Cover Story By Fergus Byrne

Fergus Byrne met Dr Sam Rose in Bridport, Dorset

© Dr Sam Rose Photograph by Robin Mills

Iwas born in Watford, though I don’t remember any of that as we moved to Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire when I was about two. My dad’s an academic, a geographer, and my mum was a primary school teacher in those days. She’s also a geographer and I ended up becoming one too. I played cornet in the local brass band when I was young. I remember my lips froze to the mouthpiece ’ one winter playing carols in Leighton Buzzard town square. We moved to a village called Cublington between Leighton Buzzard and

Aylesbury. So I grew up wandering the fields, exploring old barns, rivers and streams. It was great, a lovely place to grow up. I didn’t yearn for town life until my mid-teens when my mates and I started going into Aylesbury, where our school was, partly because it had a great second-hand record shop. My chemistry teacher used to run the Friars Club in Aylesbury, where Bowie and Genesis and other great bands used to play, although a little before my time. I was a bit of a muso then and played the drums in a band with friends from school. We wrote our own music and in fact two very talented band members went on to make a career out of music. It was when the eighties were in mid-flow; bad hair styles and terrible clothes, all that stuff.

Strangely I had no real interest in nature at that point. I went to a grammar school which was very academically and sport focused. It you played rugby and were going to get three ‘A’s they liked you, otherwise they weren’t particularly interested. I did maths, physics and chemistry for my A levels, although at that time I was interested in ceramics and photography. However I was encouraged to pursue the sciences, and did.

Then I applied for Leeds University with the idea of being a civil engineer. I first took a year out, saved money and travelled to Australia,

Dr Sam Rose

New Zealand, Pacific Islands. My time in the north of Australia in the rainforest was where I thought “why am I going to do civil engineering?”, so I swapped my course to Geography. It was a good course but perhaps the most influential time for me at Leeds was an expedition with some colleagues from Ecology. Six of us went to Sulawesi in Indonesia for three months. We raised the money, did all of the organising, worked on projects and had an amazing time in places with people unaffected by modern society. We trekked up and down mountains and through rainforests; it was proper old school expedition stuff, but all done with the goodwill and support of the local people. I started out that trip very green and naive and I think the experience changed me a lot; it helped change the way I was thinking about the world.

At the end of my degree I wasn’t sure what to do. I knew I was interested in nature conservation in some form, so I could either go and be a volunteer for a Wildlife Trust and be continually poor, or I could do a PhD - and also be continually poor. I was offered, and took, a PhD about tropical forest biodiversity. It is an interesting and complex subject, but the PhD was difficult and isolating. I can’t say I enjoyed it, but it really taught me a lot about research, tropical forests, and about looking at nature in different ways.

After that I got a job with Raleigh International, which has sadly folded as a result of the pandemic. Raleigh is a very special thing. My job with them was to run a biodiversity research project in Chile. Over the course of three years I worked with the local forestry body, scientists from the Natural History Museum, scientists from all across Chile and of course the young volunteers. We had to figure out how to get all these scientists into very inaccessible places to do their research. I think, over the three years, we had about six expeditions studying the biodiversity of Laguna San Rafael National Park, one of the most beautiful, amazing and remote parts of the world. I became fluent in Spanish there and made Chilean friends who are like part of my family. I finished it off with a three-month period as expedition project manager to renovate a school in a remote island community in Chile. Again, that was another life changing experience. It wasn’t always plain sailing, there were lots of challenges, but it was very life affirming.

After that I came back to run a year’s biodiversity project for the University of Leeds, helping to set up the Peruvian forestry service in the Amazon with a system to manage their forests better in terms of biodiversity. It was around that time I decided I didn’t want to be an academic. So continuing on the overseas theme I got a job with VSO, Voluntary Service Overseas, living in London and working for three years doing programme development and fundraising. I was travelling about four or five times a year to countries like Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan, Mongolia. I even went to the South Pacific to Tuvalu which is now almost under water. I very much believe in what VSO do, which is to recruit volunteer specialists from the UK and elsewhere to offer technical assistance when requested. VSO volunteers are all trained to work in a way that is appropriate for the local communities and context and are paid the same wage as local counterparts.

After that, in 2004, I decided I wanted to cut the travelling, and got a job as programme coordinator for the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site team in Dorset County Council, and my wife Debs and I moved to Bridport. For the next thirteen years, whilst our boys Eddie and Alfie were younger, we settled into West Dorset, which is very much home now. For the Jurassic Coast, I think we achieved a lot. Between the team and other partners we looked after the World Heritage status well, and gave this area a strong new identity. The Jurassic Coast brand works well, people benefit from it, so it’s done good things for the area. I took over as Team Leader in 2007 and then in 2017 we transitioned the Jurassic Coast team out of the Council into an independent charity, the Jurassic Coast Trust, for which I was the first Chief Executive.

In 2019 I decided to move on from rocks and fossils. I had spent a lot of my life taking photographs and it had become closer to a passion than a hobby. Although I had done exhibitions, I never really felt I knew what I was doing, so I decided to do an MA in Photography at the Arts University Bournemouth. I continued consultancy work on World Heritage, mainly with the prospective Flow Country World Heritage Site in the far north of Scotland. It’s a massive area of peatland, important for biodiversity and climate change. In the meantime I also co-founded the Bridport parkrun, which took us about nine months to get going, and literally the day after I finished my job with Jurassic Coast Trust we had our first run—symbolic of a new start. I am very proud of our parkrun and fabulous team of volunteers.

I had to find a major project for my Photography MA and had been reading Isabella Tree’s inspiring book Wilding. So I decided that rewilding would be my subject, and over a period of two years I made thousands of photographs from different sites, interviewed about forty people, and produced podcasts and case studies. The results are on an ongoing site

© Dr Sam Rose Photograph by Robin Mills

at www.whatifyoujustleaveit.info. I knew Tim Smit from Jurassic Coast days and he was incredibly helpful with connections to get me going. Nick Gray from Dorset Wildlife Trust was, and remains, very influential. I finished my MA in December and was very proud to get a distinction. I have a touring exhibition that was in Bournemouth University then went on to Yeovil Hospital, and which is in Bridport Arts Centre over the summer. I’m also working on a book about Rewilding that I hope to have published by November.

As well as learning to be a photographer, I’ve learnt an enormous amount about rewilding, I’ve learnt another new profession really. I don’t pretend to be an ecologist but I understand the processes involved, the principles, what “natural process led restoration” is all about. It’s about allowing nature to take the lead. It’s about restoration of degraded land, not so much management of existing nature reserves; you don’t need to restore those because they are generally doing ok. There are a lot of parts of our landscape where you can start to restore nature quite quickly. It’s particularly the marginal land, the land that’s not so good for farming, steep slopes, wetlands or areas prone to flooding. There are so many places where you can really do this, which would not impact on food production but which would have a positive impact for nature.

I’m currently working with Nick and local landowners on a new rewilding initiative called West Dorset Wilding. I’m also doing photography contracts and will be teaching a creative photography course at Arts University Bournemouth in September. I’m also hoping to continue to grow my ‘What if you just leave it?’ podcasts and case study work about rewilding. ’

Watering plants in the moonlight recently was a first for me; a new experience to add to my memories and one that, at the time, I mused might become common. It made me think of Philip Strange’s visit to see Luke Jerram’s ‘Moon’ at Exeter Cathedral (page 22). In his article, Philip highlights the Moon’s effect on our lives. The Moon is one of our environmental titans and he describes it as the ‘driver of tides’, reminding us how it sets up important rhythms that also influence migration and reproduction in the non-human world; it was the spectacular Buck Moon in mid-July that gave me the unusual opportunity to enjoy the garden at night. However, it was that other environmental titan, the Sun, which probably took most of the focus in July, with thousands of words written about the effects of climate change. But apart from causing discomfort, disruption, and in some cases tragedy, the recent ‘heatwave’ also led to some people reminiscing about their youth. Long days and hot weather can do that. In my case, I remembered lazy days swimming in the local river; fishing for trout in a stream called the ‘Pinkeen’, and running around a recently topped field dreaming I was in Wembley Stadium. Then it was home for banana sandwiches before rushing out for another Cup Final replay. Regardless of what generation you speak with, everyone seems to have a few rose-tinted memories of summer days. My mother often related stories of the slowness of life. One particular tale she told was about the morning sun waking her in the seat of the pony cart that she and my father had been driving home from a late-night dance. As the sun rose above the trees and the two young lovers dozed, the pony had stopped by the side of the road to enjoy a long, lazy breakfast. Most of these memories are due more to extended daylight than to extended sunshine, but they do convey a slower lifestyle; a time when there was less awareness of the damage being done to our environment. Today most people have moved beyond skepticism of climate change and in many cases denial has turned out to be a ploy to conceal other agendas. But watering in the moonlight did make me wonder how long it will be before future generations are robbed of such summer memories. 3 Cover Story By Fergus Byrne

10 Event News and Courses 20 News & Views

21 Butterflies, Vicars and Amazonia By James Crowden

22 When the Moon came to Exeter Cathedral

By Philip Strange 24 Under the Greenwood Tree By Cecil Amor

28 House & Garden

28 Vegetables in August By Ashley Wheeler 30 August in the Garden By Russell Jordan 32 Property Round Up By Helen Fisher

34 Food & Dining

34 Lemon and Lime Spritzer By Lesley Waters 36 Black Cow Oyster Mary By Mark Hix

38 Arts & Entertainment 38 The Marshwood Vale and Beyond

By Margery Hookings

40 Galleries

43 Preview By Gay Pirrie Weir 46 Screen Time By Nic Jeune 47 Young Lit Fix By Antonia Squire

48 Health & Beauty 49 Services & Classified

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Fergus Byrne

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Cecil Amor James Crowden Helen Fisher Mark Hix Margery Hookings Nic Jeune Russell Jordan Robin Mills Gay Pirrie Weir Antonia Squire Philip Strange Lesley Waters Ashley Wheeler

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