ECOS Interviews: ALAN WATSON FEATHERSTONE

Thoughts from influential nature conservationists…

Alan Watson Featherstone

Career Highlights

My career highlight was founding Trees for Life in 1986. I have worked on that for the bulk of my productive adult life. In that time, TfL has worked to restore areas of the Caledonian Forest in the Highlands of Scotland, initially in Glen Affric, and then spreading out to surrounding areas. I founded it with a vision of restoring an area of about 600 square miles which had good forest remnants, virtually nobody living there, and is big enough to help sustain some of the missing wildlife species which I’ve always advocated reintroducing.

There were a number of things we did that made us different at the time. One that I’m particularly proud of was survey work for a lot of obscure species. Things like aphids, for example, or some species of fungi which fruit in two different cycles on two different species of trees. We were looking at the complexity and interconnectedness of species within a forest community. There were not many people doing that in Scotland at the time.

Another big thing we did in the early days of Trees for Life was map out the location of aspen trees and collect root sections from them for propagation. Aspens in Scotland produce much less seed compared to countries like Norway, where they reproduce from seed frequently. That’s because there’s been such overgrazing and exploitation that the ones which reproduce preferentially by rooting have survived, and they don’t flower so often.

By collecting root specimens we helped propagate them, encouraging them to pollinate and produce seed. That’s still ongoing today, and hopefully it’s going to shift the balance eventually in future, so that aspen becomes more able to spread by seeding again itself.

The other major achievement was the purchase by Trees for Life of the 10,000 acre Dundreggan Estate in 2008. Up until then we had been working solely with other people’s land, and were always constrained to some extent at least as to what we could do in terms of forest restoration. Becoming landowners ourselves gave us much more control over the work we could do, and the ability to plan for the long term, and implement restoration measures accordingly.

How do you define nature conservation?

I would define it as something different to ecological restoration.

Nature conservation, as is used in many parts of the country and other places around the world today, entails protecting nature as it is, preventing species from going extinct, a patch of forest from being logged, or cleaning up a beach from pollution – all those sorts of things. So it’s trying to maintain things as they are at the moment, and prevent any further destruction and environmental degradation from taking place.

Ecological restoration is very different. In my view, it’s about recognising that nature is already depleted in many places, Scotland being a classic example of that, but far from the only one.

And it’s not enough just to conserve what we’ve got left. We’ve got to actively assist it to recover diversity, and to return ecosystems to a state of health and balance, with their full complement of species.

It’s a more active dynamic process than just conservation, which is often about ‘okay, let’s put up a fence around this area to stop logging or hunting of animals’. And that’s fine. But if the area is already highly degraded, as most of Scotland is, all you’ve got left is a tiny fragment, incomplete, and maybe not even able to function naturally by itself. It needs active assistance to recover.

What’s the good news about wildlife and nature at present?

Here in the UK there’s now a lot of active work being done to help nature recover.

When I started Trees for Life in the mid-80s, there wasn’t much activity at all. There are now many organisations doing it and there’s people talking about campaigns to have 30% of the land restored and protected for nature. So those sorts of things have made a difference.

And I think now, after 30 – 40 years of restoration, people can see the results. And that inspires them, seeing that nature will recover.

And in fact, we know that scientifically, because at the end of the last Ice Age most of Scotland was bereft of vegetation and trees, and was completely covered by ice. Then when the climate warmed up, nature recovered by itself. So in a sense, our present situation in the world today is similar to the end of the last Ice Age – humans have dominated and suppress nature in many areas and continue to do so. But if we actively assist it, we can accelerate that natural recovery process.

So I think that’s the good news. And there are now restoration projects happening, in various parts of Britain, and indeed all over the world. There are organisations like the Society for Ecological Restoration, which is a global organisation. And there are campaigns to reintroduce missing species. We’ve got beavers back in various sites in Britain, and there’s a lot of advocacy around the return of missing predators.

So I see things moving in a positive direction, but there’s a long way to go still. We’ve got to actually deliver these things. With predators, there must be a conscious choice made, and that’s hard to get an agreement on. The struggle to get beavers back took decades.

Beyond the obvious of habitat loss and species decline, what’s your greatest concern in UK nature conservation at present?

The big issue is that the dominant human culture is still fixated on endless economic growth and the associated exploitation of nature that requires. And until that changes, the planet’s ecosystems are going to continue to deteriorate.

If you look at the present Labour Government, when they got in, they said they were going to pursue growth. That means more exploitation of nature.

It may not happen so much in places like Scotland anymore, because we’re already so depleted, but it means that some of the last untouched areas on the planet are exploited more and more. Places like the Amazon, the rainforests in Africa, the taiga forests in Russia and Canada.

Until this mindset changes, we can have some small successes. We can restore some of the depleted areas that don’t have any economic value, like the Highlands of Scotland now, because there’s no economic gain to be made from them, so we can restore those. But the dominant culture is still going to increase its exploitation of everywhere else.

So to me, the fundamental thing that we must do is change our culture to one which seeks to lighten our footprint on the planet, and cater for meeting essential human needs for everybody, without all the excess and extremes.

If you had a limited budget on nature conservation in Britain, what would you prioritise and why?

I’m not sure I’ve got a simple, straightforward answer to that.

There’s two things I might suggest. One is getting more positive examples of restoration work. We’ve got that in some areas in Scotland now, and there’s a few projects looking to restore things elsewhere in the country, and indeed, internationally.

But beyond that, I would use more of the funding to find a way to inspire people to live more simply, to ask less of the earth, and to recognise that lives can be inwardly rich, fulfilling, and nourishing without needing excessive material things.

At school, we learn English, we learn maths, and we maybe learn a foreign language, and we go on to learn history and geography. But there’s nothing about developing our personal connection with nature. And I think that should be integral to every education system from day one.

That connection can come through simple things. For example, I chose to become vegan in 1979, because I went to a talk from somebody at the Vegan Society. They described the impact of a vegan diet, and how much less land it needs, compared to a meat-based diet. Today, a lot of the Amazon is being cleared to grow soya beans, not to make tofu, but as a foodstuff for animals.

And we get about 10% of the food back that we feed to the animals. So if we convert to a vegan diet, we ask much less of the earth, which means more areas can either be protected or restored. So I would focus much more on that educational element and inspiring people to make a difference. And I see increasing numbers of that, as the number of vegetarians and vegans in Britain is growing steadily.

How do you feel about your input to the subject – what if anything has it achieved and would you do it differently if starting again today?

Well, in terms of my contribution, through Trees for Life I’ve inspired other organisations to do similar things.

For example, there’s an organisation working to restore native forest on Dartmoor, called Moor Trees. That was founded by man called Adam Griffin, who came and volunteered with Trees for Life. We trained him to lead the volunteer weeks, which he did, and then he said, ‘we’ve got the same situation on Dartmoor’, so he founded Moor Trees to hep restore native forest to suitable sites there.

Another example is a woman called Jennie Martin, who came and worked with us. She did some volunteer weeks and then we trained her to lead volunteer weeks. She coordinated the volunteer weeks for a while. One day she came to me and said: “Alan, it’s great that we do this for adults, but we’ve got to reach children. We’ve got to get to the next generation”. So she started doing that, taking children out to the Caledonian Forest, and then that branched off and grew into a separate charity called Wild Things!. They’re based at Findhorn and have been running educational programmes and experiences for children of all ages for many years. I was the chair of that charity for 20 years, until I retired from that role a couple of years ago.

So those are two examples; there’s others I know of as well, where people have been inspired to go and do something similar in other parts of the world.

And I, in turn, have been motivated by visiting other restoration projects and seeing what people do. One of my inspirations was going to the community of Auroville in Tamil Nadu in southern India in 1985. It was founded in totally degraded land that was formerly dry tropical forest, where there is no rain for 10 months of the year. Because of deforestation it had became a brick-hard lateritic pan, so the people of Auroville had built low earth mounds around the contours to keep the rain when it fell, and by doing so they restored a whole dry tropical forest.

I thought, if they can do that in India, we can do it in Scotland, where we’ve got plenty of rain. As a result of that, I made the commitment to launch Trees for Life the following year.

When I think about the situations I was in, I feel like I did the best I could in those situations, given the access to land, giving, funding, and so forth. In an ideal world, if I’d had more money, then yes I could have done more. But how to manifest that?

I suppose one thing I could have done, perhaps, is pursued a bit more communication. We in Trees for Life had a good website, and I went out and gave talks when I was invited to do so.

But rarely did I take much effort to initiate things like that, partly because I was too busy focused on the practical work and ensuring the charity was effective in helping to restore the forest.

Anything else you’d like to say?

I think the key thing I would like to say, to anybody who’s reading this interview, is what do you really care about in nature and the planet? What really matters to you and what is its reality today?

Is it thriving? Is it under threat? Is it going extinct? And if so, what do you want to do about it? Because that’s the way the world is going to change, when enough people decide to make a difference. I believe each of us has tremendous power inside ourselves to articulate and demonstrate care for the earth, and a positive vision.

And for each person it’ll be something different. For me it was the Caledonian Forest. I came back to Scotland, having travelled for most of my early twenties. Coming to live at the Findhorn Foundation felt very right in my heart. I was called here by my higher self, and I really took the time to deepen my personal connection with nature. And from that I felt the call of the land here in Scotland for help, the call of the Earth for help.

But what is that call of the Earth to you? And how can you take positive action to make a difference for that? Because when you act for something, it has a ripple effect, and it inspires other people, too. In my experience, not just me, but anybody who cares about nature and takes action to help, protect and restore it comes alive, and they embody their passion, and that touches and inspires other people and provides a role model for other people as well.