For every sale of our limited-edition Gift Cards, we’ll be donating £1 to our new charity partner, the Thousand Year Trust. This is the only charity in the UK dedicated to the restoration of our temperate rainforest landscapes, and the funds raised will help build Europe’s first-ever rainforest research centre, in the heart of Bodmin Moor, Cornwall.
Here, the charity’s founder Merlin explains its background, purpose — and why we all need to think like an oak tree.
Q. What led you to setting up the Thousand Year Trust?
A. I was born in Cornwall and raised in a temperate rainforest on Bodmin Moor. I spent my childhood running wild through moonlit rainforest glades and swimming in the Bedalder, the river that runs through the Cabilla valley. As a teenager I left and joined the British army and quickly found myself deployed to Afghanistan in a frontline reconnaissance unit. During that tour I was blown up by a roadside bomb and was very lucky to return to Cornwall in one piece. Many years later I began to suffer from severe complex PTSD linked to that and other incidents. The rainforest here helped to heal me and bring me back to myself.
My wife, Lizzie, and I founded our business, Cabilla Cornwall, to help others to have the same healing benefits. We bring groups into the rainforest for a range of therapeutic and restorative practices. Whether stress or burnout from urban living, high-pressured jobs or a specific trauma-related incident, we all benefit from the healing power of our rainforests.
Alongside this work we realised that increased focus needed to be given to the habitat itself, and that Britain’s rainforests across our islands were in a perilous state. A fifth of the British Isles was once a rainforest landscape, but now there is less than 1% of that habitat left. This is a tragedy which we all need to prevent from dipping any lower. We are, after all, a rainforest people who live on a rainforest island. The Thousand Year Trust is our own small way to try and prevent the further destruction of this iconic and vital habitat and to begin its restoration and return.
Q. Why are temperate rainforests so vital?
A. For a number of reasons. Of all of the many types of natural habitat and woodland that we have in the UK, rainforests are one of our pinnacle environments for sequestering carbon dioxide, restoring biodiversity abundance and providing mental health and wellbeing benefits to the humans who spend time in them. They are our most valuable and exciting pockets of wonder and never has there been a more vital time to work for their restoration and protection.
Q. What’s your big ambition for the Thousand Year Trust?
A. Our mission is to catalyse the movement to triple the amount of rainforest growing in the UK over the next 30 years. It’s thought that there might be as much as 330,000 acres still surviving across our uplands and western reaches. We’d like to see that return to a million acres by working with partners such as the Forestry Commission, Natural England, the MOD, the National Trust, The Wildlife Trusts, the Woodland Trust and private landowners.
Q. Tell us about your mission to launch Europe’s first temperate rainforest research station.
A. Our big ambition is focused on scientific research and the importance of this in protecting and falling in love with our iconic ecosystems. When young scientists choose to pursue a career in rainforest conservation, it is almost certain that they will do this in tropical rainforests, rather than their temperate cousins. This makes sense because almost all of the rainforest remaining on Planet Earth is tropical. But there are also over a hundred universities, research institutions and research field stations dedicated to studying that habitat. It is being understood, elevated, protected and restored through this research.
At the Thousand Year Trust headquarters on Bodmin Moor, we are building Europe’s first Atlantic temperate rainforest research station. A place where scientists, academics, researchers, students and volunteers can come and be a part of uncovering the climatic, biodiversity and mental-health benefits of these incredible forests. Until the necessary cutting-edge science is being undertaken within these habitats, we’ll never be able to make them a priority for government ministers, businesses or society as a whole. This is our focus.
We’re partnering with 6 different universities to study everything from ‘how you plant trees that will grow quickly back into a rainforest formation’ to ‘how we facilitate and enable epiphyte layering on the young trees’ and ‘how to help mycelial fungus to establish and grow more quickly beneath the surface of the soil’. The research station will also study the psychological and physiological benefits that these pockets of awe have on the humans who spend time beneath their canopy. These are all key questions in the mission to preserving our rainforests and helping everyone to see them for how important they are.
Q. Where are/were the temperate rainforests in the UK?
A. The bioclimatic envelope for temperate rainforest in western Europe runs from Bergen in south-western Norway to Braga in northern Portugal, but 80% of this habitat was within the British Isles. It ran from Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis past Fort William and Oban in the western Highlands and down through Cumbria and the Lake District. From here, this Celtic spine continued throughout the western reaches of Wales from Anglesea through Aberystwyth to Pembrokeshire. Finally, down in the south west, Exmoor, Dartmoor, Bodmin Moor, the Lizard and West Penwith would all once have been rainforest landscapes.
The most important driver in nature restoration is creating habitats that are ‘bigger, better and more joined up’. We need to map where all of the remaining fragments of rainforest in the UK are, expand them with buffer zones of planting, improve the native biodiversity within them and then look to join them up by using riverine corridors that run between these forests.
Q. What’s your long-term vision for the future of the UK’s ecosystem?
A. We called our charity the Thousand Year Trust because all too often 21stC humans make the mistake of considering 5–10 year timeframes as the most ambitious that we can be. An oak tree can live for up to a thousand years. This is many, many human generations. If we are serious about healing the natural world, then we need to consider what we would hope the world might look like in a thousand years’ time, long after our own short lives have ended. We need to think like an oak tree.
I have no doubt in my mind that in a thousand years the UK’s ecosystem will be in a far healthier state than it is now. There will be more rainforests, absent native species like beavers, pine martens, wild cats, eagle owls and lynx will have returned and humans will live in harmony with nature. The choice we have is how we get there. We can either continue down our current trajectory which is leading us towards runaway climate change, droughts, floods, plagues, famines and inevitable wars. This feels a bit like a Mad Max film and I don’t believe anyone should be encouraging or aspiring to this outcome. The second, much harder, option is that we steer away from that course and begin all lending a shoulder to the nature restoration movement in the UK. This involves protecting wetlands, peatlands and seagrass beds while returning absent species that perform vital keystone and ecosystem engineering functions. One of the greatest actions we can all do is to plant, protect and promote rainforests across our western uplands.
Q. For anyone reading this who’d like to help further, how can they get involved or contribute?
A. Our charity is young and small. Of course funding is our greatest challenge but, at a time when everyone is feeling more financially burdened, it would be crass to simply ask for donations. These are vital, especially as we gather the funds to build the research station, but we also need our rainforests to have the attention and awareness that they still woefully lack.
We all have MPs. Many of us have new ones. Write to your MP about the importance of rainforests. They have to respond and if enough of us pester them they have to raise it in the Houses of Parliament as a debate topic. This gets it on the national agenda.
Support your local wildlife charity. Volunteer where you can in the natural world. Nothing feels greater than planting your first tree. Also, hugely importantly, learn about our stunning British nature. It’s amazing how many school children know more about fashion brands and social media than they do about trees and woodland animals. We are all responsible for this and we can all play a part in correcting it.
The Thousand Year Trust is Kip’s charity partner. For every gift card sold, £1 will be donated to support their incredible work. You can shop the gift cards here, and find out more about the Thousand Year Trust here.
