‘We are a rainforest people, who live in a rainforest nation,’ says conservationist and writer, Merlin Hanbury-Tenison, speaking to Alex Dye on The FarmED Podcast and explaining why these ancient forests are so vital for combating climate change as well as for our own wellbeing.
In his bestselling memoir, ‘OurThe Oaken Bones,’ Merlin talks about how, while serving with the British Army in Afghanistan, his armoured vehicle was hit by a landmine that momentarily blinded and deafened him, leaving him with PTSD. His wife Lizzie suffered several miscarriages and his father was hospitalised with Covid.
‘I felt so extremely lucky and privileged to have the farm at home and to be able to go and hide and retreat and heal within what we knew as the old oak woodland at Cabilla,’ Merlin explains. It was thanks to Guy Shrubsole’s book The Lost Rainforest of Britain and David Attenborough who talked about rainforests in his Wild Isles series, that led to the discovery that the forest at Cabilla was much older than they’d originally realised, part of the Atlantic temperate rainforest, mythologised in stories and legends, which would once have cloaked much of Britain.
When Merlin and Lizzie moved back to Cabilla seven years ago they wondered: ‘How do we make a living from this land? How do we restore the land as well?
Agricultural consultants advised them to cut down the trees but instead they planted another 100,000, tripling the rainforest area, and brought back beavers.
‘The whole point is that it turns into a lower-yield conservation-grazing agroforestry scheme,’ Merlin tells Alex. ‘Atlantic temperate rainforests are a pinnacle habitat in the UK for a number of different ecosystem services. For example, they are one of our most effective carbon sequesterers. So at a time of climate crisis when we need habitats that absorb and sequester CO2 out of the atmosphere, nothing does that more effectively terrestrially in terms of what we can protect and restore than Atlantic temperate rainforests.’
Merlin and Lizzie have created a wellness retreat at Cabilla, so that others, including veterans and NHS staff suffering from burnout, can benefit from the psychological and physiological restorative properties of the rainforest.
They have also established The Thousand Year Trust.
The Trust is so named because it aims to pull people out of short-term thinking, ‘You see a lot of articles at the moment saying things like, can we reverse climate change by 2030? We absolutely can't. But could we reverse it by 3020? Well, yes, we could. We can set the conditions and it will be something that the next 20 generations will work on and then we'll get back to a place of climate health. And I think that the ability to think in multi-generational timeframes is really important.’
Hear how The Thousand Year Trust is also crowdfunding to build Europe's first Atlantic temperate rainforest research field station, a place where scientists from across the world, can study these extraordinary habitats.
Discover More:
Cabilla Cornwall: https://www.cabillacornwall.com/
Thousand Year Trust: https://thousandyeartrust.org/