Learning to Think Like a Forest - A Conversation with Ben Rawlence

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

I think we're in a very unique moment. I think that this period of time when we realize that our current system is ecocidal and is killing us, and yet what seems like a kind of total inability to do anything about it, I don't think that that moment is going to continue for that long.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. My name's Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. One of the best things about this job is that I get to find out about and share some of the most exciting new developments in education all over the world, sometimes in the most unexpected places. My guest this week, the writer, human rights activist turned educational entrepreneur Ben Rawlins and his amazing team, are building just that in a small market town called Talgarth in Mid Wales. Black Mountains College is an incredible institution working with young people locally in Mid Wales and from across the UK, set up as an alive and direct response to the climate and ecological emergency to help create a future in which nature and human societies thrive. As you'll hear Ben describe, the college is part of a tradition of land-based alternative education organizations such as Dartington College in the UK and Rabindranath Tagore's Vishwa Bharati University in India. And is continuing and updating this tradition to become one of the most inspiring examples globally of what is possible and needed in these times. Ben is an award-winning writer, activist, and former speechwriter to Sir Menzies Campbell and Charles Kennedy. He was a researcher for Human Rights Watch's Africa Division, worked for the Social Science Research Council in the USA, the Liberal Democrats in the UK, and the Civic United Front in Tanzania. His books include City of Thorns, The Treeline, and his forthcoming book Think Like a Forest: Letters to My Children from a Changing Planet. You can find out more information about Black Mountain College in the links in the show notes, including their upcoming systems change festival, Beth Now, which is happening later in June this year. Yeah, let's dive in. Welcome, Ben. Thank you so much for doing this. Really excited about what is emerging in those Black Mountains over there. So yeah, really happy to be able to talk about it with you.

Thank you.

So just in terms of situating a need for the kinds of things that you're doing, let's say I heard you really powerfully in one of your book events say we are not ready for what is coming. That's a pretty, a pretty strong statement, but with which I wholeheartedly agree. So like, yeah, maybe, yeah. What did you mean by that in terms of what does being ready look like?

I don't think we can be ready because we don't fully know the shape of the catastrophe that's unfolding. And that is a big part of why we teach what we teach and what I think are some of the skills that are needed in order to sort of preposition yourself in a way and start to embrace uncertainty in a way that we've, almost certainly forgotten how to do as a very affluent society where security is taken for granted. So my own experience working in failed states and refugee camps and things like that has given me a sense of what it might take to be ready, or at least to adapt to massive change. Why we aren't ready, I think, is because on the one hand, people don't really understand the scale of the climate crisis and the timelines. I think critically the timelines, there's a sort of Most people have a fuzzy sense that, you know, things aren't great and the weather's going weird and that, you know, it might mean food shortages, price increases, floods, and things like that. I don't think any of us can really get our heads around some of the detail in the IPCC reports, for example, AR6, which talks about, you know, catastrophic collapse of ecosystems and billions of people on the move. That's a really hard thing to imagine because we don't really have any reference points. But that is what the science is saying. And there is fierce debate about whether that is 2050 or 2100. But if it is 2050, 2050 is not very far away. You know, I touch wood, hope, would expect to be alive at that point, and my children will be certainly. So the scale of some of those things that are being, that are being talked about and the speed with which they're arriving is, is what I mean by we're not ready. If you look at the way in which governments failed to respond to COVID in an appropriate way, that was a dress rehearsal for, you know, the kind of disruption that we're seeing. And you are seeing now governments starting to respond to big disasters like what recently happened in Jamaica, the Madagascan floods that weren't so long ago, you know, the collapse of the dam in Libya and these floods in Valencia in Spain, you know, all of these things where governmental response is broadly speaking, always inadequate. When you're going to see multiple systems failing at the same time, then I don't think we can have much confidence in our collective response, our collective ability to respond at the scale that's required in order to maintain, you know, current standards of living. So therefore we've got to We've got a big mental shift ahead.

God, yeah. It's fascinating, isn't it? Because I mean, just to highlight a couple of things, I guess the we in that question, we're not ready, is also not obvious what that is to your point, right? There are many we's in that that have been experiencing collapse potentially, you know, for a long, long time or, you know, for maybe forever in a very different way. And the we that sometimes is implied in that statement is the kind of privilege, as you said, the privileged kind of global north, the more economically developed countries or whatever terminology you want to use that, and that feels a lot of the cognitive dissonance is particularly for, let's say, us sitting in those countries right now. But interestingly, there's also the global we implied in that, right? As you're saying, like we can't comprehend the planetary size of the thing that we're talking about and the we that has to be planetary, which is, I think it's just like, yeah, it's too much for most of us, honestly.

Yeah. And I think there is a, yeah, there's a lot of slippage in how the conversations people are having about the future. And there is a community there in terms of the, the we, because I think even and particularly places which are more vulnerable to the, to impacts aren't necessarily narrating the impacts that are happening in terms of climate change either.

Right.

Then they're narrating them as natural disasters, which they expect to be finite. And I spent quite a lot of time in the Dallab refugee camp in Kenya on the border with Somalia, where people have been displaced since the 1980s. And you've got successive waves of refugees coming to the camp, but the narrative is always about return, return to Somalia when peace, you know, is established. It's been 40 years. You know, and that, that return narrative is so important because it allows people to hang their dreams on, but it's increasingly untethered from the ecological reality and the political reality of what's happening.

Yeah, I know. Fascinating. And so in, in relation to obviously, you know, the podcast being about education and we'll, we'll definitely get into some detail on that, but there is a situatedness that I think is also important. And you, you know, as we're talking about planetary scale, problem. Like that's, it's hard to conceive of, but it's also hard to do anything about at a planetary scale. Like it's almost nonsensical to even say that. Right. And so, as you said, really powerfully again, and somewhere else I heard you speaking that just, you need to pick a place. Right. And I, that really resonates with me in terms of like, that's where we can act is in a place, but then just kind of opening up the space for your place and Black Mountain College in the Black Mountains. What, you know, maybe could you tell a little bit of the story of how did you pick that place and why? So why there? And then the beginnings into like, yeah, how is that giving rise to this educational, really exciting educational project that you're involved in?

Yeah, I think it's the reason we need to pick a place is because the way in which we will hopefully have some chance of navigating or surviving as best we can some of these changes is by understanding our context because the things what is shaping the economic and social possibilities is the climate. So the rainfall, the heat waves, the, you know, the soil and how those things are changing and how the ecological niches are changing for different species. And because we can't rely on the planetary and because we increasingly may not be able to rely on sort of national and international systems of distribution and governance, then the local becomes much more relevant again in a way that it was in the past. So that's why it's important to pick a place and to get to know it. The other reason is social, is that, you know, you don't, there's a proverb that, you know, your neighbor doesn't give you food the first time you knock on their door. You know, you need to knock on their door and get to know them. And then when the shit hits the fan, that's the time when you might need to rely on those people. But it's no good if you then, you need to make those relationships sooner. And the reason I'm in the Black Mountains is because that's where my wife's family's from. I'm from a flat plain in Salisbury in Wiltshire in the south of England, which is a very different landscape.

Some big stones though. Yeah. Just to remember.

Some old, some quite old stones. And I left Salisbury age 18 and never intended to go back. And I love Wales. So when my wife suggested we move here and raise a family here, I said, yeah, great. But having arrived here and having sort of had a career in politics and human rights and journalism, mostly in Africa, I found myself sort of saying, well, you know, what the hell do I do now? And what is my role at this time? And what is my role in this place? And I went on quite a journey of sort of personal discovery really, is to say, well, you know, the things I care about and the things I was aware of, which was, you know, increasing ecological collapse in the Horn of Africa, which is an early, one of the early warning bellwethers in the Earth system, bit like the Arctic. This was top of my agenda. And I was looking around in Wales thinking, what's happening? And the answer was not very much. At the same time, I was going to local community meetings about what's wrong with Mid Wales. And lots of people were saying, well, there's the further education, the higher education provision is really bad. And the county council said, it's a strategic imperative of us to have a university in Powys, an undergraduate university. We've got the Graduate School of the Environment, the Centre for Alternative Technology. And those conversations came together and I suggested a new college that was rural, that was in the mountains, that would update the inspirational idea of the original Black Mountain College, which was an experimental arts college in the United States in the 1930s and '40s.

Oh, right. Interesting.

To bring it home to the UK to, and it, they were inspired by Dartington actually. And, and Dartington was inspired by Tagore's university in India. So all of these land-based rural colleges that were, that were concerned with future alternative education. You know, there is a genealogy here, which, and it was actually the poetry of the land. It was the running in the mountains and thinking Black Mountains. Oh, I've heard that phrase before. Black Mountain in North Carolina was this inspirational place that I'd read a book about and I was always fascinated with.

Wow.

So I thought, well, let's bring the principles of that alternative pedagogy to Wales. Let's update it for the 21st century. And what better place to teach reconnection with nature and some of the skills we need to survive the coming environmental challenges than the beautiful mountains in the national park. So that was the collision of these two ideas, the sort of alternative pedagogy and the place of the Black Mountains gave rise to this idea, which of course, once you open your mouth and you tell people, oh, well, what about this? They say, oh, that's a great idea. How's it going?

Let me give you some money, you know, and then you're committed, then you've got to do it.

And then you're stuck. Yeah.

That's fantastic. No, I mean, so absolutely would love to get into some of the detail of that, but just for a moment, what you said there about what is my role at this time and what is my role in this place and the fact that you've personally been through that journey, I just think that feels to me like part of the work as well, right? Like all of us really genuinely reflecting on what am I being like in the Festival of Hope work we do, we talk about what is the world asking of me? Like, you know, really listening in the place you are, in the time, in the moment you are. What can I learn here and what is needed from me? And I just think I just wanted to emphasize that because that feels really profound actually to me in terms of how we help young people sensitize to what they are being asked in a way, right? And of course, supporting them with that, but like understanding and looking around and noticing and all of that. So yeah, no, beautiful stuff. Thank you. So then let's go into some of the specifics on that because there's interesting, I find highly problematic narratives that pervade educational landscapes, right? About, for example, this phrase future skills and it's, you see it everywhere and it feels it's often tech driven or it's often neoliberal driven, neoliberalism driven, or it's like, you know, what are the future skills you are gonna need to be an entrepreneur to succeed in the neoliberal marketplace and all of those kinds of things. And I like the fact that you are using that phrase, but perhaps to smuggle in some rather different competencies and skills and dispositions. So yeah, I mean, was that intentional that you're using that phrase to kind of Trojan horse in some other things or, you know, and then what does that mean to you? What does that set of like future skills that are genuinely preparing if we can prepare young people, like what are they?

It wasn't intentional because I don't really have a background in education, but I am a writer. So I chose future skills because I thought it was the right description of what we needed. I then came across all of these debates around what are future skills, what are green skills, what does the government think we need and so on, and discovered this huge gulf. And the same around sustainability, the extent to which the word sustainability has been captured by corporates, often trying to use it for greenwashing and so on. So we've had rich debates then about what we should call our degree program and what we should call our further education program. But we've stuck with Future Skills. And the way I like to define it is it's ancient and modern, like the old hymn book, because, you know, some of the skills like coppicing, for example, are about natural management of woodlands to allow for harvesting of trees without cutting them down. Which is absolutely what we need to be doing. And it's been done for 5,000 years and it's a way more sustainable way of managing woodlands. And again, with food growing or seed saving, or, you know, some of these are ancient practices, but where they're very relevant now. At the same time, we also need to be thinking critically about AI. We, you know, we do need a very up-to-date understanding of Earth system science and what's happening. You know, if you are going to If you're a young person coming of age, beginning a career which notionally has a 50-year lifespan, then, you know, some basic literacy about the ways in which the Earth is changing are fundamentally relevant to whether you want to be an engineer or a farmer or a banker. I mean, the way that we think about risk, you know, all of those things are very relevant to how you're going to operate and how you're going to make a living. I think the tension and the capture comes around, you know, what we think education is for. So if we think education is to support the economic growth of the nation, which is, I think, I believe how it's still defined by the Department for Education, then you're going to end up with a very different set of answers to that question. If you think education is for, you know, making us better humans and better able to fairly confront the challenges that are coming, then you end up with very, very different answers. So that is the context. That is our definition of education. And that is the context in which we think people are going into the world. We're not thinking about people going into the economy. Then future skills is around how you build just and sustainable societies. And the skills needed for that are very different. They're not necessarily technical, although some of those things are. Relevant. So, you know, solar panels, we need the electricians, we need to understand off-grid systems, we need to understand water management, ecology, and all those sorts of things. But there also, there's a big emphasis on what you might call soft skills, communication, collaboration, how to work as a team, how to work as a group, how to really listen and understand somebody who shares your conspiracy theory, but you know, he's coming at it from a very different perspective. So, you know, how we come together as a community, how we think critically, because we're being bombarded with misinformation and disinformation all the time. So it's that set of soft skills together with, I think, what you, what people used to call appropriate technology. So not technology for its own sake, but simple technology that we need, but it's only as advanced as we need it to be to achieve a particular task. So, You know, a very good example of that is Raspberry Pi computers. You know, you can do an awful lot with a very simple programming device. You don't necessarily need a top-of-the-range Apple Mac or whatever it might be.

Yeah, need is a tricky word these days, right? But there's also a really practical, I mean, as you, as you've kind of mentioned, but I just wanted to dwell on it because I read a different definition that you had in an article where you talked about the skills we, we will need when we can no longer rely on the fossil fuel infrastructure of global supply chains. Like, that gets really practical and really real, really quickly.

Yes.

And it's, yes, of course it's about all of those more nuanced skills and the durable skills, soft skills, et cetera. Absolutely. It's also, as you say, more technical, but it is perhaps one of the things that we are preparing young people for that no one's really, or not so many people are actually talking about. It's like when you can't just jump on Amazon and order your next day delivery of the thing you need tomorrow for your job or for your home or for your family or whatever it is, you know, there's a very different world in which we have to think and act quite differently on different timescales and in relation to resource and where we live locally. That is radically different, right?

It is, yes. And we are at the beginning of our journey really. So Flat Mountains College has been going for 4 years. We're in year 5 now. And the woodland management, the ecology, the food are the sort of foundations. The next stage is natural construction, building from local materials or found materials, retrofit. Then it's electronics and, you know, the grid systems you need, you know, people are going to be going to need to understand how to program their battery and their solar panels. And then, you know, small-scale community wind turbines, hydro energy.

Yeah.

You know, or, or indeed trying to do without electricity if you can, you know, that, that sort of stuff. And potentially I would say in the future, maybe more simple 1G and 2G mobile phones and things like that, you know, because all of these things are, if you do a sort of proper risk analysis of our, of our infrastructure, which not very many people are up to at the moment in the UK, you, you know, it's the electric grid. It's the railways, it's the roads, it's the water infrastructure. And as we've seen recently, it's the cloud, it's the internet cloud. You know, those big networks which are private and for the most part privately owned are the things that we rely on in daily life. And if one of them goes down or two of them go down, we're going to be in very different territory.

Yeah. But what's interesting as well about that and your work, I felt was it's not about therefore going back to a romanticized past of how we as humans used to live.

Absolutely not.

Because in your, like, I loved what you were talking about in The Treeline where you are engaging with very deeply rooted local communities like the Sami people or all over the world. And there's a dawning realization perhaps for them sometimes in interactions with you and the work that Actually, the way they have been living very locally, very connected to the land is maybe not what is needed in that place now because ecosystems have shifted, because the climate has shifted, the tree lines changed, all of the different dynamics that you talk about in that book is, I mean, that I find a really interesting opening because it's really not about romanticizing a past, a, you know, a glory day where we can just all go back to living on the land and wasn't that lovely? Like everything has to be responsive, even the deeply rooted local communities, indigenous communities that are of course changing and adapting as well, right?

Yeah. I mean, if ever anybody can identify that romantic notion, you know, it's, it, I don't, not sure it ever existed, but yeah, we definitely can't be going, going back. At the same time, there is an awful lot of, I think the word grammar is useful. There's, there are some interesting concepts in how we relate to each other and the land and our situation, which is contained in the grammar of some of those cultures. So culture is a really useful tool in how we sort of refashion and retrofit our current culture. And then to give a concrete example, in the context of the UK, Welsh and the Welsh language has really useful and interesting lessons for us in the way in which, you know, so for example, every mountain outside the window here has a name and has a story and has a history, which tells you something about about how people related to that place. And our farm that we have at the college, 120 acres with 40 fields, every field has a name in Welsh, which tells you about the use. You know, that was Hospital Field, that was called Botany Bay, for example, or, you know, that was called, that's the Home Field because that's where we used to use particular animals. So there's a grammar there that can give us a guide but you know, not that we want to go back to being the Bruconic Celts fighting the Romans, but there's a lot encoded in indigenous lifeways, which I think is important without romanticizing it too much.

100%. And interestingly, I was playing some music last night with a friend and having a chat, and we got onto something related to this, 'cause it's actually quite recent that we have lost to, in inverted commas, some pretty interesting basic skills like making your own clothes or knitting or like obviously growing your own food. Like it's really, you don't actually have to go back to indigenous lifeways in a distant past of the British Isles, for example, to find, you know, it's like, this is like, you know, our grandparents potentially that are still alive had those skills, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a reason why I think the 1950s is this very interesting fulcrum in the, you know, which is why that's the hinterland for a lot of the populist narratives about making America great again or Britain great again, because that was the moment. I mean, the big technological change and the big sort of handbrake turn in our relationship with the land in the UK was World War II and the introduction of mechanization. And then of course, the Common Agricultural Policy that followed that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, fascinating. So, I mean, maybe just tell us a little bit about specifics of the courses you've been developing and then, and particularly the degree course, which is really exciting.

So our degree program, we've got about 30 students on there, roughly 10 students per year, and the first graduates will be graduating, very exciting, in July 2026. And that degree program is called Sustainable Futures: Arts, Ecology, and Systems Change. And it brings together a few different principles. One is the takeaway that stems from Black Mountain College in North Carolina, which was, it was an experimental arts college and welcomed refugees from Bauhaus in Germany when they were kicked out by Hitler. So we had Edward and Annie Albers, Walter Gropius was there and a few other people. The key insight from that was that it is the practice of the arts, not the study of the arts, which is transformational in education. So we have three pillars, arts ecology and systems change, the arts thread, is around the practice of the arts to train the senses. Really, it's about paying attention. It's about noticing. It's about it. And then it's about expression. And the arts is what makes us human.

Can I ask just on that, how widely are you defining the arts?

So the creative practice is the word, is the phrase we use, and that encompasses life drawing, sculpture, music, but also, you know, movement, yoga. It could be walking, but walking with intent according to the principles of creative practice. So it's around, it's around noticing it's, and it's around being reflective. So it's this, it's this capacity to learn and it's an understanding of learning as practice that you have a particular thing that you practice. And then through that practice, you generate insights and reflection, which then enhances all of the other things that you're learning as well.

Love that.

So then the second pillar is ecology. So there's a sort of basic introduction to systems and ecology, but our, again, our definition of ecology is more human ecology in line with the Centre for Human Ecology. That was a kind of pioneering department at the University of Edinburgh in the '80s and the '90s. So that's humans in relation to nature. It's not just ecosystems and, you know, looking at the national park, it's, you know, how, how humans are part of that. And then the third strand is systems change. So that in a sense, a bit like a politics, philosophy, and economics degree, but compressed into one third of ours. So there is an introduction to systems thinking with writers like Fritjof Capra and Donella Meadows, but also a kind of appreciation of critical political economy. So the idea that politics and economics are linked, you can't abstract economics on its own. So then when we look at things like degrowth or post-growth economics in the later parts of year 2 and year 3, we are looking at it from a political lens as well. The last thing I'd say about the degree is it's been designed in such a way that you start very, very broad. This is always a tension with interdisciplinary degrees or interdisciplinary programs of study. So you, you get a, a little bit of lots of things. Then in year 2, you specialize. And narrow things down. And then in the third year, it's almost entirely bespoke. So you have one seminar with your colleagues, and then you have a placement and a project, and that's 6 months, and that's to answer a question of your own choosing. And the, the thing that unites everybody in that final seminar is a commitment to change. So you are not all united by a subject like geography or physics or whatever your degree title might be. But what we have now in year 3 is we have one student who's pioneering an agroecological farm as part of their project. We've got another person who's looking at a very specific form of fermented cow urine as an alternative to nitrate fertilizer. We've got somebody else doing a project on the rights of nature in the boardroom and the legal fiduciary duty of companies. So in the seminar, the conversation is about how do theories of change apply to what you are doing? What are the barriers you are confronting? You know, this is what, what I'm experiencing in my situation, but it's very interdisciplinary and united by that shared commitment to change. So it's a, it's a learning journey for us. Every year we have a reflection at the end of the year. We make tweaks and changes. Yeah. And we expect to be doing that into the future.

Fantastic. I love it. I mean, so many questions sparking from that, but like one is about partnerships and how are you, how like obviously London Interdisciplinary School comes to mind in terms of the, you know, the journey they've been on in developing a really like a really new innovative institution there in London. And then also your relationship with Cardiff Met, like, so how are you One piece is about credentialing, obviously, and establishing as a formal university. And then the other is about the kind of, yeah, the broader movement that is hopefully more of these kinds of exciting courses are coming up. Yeah.

So setting up a new institution in the UK is not easy. If I'd have known, I don't think I, yeah, it might have been a different story. So yeah, you, you can't get degree awarding powers. In Wales. You can in England under the OFS by proving to the OFS that you've got, you've got the ability to do it. That's mostly a question of money, but in Wales, you, you can't, you have to have a sponsoring partner. You have to have an accrediting partner. So our partner is Cardiff Metropolitan University.

Yeah.

And there's a really, I think that's a really positive story because there's a lot of sense in the UK higher education sector that change isn't possible, that these big dinosaur institutions aren't responsive, you know, can't innovate and so on. At least not in the, in the structures of academia. Cardiff Met has proven that's not the case. Their Senate was very flexible, very open. We designed a degree in partnership with them with really interesting, sophisticated assessments. There's no exams. The mix of disciplinary approaches and so on was, was welcome. Couldn't have been a smoother process. The other thing that's, that you can't do in Britain as a whole, and especially in Wales, is set up a further education college. So again, we have to be an alternative provider. We are a subcontractor, both of Cardiff Metropolitan on the degree programme, and then of Neath Port Talbot College on our further education programme. So we're reliant on both of those partnerships to access public funding.

Sorry, just to clarify for listeners who are not based in the UK, further education as a term Is post-16 non-compulsory education?

Yes, post-16 non-compulsory education, but not university. So it's BTECs, it's diplomas, it's 1 or 2-year courses, mostly on vocational subjects. So traditionally horticulture, agriculture, forestry, plumbing, electricians, that kind of thing.

No, amazing. And the other question, if I may, that came to mind was 'cause you spoke about learning from the place and Powys and the connection with the community that there was a need for the local provision. So how are you finding the take-up locally as opposed to, because I mean, clearly, you know, you're sitting with me on a podcast that goes out to people all around the world and they're gonna be super excited to hear about this. And you know, you'll be inundated with applications for the next cohort, right? From all over the world. But what about locally? I mean, you know, I joke, but you know, there is a question there about, investing in the local as an institution that is locally based and more broadly?

Yeah. Both from, so firstly, just in terms of the curriculum, we have a change in practice module that runs through the degree. So in year 1, year 2, year 3, and that final project in year 3 is the sort of fullest extent of that. And those, that change in practice, the first one is, is here on our farm in the community. The second one is more elective, and then the third one is entirely the student's own project. All of the vocational further education programs also have a change in practice element. And those are based on real-world problems and challenges in the community. And there is a dialogue with the community about things that they would like student projects to focus on. And then students organize themselves in groups, work together to solve particular challenges. So our students are engaged in, let's, for want of a better word, sort of regeneration or regenerative activities. In the places where we teach. The, the sort of wider community impact and involvement of the college has been very strong. So up until this year, we had about 50/50 students from Powys locally and, and then students from wider Wales and England. We still don't have Tier 4 license for international students at the moment. We hope that that will come in the next 2 to 3 years. But that's quite a long process with our current government, as xenophobic as it sometimes appears to be. So this year, the balance of students from Powys is higher. So I think we've, people who've been attracted to an alternative educational experience have found us and have come from across the UK. But I think we've, in a way, had to prove ourselves to the local school leavers and establish ourselves in the landscape before they started to come. The hope is that we will, by attracting people from further afield, both across the UK and hopefully across the world in the future, that supports the viability of the courses that we offer here, which then mean they're available for local people. Sure. The challenge that I was seeking to address when we founded the college in response to the local focus groups was that if you just teach the people leaving school in Powys, there will not be enough people to sustain a college. So you have to appeal more broadly. And a really good example is Hereford Sixth Form College, which is down the road, has got 3,000 students. Half of them are from here, from Wales, because they're going there because of the critical mass and the broad range of wonderful subjects that they can offer and so on. So the more we can, any successful enterprise in a rural area has to be bringing in people for its viability, but that is also good for the community because people have been leaving Mid Wales for generations and we finally need to be bringing them back.

Fantastic. That's amazing. And I mean, maybe that just leads on to a kind of a future-focused question of where, like, you know, what are you excited about for the future? Like, clearly there's a lot there. There's a lot of development that you've obviously been engaged in. This is such an exciting example of what's possible. But clearly it's taken some blood, sweat, and tears from you and many other amazing people there. Like, what is it that you're— where are your hopes or excitement about what's coming?

When I started this project, I thought, you know, it'll claim its pound of flesh and I might have to invest, you know, maybe 5, maybe 10 years of my life to get it off the ground. And then I'll go back to writing books. Actually now, We are 8 years in, so I've still got a bit of time to go, but I'm actually feeling like we're only at the beginning of the journey. You know, we're up and running. We've got 130 students. We've got another campus in Traherber in the Valleys, in the, um, in the Rhondda, not far from Cardiff on the Metro, which is a really exciting place to be. A very different demographic than the National Park in Mid Wales. We're looking for partnerships elsewhere. But we're also, I think, really refining and deepening the model. So we've started a series, just yesterday we started a series of deep dive conversations with students on topical issues here. So we can better link some of our change in practice work with the things that are going on in the community. We've just hired an action research fellow who's again looking at community cohesion and how do we integrate the development of the town with the students. And then there's, you know, there's so many opportunities for refining the model. How much more can we get students involved in governance? How much more can we actually harness the power of the students and the staff together to start building housing co-ops? We've got a food share that students have started, you know, now could we expand that to become an open food network? And there's a partnership possibly with the University of Birmingham to supply vegetables from Mid Wales, you know, what can we coordinate that? Can we, how can we actually drive systems change and make it a learning opportunity at the same time? So the more that once, yeah, as I said, I think when I started, I thought I set up this thing, I have an obligation now because I've opened my big mouth and then I can go back to my quiet life and be a retired writer and watch the world unfold, you know, but actually now I'm thinking here is we've built this thing. This is an engine for social change. Look at all the things we can do. And we, I mean, I can't reply to all the emails I get at the moment because so many people want to partner doing interesting things. And I think most, one of the most rewarding things has been this kind of reinvigoration in the potential of further education. It's often written off as a kind of, if you can't go to university, go and train to be a plumber, you know, no further education is super exciting. It's free in Wales. Would you believe?

Who knew?

That anybody in the UK who's a UK resident can come and study for free in Wales doing these cool courses that we've designed because the system is not entirely broken. Yes, it's not great, but you can do these things. So there's just tons of opportunity. And I think it's at the moment, I'm really enjoying it.

Brilliant. Oh, it's amazing. I mean, it's totally inspiring on so many levels because I think, you know, in a way it's inspiring and in a way it's sad that it takes people with such commitment and entrepreneurial spirit and resilience and,, you know, just can do to dive in and actually build these things because, you know, we can't rely on the broken systems to provide what actually is needed now. Maybe in 50 years' time they might cotton on to the fact that this thing is relevant, but in a way it's totally inspiring and I just want to encourage more people to do the same, right? In their local areas. Of course, it's a, it's a hell of a journey, but I also hope there's some, some really useful learning that can happen across the world from people doing similar things.

I think that is all, that's exactly right. And that's the hope in terms of our impact is, you know, we've got 3 levels. We've got the students that we train and that, you know, they're going to go out in the world and they already are going out in the world and kicking up some dust. We've got the impact locally here in our place and in our sort of wider network in Wales of what we're doing and hopefully making some positive change. But then there's the 3rd level, which is the model. So It can be done. You can blend further education and higher education. And in the current global context of climate and nature collapse and the need for community cohesion, here is a model that you could actually import to any county in the UK or indeed any bio region. It's a bio regional model that works with an ecosystem and the community and blends further education and higher education for social change. So, you know, maybe in a few years' time, there's a role for me going and helping set up similar things in response to ecological collapse because we all need to learn new skills. Climate change will be, what's the phrase that I can't remember quite where I heard this, but climate change will not be kind to the manually inept.

I have heard Ginny Servant-McClough say that. That's it.

That's where she, yes.

Yes.

It's a lovely quote. Yeah.

She's a force and absolutely, it's a brilliant quote and spot on. And the amazing stuff they're doing with the Building Climate School is equivalently inspiring, right? So no, this is, I mean, it's just amazing. And just to finish, I mean, like clearly you haven't quite given up on the writing because you've got a book coming out in April called Think Like a Forest. So you're managing somehow to fit in some time as a retired writer somewhere on your stoop somewhere. So yeah, just maybe just to finish with that, what are you, there's some messages we need to send to our children. I mean, I have 3 of my own. You have a couple, do you?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you know, so it gets really personal, like this is really significant, right? And very personal. And it's of course global as we speak to, you know, to young people around the world in relation to this. So yeah, what are you hoping with that book and what are you, what are the messages you're sending to them?

Yeah, that book is emerged out of kind of my inability to speak to my kids because when they were really young, I felt I had all this stuff that I needed them to understand and I really wanted to tell them and I couldn't. So I just started writing them letters and those letters are now published as a book coming out in April. But it's around, I think we're in a very unique moment. I think that this period of time when we realize that our current system is ecocidal, and is killing us. And yet this total, in what seems like a kind of total inability to do anything about it. Yeah. I don't think that that moment is going to continue for that long. So it, it's sort of what parenting, some of the challenges of parenting in this unique moment. And then really just sort of exploring what I want them to know, you know, what do I think they need to know? What, what can I do to help them get ready to get their heads around this challenge that we started our conversation about. And in a way, it's the sort of lesson I came to at the end was that this is really more just me kind of working out my own neuroses because actually they are already living in it. Yeah. And they are the sort of key quote from my daughter aged, I think 5 or 4 at the time was, when is spring? And I just couldn't, I just kind of broke down. I couldn't answer the question because I, you know, it's once upon a time, it would have been an easy question to answer. Now it's existential. And when I did sort of finally try and explain it to her, she said, you know, that, you know, once upon a time, spring, summer, autumn, winter, these days it's a bit more messed up. And she said, I know. And I was like, what?

You know?

And of course she does know because she hasn't actually known anything different. The fact that, you know, it was 14 degrees on Christmas Day, but it was, you know, 8 degrees at Easter and we had snow in June and, you know, so this is part of her reality. That's not to say there isn't a huge mountain to climb in terms of resilience. But I think one of the things that we, that I'm trying to do and which I try and communicate to them in the book as well is building culture. You know, the culture we have and that we live in and all these things we take for granted are not right., and therefore you need to be prepared for the contingency of those things. And they're starting to get with that program. You know, it's like, well, most kids know about Easy Peelers and bananas and chocolate. And, you know, actually you might not be able to keep eating these things later because they are driving deforestation and the price is going through the roof. Similarly, you know, eating local, but also what we wear. You know, they're, they're very alive now to the fact that they, you know, now they don't want plastic clothes, not just because they're bad for the environment, but increasingly they're aware that they're inhaling 6,000 particles every day from their polyester jumpers. You know, so it's just being aware and building that awareness of, of the fragility and the contingency of the things we live by. And I think that's as much as you can probably hope for. Yeah. And then obviously that they'll look after you when you're old.

Exactly. No, beautiful. I mean, it is absolutely like deeply an intergenerational project, isn't it? I mean, and it makes me think of Robert Macfarlane when he talks about with his book, Is a River Alive? And he talks, talking to his child about, of course, like, of course the river's alive. You know, there's like, it's just a really important interactions that we need to be having around some of these things that, and as you say, they, A lot of them know quite a lot more than we imagine they are aware of. But no, thank you. I mean, just such beautiful work. I'm so happy to be able to hopefully share and inspire other people, maybe to do similar things in their context around the world. And no, just thanks, Ben. I mean, totally inspiring work.

Cheers. I really appreciate it. Thanks for the time.

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