Bring Back the Wolf - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 98

hillsides like a goat. He was born in Airdrie, a small industrial town
close to Glasgow. When his family moved to Stirling, he began to take
an interest in the woods and water that surrounded his house. When
he left university, he travelled to North America, where he worked for
four years as a tobacco farm labourer, a housepainter and a mining
surveyor. The surveying work took him to remote places, where bears
and moose were common sights.
'It was a transformative experience. It kicked off such a lot of won-
der in me, and a desire to know those things. But I was working for
the destruction of the earth. It was contrary to what my heart was
saying was important.'
When he returned to Scotland, he went to live at Findhorn, where
he worked in the foundation's gardens, coming to believe something I
find hard to accept: that 'plants flourish in an atmosphere of love'. He
visited Glen Affric, where some of the last remnants of the ancient
Caledonian Forest grow, and was astonished by what he saw.
'I had never known that anything like this existed in Scotland. It
looks like Canada or the western US. I had thought heather-covered
hills and empty glens were natural. But I also realized that the Cale-
donian Forest remnants there were dying on their feet. I had a feeling
in my gut: this land is calling out for help. Calling out to us. The feel-
ing was there with me for years.'
In 1986, he organized an environmental conference in Findhorn, at
the end of which people were asked 'to stand up and make a commit-
ment to the earth'. He announced that he would launch a project to
restore the Caledonian Forest. 'There was no going back then. I had
no background, no experience, no qualifications. My degree is in elec-
tronics. But my passion was there. That's where the drive came from.
The commitment to make it happen.'
At first he worked through the Findhorn Foundation; in 1989 he
set up Trees for Life. He began by persuading some of the owners of
estates on the north side of the Great Glen, the neat diagonal slash
almost cutting Scotland in two, to let him plant or protect young trees
on their land. He also began to recruit scientists to work alongside the
project and to mobilize a volunteer army of mappers and planters. He
started to form an astonishing plan.
Alan intends to reforest an area of some 1,000 square miles (roughly