An afternoon with Alan Watson Featherstone
In summer 2022, Cathy Fitzgerald of Haumea Ecoversity heard I was travelling to Findhorn to collect stories, and suggested I contact Alan Watson Featherstone; ecologist, nature photographer and public speaker.
Alan has dedicated his life to protecting the biological diversity of our planet and to sharing his learning with others. He founded Trees for Life in 1986 and has developed a number of other local and international conservation projects since then.
It was a privilege to meet with Alan at his home to chat about his career and some of the most significant moments of his work in nature and conservation.
This is the abridged version of this story, containing thoughts on ecological living, nature, and some of Alan’s most important projects, along with some memories of favourite trees from his career working with trees.
You will soon be able to read the full interview in the post titled ‘Alan Watson Featherstone – complete story’
We join the story here with Alan talking about connection to nature, how it brought him to the Findhorn community, and why connection to nature should be our focus today.
It was connection with nature that brought me to Findhorn. This idea of spirit in nature and the principle that if we take time to be still, to focus, to open ourselves, open our eyes, our inner senses, our ears, we can connect, we can commune, and there can be contact on a deeper level. That’s why I came to live here.
I felt that this connection to nature was really needed in the world; because in my travels I’d seen so much destruction. In South America I saw the Amazon burning in the 70s. I’ve seen the poverty of some people’s lives and I’ve seen the materialism and the superficiality of others with very wealthy affluent lifestyles. I saw that there is such a need for change in the world. It has to stem from having this different level of connection.
We need a different relationship with nature. Nature is what supports and sustains us, and we can’t just be focused entirely on maximising how much we take from nature. We have to learn to be in balance, and to give something back. It seemed to me that the Findhorn community was an experiment in that direction. Of giving something back, of giving love - that’s the essential message of our Findhorn garden. That love does not just nourish children or partners or pets. It also nourishes plants, it nourishes landscapes, it nourishes the Earth. That is what brought me here to Findhorn.
Alan went on to describe the transformative experience of hearing the call of the trees in the old Caledonian forest at Glen Affric.
Glen Affric
One weekend at Findhorn, we went on a day trip to Glen Affric. I had previously seen untouched nature in Canada, and thought it was so beautiful – and going to Glen Affric - it was like a small piece of that. It’s not completely untouched, but there are a lot of trees there - old trees, ones that weren’t planted, grown by themselves. There are mountains, there are lochs, there are rivers with cascading waterfalls and it was like a little bit of Canada in Scotland. I never knew that this place existed! So in the following years, whenever I got the chance, I would go out to Glen Affric. I began to build a relationship with Glen Affric - It really is beautiful.
But the more I explored, I started to get a feeling that all was not well there. All the trees were old. There were no young trees. There were dead trees, and beyond them was just the bare hillside. I could see what was happening: the forest was shrinking. And I realised that it's one of the last holdouts of the ancient forest that used to cover most of Scotland. There are a few other remnants, but Glen Affric is one of the best ones. For a couple of years I just wondered to myself - why is the government not doing something about this? Most of the land in Glen Affric belongs to the forestry commission. Their job is to grow trees, why are they not doing it? The issue is that there is too many deer; they eat all the baby trees, and there are no wolves to eat the deer, or to chase them away. So they just stay and they eat everything, that’s what’s been happening and that’s why there are no younger trees. A visionary forester in the early 60s had in fact already fenced off a part of Glen Affric - they put up a fence to keep the deer out, just to see what would happen. Of course, what happened was that the forest within the fence recovered. So I thought well, why is nobody doing this again now? There is so much more land that they could fence. Why are they not doing it? There is no answer.
I decided that I was going to launch a project myself to restore the Caledonian Forest. I made a public declaration at the One Earth-Call to Action gathering in 1986, saying that I was making a personal commitment to do this. I still feel quite emotional even now when I think back to that moment. I saw the need, and I said ‘I’m going to do this’. I felt the call of the trees - and yet I had no experience, I had no skills, I had no resources, I had no access to land. On a superficial level I had nothing, but I had this inner connection. I had enough training by then from being at Findhorn to know that if I really followed my heart, the call of the spirit would attract to me what I needed to make it happen.
The work in Glen Affric
It took me several years to get to the stage where any practical work took place. I had to make contact with land owners, I had to educate myself on what could be done, I had to raise money, I had to develop some knowledgeable skills so I could be taken seriously. I went out to Glen Affric with Finlay McCraig, the visionary forester, he had retired by then. A wonderful man, a real genuine Highlander, spoke Gaelic, played the bagpipes, and he loved the land. He loved the trees, he had the same deep connection with them as I felt, and he cared for that place.
I picked his brains and talked to him about why he’d tried putting up the fence around the trees, why did he start there? He said, “Well, we had a limited budget, we had to start somewhere, that was as much as we could do; it was a big risk.” He was very happy that in the end it had achieved so much.
In 1989 I managed to reach an agreement with the forest commission. The man who had superceded Finley McCraig was a young guy, who travelled a lot, was open minded and willing to go out on a limb. He had an interest in seeing the forest restored, but in ’89 it was the Thatcher government era. The forestry commission was under pressure to balance its books, be financially viable. So they had no money for conservation - he saw the need, but he had no money. But by that time I had raised enough money to get started - because I had begun publishing calendars of my nature photography – sufficient to buy a fence and land to put the fence up on.
So I got together for a meeting with this man from the forestry commission. I was very hippie in those days with a full head of long hair and a bigger beard, with no background in forestry, and he was as official and formal as you can get. The miracle was that he said yes. So the fence went up in 1990, put up by forestry commission people; we paid their salary and all the materials. This allowed the trees within the fenced area to regenerate and flourish.
This work formed the start of Alan’s founding of Trees for Life – read more about this in the full version of Alan’s story which will soon be available in the next post on the website. Among the many trees and habitats Alan has encountered on his travels, his work in South America with the monkey puzzle tree has been a major focus for him. He explained to me how the threat to this iconic tree is connected to the impacts of climate change and human activity.
The Monkey Puzzle – Araucaria Araucana
The Monkey Puzzle forest and its conservation has turned into one of my biggest projects. There are 14 species of Araucaria left in the world, of which ten are in New Caledonia, alongside two species in South America, and two in Australia and New Guinea.
I first went to the monkey puzzle tree forest as part of a trip to South America in 1977. Somebody I met on the way told me that there is an interesting forest on the Andes, on the pass between Chile and Argentina, but to the south. He didn’t say where it was, he just said it was a nice forest. Because I was interested in trees I said I would go there. I got there and discovered it was a whole forest of monkey puzzle trees, and that’s where they come from. I camped out there one night; I was hitchhiking and I couldn’t get a ride so I just slept in the forest. It was April, and I ate some of the pinions– the seeds of the monkey puzzle tree - it was a great part of my experience in South America. I have spent a lot of time with that forest since and have discovered that it is highly threatened. It’s being burned, climate change is making it more susceptible to fire, there is cattle grazing in the forest which doesn’t allow it to regenerate properly – all the usual problems.
I thought: this forest needs help. I'm not going to move to Chile and start a project myself but I could at least make a book about it to raise awareness. So I started doing photography there immediately, and I made four more trips in the next three years to document it across all four seasons. I was able to add to that with all my knowledge from the Caledonian forest - everything about fungi and insects, slime moulds and springtails and all the things that make up a forest’s relationships. It was great to be able to explore all of that ecology in the South American context. Chile is a stunning place, and I’ve recorded everything – the forests, the landscape, the snow covered volcanoes, the lakes. Beautiful Autumn colours, the insects and reptiles and wildlife of the forest like the South American fox.
The monkey puzzle tree is a very interesting tree. It's a relic from the time of the dinosaurs. In the dinosaur era, monkey puzzle trees and their close relatives were the dominant forest type on the planet. This was before broad leaf trees had evolved; there were only conifers, dominated by the Araucaria family. So they are survivors, although most of them have now disappeared. Monkey puzzle trees survived by becoming very highly evolved. They’ve got these very tough triangular needles that fit together on the stems, close together so insects find it very hard to get inside. It's only specialised creatures that can live on the monkey puzzle tree - there is a whole story to tell about these relationships.
A few scientists and botanists have studied the tree in this way but I feel that most people don’t yet have much knowledge about it. Many people recognise the tree in the UK, it's in town parks, it's in gardens, everywhere. You need a male and a female tree in fairly close proximity, to pollinate each other, to reproduce. The monkey puzzle trees are found all over the place, but here in the UK but we haven’t got the ecosystem that goes with the tree, all the special organisms and the fungi and the special insects.
So, if the Araucaria are dying out from climate change now, even though they’ve previously evolved in lots of different ways, is the problem that they can’t keep up with the speed of change?
No; it's not so much climate change per se that is doing it, it's the impact of climate change, the increase in fire especially. You see, where they grow on the slopes of the Andes - typically from elevations of just about 1000 metres to about 1700 metres - if the Earth gets warmer what would happen is they’d just move up a little bit, because the higher up they are the colder it is. So there’s scope for them to do that, I’m guessing that’s what’s happened to them in the past since the demise of the dinosaurs. We’ve had ice ages and they’ve gone up and down mountain slopes; but it's now about the human impacts associated with climate change. More fires, cattle in the forest that prevent the growth of seedlings, Illegal logging, all those things going on.
I asked Alan what, out of all the trees he’d encountered, what would be the most memorable tree encounter he’d had? Or if he holds a special place in his heart for any particular tree?
There is probably no single individual one, there are such a lot. There are special places I’ve been to where there are really remarkable trees. I’ve seen Redwoods, the giant Cicadas, I have visited huge Baobab trees - Madagascar has a lot of very interesting trees including most of the world's Baobab species that occur in Madagascar.
I’ve a particular connection with Mangroves, which are the trees that grow in the tropics on the shoreline and there is a particular Mangrove that grows in Colombia called the Piñuelo Mangrove which I really love. Many Mangroves have stilt roots but the Piñuelo Mangrove has buttress roots. It occurs a bit in Ecuador and Panama too but mainly in Colombia, it has quite a limited geographic range.
The monkey puzzle tree is another one of them, I think it is particularly special because it's such an ancient tree and it's got so many unique features to it. And it's very long lived, living for over a 1000 years.
I mentioned that one of the things that I’m enjoying hearing about about through the Stories of People and Trees project is the idea of trees as memory holders - witnesses to history and events, especially in the cases of the very long lived trees.
Yes – there’s the yew tree at Fortingall in Perthshire - it's a really interesting tree. It's not in a wild setting, it's in a church yard with walls around it. The day I was there it was foggy so you couldn’t see much of the walls, it was one of those gifts of the fog. But they estimate it to be between 3000 and 5000 years old. They don’t know for sure because the whole centre of the tree is rotted away. There are no rings to count, just the outer. They can calculate from the diameter and get some estimate. And there’s records of that tree in the time of Pontius Pilate. He had some association with that particular tree. So it's at least 2000 years old but we think between 3000 and 5000.
There are a lot of special trees on the planet. I’ve been to see Huon pines in Tasmania, the giant Eucalyptus in Australia, who are almost as tall as the Redwoods of California. I also like the Banyan tree in India. The Banyan tree is a fig which is really interesting, it germinates from a seed in a bird dropping high in a tree and it send roots down and around that tree; it's not a strangler, although it is related to the strangler fig. What it then does is send out lateral branches which send down roots which then grow into separate trees so the Banyan tree can cover several acres with multiple trunks and its one organism.
In India when they see that happening they generally don’t let it continue, when they see the roots coming down they just prune them. But in the Auroville community in India they’re letting the Banyans grow. There's some fantastic Banyan trees there.
With such a wealth of expertise, learning and practical work over the course of a lifetime dedicated to trees and nature, I wondered what Alan would pass on to younger people who are in a position to be taking action today. What should we be doing now, based on his own experiences?
Well, to go back to the words of Richard Saint Barbe Baker, he was very clear, “Trees are the skin of the Earth.” The skin not only covers and protects but nourishes the body, and trees are the largest and longest lived beings on the planet, so they have a history that they contain. You cut a tree and you can see it literally in the rings, but I think it works on different levels as well, on a more spiritual level - they have a presence, a personality. Because of their long lives they are the custodians of continuity, of peace, of tranquillity, strength, endurance. All those qualities; they embody them. We need those qualities more than ever in the world today.
Our whole life, our culture, our lifestyle, wouldn’t be here if we didn’t have trees to support us. I’m sitting on a wooden chair. This is a wooden floor, we ate some fruit from a tree, we drank apple juice from a tree. Clothes can be made out of the fibres from the trees, so we are totally dependent from them and of course they produce the oxygen that we need and we produce the carbon dioxide that they need. There’s an intimate interdependence which we are breaking, we are sundering. We need to rediscover that, and take it to a new level.