Consolidating the vision
My introduction to Trees for Life was reading the seminal book Feral by George Monbiot. I became fascinated by rewilding and the inspiring vision of Alan Watson Featherstone to restore Scotland’s Caledonian forest. I felt honoured to join the charity as its first CEO in 2016. Trees for Life was already doing brilliant work with its volunteer weeks, forest restoration at Dundreggan and Glen Affric, and specific projects to help aspen trees and montane scrub. In order to deliver on Alan’s vision, however, the charity needed to operate on a bigger scale.
This led us to think about the iconic Caledonian pinewoods scattered across the Highlands and what we really knew about them. It was more than 20 years since anyone had last looked at them. With generous funding from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, in 2018 we started our Caledonian Pinewood Recovery project to assess the health and condition of all of the Highlands’ pinewood remnants.
It was a major undertaking. James Rainey, our Senior Ecologist, walked over 700 miles to examine these recognised pinewood sites, which are scattered across the country from Loch Lomond to Ullapool. Once he had crunched the data we realised how many were at risk.
The Scottish Government is now committed to helping restore Scotland’s pinewoods. We need to see more woods protected so they can recover, more landscape-scale deer management so they can spread, and urgent action by Forestry and Land Scotland to clear non-native trees and shrubs like sitka spruce and rhododendron.
Alan had long talked about an east-west rewilding corridor connecting Loch Ness to the west coast. In 2021 this idea became Affric Highlands, our collaborative initiative to rewild 500,000 acres through woodland, peatland and riverwood restoration, in partnership with landowners and local people. Today, fifteen estates are signed up to the initiative and the vision is slowly but surely becoming real.
A forest is much more than its trees. From 2015 we began returning red squirrels to woodlands from where they had been lost. This work continues today, and we have added efforts to bring beavers back to Glen Affric and lynx to Scotland more generally. These keystone species belong in the Highlands and their return will help many other species too.
Rewilding will only be successful if people experience the restored landscape and emotionally connect with it. This year we opened the world’s first Rewilding Centre at Dundreggan and already thousands of people have visited us to find out about rewilding, Trees for Life and what they can do to help.
We also know that rewilding takes a long time and that we need future generations of rewilders. This led to our National Lottery Heritage Fund-supported Skills for Rewilding programme where we trained more than a dozen people in vital rewilding skills from deer management to tree growing.
All of these new ventures have been made possible by the amazing people who support our work, our brilliant team here at Trees for Life, including those who raise the funds and look after the finances, and our many partners. It is a wonderful organisation and while it may now be much bigger than before, the original spirit and ambition to make a real difference in the world remains.