The FarmED Podcast: The Extraordinary Benefits of Temperate Rainforests with Merlin Hanbury-Tenison

Jun 18, 2025

‘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, ‘Our 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/

Full Transcript 

Alex: A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. Welcome to FarmED for the FarmED podcast with me, Alex Dye, and today our guest is a veteran rainforest expert, farmer, I mean, there's many different things I could describe you as. It's Merlin Hanbury-Tenison. How are you today?

Merlin: Oh, thank you so much for having me on the podcast, Alex. I'm delighted to be here. 

Alex: Yeah, in a slightly different location than we normally film. 

Merlin: I would be offended if we were anywhere else. I don't want to be indoors if we can avoid it. 

Alex: Absolutely. Our  usual recording space was akin to an oven. We would turn it into one of our lovely sourdough breads I think if we'd been in there too long. So would you mind if I ask you, tell us a little bit of your story. How did you fall in with rainforests? How did you fall in with this kind of world that you inhabit now? 

Merlin: That's a very short question for a very long answer. So I was born on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall on my family farm. My father had farmed there since 1960 on a mixed upland hill farm, trying a whole variety of different farming techniques that I grew up amongst. And I'd always played and loved and spent my childhood down in the valley, the forest that we have within that valley. So it's not a huge farm, it's about a 250 acre upland hill farm. And it's about one third woodland, so about 80 acres of ancient woodland, and then about two thirds of grade four grazing land, so about 165 acres of grade four grazing land. And so I'd spent my childhood here. And then when I was 19, I left and joined the British Army. And I did three tours in Afghanistan in quite quick succession.

And on the first of these, I was blown up in a roadside bomb. And I feel very grateful to not have lost any limbs or any of the guys who were in the vehicle with me. And after that, I left the military as I was getting married to my wife Lizzie and we went to live in London for a few years. And it was while up there that I suffered a mental health breakdown.

And 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. And it was while spending time down there and healing that we began to find out that actually it was this, not only much older than we first realized, we found out that it was a really ancient bit of woodland, but also it was about the time that people started referring to these habitats as Atlantic temperate rainforests and we started to reclaim this term when Guy Shrobsol's great book The Lost Rainforest of Britain came out and David Attenborough talked about it in his Wild Isles series and suddenly people became more comfortable with the idea that we're rainforest people living on a rainforest island and so that's really sort of my beginnings within this habitat and what made me fall hugely in love with it.

Alex:  It does seem like quite a strange, it's quite at odds with our view of Britishness, isn't it, I suppose. We've got a nice cup of tea here, I don't know if you've established or sort of, yeah, assumed we were a rainforest sort of island. So you say about how rainforests are, you went to recuperate and to re-energise and to take care of yourself. What is it about the rainforest that has that ability? Is it as simple as just being out in nature is good for you?

Merlin: I don't think it is as simple as that. I think that is true and I think that is a very good rule for life. And I also don't think there are many people who would disagree with that. I always wonder whether there are people who think that it's healthier to be on a busy urban street than to be surrounded by the natural world like we are now. Maybe there are people who think that, but maybe I live in an echo chamber because I don't know any of them. So I think nature is good for us, but I think that the deeper you go there is a spectrum of the benefits of nature to human physiology and psychology and you make the point that we don't think of Britain as being a rainforest environment and you're absolutely right. We are the most nature denuded country in Europe and I believe that we've all become very comfortable or pessimistically so with the idea that the UK is not a place of wilderness, a place of great nature where if you want to see nature you go abroad. Now 3,000 years ago 20% of the UK was a rainforest landscape, everything from Stornowale in the Isle of Lewis down the Western Highlands past Fort William and Oban down through Cumbria and the Lake District and then down through Western Wales everywhere from Anglesey through Aberystwyth to Pembrokeshire and then the south-west of the UK, Exmoor, Dartmoor, Bodmin Moor, some of our most ancient landscapes would all have been a rainforest landscape. And we've cut all of this down, there's about 99% of it has been lost. And when I say this to people often they'll smile or laugh at me, the idea that I'm harking back to a time 3,000 years ago and that that is so long ago it really doesn't bear any relevance to our modern society. But when you think about it from an oak tree's perspective, and that's really behind the name of the charity that we founded, the Thousand Year Trust, was trying to help people to perhaps spend a moment thinking a bit more like an oak tree and a little bit less like a human with our obsessively short-term timeframes. That's only three generations for an oak tree. And when you think about it from an evolutionary or an ecosystem perspective, 3,000 years is a drop in the ocean. And people in places like Malaysia or the Amazon or South and Central America are very comfortable with the idea of their countries being rainforest nations, rainforest cultures, rainforest landscapes, even though in many of those countries, they've cut down an awful lot of that habitat. I think that the idea of the British people reclaiming the idea of being a rainforest people on a rainforest island is a way for us to fall back in love with our natural world here on the British Isles and begin to be a bit more forward leaning in our restoration of it. 

I love to remind people that even though we might not be familiar with the term rainforest, it's something that we all know from our childhood stories and the folklore of our past. So whether you've read Geoffrey of Monmouth's Arthurian Legends or Tolkien or the Jabberwocky or the Mabinogion, you know, these are all ancient, or not that ancient, but they're all stories set within temperate rainforests.

We just weren't using that term. So we do know these habitats and we do love them and have that heartfelt attachment to them. What I think is the fascinating and important next step is the head, the cognitively led importance of them. So 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. They also restore biodiversity abundance more effectively than pretty much anything else we can do, especially on the uplands. So they're really useful in the tool against habitat and nature depletion. And then there is this mental health and wellbeing piece, which I believe at a time of a mental health pandemic and an obesity crisis, it's really vital that we restore habitats that people can benefit from and reduce the inequality of access to them as well. 

Alex: And is this something that you do quite a lot of? I mean when you first arrived with us earlier you mentioned that you'd just completed a rainforest tour before you set off to come and visit us. Is this something that you guys down there do quite a lot of?

Merlin: So we have two things down in the valley, well three really because there's the farm and then the other two are the business that my wife and I set up, Cabilla Cornwall, which is a wellness retreat center. So I healed in the valley from PTSD. My wife, while we were trying to start a family, suffered a number of really horrible miscarriages and she healed in the valley as well. And then my father, who turns 89 next week, he got very bad COVID and spent seven weeks sedated in Dereford Hospital. And we were told basically that he wasn't gonna come back, that he was gonna die and he's a very stubborn bugger and when he did heal and come back he did his healing in the rainforest and has gone on to do great things and isstill very robust for his age. So we had these three distinct healing stories and we knew that we wanted to build from that to bring a lot more people into the rainforest to have similar experiences, people that we felt really needed it, so veterans with PTSD, people from the NHS, nurses suffering from stress and burnout, professionals who are spending their lives in the urban environment stuck in their sympathetic nervous states when they need to have that rest and digest, rest and recuperate experience.

But we also didn't want to fall victim to what happens in so many beautiful nature spots where too many people come in and nature suffers while humans benefit. So we know about places like Whistman's Wood or many beautiful places where they get over trampled or over visited, people take souvenirs. We aren't very good in the UK at helping people learn how to interact healthily with the natural world. So we have this balancing act of bringing as many people in as possible, but also making nature our principal client. And to this day, over the last four years, we've brought about 3,500 people into the Cabilla Valley, most of them on two or three day retreats.

Lizzie and I judge everything based upon the positive emotional outpouring that people have while they're staying. So that's the tear rate. And we hit about a 65 to 70% tier rate of people who just break down when they're in the valley and then leave feeling very improved. I would like to see that increase to 80% before I'm satisfied. And at the same time, we've tripled the size of the rainforest. We've returned as many lost species as we can, and we're increasing the health and resilience of that habitat. 

So I think we can improve the natural wilderness, also increasing the number of people in it. So that's what Cabilla Cornwall does. And then there's our charity, the Thousand Year Trust. 

Alex: I think that's a similar sort of tear rate that I get when I go to visit my parents. Love you guys. So the Thousand Year Trust, you've mentioned that a couple of times now. What is the Thousand Year Trust? What do you do with the Thousand Year Trust? So it was, well, our initial project at Cabilla. Lizzie and I called it the Thousand Year Project because we really wanted to try and pull people out of that short-term thinking. But I think our political cycle and our corporate cycle fix us in the idea that we think about things in two, five, maybe if we're being really ambitious, ten-year timelines. 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, but not our generation. It's going to be, 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. 

So we started our project at Cabilla. We've re-established 100,000 trees, brought back beavers, we're also working to bring back pine martins and wild cats, glow worms and frogs, a number of other species, remove non-natives from the valley as well. And it was while doing this project that I realized that we really needed to do something bolder and bigger. So the charity was founded about two and a half years ago. It is the only charity in the UK that has Atlantic temperate rainforests in its charitable purpose. So there are many really great environmental NGOs, people like the National Trust, the Woodland Trust, the Wildlife Trust, huge organizations that I sit in their shade as is absolutely appropriate, who are doing a lot of work with temperate rainforests at the moment. But because none of them have that habitat in their charitable purpose, it's likely to only be a temporary moment that they're able to really focus on that. We are the only one track minded, single habitat focused charity in the UK focused on temperate rainforests. And we're really more than anything a research charity because I believe that we will never protect and restore our temperate rainforests, such an important habitat, until we fall in love with them and accept that they are a part of our culture in the UK and we will never fall in love with them until we understand them and we will never really understand them until the scientific research has been done into them to know what's happening within them. 

Alex: And do you think a lot of people who are watching, listening, will have walked through a temperate rainforest and not even realised that's the case? 

Merlin: Well we're so binary as humans and it's think, much to our detriment that we, and I get a lot of emails and phone calls from people saying, I've seen a temperate rainforest, I've been in temperate rainforest, or on the converse, people saying, don't be so ridiculous, there are no rainforests in the UK. And so I think that there will be many, many of your listeners or watchers.  There's a huge spectrum as well of rainforest health within the UK. Has it been overgrazed? Does it have non-natives like rhododendron or beech or sycamore taking over? Are there lots of, is there lots of pressure from deer or gray squirrels? How ancient is it as an environment? How healthy is the epiphytic growth or the mycelial growth in the soil?

I think there's, it's easy to sort of search for a simple designation for temperate rainforests but really they are a whole panoply of habitats and habitat health that we should always be pushing towards improving. So you mentioned a lot in your well you spoke about it here but you also in your book Our Oaken Bones available now in all good bookstores. 

Merlin: Thank you. 

Alex: You're welcome. About just how many different places your life has been over the years. I suppose, well, I suppose where I'm getting towards

with this is whilst you were growing up, whilst you were in these environments with these rainforests, did you ever think there was going to be a future for you in that? Because you went into the army and you can't have left the army thinking, I know exactly what I'm going to do, I'm going to go back and sort out that rainforest. Was there a point at which you suddenly thought I could make this my life's calling? 

Merlin: I think it's easy to look backwards and think that there was, there's a great saying that when you look backwards it looks like a straight line, when you look in front it looks like spaghetti. We love to look backwards and think that there was a clear path in terms of the decisions that we made. I always remember the great line from the Baz Luhrmann song, Everyone Wears Sunscreen, that some of the most interesting 22-year-olds don't know what they want to do with their life, some of the most interesting 40-year-olds still don't know. And I think I've tried to respond to the wonderful habitat that I'm stewarding and try and help it to improve in the best way it can and create a little bit of a national movement around that or be a part in a national movement that's being created by some great people.

I didn't know that Cabilla was a temperate rainforest when I left the military. I knew it was a beautiful habitat that needed protecting. I also, I think, and something very germane to the work that FarmED’'s doing, as someone who came down to take over a small upland hill farm, and I was looking to find out how you make a living from these environments in a way that doesn't deplete the natural world.

And so Lizzie and I, when we moved back to the farm seven, eight years ago, were looking at it and going, well, how do we live here? How do we make a living from this land? How do we restore the land as well? And how do we keep our family on the land and not just slide ever further into debt? And these are all big challenges, which I believe rainforests have a part to play in the answering of. 

Alex: Your land is, or was farmland as well, is that right? Was there not a point where you thought I could go full farmer on this land and just do that? 

And this was a big part of that, the beginnings of it, that. In about 2017 I started preparing the ground for returning to Cabilla and we made the move finally over the preceding two years and then we're completely back there by 2019. And I would speak to many agricultural consultants and farm advisors and the first thing they would all say is well the first thing you gotta do is cut down those trees because they're rubbish. It's not timber crop, you can't use it to grow planking, you can't graze within it, it's very inconvenient. You have a hundred and sixty-five farmable acres at the moment that's not really enough to have a going concern but if you cut down that woodland you'll have 250 acres of farmland. Then you might be onto something. You can put more meat, more milk, more wool out of that land.

You might have a farm that we could talk about. And I was just hearing this advice from multiple sources and thinking, this just doesn't feel right. And also, bear in mind, in 2017, we'd made the decision to leave the European Union. But it hadn't started to bite yet in terms of the reduction in the subsidies. So I was looking at it and going, well, and I looked at some NFU reports that showed that the average upland hill farmer on Bodmin Moor and Dartmoor was taking between 85 and 92% of their annual income from European subsidies from the Common Agricultural Policy and the Basic Payment System. And it was already clear that that money was going to be taken away incrementally over the next seven or eight years until 2027, or ten years until 2027. And there was this hope that a British subsidy system might be as generous as the European one, and I just didn't think that was ever going to be the case. We simply don't have the same appetite for burning tyres as German or French farmers, and so the subsidies were always going to be smaller. We've seen that now with the sustainable farming incentives being switched off. This is creating huge challenges. So I knew that the model of farming was going to have to change. I'd watched my father try and farm everything from totally mixed farmland to beef to sheep to to deer, to wild boar, and all of those be very challenging things to try and make a living from on a relatively small patch of land. And then as we had our healing journeys, both Lizzie, my father, and me, within the valley, the idea of cutting down the woodland went from being a crime to being a sin to being utterly unthinkable. And that was when we started to think, well, what if we actually planted it all up with woodland? And we haven't taken it out of farmland. 

The whole point is that it turns into a lower-yield conservation grazing agroforestry scheme. The idea being we can use native breed cattle, horses, pigs to move through this woodland. Because we have this very strange concept in the UK that healthy farmland, when it's grazing, is lots of green fields with no trees and large animals and healthy woodland is lots of big trees with no large animals and actually all of our native breeds in the UK evolved within woodlands, within forests and within forested landscapes. They get shade in the summer, shelter in the winter and additional forage. So it was about saying actually how can we replant a rainforest and triple the size of this rainforest but still keep livestock on the land, still keep meat being produced by the land? And I think that's a better model. 

Alex: Yeah. And I think within the farming world in the UK, we had a group who came here not too long ago which we were discussing about these sorts of things, subsidies and different ways of making money. I suppose with your farm that weren't necessarily just cropping. And I think pretty much all the farmers we had in this group said that they were expecting that the future of farming was going to be in that system, not just mass production of food using your synthetic chemicals to boost all your yields. Constant inputs. Exactly. Your inputs, your fertilizers, your pesticides, etc. They all expected the future would be in diversifying your portfolio on your farm. 

Merlin: Public money for public goods. Absolutely. It has to be. Absolutely.

Alex: On a slightly different note, in your book you talked a little bit as well about how being in an urban environment, being in cities, is akin to... Well I think your wording was that back in the day we would only have our fight or flight instinct activated if there was danger, if there was need for it. But we've kind of evolved ourselves in an urban setting to constantly be on this level of panic or fear because of this stimuli that exists in the world today. Is this something, I mean you've mentioned before that you think this is something that contact with nature, contact with rainforests can help. Do you think that's, is there any more you'd like to say on that? Yeah I think, you said an interesting phrase there which is that we've evolved into this urban setting and that I think is the challenge is we are stuck within human time frames and human mindsets and therefore even though we know academically that evolution is a very, very slow process, it takes tens if not hundreds if not millions of years to really happen, we will think of it in shorter timeframes. Now we've lived in urban settings for 500 maybe 1,000 years, settled in kind of agrarian communities for maybe 10,000 years. But there is no difference between your physiology, your brain, anything to do with you as a human to a human from 20,000 years ago. Absolutely no difference at all.

And so we haven't evolved, we haven't changed. Homo sapiens is the same as it has been for the last 20, 50, 100,000 years. And the urban environment creates a huge amount of stimuli that we would never have had to deal with. So I'm not implying that urban settings aren't a very good thing. They've created centers of great learning, centers of innovation. So much good has come from the way we've been able to settle and create civilization. At the same time, there is definitely no world in which that is our natural state.

And one of the things I talk about in the book is that we have, we're very comfortable with the idea that if you take a wild animal and you put them in a zoo, you put them in a cage, you take a tiger and you put it in a zoo in Berlin or in London, where it's totally outside of its natural evolutionary range where the air pressure, the temperature, the humidity, the seasons are nothing like what it evolved to, its species has evolved to be comfortable with. And then you put it in a concrete enclosure where it's sleeping, eating unnatural food and sleeping in an unnatural den at night and it begins to behave strangely, which many zoo animals do. It starts to become aggressive, it begins to behave strangely, which many zoo animals do. It begins to pace backwards and forwards.

Alex: Zookosis? 

Merlin: They won't mate. And we call this zookosis. And I think it comes down to this kind of Galilean concept that humans are a part from nature, or Judeo-Christian concept that humans are a part from nature, not a part of nature. Andernicus tried to put us back within, rather than being above the natural world and dominion, we are one species within. If we start to think in that way, you realise that there's only one mammal species that we are uncomfortable using the terms of zookosis  for, and that is humans. Yet when you look at much urban living, especially when the population density is very high and people are living in skyscrapers or in small apartment blocks, it's quite clear that the symptoms of zookosis are present in humans. We just don't like to call it that, we call it poor mental health or we call it constant lower back pain or we call it an obesity pandemic and I think we need to slightly conflate and merge our understanding of what happens in the natural world and what can happen in the human sphere as well. 

Alex: You mention as well in your book a lot about your connection with the mother tree in your forest. So what is the mother tree? It's a term I've really stolen from a huge hero of mine which is Dr. Susan Simard who wrote a book called Finding the Mother Tree and she's a professor at the University of Columbia and she started to demonstrate in the 1990s that trees have these amazing mycelial connections between them and she was really pioneering the research that showed that connection of fungal matter that connects the roots of trees and this mycelial hyphae, these funguses, they connect with tree roots at the cellular level. So there's actually no point under a microscope where you can see a tree root ending, the mycelium beginning, the mycelium ending, and the tree root beginning of the next tree. And you end up, and this is what we see at Cabilla where we have a 4,000 year old rainforest, is the mycelial density is so high and there's so much fungal matter in the ground that when you walk through a young plantation woodland that's two or three hundred years old, you're walking over a big patch of mud with ten thousand trees growing out of it. When you walk through an ancient woodland, temperate rainforest or other, that has had this period of several thousand years to really grow that fungal matter in the soil, you're actually walking over a giant fungus, a giant mushroom with ten thousand fingers all pointed up in the air. It turns them into very different habitats. And within this you get these older trees, these nodes, these nexus points, these lynch pins and those are what Susan Simard calls mother trees. And we have many trees like that at  Cabilla, but there's one in particular that sits on the edge of the rainforest and acts rather like a sentinel or an ambassador. And I really wanted in the process of writing the book to not only have human characters,but to try and have characters that people could relate to and connect with, whether it was the beavers or whether it is the mother tree or whether it's Gloria the pig, you know, some of the creatures, which I want them to be characters in their own right and I think trying to get us to fall in love with a tree as an entity and there's a danger around personifying or anthropomorphising things in the natural world but there's also an upside to it where it can help us to protect them more effectively as well. And the mother trees of Cabilla are I think very personable creatures. 

Alex: And am I right in thinking that you wanted to immortalise this mother tree in some way? 

Merlin: I did much to the the chagrin of especially my my mother and my wife who neither of whom are huge tattoo fans and I surprisingly have more tattoos than most people expect. I've got quite a few but I I did recently get the mother tree tattooed on my back and I was chatting with Sarah Langford about it the other day, who I think you've interviewed on the podcast. 

Alex: Friend of the podcast? 

Merlin: Yeah, friend of the podcast and a great person who's written her beautiful book, Rooted, and is doing amazing work for nature restoration and for regenerative farming. And I was chatting with Sarah about it the other day and she had a complete sort of explosion about it because when I showed her the tattoo she thought I had sort of a tiny acorn or something tattooed on my ankle and actually it's the entirety of my back. It was 22 hours worth of tattooing so it's a bit more than perhaps I should have but it's there for life now. 

Aleex: So did you, I'm assuming you went in and you said I want this, I want all of this, there's like this picture of this tree, I want the whole back.

Merlin: Well I have a, there's a great watercolour tattooist called Georgie Higman down in Cornwall who I work with on all of this work, who's I think a very talented artist and an illustrator called Imogen Partridge who did all of the illustrations in the book. She, so it was a longer project because I kind of got Imogen in to have a look at the tree and really paint a beautiful picture of it and then worked with Georgie to turn it into something that could be tattooed and yeah now it's sort of very much everywhere. My children love it, my daughters, they love to point to me and if I don't have my shirt on and go, Daddy's got a rainforest on his back. I think it's hilarious. 

Alex: And in a way you're carrying part of that rainforest with you?

Merlin: Yeah, it may sound sort of whimsical, but after the tattoo was finished, I was up in London for a meeting, and I lived in London for eight years, and it's a great city, but I don't go there very often now, and I was finding it quite overwhelming. I was walking through a busy part of town, and lots of noise and sounds. It was quite a hot period of the year as well, and I suddenly had that remember, I sort of remembered suddenly that actually I have the Mother Tree on my back and I have the rainforest with me even if I'm in the heart of a city and that did help to regulate me and bring me back down again. 

Alex: Wonderful. So what do you think, in a way, to sort of round off our conversation, what should the average person who is listening, who is watching, what would you like them to take away about rainforests? Why should they care? Why should they get involved? Why should they go and visit and support trusts like the Thousand Year Trust? 

Merlin: So the very short answer and then a slightly longer one, the short one that I want everybody to remember, and I'm gonna turn the camera for it, is that we are a rainforest, people who live on a rainforest island. And I think that is an exciting idea that it takes time to truly integrate and believe that, but it is the truth of the UK. And for me, the longer answer of what I think is really exciting about that is everybody, and it doesn't matter if you're eight years old or 80 years old, everybody knows about rainforests, everybody knows about the Amazon, everybody knows that these are the lungs of the planet, the most exciting and important habitats in Brazil or Colombia or Costa Rica or Borneo or Malaysia. You know, these are vital and important and that we've cut half of them down and that they need to be protected and restored and that we love them. I think that is a truism that all schoolchildren grow up learning and the reason that we have this passion for them is because they've been so well studied. And my father who is a tropical rainforest explorer spent most of his career in these tropical rainforests helping to uncover some of these mysteries and that's wonderful that that work has happened.

 If you're a young conservation scientist and you're just finishing your PhD and you want to make a career in rainforest conservation, rainforest research, it's almost certain that you will do that work in the tropical rainforest zone. And that makes a lot of sense because there's so much more tropical rainforest than temperate rainforest. But also there are hundreds of universities with dedicated courses to tropical rainforest research. There are dozens of universities with dedicated courses to tropical rainforest research. There are dozens of research institutes that provide millions of pounds of funding to this habitat and there are also, I think most importantly, dozens of research field stations where as a young scientist you can go and very easily drop in into a tropical rainforest research station, join a multi-disciplinary research team, work with tenured professors, contribute to peer-reviewed papers, shift government policy and societal opinion, you can make a career in tropical rainforests very easily. 

If this same young conservation scientist wants to work in Atlantic temperate rainforests there isn't a single university with a dedicated course, there isn't a single research institute, and most importantly, there isn't a single field station where you can go and do that work. So the Thousand Year Trust, our charity, is building, at the moment. We launched a crowd funder a few weeks ago, which has still got 40 days to run, depending on when this podcast comes out. We are building Europe's first Atlantic temperate rainforest research field station, a place where scientists from across the world, and we already work with PhD students from places like Zimbabwe and other more traditionally global south countries who are coming and shifting that knowledge exchange so it isn't just the global north saying to the global south, don't cut down your trees, don't kill your megafauna, don't kill your apex predators, after we've all done that already. We're now, I hope, moving into a phase where we can sit back and be more humble and learn from some of the expertise from these perhaps less industrialized countries that have been doing this nature restoration and can come and help us to restore our rainforests and our research station will be the nexus point in Western Europe for Atlantic temperate rainforest research and that my hope my dream is that over the years that come that will allow Atlantic temperate rainforests to sit somewhere alongside tropical rainforests in the minds of school children and adults as they grow up. And what I like is at the moment if you say to anybody, what do you think of when you think of a rainforest, they'll say the Amazon or they'll say tropical rainforest. What I hope is that in 10 years, 20 years time, when you say to the average person on the street, what do you think when you think of a rainforest, they'll say, oh well you've got tropical rainforests, they're really important and beautiful but they're also Atlantic temperate British rainforests and they are also so beautiful and we're bringing them back. That is the dream and that's what we're going to make happen at the Thousand Year Trust. 

Alex: Excellent. What a fantastic sound bite that is as well. Brilliant. Thank you very much for your time spending with us here today and the glorious sun of the Cotswolds it is glorious we will link your crowd funder below thank you. And thank you so much for joining us today at home wherever you are in the world if you've liked our podcast and would like to learn more find us on farm-ed.co.uk follow us on social media, give us a like if you like it tell us what we're doing right what we're doing wrong. Thank you very much and thank you very much.

Merlin: Thank you Alex and thank you FarmED.