The 'Godfather of Rewilding' with Alan Watson Featherstone
When I think about conservation heroes, I often think of individuals in faraway places whose work revolves around rainforests or coral reefs, sharks or chimpanzees, and I forget to look a little bit closer to home. Who has been responsible for saving and restoring the places I explore on a regular basis?
Here in Scotland, we have a man who is known as the ‘godfather of rewilding’ - someone who made a promise to himself and a room full of people at a conference that he was going to dedicate the rest of his life to restoring Scotland’s lost Caledonian pine forests. Meet, Alan Watson Featherstone…
Alan Watson Featherstone, by Kate Chesterton
Alan has a seriously epic life story - after training in electronics (note: not ecology) he travelled extensively, connecting with nature and communities who thrived alongside it. His travels eventually led him back to Findhorn in Scotland where an intentional community was being built around spirituality and nature. Alan immediately felt at home and, after running a conference that asked people to make a public commitment at the end, made a promise to spend the rest of his life restoring Scotland’s severely degraded Caledonian pine forests.
Glen Affric is a shining example of the work that he and the organisation that he later founded, Trees for Life, have done over the past fifty years. Through a simple approach of fencing off healthy areas of forest and ‘letting Gaia do the rest’, the area looks like something out of Jurassic Park. It also happens to be one of my favourite places in the world, so I was extremely excited to speak to Alan and learn how this place came to be.
Alan has to be one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever spoken to, and this uplifting conversation is one I seriously needed to have in a world that feels extremely heavy. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed having it!