.
There's a very small case study where in 2018 when we started
our beaver reintroduction program at Cabilla, everybody said we
were mad it wasn't gonna work.
They were maniacs with chainsaws.
It was the worst thing ever.
It was gonna destroy nature and.
Seven, eight years have passed since then.
And now every time beavers are reintroduced anywhere across
the uk everybody sees it as an incredibly positive story.
And it's incredible how reverse shifting baseline syndrome can work.
That we can go from knowing the world, someone's who
Rupert Isaacson: gives it a go, you
know, the innovators and how the world as it is right now
is how it should always be.
And any change is scary and, and, and probably destructive.
And then we make that change and we suddenly look backwards and go, how could
we ever have been so, shortsighted to not see that this would be a good thing?
And I think that will happen on a societal level, on a planetary level,
and, and on an ecosystem level.
Rupert Isaacson: You guys are not just talking about it.
You are putting your money where your mouth is.
So, one things I love about you, Robin, is you like my dad.
So my dad is 91 this year and arguing with my mom about whether
or not she should do her own.
Who's at.
Seven, I think whether she should do her own road trip in South Africa to
meet him in his solo trip in Zimbabwe that he's off to do at 91 or whether
they should go there together.
And they were giving out about this together bickering at the
table in London the other day.
I was there.
I'm like, lads, you do see that this is a win, right?
The fact that you're sitting here having this, having this argument is
a, is a, is is a major achievement, you know, not everyone has that luxury.
And, and Robin, you know, you've, you've put your body on the line.
You've done a lot of physical stuff as well as helping
policy change and, you know.
Helping to protect environments and peoples who live in those environments.
And you're about with your son to do it again.
You're about to do something a bit nuts, which I love.
So would you guys tell me the nuts thing you are gonna do
and how can we help support it?
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: Well, I have previous on this one when I was
about to be 80, I thought that was old and stood up with the idea.
So I did eight silly things for Survival International starting with running the
marathon, not actually for a long time.
And anyway, I raised up survival during that.
I then, after I was covid, I raised 50 by climbing Mountain when I was,
and I realized that people will help if you put the right story to.
And what Merlin is doing is so inspiring with the temperate rainforest.
And we've mentioned the research station, which she's building now,
which he needs a lot of money for.
And if you want to study topical rainforest, there were research stations
all over the world in, in Borneo and in Africa and Amazon and Panama and so on.
So anybody can study tropical rainforest.
But now the, the interest in temporary rainforest, which we're looking
realize how important and where they're is, is growing and isn't a single
temporary rainforest research station.
Not only is starting the on the farm, that is what, not in
Canada, not in the Pacific Northwest.
No, no, there are.
Sorry, just a Yeah.
There, there are in, in Tanzania sorry, not Tanzania.
In in Tasmania and in New Zealand there are a couple, and there are
places in Canada, especially in British Columbia with a lot of research done.
And in Japan, in the Pacific temperate rainforest, there, there is not a single
Atlantic temperate rainforest research.
Oh.
So, yes, of course we the Atlantic and.
Anywhere from Southwestern Norway, from from Bergen and Norway down to
Bragger in northern Portugal, which is really that temperate rainforest
range from, from southwestern Norway till northern Portugal.
And where we are in Bobman, sits slap bang in the middle of that range and is
the perfect place if you were to have a nexus, a hub, a home of temperate
rainforest scientific research.
Sorry, I didn't mean to
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: I facts.
Yeah.
I was like, really?
Rupert Isaacson: And then you're right, but you nothing in the Atlantic.
We don't think it's there because we cut all down.
And, and, and this is why, as I, as I was mentioning earlier on, that
everybody, both young and old knows about Rainforest and how important
they're, and it's because of things like the Ulu expedition that my father ran.
It's because they've been so well researched until we start actually
investing in that scientific focus on our Atlantic temperate rainforest zone.
Everything from Galicia, which has lots of rainforests, the Fragas Perdidas
the, the Breal Rainforest, the the Irish rainforest, which is stunning
from the, the Highlands of Scotland where they have amazing rainforest
in the Welsh Celtic rainforest.
We need to be investing in understanding the data behind that, climate mitigation,
biodiversity, and mental health benefit, because it's only when we can present
that to the governments of all of these areas that they will then invest in
protecting and restoring these habitats.
It all has to start with science.
Rupert Isaacson: So you're start, you're, you're, you're raising
money to start a research station, the research station, but you're
gonna do something a bit stupid.
Okay.
Which I love.
So tell, tell me the the stupid thing you're gonna do.
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: Well, the legs aren't what they were, so I'm not gonna
do any running or climbing any mountains.
So I'm just gonna try and make use of the bit the left.
It still work as I enter my ninth nineties, my ninth decade.
And my arms pretty good then.
So I've been doing lots of training on the rowing machine.
The original purpose was to row across the English channel, which
seemed like that an easy thing to do.
Immigrants are doing it all the time after all, but it's now become very
complicated with legislation and, and, and because, so, it's 22 miles from,
so instead of doing that, I'm Miles, first of all, the river, which divides.
And then the next day and England
divides and England as we like, sorry, sorry, England, like Texas and America.
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: Get that.
Right, exactly.
And, and then the next day I'm going 11 miles up and 11 miles down, which is 22,
which is the same as the English channel.
And purpose be to show that you don't give up on very well and if you want
to raise money for a good cause, you used a bit sort of still working.
Rupert Isaacson: So you, you're gonna row 26 miles on the Tamar River.
And again, for the listeners who, who, dunno what that might mean
that's not a leisurely row because the Tamar River comes down quite
quickly from the uplands of Dartmore.
Right.
More or less to, so I could see coasting down it quite happily.
But the idea of rowing up, it makes me want to hide up.
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: It's actually titled by then and it's wind, wind.
Okay.
So
it is a hard challenge though.
It'll be yeah, yeah.
I, I'm gonna run with him and I think it'll be hard work for, for me.
It'll be very hard work for a person who's gonna be on their 89th birthday that day.
So what day is it happening?
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: May the seventh?
May
Rupert Isaacson: 7th.
So soon
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: May the seventh, which is my birthday.
Maybe eighth, which is VE day.
Okay.
Rupert Isaacson: So we are right at the end of April, 2025.
Some of you of course, will be listening to this.
You know, you'll find this on YouTube like five years from now and go, oh,
well, you know, I missed that one.
Well, no you didn't because what will have happened by the time you find this is that
the handbury tenons will have, of course, used that money that they raise, and then
the subsequent stupid shit that they do for the next five years to keep raising
more money to build this research station.
Yeah.
How much money do you need?
What's it gonna take?
What do you think?
So we've launched a crowdfunder for, for this particular challenge which is live at
the moment and has some beautiful videos if anyone's interested to learn a bit
more about it and some really good kind of architects, renderings of what the
research station will look like, which will be right on the edge of the, the
rainforest here in the Cabilla Valley, and Aviva or supporting that pledge as well.
So anything that's given to this pledge will be matched by Aveva.
So we're aiming to raise 50,000 pounds in this first one.
We need about 600,000 pounds to actually build the research station.
So this is just the beginning, but if we can raise 50,000 pounds on
the Crowdfunder that gets matched by Veva, which raise it to a hundred.
And then we've got some philanthropists who've said that if that is successful,
they will then match that money again.
So actually, if people help with that initial 50,000, it unlocks so
much more and it actually gets us to having 200,000, which is a further
way to completing the station.
And our aim is to have it built this year in 2025.
So we've got a lot to do, but we're gonna get it done
Rupert Isaacson: now once you complete the station.
It needs to be manned.
It needs to be staffed.
It needs to be, so what's the plan for that?
What's the sustainability plan for so.
Has a fantastic team already.
We've got two amazing research directors.
We've got a, a, a gaggle of research assistants who come in and help.
We've got formal partnerships with six different universities.
Last year we did six PhDs and 20 MSCs.
This year we're planning to do 40 MSC and 12 PhDs to, to double the amount
of research that's been done here.
So we already have a huge kind of support network and infrastructure.
We just lack the actual physical infrastructure to, to especially have
people in a residential capacity, which is the really important thing.
'cause right now when students come here, they really need to be either
coming from nearby or have their own arrangements for where to stay.
This will facilitate in exactly the same way that if you went to do research in
Costa Rica or sac, there are research stations where you can join these
multi-year multidisciplinary programs, contribute to peer review papers, and
shift government policy on these habitats.
Rupert Isaacson: What, what's the, what's the.
Most pressing research that you guys think needs to be done.
Okay, so the, the center's that it's up and running.
What's like project number one, total priority.
So we, we really break it down into these three areas around climate,
biodiversity, and human health.
And for me, the one I'm most excited about is human health.
So we know from a lot of studies that in places like Japan, British Columbia, and,
and South Korea, that spending 30 minutes in a temperate rainforest environment
and your cortisol levels, your key stress hormone drops to a level that can
still be measured up to two weeks later.
So, and that's because of the, the terpenes and fight inside the volatile
organic compounds that are secreted during the photosynthetic process that we breathe
in, in these temperate rainforest habitat.
So we know they do amazing things.
They increase kidney function, boost immune system response.
They put us from our sympathetic nervous state, our fight or flight, and they help
transport us into our parasympathetic, our homeostasis, rest and digest state.
So we, we know they do this and there's huge anecdotal evidence.
I don't think anybody feels that being in a busy urban environment
is better for their stress than being in a a, a gorgeous, wild,
ancient rainforest environment.
But what we need now is the data that really supports that.
So that we can get it into places like the NHS for green prescribing, right?
And so that we can get it onto, onto minister's agendas.
So for me, the physical and mental health benefits of temperate rainforest
environments is, is goal number one.
Rupert Isaacson: So ideally doctors are prescribing people testing.
Yeah.
And they already are.
There, there are seven NHS areas in the UK where they, where doctors, if you come
in and you are demonstrating anxiety, stress, depression the doctors, rather
than immediately putting you on clinical medication, which is very beneficial and,
and, and should never be discounted can, can also recommend green prescribing.
So going on a gardening course, going and spending time in nature,
and they're finding so much more benefit than they thought they
were from Wait, where are these
Rupert Isaacson: seven NHS districts that are doing this?
I've, I, I looked at the, they, they're dotted all over the uk.
There is one down in the southwest and I think there are a couple up in the
Midlands a few in the Southeast as well.
Why did these
Rupert Isaacson: particular areas decide to do that?
Do, do you happen to know the background?
I mean, I'm, I'm also, I might go on Google and Google it.
There was a, i, I write about why there and not somewhere else.
You know,
I write about it in my book RO Bones, which has just come out.
Okay.
But there was very limited government funding initially, and, and they
spread it across the country from the NHS to try and get a good range.
And I don't actually believe there's a plan to continue the funding at the
moment, which is a huge, huge shame.
Rupert Isaacson: I'm sure.
You know, it's interesting.
I dunno those, those listeners who know what we do, we have these three
main programs for mental health and one of them, which is called Movement
Method, which is a non equine thing.
We actually just ran our first neuroscience conference in a out of a
medical school in the USA last year, which we were asked was a big breakthrough.
Where with doctors now beginning to prescribe movement in nature for
neuroplasticity as well as, as you also say, bringing down cortisol levels, bring
up oxytocin and serotonin and all these things, which, which we now know happen.
It's all really the same work.
And it's just so interesting that we're now just on the cusp of a revolution
in health where we can actually get prescribed to do the things that we all
know, you know, have always known, worked.
If you think about, you know, mental health, asylums, you know, the whole idea,
asylum actually means sanctuary, you know, and that the old idea was that people
could go to a beautiful natural area and just kind of get over their psychosis
before they went back to, and then it became, of course, something horrible
with torture chambers and all of that.
And now we think of an asylum as that.
But it's, it's interesting to me.
That you guys are there at the forefront of this movement.
And as you say, if you have a, if you have a, a research
station, this can change policy.
My little dream, my little optimistic dream of, are we going back to a sort of
hunter-gatherer, bushman way of living?
While at the same time, you know, holding onto the technologies that we've, you
know, developed at some cost to ourselves.
But, and nonetheless beneficial.
And that is of course the perfect world, isn't it?
You know, and a re wilded landscape that everyone can access with benefit for
all that, you know, makes us healthy in the same way that, you know, that
that was one of the other things.
I'm sure this, you know, obviously Robin, you would've noticed this
too, that when you are hanging out with sun, people often.
You're dealing with people who are 90, you know, with bodies
a bit like teenagers, you know?
Oh yes.
And they'd be like, oh, I'm not what I was, I'm a bit, I'm a
bit, you know, I'm a bit stiff.
I'm a bit, and then, you know, they start clapping and doing the healing
dance and they just like leap up, you know, from a squatting position and
Busta bunch of moves and then say, oh, well, you know, I'm not what I was,
I'm not what, you know, and then they go sprinting across the, you know, I
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: couldn't agree with you more the, the, the,
the, the human health idea that tribal life was master ish and short.
It's a terrible myth.
I've seen so many really healthy old people.
You just say a couple of years ago I was in quite remote area of Burma up
and going back to what you was talking about just now, and came on with a shack
and it was a small solar panel on it.
And I said, interpreter to the cap sitting underneath what, what's that for?
What's the solar panel for?
He said To charge my mobile phone.
Of course.
And suddenly I realized at that moment, I mean the, the, the world has, has.
Absolutely potentially transformed through proper use of technology and
can, can revolutionize everything.
I mean, this man can be, as far as I knew, taking a degree at Harvard by,
on the internet 'cause of one simple piece of technology, one solar panel,
but linked him up to the whole internet.
And that's gonna be transformational in so many ways.
Rupert Isaacson: I agree with you.
Alright, listen guys, I think what we need to do is, I think we just
barely scratched the surface here.
Would you guys consent to come back on because people will have questions and
I wanna find out how it went after the, after you guys do your row up the river.
And I want to sort of follow the progress.
So just before I let you go, 'cause I got, I know you guys are short
of time, just the plugs quickly.
How do people find the website to support the thousand Year Trust?
How do they find Cabilla?
And tell me about your book.
Sir.
Alright.
So one, two, 3000 year trust.
First
it would be very, it'd be wrong with me to write a book without my father
bringing one out at exactly the same time to cast me back into the eternal shade.
So the thousand Year Trust is, is all online.
If people look at the, the website is www dot thousand year trust org.
And our crowdfunder, there's links to it on the website, but that's also, if you go
on Crowdfunder and, and the usual things, which I always feel so awful saying is
please do follow us on social media.
We're on Instagram and, and are posting lots about the challenge on there.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay, cool.
Okay.
Thousand year trust.
Look for it all over the social media stuff.
Alright Cabilla, how do they find what they come to?
Cabilla.
Cabilla, I would welcome anybody and encourage anybody to please get in
touch about Camon or retreat at cabilla.
So Cabilla Cornwall, that's www do cabilla cornwall do com.
How do you spell spell Cabilla?
Rupert Isaacson: How do you spell Cabilla?
C Like, like Camilla, but with a B.
So C-A-B-I-L-L-A.
Two Ls.
And two Ls.
And that's also all over Instagram.
So please do find our website, find us online.
Drop us a message would be wonderful.
Super.
And the books.
And, and my, my first book R Open Bones, which is the story of much of what
we've been talking about, but so much more as well was Bones our, our Open.
So like Open, oh, love our Open Bones.
And it was published a month ago by Penguin.
It's been doing really well and we've been getting lots of great feedback, but it's
Rupert Isaacson: the story of everything we're doing here in the valley.
Open bones and Robin, because you can't let your son publish
a book without interfering.
Of course.
Make sure all you need character building for him.
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: Yeah.
All you need to do is go into my website, which is very simple.
Robins books, co uk, Robin's books, Robins Books uk.
All 27 books are on there, including my teenagers that
have just won an act this week.
And can all be got through that website, including access to all
the films and podcasts and other broadcasts and things I've done.
It's all on there.
The easiest way is just going and buy some books now.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Robins books.com.
Now also anyone who's interested in the work that Robin has done over the
course of his life too, you should just check out Survival International.
It, it's not they don't present it as a monument to Robin, but just look at the
work that's being done all over the world with indigenous people and just get some
of that down your neck because it's.
It's, it's work that needs to be supported and I'm, I'm so glad that
you've now brought that back to the west.
Okay, my friends, I know you need to run, so I'm not gonna talk to you any further.
So until the next time, thank you.
Be well.
And I will hit the stop recording.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Pleasure.
Oh,
Rupert Isaacson: it's so my pleasure.
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