How does one get communities and people back into the woods? Al Tempest created a handful of answers, including Dartington’s ground-breaking Woodlab, and regular events, The Woodland Presents.

It started with a question:   

How can humans’ need for timber, result in healthier, more biodiverse woodlands and forests? 

As a boy in South Devon, I had seen many trainee foresters purposefully pacing around North Woods, with Dartington Forestry Ltd written boldly in yellow against their forest-green shirts. At the time, the scale of Dartington’s forestry enterprise was impressive. Thousands of acres, pioneering silviculture, local timber processing, beautiful products, all stemmed from my little village. I could walk past the sawmill, past the forestry college, through the woods and sit on a Dartington Joinery chair, beneath the grand wooden frame of Dartington Hall. Local trees and timber surrounded me.

The decline of the whole operation was a mere reflection of the wider, national decline in domestic tree and timber affairs, characterised by high timber imports, lowering domestic supply, fragmented woodland cover, diminishing biodiversity, many unmanaged woodlands, fewer new entrants learning the skills to keep the culture alive. Presumably if you’re reading this, you already know of this part of the tale.                  

The interesting question is: so what is the response? We know this decline has, and continues to happen in the UK, so what do we do about it? By now, the incalculable threat posed by the climate emergency is glaringly apparent. My chosen response was to begin studying Transition Economics at Schumacher College in 2011; specifically, the merits of community and social forestry. It was quickly becoming clear to me that capitalist economics was fundamentally at odds with the needs of trees. The dominant approach being steeped in anthropocentric short-termism and rational self-interest, positioning trees as if they are an infinite resource to be harvested at a time best suited to human economic systems. 

But humans’ need for timber is real, we do need to use wood, and that need is not going to change. So that’s how I arrived at the pivotal question. How could humans’ need for timber result in healthier, more biodiverse woodlands and forests?

The experiments began.     

By campfire lights – a Woodland Present evening – this and all remaining photos Al Tempest

Before – Dartington’s Tractor Shed….

There were, and still are, so many benefits from forests to work towards: health benefits, ecosystem services, timber supply, fuel supply, food supply, soil health, flood protection… the following pages could be filled with this list. Leveraging these benefits for humans whilst enhancing their potency seemed key. I began to form a cluster of initiatives that might have the potential to help. 

One seemingly very important aspect is the need to rebuild ‘woodland culture’, to rekindle the mutual reverence and relational activity between people and forests. Initially my work in this area began with getting local people into the woods. We began putting parachutes up for shelter, and hosting community cinema nights.

Later the focus of the gatherings became more varied, the intention became to provide more reasons for a wider demographic to visit; to normalise people being in the woods, and attract more than just the bike-riders, dog-walkers and established tree-lovers. I soon needed a permanent shelter and a team to host our pop-up woodland barbershop, woodland cafe, woodland performances, social prescribing, community events and more. We were now playing with the concept of social forestry, at a space in North Woods called The Glade, with the intent that it could be a replicable model to ‘franchise’ across suitable woods around Britain. The Glade now has had thousands of visitors, and runs its own well-being programme of events, and supports over 50 regular groups to be outside in the woods. 

Under the umbrella organisation The Woodland Presents (Community Interest Company) The shed transformed into Woodlab, a hub and resource to the members of the local timber sector. Makers, foresters, architects, sawyers, engineers were to be invited to events, to use the workspace and digital platform. The goal was to help grow the local timber sector and bring more local woodlands into management. Today Woodlalb runs courses, offers makerspace and produces furniture and joinery from frees around the area. One of Woodlab’s main goals is to integrate eco-forestry principles with a local timber-processing chain which can manifest contemporary buildings, furniture, joinery and non-timber forest products. 

We set ourselves a challenge, to see if we could build a hi-spec eco-home, inside and out – out of diseased timber from our woodland. This is the point where I encountered the planning, architectural and natural build services of Terra Perma. Our organisations united in the need to shift the way we work with wood and think about wood, so it’s no longer seen as a disposable natural resource, and instead recognised as part of the same ecosystem that we are part of. The aim was to do as much of the house and internal joinery from trees that would otherwise succumb to disease. The primarily wooden dwelling was built only of English timber, the majority of which came from the woodland on site. The results were splendid. 

Through working with Terra Perma, and their integrated approach to planning, landscape design, eco-construction, my question broadened. I came to realise that we couldn’t afford to view forestry in isolation, but rather it was essential to be viewed within a wider land-use framework. So we began working on Regenerative Settlement CIC, which expands on the Welsh ‘One Planet Development’ planning model, with the aim of creating resilient, localised places where communities live well, in ways that help create thriving natural ecosystems. The project has the potential to enable thousands of skilled land-workers to establish dwellings and increase both the productivity and biodiversity of the land they would otherwise be unable to inhabit. The first 40-dwelling eco-settlement based on our framework is underway on the outskirts of Totnes, South Devon, complete with rainforest creation and biodynamic farm.

…and after – Woodlab

Sweet-chestnut cladding under the wild-flower meadow roof

In Woodlands Yard – the same place I saw many of those trainee foresters as a boy – there is a resurgence happening. Myself, together with James Shorten and Ben Coles Hollely (the Directors of Terra Perma) have purchased the yard and are congregating these initiatives engaged with regenerative land-use together. Where Woodlab’s goal was to help integrate the local timber and tree sector, the wider goal now is to integrate the regenerative land-use sector to better utilise local resources in the everyday practices of progressive architecture, planning, engineering, ecology, and construction. To see what happens when you cluster together ecologically-guided multi-disciplinary expertise, skills, resources and natural materials into a form of ‘regenerative hub’, with the goal of amplifying the collective impact and making the pragmatic rural regenerative movement more visible and accessible.

There are realistic and achievable pathways for humans to begin to change the extractive characteristics of the way we provide for our basic needs of food, shelter, homes, livelihoods and relationship with the ecosystems we depend on. I see great potential in a national network of regenerative hubs forming around the country in whatever manifestation they may come together in. For now, we will continue to pilot this model and hope that we affect much positive change, and gather many other like-minded organisations and clients that are willing to do the same.

 
Al Tempest is the director of Woodlab Studio and three not-for-profit organisations (The Woodland Presents CIC, Regenerative Settlement CIC and Wessex Community Assets CBS). He lives in Dartington, South Devon and has been innovating ways to catalyse eco-forestry, local supply chains and regenerative land-use for the past 15 years. 

You can find information about organisations mentioned in this article on these websites:

Woodlab
Terra-Perma-Geo
Regenerative Settlement
The Woodland Presents
Tree Radicals         

The Woodlab Handbook is here.